St. Albans cathedral
The church has spread its long low bulk along the crest of the hill for nearly a thousand years, where a shrine to England’s first Christian martyr stood since his execution here in Roman times. A great part of the church as it stands was built by the Normans reusing the thin red brick from the Roman town below, giving it an almost industrial air now that the original limewash has gone. We are so used to these old buildings presenting bare faces to the world that we forget that they were once accurately described as a white robe of churches across the land; time and the Victorians have stripped them of their coats of lime, often destroying murals in the process both outside and in. The great central tower, the transepts and long nave retain all the grim simplicity of the early Norman style, being built rapidly between 1077 and 1088. Western towers were planned, but given up in favour of extending the already long nave and adding a bigger choir during the mid thirteenth century. Three large gabled porches on the French pattern were begun, but the abbey’s finances were poor, and the west front was never entirely finished. A Lady Chapel was added to the east in the high Decorated style, and the collapse of one side of the Norman nave led to the asymmetrical structure we have now. Apart from some later Perpendicular windows, the abbey was structurally complete by the end of the fourteenth century.
The church has spread its long low bulk along the crest of the hill for nearly a thousand years, where a shrine to England’s first Christian martyr stood since his execution here in Roman times. A great part of the church as it stands was built by the Normans reusing the thin red brick from the Roman town below, giving it an almost industrial air now that the original limewash has gone. We are so used to these old buildings presenting bare faces to the world that we forget that they were once accurately described as a white robe of churches across the land; time and the Victorians have stripped them of their coats of lime, often destroying murals in the process both outside and in. The great central tower, the transepts and long nave retain all the grim simplicity of the early Norman style, being built rapidly between 1077 and 1088. Western towers were planned, but given up in favour of extending the already long nave and adding a bigger choir during the mid thirteenth century. Three large gabled porches on the French pattern were begun, but the abbey’s finances were poor, and the west front was never entirely finished. A Lady Chapel was added to the east in the high Decorated style, and the collapse of one side of the Norman nave led to the asymmetrical structure we have now. Apart from some later Perpendicular windows, the abbey was structurally complete by the end of the fourteenth century.
After the dissolution came a long period of neglect, leaving the church as a stripped and shattered husk with rights of way running through it and the east end divided off as a school. Brick walls blocked off the aisles, and apart from the Georgian parish church fitted up in the choir most of the building went to wrack and ruin. The remainder of the abbey was gradually demolished, and all that remains is the great gatehouse and the ghost of the cloister along the side of the nave. When the enormous see of Lincoln had been split up, it was decided in 1877 to make St. Albans the cathedral of a new diocese, and restoration was urgently called for. Unfortunately, it was Lord Grimthorpe who answered the call, before the guiding hand of a chapter could restrain his amateur enthusiasm. He had plenty of money to spend but unrefined tastes, preferring his version of gothic to the real thing. Only Wyatt the Destroyer has come close to Grimthorpe as the great bête noire of English ecclesiologists, spending his money where it would be most obvious, on the ends of the transepts and front of the nave. He ripped down every facade, raised all the roofs changing the silhouette of the church and put toy town turrets everywhere, leaving each machine cut front devoid of imagination or charm, work more suited to a Methodist meeting house in Merthyr than England’s oldest abbey. The best one can say is that it’s not much worse than Hereford’s Edwardian west front, which has received much less opprobrium.
We enter the nave under his gaze; having rebuilt the west front he is carved in one of the porches as St.Matthew. The inner parts of these retain original Early English stiffleaf capitals and Purbeck marble shafting, and in the north west porch the deeply cut outline of an eagle can be seen on one wall, far too big and well drawn to be graffiti, probably the outline of a Thirteenth century mural. The nave was left with a lopsided look, with the rudest round arches piercing the north wall answered by Decorated gothic on the other side, with the lancet forms of Early English to the west. The heavy Norman arches of the nave and crossing are enlivened with original jazzy red and white painted patterns on soffit and vault. Behind the altar set into each archway was a painted reredos, with crucifixions and annunciations added throughout the Thirteenth century, and big fourteenth century figures of saints on the wall facing the nave, the survival of which under coats of whitewash is really rather rare. Other murals can be seen throughout the church, from skeletal Jacobean memento mori in the south choir aisle to fourteenth century bishops in the feretory, as brilliant as an illuminated manuscript, painted below some reused late Norman heads that are marvels themselves, with spiralling ice cream cone hair similar to statues in York. The ceilings above add much colour to the east end, where flights of gilded eagles and angels carry heraldic arms on the vaults.
