From “Monkish Piles” to “Beautiful Models”: Antiquarianism, Anti-Catholicism, and the Eighteenth-Century Surge of Interest in Medieval Ecclesiastical Architecture
In 1791, the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) published in Vetusta Monumenta two engraved plates devoted to the West Front of Lincoln Cathedral (Plates 3.10-3.11). The plans of the complex chambers of the western block, drawn by the cathedral’s clerk of the works, William Lumby (c. 1755-1804), “with great labour, attention, and very frequent goings-up and down” (Englefield 1796, 1), are painstakingly accurate. The scholarly account that accompanies the plates uses architectural style to distinguish not only between the Gothic and the Norman parts of the building, but also between the two Norman phases of the work, that of Bishop Remigius in the eleventh century and that of Bishop Alexander the Magnificent in the twelfth century. In key ways, these plates, together with the accompanying written account, display all the hallmarks of modern scholarship. They are invaluable, both as a record of a building as yet undamaged by industrial pollution, and as a starting point for the twentieth-century discourse about the date of the West Front together with its function.
These Lincoln plates fall within the type of buildings and artworks grouped by the antiquary John Fenn (1739-1794) under the category of “Class IV, Abbeys; Churches and Chapels; Tombs and Shrines; Fonts and Windows.” This was perhaps the most capacious of the seven “classes” developed by Fenn for his Index to the Prints Published by the Society of Antiquaries of London, including the first two volumes of Vetusta Monumenta (Fenn 1784). But the Lincoln engravings were, in fact, published in Vetusta Monumenta in the eleven years after the index was completed in 1784. During this short period, 1784-1795, driven by the enthusiasm of Richard Gough (1735-1809), director of the SAL since 1771, the subjects in Class IV reflected commitment to medieval art and architecture through the frequency with which they were selected for publication in this series.
However, no more than twelve subjects from Class IV were chosen for publication in Vetusta Monumenta from its inception in 1718 to the date of Fenn’s index, and this is a low number compared with sixty-seven subjects in Fenn’s other classes. Moreover, during the earlier years of the eighteenth century, significant gaps occurred in the periods between the selection of ecclesiastical subjects: eleven years between examples in the 1720s and the 1730s, fourteen years between the 1730s and the 1750s, and fourteen years between the 1750s and the 1760s.
Do these figures suggest a lesser degree of interest in pre-Reformation religious art and architecture earlier in the eighteenth century compared to a more intense interest at the end of the century? In 1780, Gough himself wrote, “One cannot but regret the little regard hitherto paid to Gothic Architecture, of which so many beautiful models are daily crumbling to pieces before our eyes” (Gough 1780, xxiii).
However, when, in 1784, Fenn placed twelve subjects within Class IV, he created (intentionally or unintentionally) a subsection of works that had been designed before the English Reformation specifically for the practices of the Roman Catholic Church—practices which were, throughout the period when the engravings in Class IV were commissioned, illegal. As Rosemary Hill observes, “Catholicism, or ‘popery’ to its enemies, was still deeply mistrusted in Britain three centuries after the Reformation” (Hill 2021, 182). So, for the student who follows the eighteenth-century surge in interest in medieval ecclesiastical architecture and art, it is impossible to divorce Fenn’s Class IV works from religious and, consequently, political controversy.
The earliest engravings commissioned by the SAL in the 1720s included a number of plates depicting abbeys, which King Henry VIII had dissolved and reduced to ruins due to their allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. Once the monarchs of England became the Heads of the Church, it became illegal to recognize the supreme authority of the pope. Hence, the remains of great abbeys in early eighteenth-century England could be viewed as the visible evidence of the former presence of an enemy. John Evelyn’s (1620-1706) condemnation of the Gothic style, republished in 1723, was driven by its association with monasteries, which he termed “Congestions of Heavy, Dark, Melancholy and Monkish Piles” (Evelyn 1723, 9). In 1718, Browne Willis, a founding member of the SAL, cautioned that admirers of abbeys could be considered to have a “too superstitious Affection for these buildings” (Sweet 2004, 238).
