The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  The refurbished choir of Gloucester Abbey was descended from the heavenly mansion that floated over the body of Edward II; but its habitat was an earthly building of thick walls and heavy arcades, and the difficulties of adapting heaven to earth are apparent everywhere. While the body of the choir is a model of celestial order, the aisles that run on either side of it are a jumble of mismatched architectures: blocked openings, seemingly random demolitions, and improvised junctions.

  Medieval building was rarely, if ever, the simple implementation of a preconceived design. Buildings were not drawn or modeled in their totality before work began on site, and much was therefore left to chance and ingenuity. At the same time, large structures took so long to build that no one generation could ever hope to see them completed in their own lifetime. As a consequence, medieval architecture is almost always the result of a slow collective process of adaptation, rather than the invention of an individual genius.

  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the crossing at Gloucester, where the walls of the choir, with their narrowly spaced supporting columns, met the wider transepts. This was a structural problem, born out of the misfit between the existing shell of the building and the new design evolving inside it, and it left the vaults of the crossing—and the tower above them—with nothing to rest upon but thin air. It was, perhaps, a miscalculation; but just as they had done before, the masons decided not to conceal their problem but to celebrate it. They decided to make it seem as if their vault was indeed floating on almost nothing at all. They spanned an arch of almost impossible thinness and lightness over the opening of the transept, and then they balanced a tiny pedestal at the apex of this arch. The massive load of the tower came down the ribs of the vault, through the tiny pedestal and the delicate arch, and safely to the ground; but the ribs showed no strain whatsoever, fanning out from the pedestal as if they were dancing around the head of a pin. The masons had taken an intractable problem of engineering and construction and had conjured an illusory moment of angelic grace.

  WHEN THE CHOIR of Gloucester Abbey was complete, King Edward III died, and Abbot Horton took to his bed, and he was succeeded by Abbot Boyfield. It was in the time of Abbot Boyfield that King Richard II came to stay at the abbey. He prayed at the shrine of Edward II and embellished it with his ensign of the white hart—in memory, perhaps, of the creatures that had drawn the king’s hearse from Berkeley Castle to Gloucester. He even wrote to the pope proposing that Edward II be canonized.

  When Abbot Boyfield was taken to God, he was succeeded by Abbot Froucester. And in the time of Abbot Froucester, the choir of Gloucester Abbey, which was the child of the southern transept, which was the child of the tomb of Edward II, spawned a further descendant: a cloister of four walks surrounding a central garden.

  On one side of these walks, a luminous grid of windows looked into the garth; on the other, a solid stone wall hid the secular functions of the abbey. The masons covered every surface of the new cloister with the same traceries they had employed in the transformation of the choir, so that it was impossible to tell what was wall and what was window. Indeed, so elaborate was this masking that it was possible to imagine even the heavy vault above the cloister walks as a skeleton of stone ribs, webbed with a skin of glowing glass.

  But there was an additional elaboration here in the cloister, a further step in the evolution of the tomb’s descendants. The vaults above the tomb of Edward II, and the vaults in the new southern transept and in the refurbished choir, were all essentially just barrel-shaped tunnels intersected at right angles by other tunnels; but the masons vaulted the walks of the cloister in a completely different manner. In between each cloister window they placed a thin shaft of stone, and from this shaft emerged a conical fan of ribs, which unfolded above each window. Each of these fans met its neighbor tangentially, so that the cloister walks read as an avenue of palm trees with spreading fronds rather than a crossing of tunnels. Indeed, it was almost impossible to imagine that this was the work of the same masons who had made the transepts and the choir.

  The cloister was an entirely new structure, built on new ground outside the church; but it still recalled in stone the quirks and idiosyncrasies of its ancestors, caused by the mismatch between them and the original abbey. There is a door on the west side of the cloister, for instance, that used to lead into the abbot’s lodging. It’s easy to miss. Here, the ribs of the vault do not fan out from a shaft of stone between the windows, but from the apex of a slender arch placed above the door—repeating, in miniature, that angelic moment in the crossing of the church where the masons made a vault that seemed to dance on air. There, the device was an ingenious response to structural necessity, but in the cloister its presence is apparently arbitrary: an inherited tic, a family trait outlasting the original reason for its existence.

  After the cloister was complete, Abbot Froucester passed away and was succeeded by Abbot Moreton, who “died without having done anything worthy of particular notice.” And when Abbot Moreton was taken to God, he was succeeded by Abbot Morwent, who started to rebuild the nave of the abbey church but was cut off after three arches.

  When Abbot Morwent died, he was succeeded by Abbot Boulers, who was made the king’s ambassador to Rome and was imprisoned by the Duke of York in Ludlow Castle. He had little time for building. In 1450 Abbot Boulers was elevated to the see of Hereford and was succeeded by Abbot Sebrok; and in the time of this abbot, the descendants of the tomb of Edward II spawned yet another descendant, larger and more prominent than all its ancestors. The tomb of King Edward II, having remade the south transept and the choir, now pierced the roof, transforming the bell tower that rose above the crossing of the abbey church.

