Although I spend most of my time looking for graffiti I
suppose, for me at least, one of the most interesting things I come across
really isn’t graffiti at all. Very occasionally, staring at a stone wall or the
back of a rood screen, I come across something that I feel takes me perhaps
closest to those people who actually built these elaborate and beautiful
monuments to belief. The church builders themselves.
Architectural inscriptions are a rarity. There simply aren’t
that many that survive. When we began the project the number of known
architectural inscriptions surviving from the Middle Ages numbered less than
twenty. The most famous of these, and widely documented, were those at places
like York Minster and Wells Cathedral. Here the architects of the cathedral, or
rather the master masons, had used deliberately prepared areas of the buildings
as their design studios. These areas were most usually hidden away in places
where the public could not go, and the work was undertaken on specifically
prepared floors of plaster, known as ‘tracing floors’. Here they had worked out
their designs, drawn up their templates, and created the blue prints for a
monumental building that was to last for centuries to come. The tracing floor
at York Minster looks today to be an architectural jumble of broken fragments
of gothic architecture. Arches and curves intersect at obtuse angles, window
fragments lie in the remains of a half century old arcade. However, these
tracing floors were the real power-houses of medieval design. It is here that
the master mason turned dreams and aspirations into a stone-built reality.
However, when it came to the more modest parish church, the
master mason had none of the luxuries of a full scale tracing floor upon which
to carve out his ambition. Many of the architectural designs I come across are
far more modest in scale than those found at Wells or York. They are discretely
located on flat pieces of wall, such as those found at Swannington, or located
on the rear of rood screens, or the ends of benches. In retrospect it’s all
rather obvious really. A workman arrives at a church to carry out building work
and wants a nice flat surface to sketch out and plan his ideas. Why bother
carrying a drawing board around with you when there’s the nice flat area on the
back of the rood screen? Since the graffiti survey began we have actually
doubled the number of these architectural inscriptions known to exist in the
UK.
The first time I came across these architectural designs was
in the very first weeks of the graffiti survey, at the beautiful and atmospheric
Binham Priory in north Norfolk. For those who have never visited the site
Binham is simply a joy. Today most of the site is in ruins, cared for by
English Heritage and the Norfolk Archaeological Trust. However, the original
nave of the priory church now acts as the local, rather grand, parish church.
Although now sitting in a fairly remote spot a stone’s throw from the coast,
Binham holds an important place in architectural history. The great west window
of the church is regarded as the earliest example of gothic ‘bar tracery’ anywhere
in England, built in about 1245 and pre-dating even Westminster Abbey by at
least a decade. Prior to the introduction of bar tracery windows were built
using a system called ‘plate tracery’, which in its simplest form was to just
build a wall and cut a hole in it for the window. This meant that the designers
were extremely limited as to how big they could make the windows without the
entire wall collapsing. Bar tracery changed all that. The actually tracery
stonework was designed to be structural and load bearing, allowing the creation
of much larger and spectacular windows, and allowing light to flood into these
buildings for the first time.
Although Binham is widely regarded as the very earliest
example of this revolutionary new style in England, it has also become the
centre of a sometimes heated debate between architectural historians as to just
how revolutionary the west window was. The problem, you see, is that the window
actually failed in the late 18th century and was bricked up. With
only two earlier engravings of the window, both of which contradict the other,
the argument has centred upon whether the window had four openings (four ‘lights’)
or eight openings (eight ‘lights’). Although it sounds like a minor point to
argue about it is, in terms of architectural history, a bit of a major
controversy. Put simply, if it was a four light window then it can be regarded
as simply an evolutionary step towards the style that was later perfected at
sites such as Westminster Abbey. However, if the Binham window was of eight
lights it can be seen as truly revolutionary. In recent years the eight light
idea has taken a bit of a hammering, with one well known historian describing
it as the ‘eight light myth’.
When I first began to look at Binham I was searching for the
usual type of early graffiti that I’d found in the churches nearby. Ships, text
inscriptions, compass drawn designs – just the usual. However, I noticed that
certain areas of the walls were covered in very unusual lines and curves. These
were on a far larger scale than anything I had come across earlier, being
impossible to photograph using the usual raking light survey techniques. I was,
in short, puzzled. It was really only on my third visit to the site that I gave
them any real attention. One wall in particular appeared to show a real
concentration of these markings. However, it was only when I looked closely at
the very upper parts of the wall that I noticed that there was the clear
remains of a quatrefoil which disappeared beneath fragments of a 14th
century paint scheme. It suddenly became clear that I was looking at a very
large scale architectural design.
It turned out that this wasn’t the only one in the building.
For some reason the master mason at Binham had chosen to use the walls of the
existing church as his drawing board, and I clearly had the remains of at least
five separate designs – one of which was over two metres tall. Although none of
them were complete, and several were too fragmented to even record in any
detail, it was clear that at least two of them related to the west front and
the controversial tracery window. What’s more, the main inscription did appear
to support the idea that the window itself, rather than being the four light
evolutionary stepping stone was actually of a revolutionary eight light design.
At the time I really didn’t understand the true significance of what I was
looking at. What I did feel though was something of a connection with the man
who made them. He had stood in the exact same spot that I was standing, facing
the same piece of wall, and started an architectural revolution. Nearly eight
centuries later I was staring at his working drawings - at the very place that
this revolution in style, design and church building had began in England. It
was a humbling experience.
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