Church of the Holy Trinity Hildersham, Cambridgeshire Meditation on a Stained Glass Window

The south chancel window at Hildersham Church

A talk by Jeremy Lander RIBA SCA AABC September 2012

I’ve called this talk ‘Meditation on a Stained Glass Window’ because when Keith Day asked me to come and talk to you about the new north porch I said I would be delighted but could I first indulge myself by talking to you about one of my interests? I will talk about the new porch, the lavatory and the drainage, but first I really can’t miss the opportunity to reflect on some church architecture in general, especially here at Hildersham because we are here in a very special place, a time machine in fact. That is the interest that I want to indulge briefly: the ability of buildings to tell the time. Not the hours and minutes of the day but rather the deeper sense of time that only old buildings, especially our medieval churches, can convey. The contemporary architect Niall McLaughlin has said if you want to know the time of day you look at a clock, if you want to know the season you look at the trees, if you want to know about the passing of the generations you look at your parents, your children and grandchildren; but if you want to know about the kind of time that is measured in centuries you look at a building. I just love that idea and of course this applies in particular to churches, usually the oldest building around. So I want to go back in time, not to when the church was first built in the 13th century, but to 1830s and the beginning of the Victorian era. It was a bit like the 1960s then really, huge changes in society were taking place, or about to. The young Victorians thought that their parents and grandparents, the Georgians, had messed up big time and they wanted to make a fresh start. They could already see the perils of industrialisation and the divisions opening up between rich and poor but they were especially concerned about the state of the nation’s parish churches. During the 18th century Non-conformism and the steady drift of people to the growing towns had left rural churches in steady decline and the fabric of medieval churches had fallen into a shocking state of disrepair. The emphasis was now on the spoken word and re-orderings were carried out to maximise the view of the pulpit, regarded as the centre of worship, with large galleries often inserted in a hap-hazard way. Parishioners were not enthusiastic about the idea of the so-called ‘Auditory church’ and installed high-sided ‘box’ pews where they could hide from the lengthy sermons delivered from higher and higher pulpits, and keep themselves warm. Liturgically many perceived a huge complacency with a lack of energy and symbolism in the church services. Change was in the air.

Illustrations from ‘A Church As It should Be’ Ed. Christopher Webster & John Elliot

In the 1960s young people sought the solution in rock music, drugs and a permissive society, but what these young Victorians prized was quite the opposite; it was something they called Reality. It became a buzz word which didn’t really mean anything in itself; it stood for an idea. In Rosemary Hill’s excellent book ‘God’s Architect’ she describes Reality as ‘standing for integrity, for solidity, for high seriousness, for everything the Georgians seemed to their children to have lacked…in religion, in architecture and in life’.

The architect in question in Rosemary Hill’s book is of course Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

A.W.N. Pugin 1812-1852

It is the bicentenary of his birth this year and the 160th anniversary of his death. In his 40 short years he accomplished what most people would need two or three lifetimes to achieve: a superb draughtsman, architect, furniture designer, thinker, writer, and activist. In 1834 he stood and watched, along with many thousands of others, the burning down of the old Houses of Parliament. He said of the spectacle: “There is nothing much to regret and a great deal to rejoice in”. Today I’m sure there would be many people ready to say the same thing, and keep all the politicians inside at the same time. Another of the watchers was Charles Barry, already an established architect and 17 years Pugin’s senior. He was said to exclaim “what a chance for an architect!” And of course it was. The pair joined forces and won the competition to design the new parliament building, Barry, some say, claiming rather more of his share of the credit. Pugin certainly designed all of the interiors and furnishings and may well have had a significant influence on the exterior. In any case it was a massive victory for the young Goths. The Medieval style of Architecture was now the order of the day and it swept aside the porticos and pediments of the classical world of Georgian and Regency England. While Pugin was busy with the drawings for the new parliament he found time in 1839 to publish a short illustrated book called Contrasts. Its long title is ‘A parallel between the noble edifices of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and similar buildings of the present day shewing the present decay of taste accompanied by appropriate text’. So you get an idea of the strength of feeling there.

