Tag Archives: Wells Cathedral

Chapter Houses

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DSCN3977-2The chapter house was the second most important building in the monastery range after the church. It was here that the monks met every day to discuss abbey business and to listen to a chapter from the Rule of St Benedict. The monks sat on stone benches around the walls as shown in the first picture showing the ruins of the chapter house at Rievaulx.  It was here also that punishments were metered out to erring monks, important visitors greeted and Visitations conducted.  It was here also that the abbots and monks of monasteries across the land surrendered their properties into the hands of Cromwell’s agents.

Burton and Kerr (page 80) emphasise how unusual the chapter house is at Rievaulx. Instead of being rectangular it has an apse (semi-circular end).  It was also large enough to accommodate the lay brothers as well as the choir monks. The chapter house was built during the time of Abbot Aelred  (abbot -1147-1167) but the shrine to Sir William of Rievaulx who was Aelred’s predecessor can still be seen behind a window of the chapter house.

Indeed in the earlier chapter houses it is perfectly normal to find the tombs of  abbots as well as pavements bearing reference to patrons, even tombs of patrons in some cases.  On a more prosaic level in Cistercian chapter houses libraries in the form of book cupboards built into the walls can also be found.

IMG_4456As with much else about monasteries the chapter house changed according to the period in which it was built. Early chapter houses are rectangular ground floor affairs beneath the dormitory but they became increasingly ornate as the medieval period advanced. The chapter house became a separate vaulted building, some with apses and others, which took on a polygon shape- sometimes the original rectangular chapter house became an outer room leading to the chapter house which projected out of the east range.  Many chapter houses are separate from the church, with a slype or alleyway between the church and the chapter house but in other places, such as Chester the chapter house adjoins the church.  Some chapter houses such as the ones at Southwell are heavily decorated.  In Southwell it’s possible to spend hours in the chapter house looking for green men.  Foliate heads of all sizes peer at you from the masonry where as at Wells, as the two photographs in this paragraph show, the vaulted ceiling and lantern of glasswork will have you craning your neck. IMG_4455

Burton, Janet and Kerr, Julie (2011) The Cistercians in the Middle Ages (Monastic Orders). Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer,

Cloisters, carrels, dorters, reredorters and nightstairs – or, how not to get lost in a monastery.

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IMG_4438 - Version 2Monasteries tended to be built to largely similar plans. The cloisters of a monastery are usually on the south side of the church. Cloisters are built in a square shape and the middle is open to the elements – lovely on a sunny day not so great for the rest of the year. Each of the four sides of the cloister was called a walk and usually covered by some kind of roofing to protect the monks from wind and rain. Cloisters in modern cathedrals tend to be completely covered but this would not have been the case in medieval monasteries they would have been open to the elements.  Monks would have studied here, dried their laundry and had their tonsures cut.  The novice master would have taught the novices here as well.  The tranquil ruins we see today do not give us a picture of the day-to-day business of the cloisters – albeit largely silent business. Benedictine monasteries and Cistercians used different layouts. This post is principally about Benedictine monasteries.

The north walk usually lies with its back to the church wall. This was the most important walk because it was south facing. It is on this wall that visitors to medieval ruins can often find stone benches or the remains of individual study areas called carrels. Gloucester Cathedral has some lovely stone built carrels rather than wooden enclosures. Light came through the upper part of the carrel.

There’s usually an entrance to the church at the top end of the east walk. There would usually also be a door leading in the direction of the infirmary. All along the rest of the east walk there were rooms for monks who held office within the monastery to go about their business such as the treasury. It was on this side of the cloister that most conversation occurred. The south walk led in the direction of the kitchens whilst the west range led to the areas of the monastery where the lay brothers and members of the public who had cause to be there might be found.

The dorter – the monks’ sleeping quarters are usually on the upper floor of the eastern range. There would usually be a parlour beneath the dorter as well as a common room or warming room with a fire and offices such as the treasury. The chapter house also lay in the east range but more of that in another post as they come in all shapes and sizes.

IMG_4462There were usually two sets of stairs leading to and from the dorter. There would be a day stairs- usually to be found near the chapter house in Benedictine monasteries but in Cistercian monasteries, especially the later ones they exit at the juncture with the south range of buildings. The night stairs led straight from the dorter into the transept of the church. My favourite examples of night stairs are those in Hexham (black and white photo to the right of this paragraph) and Wells Cathedral (picture at the start of this paragraph).IMG_2034

The dorter started off as a large room but later on was partitioned into cubicles with wooden wainscoting. The monasteries built later in the medieval period provided a small window for each cubicle.

It should be added that not every monastery was designed on the principle of the four ranges. In Durham the dorter is above the west range of buildings.

The reredorter lay beyond the dorter. Another name for the reredorter was the necessarium. The size of the reredorter depends on the wealth of the monastery in question and the water supply. The monks availed themselves of the facilities on the first floor, the drainage and engineering required to carry the waster off is usually an impressively deep ditch to modern eyes but in medieval times the covered in drain began its journey away from the monastery by running parallel to the undercroft.

Corbels, corbel tables and label stops

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Wells lizard

Every profession and specialism has its own jargon.  It makes life a lot easier than referring to the ‘thingy’ or having to keep pointing and saying “that one over there.”  Communication becomes precise and efficient.  While an assortment of words (largely nouns if we’re going to be accurate)  may be helpful for people in the know, for those of us who are just getting to grips with these things, jargon can also be plain confusing – not to mention intimidating.