In this context, it seems surprising that the first example to be engraved from within Class IV, in 1720, should be the ruins of Walsingham Abbey (Plate 1.6). The Roman Catholic Jacobite Rising, which attempted to dethrone King George I, had taken place only five years earlier in 1715. The savagery with which it was repressed (one of its leaders, James Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater [1689-1716], was publicly executed on Tower Hill) would be enough to deter even the wealthy and influential Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries from displaying signs of enthusiasm for the Roman Catholic Church. A key to an understanding of their attitude toward the abbey can be discerned in a remark recorded in the minutes of the meeting of 17 May 1720: “Mr. President brought a pretty Drawing of the Ruins of Walsingham Abby” (SAL Minutes I.34). Thus, what had once been one of the great powerhouses of pre-Reformation England was reduced to no more than the object of mild approbation. In the drawing and subsequent engraving, the building’s ruins are conveyed with a degree of accuracy but without the careful measurements that could act as a basis for future restoration. Contemporary figures are included in the scene, but they are shown as absorbed in their own lives of agriculture and hunting and seem indifferent to the ruined buildings.
Three years later, the SAL published four views of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire (Plates 1.9-12). Taken from drawings by Samuel Buck (1697-1779), these views are accurate and convey the huge size of the extensive ruins. But in these representations, nature, in the form of trees and plants, has encroached everywhere to the extent that it is in the process of destroying the buildings. Their fate is conveyed as inevitable.
In 1727, the SAL published an engraving of Furness Abbey in Lancashire (Plate 1.27) The plate’s caption records its foundation date of 1127, 600 years earlier. Its depiction, however, accords with the contrast made in the caption between the Abbey’s former wealth (“when it was dissolved, the Abbey handed over its property along with its annual revenues of £966.7.10 to the Royal Exchequer”) and its present state (“The most splendid ruins show how much the Abbey has changed from its original condition”). The ruins are accurately drawn, and their size is conveyed, but they are shown as divorced from the successful enterprises of eighteenth-century life, which goes on within and around them. Hunting occupies the ground in front of them. A draughtsman is depicted in the center foreground, but he is turned not towards the abbey, but towards a large and splendid modern mansion and gardens. Only one small figure acknowledges the abbey. In front, a gentleman gazes into the ruins of the former church. The abbey’s days of glory are over.
The attitude expressed in these early eighteenth-century plates was typical for this period. 1718 saw the republication of William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum, originally published 1655-73, including entries on the monasteries of Walsingham (128), Fountains (90), and Furness (87). A print by Daniel King accompanies Dugdale’s entry on Fountains, first published in the 1661 Monasticon Anglicanum. Perhaps it was this image, where the ruins are inaccurately depicted (for instance, the twelfth-century Romanesque nave windows have been incorrectly filled with Gothic tracery), that encouraged the SAL to produce better views of the abbey. A Collection of Engravings of Castles, and Abbeys in England (1726-42), by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, depicts abbey ruins, like those of Croxted Abbey or Dudley Priory, as overwhelmed by the natural world.
Why then should the SAL have chosen monastic ruins as appropriate subjects for engraving in the 1720s? In 1727, the antiquarian Francis Peck wrote: “Books of antiquities should contain plates of these structures (parish churches) rather than gentlemen's seats” (quoted in Sweet 2004, 246-7). But landowners who owned monastic ruins would be amongst the most eager buyers of engravings of such subjects. Nevertheless, another reason for these expensive commissions was firmly stated in 1725 by the Society’s Fellow and first secretary, William Stukeley. “It is evident how proper engravings are to preserve the memory of things” he wrote, “and how much better an idea they convey to the mind than written descriptions” (Stukeley 1725, Preface). In 1725, Stukeley could have had little faith that these abbey buildings might be preserved or even restored in the future. But visual evidence from this pre-photographic age, the work of eighteenth-century draughtsmen and engravers, and the enterprise of such bodies as the SAL, have indeed been invaluable over the centuries and continue to be so today.