  The new tower advertised the presence of that tomb to the distant fields and the floodplains that surrounded the city, all the way to the river Severn. It does not reach upward to heaven like a pointed spire. Rather, it seems as if a weightless shrine of traceries, cusped arches, thin buttresses, and pointed crockets has descended from above to float upon the abbey roof. The top of the tower is embroidered with castellations and corner towers, so riddled with fretwork that they might have been embroidered in lace rather than carved from stone.

  Abbot Sebrok was succeeded by Abbot Hanley and then Abbot Farley. In their time, the ancient abbey church burst open and gave birth to another descendant of the tomb of Edward II, a new chapel extending from the east end of the church behind the altar. This Lady Chapel was not imprisoned in the earthly cave of the old building, and the sun poured in on all sides, refracted through colorful stained glass that shimmered against golden stone. Liberated from the ancient structure, the Lady Chapel had no need for any of those oddities—evolved in response to emergency and miscalculation—that disrupt the regular composition of the transept, the crossing, and the choir.

  But the masons put them there all the same. Buttresses sliced diagonally through grids of tracery, vaults sprang from etiolated arches that flew through the air, and clusters of stone ribs fanned out from tall thin shafts. Redundant and diminutive as these motifs were, their presence was no arbitrary quirk. The Lady Chapel was a record in stone of all the strange and wonderful things that the masons had devised, generation after generation, in the transformation of Gloucester Abbey. It was their testament and their history. One can only suppose that, since the monks would not write it for them, the masons had decided to build their own Historia of the abbey in stone.

  THE IDENTITIES OF the masons are, in the absence of written records, a matter of rumor and speculation. Some have noted similarities in conception and detail between the south transept at Gloucester and the chapel of Saint Stephen at the Palace of Westminster, although that chapel burned down in 1834. On that basis, scholars argue that Edward III sent the master mason of Saint Stephen’s, a certain Thomas of Canterbury, to dignify the resting place of his father in the manner of the court. We shall never know. Thomas of Canterbury disappears from the record in 1336, just nine years after the death of Edwa
rd II.

  A few broken stones on display in London are all that remains of the chapter house of the medieval cathedral of Saint Paul’s. The moldings carved on these stones are so similar to those in the choir at Gloucester Abbey that some believe that the same person must have made them both. That person, they argue, was the master mason William Ramsay, the chief scion of a dynasty of masons that built the cathedrals and the castles of eastern England in the middle of the fourteenth century. He had worked under the tutelage of Thomas of Canterbury at Saint Stephen’s in Westminster, perhaps as his apprentice.

  But there is no record of William Ramsay in the Historia of Gloucester Abbey. There is no mention of any workmen during this period at all. We do know that a certain John of Sponlee surveyed the castle of Gloucester in 1336 and was later engaged at court. Perhaps he implemented the design of William Ramsay for the abbey choir. Perhaps the great man spotted him, and made him his apprentice, and carried him off to Edward III’s Court of the Round Table. We shall never know.

  The fan vaults of the cloister present further mysteries. They are obviously the descendant of the vaults of the abbey interior in some respects, but they represent a radical departure from their predecessors in others, and they certainly betray the hand of a new master. Perhaps a clue lies in a seventeenth-century drawing made of the chapter house at Hereford Cathedral, near Gloucester, before it was demolished. The paper is rough, and the line uncertain, but the resemblance is unmistakable: the vault of this vanished chapter house—or at least its manuscript ghost—is so similar to the cloister vault at Gloucester that it is almost impossible to imagine the two were not in some way related.

  And we do know who designed the chapter house at Hereford: a certain Thomas of Cantebrugge, who became a freedman of that town in 1365. Now, Cantebrugge is the old name for Cambridge, a hamlet on the road between Gloucester and Bristol. Some have argued that this Thomas of Cantebrugge must have begun his career under William Ramsay or John of Sponlee, working on the choir of Gloucester, and became master mason there before moving on to Hereford. Perhaps. Maybe this Thomas of Cantebrugge was the inventor of the fan vault. We shall never know.

  It is written in the Historia that the transformation of Gloucester’s bell tower under Abbot Sebrok was designed and carried out by a canon of the abbey, a certain Robert Tully who went on to become the bishop of Saint David’s in the principality of Wales. There is, however, an old country rhyme that contradicts the Historia.

  John Gowere,

  Who built Campden Church

  And Glo’ster towre

  Of John Gower, we know nothing more; and of those who designed and built the Lady Chapel, we know nothing at all.

  PERHAPS IT IS no coincidence that the Freemasons of today—who are, of course, sworn to silence in all that they do—trace their origins back to a document produced in 1390, when the cloisters of Gloucester Abbey were under construction. This document, known as the Regius Manuscript, is written in a dialect of English associated with Gloucestershire; and in it, the masons, for the first time, wrote their history down on parchment rather than building it in stone.

