(piano music plays)
- [Steven] We're in Durham Cathedral at the top of a hill
in north eastern England.
This is one of the great early cathedrals.
- [Beth] And it's built less than three decades
after the Norman Conquest,
that is, after William the Conqueror crossed the channel
with his army and invaded and took over England
in a rather brutal invasion and replaced
the old order of Anglo-Saxon England
for this new Norman order,
and built many churches,
among the first of which is Durham Cathedral.
- [Steven] This location is at a bend in a river
that is naturally fortified by a steep slope,
and the cathedral is built,
as is the castle next to it at this high point,
and it was built to contain the relics
of an extremely important English saint,
St Cuthbert.
- [Beth] Cuthbert lived for a time on an island
just off the east coast of England in an area
that was then called Northumbria.
That island is called Lindisfarne and you may have
heard of it because one of the most beautiful of all early
medieval illuminated manuscripts,
the Lindisfarne Gospels,
was produced at the monastery at Lindisfarne.
- [Steven] And was made to honor St Cuthbert
and was transported with the remains of the saint
from the island to this more protected area at a time
when vikings were threatening the coast.
- [Beth] It may seem odd to be carrying around the body
of a saint but the body,
the relics of Saint Cuthbert were incredibly important,
they performed miracles and in fact a shrine was built
for Saint Cuthbert.
It was gilded,
it was covered in jewels.
- [Steven] Cuthbert developed a following that extended
across the nation and even in the continent.
England had been taken by the Normans and was politically
associated with that northern part
of what we now call France.
- [Beth] Normandy, and that's where the Duke of Normandy
who invaded England in 1066 came from.
- [Steven] And he brought with him not only his own bishops,
not only his own nobility,
but also building techniques from the continent.
And so there was a continuity between Norman churches
such as this one and the Norman churches that we see
in northern France,
which is why we call this style Anglo-Norman.
English history is complicated.
We have native peoples here that were conquered
by the Romans who then left in the early fifth century.
The political vacuum was then filled by invaders
from what is now southern Denmark and northern Germany,
peoples that we call the Angles and the Saxons,
or the Anglo-Saxons.
- [Beth] And then Anglo-Saxon England is supplanted
by Norman England and this is one of the first Anglo-Norman
churches, and we feel the ancientness of this building.
It is heavy,
it feels fortified,
and in that way we know that we're standing
in a Romanesque church.
- [Steven] This was some of the earliest large scale
architecture to take place since the Romans had left,
and we call it Romanesque because this architecture
was dependent on the technology that the Romans
had originally used,
that is the round arch.
- [Beth] One of the things that one notices immediately
was how decorative the surfaces are,
that is a key feature of Anglo-Norman Romanesque
that differentiates it from what was going on
on the French continent.
- [Steven] We're standing in the nave and we're surrounded
by these massive piers that hold up the heavy vaulting
above us,
and there are basically two types of piers that alternate.
One is a simple cylindrical pier,
and the other is a more complex and larger compound pier
that has attached columns.
- [Beth] And the cylindrical piers are the ones
that carry this amazing linear decoration.
When we walk in from the west and we see fluted columns.
As we make our way east towards the holiest
end of the church we see cylindrical piers
decorated with chevrons,
these zig-zag shapes.
And then we come upon lozenge shapes,
and in each case really deeply cut creating dark shadows
that were likely originally painted.
- [Steven] And if you look closely you'll notice
that ingeniously the stonemasons created a kind
of mass production, each stone is identical to another
and yet when they fit together they create
these continuous patterns.
- [Beth] And this is a testament to the increasing skill
of stonemasons during the Romanesque period.
- [Steven] As we move eastward we see massive spiral columns
which reflect that spiral columns at St Peters in Rome,
surrounding the tomb of St Peter.
Here the columns are closer to the tomb of St Cuthbert,
creating a correspondence between Cuthbert and Peter.
- [Beth] Also the dimensions of this church
are very close to the dimensions of Old St Peter's.
And that was a very common thing in medieval architecture,
to emulate important precedents like St Peter's
or important churches in Jerusalem.
- [Steven] The inter-elevation is three-part.
Above the nave arcade is this broad,
heavy gallery.
- [Beth] I'm struck by the depth of the archway
and the rolls of molding that lead our eye
up to that gallery and we can see that in some cases
that molding is decorated with that chevron zig-zag pattern
in these wonderfully complex ways.
- [Steven] And we see that chevron zig-zag everywhere
in this church.
It creates the most lively pattern that activates
the surfaces of stones.
- [Beth] Now the church is relatively dark as most
Romanesque churches are.
We can see a clerestory which is rather small
and interestingly those windows are slightly inset,
again we have a sense of the depth of the wall.
- [Steven] There is in fact a narrow walkway
that moves just in front of those windows.
- [Beth] So this idea of emphasizing the depth of the wall,
this interesting decorative carving,
these are all things that art historians sees
carrying through after the Romanesque
into the English Gothic.
- [Steven] And one of my favorite decorative aspects
of the church can be seen in the aisles.
We see these doubled attached columns
with these interlacing arches just above.
It's almost musical.
- [Beth] We have to imagine these painted in reds and greens
and yellows so they would have really stood out.
Art historians believe that these might be influenced
by the art of Islamic Spain.
- [Steven] For example, in the great mosque at Cordoba
we see interlacing similar to this.
An aspect of this church that fascinates art historians
is the vaulting,
because here we see the precocious early use
of ribbed vaulting.
- [Beth] Ribbed vaulting does in some form
go back to the ancient Romans,
but it's use here is very important because
we know what's going to follow in the Gothic.
Before stone vaulting,
churches had been covered with wood,
sometimes even flat wood ceilings.
And so not only was stone vaulting more fireproof,
it allowed for a shaping of space that was
far more decorative.
- [Beth] If we follow the lines of the vault,
we notice that it leads our eye down a shaft
which is attached to the compound pier,
and so you have this unifying of the nave
from the ground all the way up through and across
the transverse arch that takes to the other side
of the nave.
This unification of space is something that will become
very important in the Gothic era.
- [Steven] We've entered the galilee.
This was built after the main church was completed
and architecturally it's a completely different space.
- [Beth] Here instead of those very massive heavy
cylindrical columns or those massive compound piers,
we have sets of four columns joined together
that feel very light and the space feels very open.
- [Steven] And that was possible because this part
of the church does not have heavy stone vaulting.
Instead we have a wooden roof and so the architect
could afford to use these delicate slender columns.
- [Beth] And they carry arches that are decorated again
with these incredibly deep and complex chevron patterns.
- [Steven] But here because the ceiling is lower,
they're closer to us and they really activate the space,
the entire space almost feels electrified.
- [Beth] And there is significant wall space
above the arches and much of that was,
it seems covered with paintings,
some of them just barely survive along one of the aisles.
- [Steven] We think this is the first galilee
attached to a church in England.
- [Beth] And we know that these spaces were used
as gathering places,
perhaps at the start of a liturgical procession,
and the word galilee is a reference
to Christ's entry in Jerusalem,
because when he entered Jerusalem
he came first from Galilee.
So we've left Durham Cathedral and heading back
to the train station,
taking the view of both the cathedral and the castle
and the river that surrounds them,
and we're reminded of St Cuthbert himself
who chose this very strategic location.
- [Steven] At least according to legend,
as his remains were being carried on a cart,
the cart stopped not far from here.
- [Beth] As though this was directed by the saint himself.
- [Steven] And then thanks to a vision
that had to do with a brown cow,
this sacred spot was found.
- [Beth] I'm so glad this Norman castle and cathedral
have stood the test of time.
(piano music plays)