Given the caution towards a display of enthusiasm for the Roman Catholic past, the decision in 1724 to publish in Vetusta Monumenta a print of the tomb or feretory (mausoleum sive feretrum) of St Edward the Confessor (Plate 1.16) seems bold. Before the Reformation, this shrine in Westminster Abbey had drawn pilgrims from across the British Isles and from Europe. It was destroyed under the orders of Henry VIII in 1536. Indeed, its survival was due to the short-lived revival of Roman Catholicism under Queen Mary I, when it was reconstructed in its original position. Surprising also is the artist's presentation of the thirteenth-century shrine. It is depicted as a noble work of art. It stands alone, with no distracting surrounding architecture or figures. Its condition shows that it will last into the future, and its design is meticulously recorded.
The freedom afforded to early eighteenth-century connoisseurs to admire this work can be explained by the metamorphosis of the Westminster building from an abbey church into the Protestant Collegiate church of St. Peter. Moreover, as a “royal peculiar" established by Queen Elizabeth I in 1566, it belonged directly to the English monarch, rather than to the diocese of the bishop of London. Finally, it was the setting for royal coronations. Nor could the monument’s inscription, recorded in the engraving, be problematic. “Omnibus insignis virtutum laudibus heros sanctus Edwardus.” Among these words stands out the word heros (hero), a type of person that even the most devotedly Protestant monarch could aspire to be.
Notwithstanding the evident admiration for this pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Gothic work of art, and the Furness ruins published shortly afterward, there was a gap of eleven years before another engraving belonging to Fenn’s Category IV was published in Vetusta Monumenta (Plate 1.49)—even though this subject, the Bishop’s Chapel at Hereford, had been recorded in drawings by Stukeley as early as 1721. However, Hereford Cathedral was by then the seat of an Anglican bishop, and the chapel in question was part of his palace. Its style, although undoubtedly medieval, was not Gothic. The commissioning of the engraving of the building in 1737 followed the announcement of its impending demolition (Drinkwater 1954). By 1738, it had ceased to exist.
This 1738 engraving marks a significant moment in the history of Vetusta Monumenta’s presentation of medieval ecclesiastical architecture. The precisely measured depictions of its ground plan and west elevation anticipate the work of much later scholars, for instance, the 1791 engraving of the West Front of Lincoln Cathedral, discussed above. The commissioning of the engraving resulted in a scholarly paper about the building, recorded in the Society’s minutes, anticipating the explanatory accounts added to the engravings in Vetusta Monumenta later in the century. The evident interest in the building mirrored the contemporary interest in the style and date of architecture that preceded Gothic: “This most venerable structure . . . is undoubtedly of Roman Architecture seeming to have been built at the end of the eighth century” (SAL Minutes III.122).
It was to be another fourteen years before another subject from Fenn’s Class IV was chosen for publication, during which twenty-six engravings of objects and buildings from the other classes were selected. The choice in 1752 of The Wooden Church in Greensted, Essex is noteworthy (Plate 2.7). It occurred within the context of scholarly interest in the history and culture of pre-Norman Britain, an era designated by antiquarians as Saxon. In this respect, the presentation of the church builds on that of the Hereford Chapel. Its elevations and plan are drawn with care and exactitude. In a further development, the essay resulting from the scholarly research surrounding the church was no longer confined to the SAL Minute Book, but was engraved on the plate below the images. Finally, the plate presented not just the church, but two other seemingly disparate objects: the shrine of St. Edmund taken from a fourteenth-century manuscript and the seal of the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Their presence links the church with King Edmund. It is perhaps no coincidence that the engraving was published in 1752, one year after a Royal Charter was awarded to the SAL by King George II. The receipt of the charter might have been seen as a tacit endorsement of the Society’s interest in the Catholic past. This was the first non-ruinous ecclesiastical building chosen for inclusion in Vetusta Monumenta. Greensted church still exists and a reproduction of the SAL engraving is even now prominently displayed within it.