  The Regius Manuscript opens in grandiose Latin: “Hic incipient constituciones artis geometriae secundum Euclydem” (Here begin the constitutions of the art of geometry according to Euclid). For the masons of the Middle Ages were not ignorant craftsmen, as some have supposed. If they were silent, it was not because they lacked means to communicate, but because they chose not to do so. The masons were learned men of ancient lineage; what is more, they were free men, not the serfs of some lord or abbot. Master masons like Thomas of Canterbury, John of Sponlee, and Thomas of Cantebrugge were free to come and go as they pleased, following the great building programs of cathedral and castle and abbey around the country.

  These men had minds and secrets of their own, and in order that they might all share and benefit from their knowledge the master masons agreed to a list of regulations. Foremost among these were two articles: first, that they should all assemble and meet together at regular intervals; and second, that they should all employ and train apprentices in their craft.

  It is the relationship between master and apprentice that underlies the story of the many descendants of the tomb of Edward II and their successive superimposition on the old church of Abbot Serlo. For more than a century after the king was buried in the abbey, apprentices succeeded their masters in an unbroken chain. The master masons who built the Lady Chapel in the time of Abbots Hanley and Farley had been the apprentices of the masters who had built the tower in the time of Abbot Sebrok, who had been the apprentices of the masters who rebuilt the west end of the nave in the time of Abbot Morwent, who had been the apprentices of the masters who had built the cloister in the time of Abbot Froucester, who had been the apprentices of the masters who had built the choir in the time of Abbots Staunton and Horton, who had been the apprentices of the masters who had built the transept in the time of Abbot Wigmore—and so on, ultimately, to the original, unknown master who had devised the tomb of the dead king itself.

  Every generation learned at the feet of the generation that preceded it, and so, in the end, did the abbey itself. The Lady Chapel is a recitation of all the lessons learned during a century and half of construction; the bell tower is the external application of the interior architecture of the choir and the crossing; the choir and the crossing are an elegant refinement of the experimental design of the south transept; and the south transept is the reconstruction, on a vast scale, of the tomb of Edward II.

  That original tiny building, an embroidery of strange oriental arches and lacy openwork spires, in which stone became angelically weightless, was the progenitor of a whole race of architecture. Generation over generation, its descendants adapted themselves to—and transformed—the primitive and sometimes hostile environment of the abbey of Serlo. Their first ancestor, the tomb, is now scarcely visible amid their crowded clamor.

  IN 1498 ABBOT Farley passed away and was succeeded by Abbot Malvern, who died within the year and was succeeded by Abbot Braunche, Abbot Newton, and Abbot Parker. Abbot Parker was succeeded by no one, for in his time King Henry VIII dissolved the monastery and cast out the monks from the place that they had been building for nine hundred years. But rather than destroying the abbey church of Gloucester, King Henry raised it to the status of a cathedral, because he wished to honor the resting place of one of his forefathers.

  Or, at least, he believed it was the resting place of one of his forefathers. In 1337, just as the masons were beginning to transform the choir of Gloucester Abbey, King Edward III received a letter from a certain Manuele de Fieschi, a priest in Genoa.

  In the name of the Lord, Amen. Those things that I have heard from the confession of your father I have written with my own hand, and afterwards I have taken care to be made known to your highness.

  First, he has said that, feeling England in subversion against him after the threat from your mother, he departed from his followers . . . and he was captured by Lord Henry of Lancaster. And they led him to Kenilworth Castle . . . and there, many people demanding it, he lost his crown. Subsequently, you were crowned at the feast of Candlemas next following.

  Finally, they sent him to the castle of Berkeley. Afterwards, the servant who was guarding him, after some time, said to your father: “Sire, Lord Thomas Gurney and Lord Simon Barford, knights, have come with the purpose of killing you. If it pleases you, I shall give you my clothes, that you may be better able to escape.” Then, wearing the said clothes, at twilight, he went out of the prison. And when he had reached the last door without resistance, because he was not recognized, he found the porter sleeping, whom he quickly killed. And, having got the keys out of the door, he opened it and went out with his keeper.

  The said knights who had come to kill him, seeing that he had thus fled, and fearing the indignation of the Queen, for fear of their lives, thought to put that aforesaid porter in a chest, his heart having been extracted and maliciously present
ed to the Queen, as if they were the heart and body of your father; and, as the body of the King, the said porter was buried at Gloucester . . .

  Finally, after various deliberations, all things having been considered . . . he went to Paris, and from Paris to Brabant, and from Brabant to Cologne so that, out of devotion, he might see the shrine of the three Kings. And, leaving Cologne, he crossed over Germany and headed for Milan in Lombardy.

  In Milan, he entered a certain hermitage in the castle of Milasci; and because war overran the said castle, he moved to the castle of Cecima in another hermitage of the dioceses of Pavia in Lombardy. And he remained in this last hermitage for two years or thereabouts, always the recluse, doing penance or praying God for you and other sinners.

  There is a simple tomb in the mountain hermitage at Cecima, a quiet place where nothing has changed for centuries. And this crude recess in the rock, so they say, is the true resting place of Edward II. Gloucester was a rumor, a cover-up, repeated and elaborated so many times that in the end everyone believed it.

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