ST. ALBAN THE MARTYR

The Cathedral of St. Albans, as it must now be called, for the ancient Abbey became the Cathedral Church of a new diocese in 1875, was said by Freeman to be “the vastest of English ministers.” He was not quite correct, for the huge Cathedral of Winchester is ten feet longer; but the bold and elevated site on which St. Albans stands advertises its bulk in the supremest degree, while the site of Winchester Cathedral, being flat, and its precincts enclosed, the dimensions of that most interesting of all English Cathedrals are not fully displayed.

The reasons that impelled the first architects of St. Albans Abbey to so greatly distinguish their church, for size, above all others, are found in the fact that it was here that St. Alban, the first British martyr, suffered, in the dim era of the Diocletian persecution, in the Roman domination of Britain. “This year,” says the Saxon Chronicle, referring to A.D. 283, “suffered St. Alban the Martyr,” but Bede, in his “Ecclesiastical History,” places the date at A.D. 305, and as the death of St. Alban was a direct result of the savageries instituted by Diocletian, decreed two years earlier by that tyrant, the historian is probably correct.

Bede died in A.D. 735, four hundred and thirty years after the event he recorded. He and the even earlier chronicler, Gildas, who wrote in A.D. 564, mention a church of sorts being very early built upon the site of the martyrdom; but all earlier buildings were swept away on the coming of the Normans, and already in 1077, only eleven years after the Conquest, Abbot Paul de Caen had cleared the ground and began the immense building of which the existing Cathedral is the representative, still retaining large portions of his work; including the tower, transepts and choir, nine bays on the north side of the nave and three on the south.

There was at that time no spot even distantly approaching the especial holiness of this, and none could have foreseen the tragedy at Canterbury in 1170, that was, in little less than one hundred years, to completely overshadow St. Alban and set the Blessed St. Thomas À Becket above him.

Abbot Paul’s great building was imposing, but it was not beautiful. What is left of his original work has become venerable through age, but there can be no doubt that, could we see it in all its freshness, as it was built, we should consider it very gaunt and ugly indeed. He antedated the typical American in his desire to “lick creation,” and he thought in feet and yards, rather than in terms of beauty. There was much to provoke him to this. He had the relics of the then holiest indigenous martyr, and those of St. Amphibalus, scarcely less holy, in his charge, and ready to his hand lay huge piles of building materials, the bricks, tiles, and stones of the ruined Roman city of Verulamium, that had stood in the valley. The bulk of these materials was formed of tiles, and with these the abbot reared his walls and piers, and the central tower, bedding the tiles in mortar as thick as themselves: so that to modern observers it seems remarkable that, with such a pudding-like mass as this must have been before it dried out, the walls ever consented to stand upright. Some few ornamental features were incorporated from the Saxon church built by Offa, King of the Mercians, in A.D. 793. These are the celebrated balusters, of undoubted Saxon character, which, fitted with Norman capitals and bases, serve as columns in the triforia of the transepts.

Abbot Paul’s building was of the most stark and naked early Norman character. He willingly forswore ornament, if he could thereby add another bay to the length of his Abbey Church, and he and the mid-nineteenth-century builders join hands, in the spirit, across the tremendous gap of seven centuries and a half. Both delighted in plaster, and both hated to show the real materials of which they built. Abbot Paul covered the entire exterior of his Abbey, as well as the interior, from east to west, and up to the topmost battlements of his central tower, with plaster, thick and slab, and thought the result beautiful. And so did his contemporaries. We may take leave to look with a considerable measure of contempt upon their taste. Traces of the plaster facing of the tower, indeed, remained until 1870, when, in course of restoration works, it was removed, revealing the beautiful dark red hue of the Roman tiles of which it is constructed.

The proverb that “the old order changeth, giving place to new,” is most strikingly emphasised in the appearance and history of any great Cathedral. Each successive abbot seems here, as elsewhere, to have desired to do something much better than that done by his predecessors; and so we find Abbot John de Cella, in 1195, with the particularly inadequate sum of one hundred marks left for the purpose by the last abbot, beginning to rebuild Abbot Paul’s gigantic church. De Cella was a supreme artist, but unhappily an idealist who did not count the cost of what he was doing. He pulled down the West Front, and began to rebuild it in the Early English style. Before he had done more than get in the foundations of his new work, bang went the hundred marks, with much else: a circumstance which led the historian, Matthew de Paris, to gibe cruelly at him; saying, very caustically, he wondered the abbot had not recollected the ancient proverb,—“That he who is about to build should compute the cost, lest all begin to jeer at him, saying, ‘This man began to build, and was unable to finish it.’”

How de Cella tried in every direction to raise money for his works is a pitiful story: how he visited, travelled, petitioned, and begged, first of one person, and then of another; how he was “looked coldly upon” and snubbed. Finally, after a great number of years, during which the works were only spasmodically in progress, de Cella died, in 1214, with the porches of his West Front only half finished.