In 1754, an engraving was published that marked both a continuation of the Society’s interest in pre-Gothic ecclesiastical architecture and, at the same time, represented a major milestone in the scholarly approach to the understanding of an important medieval building. Plate 2.15 is a copy from the twelfth-century Eadwine Psalter of the monk Eadwine’s depiction of the plan of his monastery as well as the entire south elevation of Canterbury Cathedral as it was before the major changes in the later twelfth century and in the fourteenth century. Just as important, the plate includes an eighteenth-century ground plan of the pre-Gothic cathedral, showing the twelfth-century “Glorious Choir” to the east, joined to the eleventh-century nave and transepts to the West, the various parts meticulously labelled, following written accounts by the eleventh-century monk Eadmer and the description of the choir by the twelfth-century master mason of the Gothic East End, William of Sens. In this way, Plate 2.15 extended valuable evidence provided by a medieval manuscript conserved within the library of a Cambridge college to a much wider audience and laid the grounds for all future work on pre-Gothic Canterbury Cathedral. In addition, for the first time in Fenn’s chronicle of engravings published in Class IV, the plate was accompanied by an extensive explanatory account that hypothesized dates for the various parts of the pre-Gothic cathedral and presented the evidence to back these hypotheses.
In 1768, the Fellows of SAL selected a subject within Fenn’s category of Class IV that demonstrates how profoundly attitudes towards works of art created before the Reformation to serve the Roman Catholic Church had changed since the early eighteenth century. Plate 2.26 is an engraving of a fifteenth-century stained-glass window that had been rescued from Waltham Abbey at the Dissolution. It escaped destruction and was hidden from public view for over three hundred years until, in 1758, it was installed in St. Margaret’s Church at Westminster. It shows images of Christ on the Cross, together with attendant saints, images that were still expressly condemned in the English Church’s set of rules, the 39 Articles (Article 22). At this time, Roman Catholic worship was still illegal in England. When the window was installed in St. Margaret’s, the churchwardens were accused of “suffer[ing] to be set up a certain painted Glass in the great Eastern window…whereon is represented by Delineation and Colours, one or more superstitious Picture or Pictures, Image or Images; and more particularly the painted Image of Christ upon the Cross” (Wilson 1761, 7).
In fact, the SAL had recognized the qualities and historic importance of this window and had paid for it to be recorded in colored drawings thirty years earlier (SAL Minutes III.67). But even in the 1760s, they evidently hesitated to approve such a work publicly. The project was first discussed by the Council on 21 May 1765, but was then “adjourned sine die” (SAL Council Minutes I.116). Perhaps it was the award of the Royal Charter in 1751 that finally provided the confidence to make the engraving. Furthermore, by 1768, the wheel had turned in terms of antiquarian appreciation of Gothic. For example, in 1765, Gough received a letter including the statement “Heavens what a noble pile of Gothic Architecture is Tintern Abbey. I was in extase and speechless” (Sweet 2004, 317).
The last two subjects on Fenn’s list were engraved just a few years before he compiled it in 1784. Plates 2.29-2.35 of 1780 show three royal tombs in Westminster Abbey. By this time, antiquarian interest in the abbey had a long history. Its west towers had been completed by 1745 in the Gothic style, and as early as 1723, John Dart published his Westmonasterium, or, The history and antiquities of the abbey church of St. Peter's, Westminster, albeit considered by Gough in 1780 to be “a pompous, but very inaccurate work,” (Gough 1780, 763). In important ways, Plates 2.29-35 link the past with the future. Like earlier engravings in Vetusta Monumenta they were commissioned because their subjects, hidden “behind a screen of ill-designed and unmeaning carpentry” (Ayloffe 1780, 4), needed to be recorded for posterity. They also set the scene for the rich series of engravings of medieval ecclesiastical architecture of the 1780s and 1790s. The explanatory account of Plate 2.29, of Aveline, Countess of Lancaster, recognizes that the Gothic style changed over the centuries. The author noted, for example, that “these mouldings, . . . consonant to the taste that prevailed in the 13th and 14th centuries, have their hips and fynials enriched with crotchets” (Ayloffe 1778, 4). The discussion about the fourteenth-century wooden Sedilia situated above the tomb of Sebert establishes the identity of the two kings painted on the north side, a recognition still largely accepted today. Furthermore, the material composition and technique of these paintings is carefully analyzed.
