Throughout the Middle Ages (c.1100 – 1530s) no new diocese were created although at Salisbury, for example, the old Anglo-Norman cathedral at Old Sarum was replaced by a new cathedral and cloistral range of buildings for a colony of secular canons (s.p.b.s) all constructed between 1220 and 1258, although its famous crossing tower and ‘needle’ spire were built about a century later.
Any writings about medieval church buildings or building changes are dominated by the following terms – Norman, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular, these now long-established as architectural eras.
In fact these terms were never used by ecclesiastical hierarchies, master masons and building craftsmen of the time, being defined first by Thomas Rickman in the early 19th century. If there were medieval words for new building styles that came along across the Middle Ages there seems to be no record. Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) was a self-taught architect, this in-turn resulting from a period in his early adult life when to contemporaries he seemed to be wasting his time wandering the countryside sketching church buildings as seen then. That said, many of his sketches were very accurately drawn, akin to later draughtsman standard. In so doing he came to realise that certain building features recured across many church buildings and that these reflected the time in history when they were built, he thus devised and started to use the terms listed above. His work gained recognition after he gave a public lecture in Liverpool and as his architectural buisness started to take-off he published in 1817 what was to be a very influential book entitled ‘Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture’. The drawing above is taken from that book and shows, in a stylised example, typical features of a Norman Church interior, this would have been the fashionable style from about the mid-11th century to the late 12th century.
(to be continued)