The other problem with jargon is that you may think that you know something but then a new word comes along to sling the proverbial spanner in the works.  Such was the case for this blog.  Half an hour ago I knew what a corbel was; ten minutes after that I read a guide on a local church website and discovered a new word which threw my poor brain cell  (yes  one – the other one seems to have gone on holiday) into confusion.

A corbel to quote Scotland’s Churches Trust is “a stone which projects from a wall-face, to support a floor or roof, or some other structure. A row of corbels, with spaces in between, at a wallhead, is known as a corbel table. A continuous row of such projecting stones is known as corballing.”  http://www.scotlandschurchestrust.org.uk/maintain-your-church/glossary/?term=73

Corbels can be seen both inside and outside buildings from parish churches to royal castles.  A corbel isn’t always decorated – sometimes it just looks like a neatly cut lump of stone holding something else up.  So far so good.   A  corbel is different from a gargoyle in that a corbel is just one end of a load bearing lump of masonry whereas a gargoyle is a waterspout jettisoning water from the roof after it rains.

Now for the new terminology that had me confused. A label stop, again to quote the excellent Scotland Churches Trust is “the name given to the lower end of a drip mould. Usually a short horizontal section of the same form as the drip mould, but sometimes a carving of a human head, a grotesque animal, or a bunch of leaves.” http://www.scotlandschurchestrust.org.uk/maintain-your-church/glossary/?letter=l

So why was I confused?  I began writing this blog thinking that the delightful little salamander munching his way through a selection of fruit just off the north transept of Wells Cathedral was a corbel – then I did my research for this blog using the Internet to see if I could find out any thing else about him. I landed on the aforementioned local church website.  The words corbel and label stop occurred in close proximity to one another without clarifying the difference between them.  The result was that my brain cell had a minor panic.  Was the lizard a corbel or a label stop?

Further research ensued.  I then found the Scotland’s Churches Trust website with its lovely clear glossary of architectural terms – the brain cell heaved a huge sigh of relief and added another term to the long list of useless information stored in the dim recesses of my skull.

To summarise my convoluted meanderings – the Wells lizard sits at the end of a shaft that shoots off to form an arch – so he is load bearing.  This means that  he is very definitely a corbel.  Look at it and pause to wonder at the engineering capacity of medieval builders as well as their creative genius.  Photographically he is delightful to behold and required me to stand only on tip toes with my arms extended (who’d have thought that a visit to a cathedral could also be an aerobic work out?)

A  label stop, on the other hand, is a dinky piece of sculpture (no that’s not a technical term)  found at the end of a length of decorative moulding so not holding up anything but pretty to look at- but still pause and marvel at the skill it took to create something so very small in so much detail.

If you’d like to browse a glossary of church related architectural terms double-click on the picture to open up the Scotland’s Church Trust glossary.

Capital

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Wells capitalsI’m sitting here feeling slightly dazed – and perhaps it’s not surprising.  I’ve just spent five hours in Wells Cathedral taking photographs (okay there was a pause for a very moorish ginger and chocolate tray bake which contained absolutely no calories what-so-ever and a cup of tea.)  Aside from the scissor arch, the medieval crazy patchwork stained glass and the cathedral cat – a glorious and imperious ginger called Louis I spent an awful lot of time craning my neck for some capital shots.

A capital coming from the Latin capitulum meaning of the head refers to the top bit of a column – so it’s load bearing.  A very nice guide even talked me through the different parts of a capital this morning.  The very top of the capital is flat – that’s called the abacus.  The abacus tends to be plain – though by the late Gothic masons were decorating them as well.  Then comes the necking which thins to join the shaft of the column beneath it.  Sometimes the necking runs straight into the column but more often than not there’s a thin moulding to separate the column from its capital.

It’s possible to tell the age of a capital in an English church by the kind of decoration on the necking.  Norman capitals are solid and largely undecorated – those are the Romanesque ones.  Having said that the Normans do decorate their capitals often with symmetrical patterning and rather chunky looking people if my memory serves me correctly.

In any event  the next stage  in the evolution of the capital involved foliage – in some cases foliage that looks rather like a tree drawn by a small child – one stem and one leaf in neat rows.   Somehow the Gothic evolved out of the Romanesque so that by the thirteenth century masons were running riot carving sinuous leaves, green men, strange birds, beasts and odd little figures.

In Wells there are doves, dragons and lions as well as a fox running off with a goose in its mouth.  The fox is being pursued around the capital by a very cross farmer.  There’s a spoonbill swallowing a rather plump frog; a devil who has caught a fish; a pedlar with his pack and a string of beads; a man with terrible toothache; a cobbler; a man removing a thorn from his foot; a thief; assorted Old Testament types; someone being martyred and rather a lot of different kinds of leaves as well as a bewildering collection of heads peering down from their hiding places.  The more you look the more that you see – English Gothic at its best – at least that’s what the very nice guide told me and I’m not going to disagree.

So next time you go to a church or cathedral if you’re not crawling around on your hands and knees attempting to photograph misericords  without moving them or crossing any barriers that have been erected to keep the public at a safe distance you can vary your posture by standing on tip-toe developing a crick in your neck while trying to hold your camera steady in order to capture capitals.