The final plates from Class IV in Fenn’s Index bring the subject of eighteenth-century involvement in medieval ecclesiastical architecture full circle because they are concerned, like that of the earliest in this class, with a pre-Reformation monastery, St. Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield, reduced by Henry VIII to a ruin which left only the east end of the church standing. There is a noticeable contrast between 1720s and 1780s presentation of monastic ruins. Plate 2.37 shows an elevation of a bay of the main arcade and gallery in the east arm of St Bartholomew the Great. It is precise and accurate and provides a record for future restoration. Gone completely is the foreboding sense of annihilation that characterized the 1720s works. Plate 2.36 shows the fifteenth-century monument to the monastery’s founder, and first abbot, Raherus, and is the earliest pictorial record ever made of this important tomb. The inclusion of an engraving of a tomb of a Roman Catholic Prior in Vetusta Monumenta could be justified because Raherus had founded the hospital of St Bartholomew. In addition, despite the fact that some strong anti-Catholic feeling persisted, as witness the Gordon Riots of 1780, a general relaxation of attitudes towards the Roman Catholic Church had come into being, a relaxation that was to underpin the choice of ecclesiastical subjects to appear in Vetusta Monumenta in the 1780s and 1790s.
The twenty-five plates devoted to eleven ecclesiastical subjects published in Vetusta Monumenta between 1784 and 1795, after the completion of Fenn’s index, have received more approbation from modern scholars than those produced between 1720 and 1784 and categorized by him as “Class IV.” The engravings of these later works, together with the scholarly accounts that accompany them, echo the popularization of antiquarian approaches to the Gothic past of those years. But the favorable reception of these later plates does not diminish the achievement of the scholars and Fellows of the SAL who were responsible for publishing the earlier works. In a climate of suspicion and hostility towards the Roman Catholic church, they risked their reputations by publishing material on works of art and architecture which had been created to serve it. They are the giants on whose shoulders medieval ecclesiastical scholarship rests.
Works Cited:
Ayloffe, Joseph. 1775. “An Account of the Body of King Edward the First, as it appeared on opening his Tomb in the Year 1774.” Archaeologia 3: 376-413.
------. 1780. “Account of Some Ancient Monuments in Westminster Abbey.” Paper read to the Society of Antiquaries, March 12, 1778.
Drinkwater, Norman. 1954. “The Bishop’s Chapel of St Katherine and St Mary Magdalene.” The Archaeological Journal 111: 129–37.
Dugdale, William. (1655-73) 1718. Monasticon Anglicanum. Translated by John Stevens. 3 vols. London: R. Harbin.
Englefield, Henry. 1796. “Lincoln Cathedral Commentary.’ In Vetusta Monumenta. Vol. 3.
Evelyn, John. 1723. An Account of Architects and Architecture, Together, with an Historical, Etymological Explanation of Certain Terms. London.
Fenn, John. 1784. “An Index to the Prints Published by the Society of Antiquaries.” In Three Chronological Tables, Exhibiting a State of the Society of Antiquaries, 17-30. London: J. Nichols.
Gough, Richard. 1780. British topography. Or, an historical account of what has been done for illustrating the topographical antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol 1. London.
Hill, Rosemary. 2021. Time's Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism. London: Allen Lane.
Society of Antiquaries of London. 1718-. Minutes of the Society’s Proceedings.
------. 1754-. Minutes of the Council of the Society of Antiquaries.
Stukeley, William. 1725. Itinerarium curiosum; or, An account of the antiquities, and remarkable curiosities in nature or art, observed in travels through Great Britain. London.
Sweet, Rosemary. 2004. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Wilson, Thomas. 1761. “Appendix.” In The Ornaments of Churches Considered, with a Particular View to the Late Decoration of St. Margaret Westminster. Oxford.