Illustration from Contrasts by ANW Pugin (The Classical world above, Medieval below)

It set up a series of powerful arguments for the medieval way of life, contrasting it with the rational, classical world of the Enlightenment and showing that architecture must go hand in hand with a new order through the creation of a new revitalised gothic style. Pugin didn’t come up with all this on his own of course. As is often the case the ideas emerged out of literature and painting; from the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Scott and painters like Caspar Friedrich and JMW Turner, who himself painted the fire at Westminster. It was loosely termed the Romantic Movement. Gothic seemed to embody this new spiritualistic view of the world, and it was rooted, people thought, in a style that was truly English and truly Christian; never mind that the Gothic style actually originated in France. And never mind that original Christian architecture was in fact classical, as Roman converts adapted their temples and houses to the new religion. Logic does not really come into this, it was simply a welling up of feeling and emotion based on what many saw as a deep moral crisis gripping the country. In fact feeling was prized far higher than knowledge by the Romantics. Another Young Victorian, the brilliant Cambridge scholar John Mason Neale (Chaplain of Downing college at the age of 22) remarked ‘we have remarkable proofs that feeling without knowledge will do more than knowledge without feeling’. We should remember that these issues mattered a great deal to many people then, a time when ordinary folk took to the streets and rioted about such things as candles on altars, and the wearing of vestments.

In 1839, the same year that Contrasts was published, John Mason Neale and a few other Cambridge undergraduates got together and formed the ‘Cambridge Camden Society’, initially called the Ecclesiological Society. One of the very first members was a man called Harvey Goodwin, which brings us to our stained glass window, in the south wall of the chancel here at Hildersham. In it Harvey stands in the centre with his brother Robert on the right and their father Charles on the left. Charles was the rector here in the early 19th century. Harvey was at Caius, Robert was at Clare. Robert was ordained at Ely in 1839 and immediately became the curate at Hildersham, becoming Rector when his father died in 1847. Harvey went on to become Bishop of Carlisle and is depicted in his mitre. Neale, Goodwin and the others began just by studying medieval church architecture and religious practice. There were trips out to look at parish churches around Cambridge including, undoubtedly, Hildersham, but it quickly became something much more than an antiquarian society; it became a campaigning organisation. Within three years the society counted 16 bishops and 31 peers and MPs among its membership, not bad for an undergraduate society. With Pugin urging them on it began a vociferous, sometimes quite vicious, campaign to medievalise architecture, in particular the architecture of churches. So in this stained glass window we have a microcosm of the burgeoning Gothic Revival movement, and at its centre one of the founding members of its chief mouthpiece: the Cambridge Camden Society. In 1841 the society published a pamphlet entitled A Few Words to Church-builders, summarising its ideas about what a modern church should look like. They recommended the Early English style for small chapels and the Decorated or Perpendicular for larger ones, but by the third edition of 1844 they were unreservedly recommending the Decorated style.

An illustration of the different periods of medieval architecture

The two essential parts of a church must be the nave, they said, and a welldefined chancel not less than a third of the length of the nave. Aisles were recommended, because a tripartite church symbolised the Holy Trinity, as here at Hildersham, which is doubly appropriate.

Stone should be used, not brick, but flint was perfectly acceptable. The chancel was strictly for the clergy, and no laity should enter. It should be raised at least two steps above the nave, and the altar should also be raised. Chancel and nave should be separated by a rood screen. Seating should not be in closed pews (the dreaded box pews of the Auditory Church) but in open benches or chairs, as here at Hildersham. They were also very keen, Pugin especially, on decorating churches with wall paintings as they had been in medieval times, as here. Singing galleries were another target of their wrath. To create space for new four-part harmony choirs and their accompanying wind and string instruments these had been put up in virtually every church during the 18th century, here at Hildersham too. They were torn down by the Victorians who replaced them with organs and surpliced choirs. It was very controversial. When the singing gallery was demolished here in 1870 we know that several players ‘never set foot in the church again’ and this was typical of what happened all over the country. Thomas Hardy writes about just such an event in his novel Under the Greenwood Tree.