Between the nave and the choir is the stone rood screen, one of many such divisions in the grander churches, though an unusual one to have been retained. A bit of a museum has been made of the north aisle, and some carved wooden bosses and Jacobean bread cupboards are shown in an alcove in the south transept, which also houses some ornate late Norman arches removed from the slype passageway outside, the new visitor centre now built on its site. This blind arcade and central doorway have intersecting arches made up of strings of bobbins, and capitals carved with birds and beasts, dragons and green men, and oddest of all, an owl between a naked Adam and Eve; all a far cry from the raw simplicity of the early Norman nave. This unique carving shows two reclining nudes, one holding a jug, the other possibly priapic, with a large owl between them, a disembodied head staring over its shoulder. Owls were an abomination in the Old Testament, and were a symbolic of Judaism in mediaeval art, when the Jews were seen as preferring Old Testament darkness to the light of Christ; owls were also linked to Adam’s first wife Lilith and her demand for sexual equality, and may just possibly represent her here. The transepts and crossing are the oldest part of the building, everything to the east having been rebuilt in mediaeval extensions. The little pillars up in the triforium look more like Saxon baluster shafts than Norman colonnettes, local labour having been used in the post-conquest period.
Some of the unusual relief patterned tiles removed from the site of the chapter house have been reset in the north transept. These big twelfth century tiles were made here by tilers from the Rhineland, whilst the later encaustic examples came from kilns at Penn in Buckinghamshire. One double sized tile shows part of a hunting scene with dogs; this is set beneath an altar slab made from the base an earlier shrine. The north wall here boasts the ugliest of Grimthorpe’s windows; being formed of various circles as if based on a handful of coins it became known as the bankers’ rose. Lately this has been improved with a mosaic of coloured glass, one of several modern artworks introduced into the church, most of which seem directed at children. One exception which is not glaringly out of place is the angelic host filling niches in Abbot Ramryge’s chantry chapel, though it’s a pity that the wires show. Such filigree stone cages as this were added in the late middle ages when it was believed that one could spend less time in purgatory by spending more money here, paying for priests to pray for your soul. This Tudor example repays close study, with every surface carved with miniature monsters, mermaids and men. As often as possible the abbot’s name is repeated as a ram’s head rebus amidst heraldic signs and symbols, just in case god or man forgot who he was. The vaulted structure is gothic but the detail belongs to the Renaissance, a last explosion of ornament before classical quiet.
This chantry was set up to the north of the high altar, and another abbot’s chapel is to the south, with a high Tudor screen full of pedestrian statues by Harry Hems hiding the shrine to the east. The niche behind the main altar now holds a resurrected Christ by Alfred Gilbert, the art nouveau sculptor famous for Eros in Piccadilly Circus. Gilbert’s work could be touched by genius, but here an interesting idea is let down by execrable execution, and the pudding faced angels are best seen from afar. Worth a closer look is Abbot De La Mare’s memorial in the north choir aisle, a massive Flemish brass with saints and winged monsters everywhere. The third of the fancy chantry chapels is that to the royal Duke Humphrey, whose massive heraldic confection arches above his burial vault, formed as close as possible to the saint’s shrine in the feretory behind the high altar. His chapel was once a mass of colour and carved saints, and even the vault underfoot was decorated with murals, rarely seen then or now.
The far end of the church was extended for a lady chapel in an ornate mid fourteenth century Decorated style that never caught on locally. The window tracery with foliate gables over individual lights was extremely elaborate, ornamented with tiny niches containing carved saints, details of an opulence more common in Oxfordshire than here. Remains of paint and gilding indicate just how splendid a sight this must have once made, though not more so than the shrine area itself, the heart of the church around which pilgrims progressed. At the Reformation the shrine was smashed and used as rubble infill to block the arches to the east where a road was run through the retrochoir; during restoration 2000 bits of the Purbeck marble base carved with censing angels and scenes from the saint’s life were pieced together again, though the precious shrine itself had been melted down for the king. The broken base of the shrine of St. Amphibalus, the priest Alban tried to hide, stands in the north aisle; between it and the feretory is the wooden two storey watching loft, designed to keep an eye on the gold and silver shrines. Below are cupboards to take relics, and a carved frieze runs around on all sides showing everyday rural pursuits; a shepherd plays a flute to his sheep, men wrestle, a bear is baited, a sow feeds her piglets, a cat catches a mouse, and there are farmers, huntsmen, squirrels, a dog with a boar and a woman milking a cow; all as if the Archers were carved into wood.
If you seek soaring pillars and spatial complexity or some solemn site of numinous mystery then St. Albans is perhaps not the best place to look; but if you like searching out small scale surprises in a big boned battered beast of a building then there is plenty of unique interest here. In the final judgement Grimthorpe’s mediocrity is far outweighed by the wall paintings, chantry chapels, shrine and watching chamber, whilst that great brick tower has a grim beauty all of its own. This is a church with its feet firmly fixed on the floor and roots that dig deep into the land, and whilst it has few stylistic links with the parish churches of the county, its down-to-earth air and lack of pomposity make it an appropriate cathedral for a realistic region like this.
The cathedral is open every day, and doesn’t yet charge for entrance like most. That’s rare nowadays, so please try to remember that the continued existence of all such buildings is our responsibility, and do leave some money whether you are Christian or not.
The cathedral is open every day, and doesn’t yet charge for entrance like most. That’s rare nowadays, so please try to remember that the continued existence of all such buildings is our responsibility, and do leave some money whether you are Christian or not.
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