- [Steven] We've taken the train up from London
to see Gloucester Cathedral.
- [Beth] We're standing in what is probably
the most famous part of Gloucester cathedral.
And that's the cloister.
- [Steven] In the center of the cloister is a garth,
an open garden and surrounding it
is an enclosed walkway on all four sides.
This is traditionally a place where monks would meditate
and would circumambulate,
they would walk along the passageways.
But if I were a monk trying to clear my mind
to let the spiritual in,
I might be a little overwhelmed by what surrounds me.
In all four passageways,
there's the most spectacular architectural decoration.
This is the birth of an architectural form
that we call a fan vault.
- [Beth] And fan vaults are typical of this very late phase
of English Gothic architecture,
that art historians call the Perpendicular.
- [Steven] The Perpendicular is the last style
in the progression of English Gothic.
What we think happened is that Royal masons
who had developed the style first in London
were then brought here and here invented
this extraordinary space that we're walking through.
And these magnificent fan vaults.
Let's go look at a couple of other examples
of the Perpendicular here at Gloucester cathedral.
- [Beth] We're standing now in the presbytery.
- [Steven] So what we're seeing here
is not building from scratch,
but instead it's taking this new delicate style,
the Perpendicular and applying it to the surface
of the massive masonry that had come before.
So we're seeing a kind of refurbishment of this church,
a kind of renovation so that it didn't feel old fashioned
anymore, so that it reflected the newest style.
The style that had developed in London.
- [Beth] By the early 1300s, this part of the church,
which was built in the 12th century
would have looked dark and heavy.
And the Gothic architects wanted to flood the space
of the cathedral with light.
- [Steven] And they did.
This room is filled with enormous windows,
but towering over them all is a window
that's the size of a tennis court.
It's a wall of glass, an almost impossible achievement.
This window cost a fortune.
We think that the glass was imported from France,
but the costliness didn't come from importing so much
as the materials that were required to produce the glass.
This would have taken a forest of trees
to light the kilns that were necessary to make the glass.
- [Beth] That stained glass represents a hierarchy.
At the bottom we have the insignia of the nobility,
the people who help to pay for this very expensive window.
- [Steven] So these are Kings and lesser nobles.
- [Beth] That represent temporal power, earthly power.
Above that spiritual power, abbots and bishops.
- [Steven] And in the middle frieze, we have saints.
- [Beth] And then above that in the center, the Virgin Mary
and Christ, and on either side of them, six apostles.
- [Steven] And then above that, we see angels.
As our eyes drawn upward,
we're drawn towards the heavenly.
- [Beth] The vaulting that we see above us
would have originally been brightly painted.
So even more glorious than it appears today.
- [Steven] And this is a very complex web of stone.
Relatively late in the development of the English Gothic
we begin to see these web like surfaces in the vaulting,
and that's because the English have introduced
three additional types of ribs.
You have a center ridge rib, which runs along the roof line.
- [Beth] And here we have one in the center
and one on either side.
So three parallel ribs run straight down the center,
leading our eye to the glass.
- [Steven] But we also have tierceron,
which are additional decorative ribs
that are attached to the peers.
And then finally we have the small linking ribs,
which are called lierne.
- [Beth] And these lovely, elegant, thin colonettes
that begin almost at floor level and bring our eye
all the way up to the vaulting
where that complex ribbing is decorated with bosses.
Some of which are floral and some of which show us
angel's singing and playing musical industry.
- [Steven] When ribbed vaulting was first introduced,
it was a structural system,
but here it has become decorative.
We're at the east end of the church, but we can actually
walk into another building that's even further east.
This is the latest construction
that took place at the cathedral.
It's called the Lady Chapel.
- [Beth] Lady Chapels are named
for the Virgin Mary, My Lady.
- [Steven] We've walked into the Lady Chapel
and light is overwhelming.
This is a building that seems impossible
to be made out of stone.
- [Beth] There are walls of colored glass.
Some of it dates to a later period, but as light floods in
it creates flickers of colors on the stone itself.
This is a space that seems truly miraculous.
Let's go now to the western part of the church, the nave.
So we can get a sense of what it was
that those 14th century architects wanted to cover up.
- [Steven] We've walked to the front of the church,
to the nave, this large open space
surrounded on either side by an aisle.
And it is so different from that later perpendicular Gothic.
- [Beth] It's true that here, instead of seeing
slender bundled colonettes that rise
from nearly the floor up to the vaulting,
we have big, heavy, wide cylinders for columns
that help support the vaulting.
And those are not decorated.
But if you look up between them to the arches,
we see rolls of molding.
We see zigzag patterns, chevrons.
We see this interest in embellishing these round arches,
which are so typical of Anglo Norman
or Romanesque architecture.
- [Steven] Those chevrons are everywhere in this room,
just above the arches you see a string course
that runs the entire length of the nave.
And it's made out of a double chevron.
Above that in the triforium
you can see double arches and chevrons there.
And so there is this desire to decorate.
- [Beth] Here we are in the early 12th century,
soon after William the conqueror comes from France
and invades England,
and the architects are just figuring out stone architecture.
How do you support a large, wide stone vault?
You need big, heavy columns to support the roof
and the structure above.
So in the 1200s, they built the vault that we see today
in what we call the early English Gothic style.
And typical of the English Gothic are these vaults
whose ribs spring from corbels
that are located between the nave arches
and in between the arches of the triforium
where we also see a darker colored stone
called purbeck marble.
All of this is so typical
of this early English Gothic style.
- [Steven] And to make it even more complicated.
We have yet another style here.
As we look across the nave towards the south aisle,
we look at these wonderful stained glass windows,
which are ornamented with hundreds of ball flowers.
This is yet another style of English Gothic,
which is known as the Decorated style.
And so in this room, we're overwhelmed
with the weight of the oldest style of the Anglo Norman.
We see the Early English Gothic above us in the vaulting,
and then we see the Decorated Gothic in the south aisle.
And then if we look eastward, we can see the Perpendicular.
This church is overwhelming in its beauty,
but it's also a history lesson
of the architecture of medieval England.
- [Beth] We could even go further back than that
because there was an Anglo-Saxon church
on this location before the Norman invasion, before 1066.
- [Steven] And we could even go further back
than the Anglo-Saxon because the church was built
in part on the foundation of ancient Roman walls
from the period when the Roman empire
occupied this part of Britain.
And it's so important to remember that the relatively
spare interior that we see today does not reflect
the opulence of these spaces before the reformation.
It's a little bit hard sometimes to imagine
what these spaces looked like.
There is one candlestick in the Victoria and Albert Museum
in London that came from this cathedral.
It can give us just a sense of how spectacular
the objects that furnished the space originally were.
- [Beth] In many ways, we are inside history
at Gloucester cathedral.