Simon Thurley - The Building of England - How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings

Fig. 50 Peterborough Cathedral nave; the flat wooden ceiling dates from c .1230 and is painted with images designed to be read from the nave far below. Colourful, expressive and a precious survival, it never succeeded in architecturally drawing together the great arcades of 1160–90.

Fig. 51 Durham Cathedral nave, unlike Peterborough, is visually united by its vault. We don’t know who the designer was, but here force and splendour are coherently combined as nowhere else in medieval England. Rib vaults were first erected in the Durham choir in 1095 and were a ground-breaking advance of European importance. The ribs have their own structural integrity and the cells between are made of lighter material 12–18 inches thick.

The Anglo-Saxons had a rich tradition of carving in stone, but their sculptures were either freestanding or used as applied ornament, rather like a bejewelled clasp on a cloak. The new architectural forms developing in Normandy and England in the years around 1066 integrated sculptural decoration into architecture, and blended the roles of sculptor and mason. Architecture after 1066 introduced new opportunities for sculptural embellishment. Whilst Anglo-Saxon doorways were plain rectangular openings in plan, after the Conquest they were routinely recessed, with small columns and capitals supporting moulded arches. These often enclose a stone slab called a tympanum, which provided an opportunity for a virtuoso display of carving ( fig. 53). Likewise the capital, a ubiquitous and essential element of the new style, was a vehicle for carving. The vault of Archbishop Anselm’s crypt at Canterbury rests on a forest of carved and decorated columns, each crowned with a sculpted capital; the best, such as the one showing a wyvern fighting a dog, are bursting with energy and motion ( fig. 54). The style of these capitals is so close to the initial letters in manuscripts painted in the priory that they must have been designed by the same hands. These were exceptional; most capitals were of a type known as ‘cushion’, a squashed cube of stone that could be painted, carved or more usually left plain. These were rare in Normandy and, as used in England, were probably copied from Germany. They were easy to reproduce quickly in places where the skill, time or money was not available for anything more elaborate.