The Village Choir by Thomas Webster

Anyway, suitably armed with his brother’s Camden Society literature, Robert began the restoration of his Church, starting in 1855 with some major construction work including the rebuilding of the South Transept. The essence of the perfect mediaeval church was already here and this must have appealed greatly to the Goodwins but over a period of 35 years Charles and Robert transformed the church. In 1860 the two brothers went to Oxford for honorary degrees and there they met a young architect called Charles Alban Buckler and they were to become lifelong friends. Like the Goodwins, Buckler was a keen student of medieval art and architecture, building many churches in the Gothic manner. His obituary in Building News stated ‘His first and last love in architecture was for the Early

English style…’ 1 He set to work on Hildersham and in 1865 he employed a large firm of church restorers Clayton & Bell to carry out the stained glass windows and the murals in the chancel. By this time church rebuilding across the country was in full flow, Clayton and Bell had to move into huge premises in Regent Street in London and employed about 300 people, some working night shifts in order to fulfil the commissions that were pouring in. They installed the east window, incredibly taking out the original 15th century perpendicular tracery and replacing it with ‘Decorated’ stonework, the Camden Society’s favoured period. This was typical of their approach; it wasn’t about preserving authentic medieval fabric, it was about creating new architecture in the ‘correct’ style as they saw it. They were often quite ruthless about it. Buckler also had all the plaster scraped off the walls in the main body of the church revealing the stonework beneath, something else the Victorians were particularly keen on because it expressed more the manner of construction, another of Pugin’s ideas. The chancel was re-plastered of course where it was used as a base for the celebrated murals. Magnificent though the result is, the somewhat overzealous restorations that the Camden Society encouraged, insisted upon even, led eventually to a backlash and the formation of Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings under William Morris. This was the beginning of the conservation movement and it is Morris’s legacy, not Pugin’s, that we live with today. Ironically it was Pugin and the young Victorians ideas of Reality, Integrity, Solidity, and High Seriousness mentioned earlier that led to a belief that buildings should in some way be honest, that they must represent something in themselves and their own physicality and embody the spirit of the age in which they were built rather than an abstract idea. This in turn also led to the Modern Movement, Le Corbusier et al, and it still underpins architectural thinking today. So with all this philosophical and historical baggage that we carry around with us we have a problem: how on earth do we adapt and extend our church buildings in the early 21st century? Do we match what is there and what do we mean by ‘there’ anyway’? A piece of 14th century wall, or something built in the 1880s to look like what they thought was 14th century? Do we keep everything ‘as it is’ or do we express ourselves in the spirit of our own age using modern materials? We also face huge practical problems: thick solid walls, floors that are cold and damp and layouts based on a way of worship that would now be totally unrecognisable, even in Roman Catholic churches. Medieval Churches were never meant to house toilets or kitchens or crèches or even heating pipes for that matter and those responsible for their upkeep are faced with the immense task of maintaining and adapting them for today’s world, providing those 1

Most of Bucklers churches were Catholic and, as happened with many of the new movement, including Pugin, Buckler converted to the Catholic faith and later became a member of the Order of Malta. The Buckler arms with the Maltese Cross is visible in one of the windows. The subtext of the Gothic Revival movement was a shift towards Catholicism which caused much hand-wringing.

modern comforts people now expect, and more recently of course also meeting concerns over the control of energy use and providing easy access for people with disabilities. Up to recent times this would not have presented a problem, walls would have been torn down or built up and new windows punched in where they were needed. But this is not an option open to us today where the past is treasured and revered as never before. DACs and Planning Authorities, English Heritage and multifarious interest groups, the SPAB, the Victorian society, the Council for the Care of Churches and so on, must all be consulted and placated. Existing fabric must be examined minutely for significance and any traces of archaeology must be respected. This is all right and proper but enormously time-consuming, challenging and expensive for the would-be Robert Goodwins and Charles Bucklers of today. Despite these difficulties there have probably been more re-orderings and extensions to Churches in the last thirty years or so than in all the years since the great church building boom of the 19th century. And despite English Heritage etc churches have adapted to far more difficult, even life and soulthreatening imperatives, in the past. Chancel floors been lowered and raised up again, altars demolished and rebuilt, pulpits removed and reinstated, rood screens torn down, statues defaced and decapitated—and people were imprisoned, tortured, and executed over such things. So what you may ask is a new lavatory compared to all this?

Jeremy Lander September 2012