The Early English architecture of de Cella remained, a lovely specimen of the artistic feeling of the period, until 1882, when Lord Grimthorpe destroyed it, on the excuse that it was decayed and could not be made good by modern workmen: building a West Front of his own, in a style which has justly been called “Dissenting Gothic.”

William de Trumpington succeeded de Cella as abbot, and in his one-and-twenty years rebuilt four bays on the north side of the nave and five on the south, in the Early English style. Five others on the south side are of the Decorated period, and are the work of Abbot Eversden, in the fourteenth century. The remainder of the nave is the original gaunt early Norman.

It would be a lengthy treatise that should duly tell the architectural and other history of St. Albans Cathedral: and this is not the place for so prolonged an exercise. Let it be sufficient, then, to tell something of the things done to the fabric in modern times, in the name of “restoration.”

Celia Fiennes wrote, over two hundred years ago, that the “great Church w^ch is dedicated to St. Albans is much out of repaire. I see the places in the pavement hat was worn like holes for kneeling by the devotes of y^e Religion and his votery’s as they tell you, but the whole Church is so worn away that it mourns for some Charitable person to help repaire it.” That person was forthcoming in the fulness of time, in that ferocious controversialist and amateur architect, Lord Grimthorpe, who “restored” the Cathedral at his own expense. As a result, it mourns, and others mourn for it, more than ever. Enormous sums of money have been expended upon the vast building, amounting to over £160,000. Of this amount £40,000, raised by public subscription, went upon the works executed between 1870 and 1879. The remaining £120,000 or more was spent by Lord Grimthorpe in playing at being an architect.

The Abbey had, indeed, been gradually falling into decay for many years, and, about the middle of the nineteenth century, had at last become quite ruinous. In 1833, some reparations had been made to the tower, but these were slight, and work was only seriously begun in 1856, following a faculty granted to a committee which, calling itself “national,” was nevertheless impotent to raise more than £30,000. Some slight accretions were made to this fund as the result of the added interest upon the Abbey being made the Cathedral Church of a new diocese, in 1875; but these were soon engulfed in the mere work of securing the sinking foundations. Sir Gilbert Scott was then called in to undertake the work, and instantly shored up the great tower, then on the point of falling. Until 1833, it had been crowned with a dwarf timber and leaden spire, but this had been removed, and the ring of eight bells had, three years earlier, been silenced, for fear of bringing the heavy mass down. Great cracks had appeared in the walls of the transepts, being slowly ground to powder by the settling of the tower, and the interior of the building was always filled with an impalpable dust, from the same cause. Still the tower sank slowly, and it was seen that the four great piers at the crossing, which had hitherto supported it, were at last failing. The real marvel was that they had not failed before, for a singular discovery was made at this time, at the base of the south-west pier, by which it was proved that at some distant period—probably about that of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII.—an attempt had been made to wreck the place. A kind of cavern, some six feet wide, had been excavated in the foundation and strutted with timbering which had evidently been placed there for the two-fold purpose of protecting the excavators, and of firing it when the undermining process had been completed. Why this brutal idea had been abandoned, when so near completion, must be left to conjecture; but it is plain to see that in all those centuries the congregations and visitors to the Abbey had been in danger, at any moment, of being crushed to death by a possible sudden collapse of the tower.

This injury was repaired, and new foundations were laid, down to the solid chalk, and the upper parts of the tower were secured. Funds at that time permitted of little else being done. In 1871, an appeal for £50,000 was issued, resulting in a subscription of about £21,000; and in 1875, a further appeal for £30,000. Then the clerestory began to fall. A new faculty was granted, and more subscriptions came in, but by 1879 all these funds were again exhausted, and the restoration committee resigned. Then came the great opportunity which Lord Grimthorpe had long desired, of getting the restoration entirely into his own hands. He was an incredibly wealthy man,2 with a passion for exercising the part of amateur architect, and an equal passion for controversy. He procured a new faculty, granting him unlimited power at his own expense, to “restore, repair, and refit the Church.” Thus, disastrously for antiquity, was the old building made over to him, without let or hindrance, to do as he would.

The handiwork of Lord Grimthorpe is writ large, all over the building. He did the most extraordinary things. In restoring the transepts he put in what purported to be “Early English lancets,” with false heads that look like genuine heads from without, but from within are seen to be cut off square; and was so enamoured of the red Roman tiles that give so noble an appearance to the exterior that, in rebuilding the walls, he supplied the lack of genuine ones for the new work by especially manufacturing “Roman” tiles of his own, to form the walls of the south transept; designed in what has been very fitly styled “Railway-station Gothic.”

It would be wearisome to follow Lord Grimthorpe in detail, in his new way with an old Abbey. With extraordinary passion and virulent contempt for public opinion, he swept away genuine Norman work, and in many places gave a brand-new appearance where had before been the bloom of antiquity. Controversy followed upon controversy, during the progress of these works, and Lord Grimthorpe went grimly on his way, replying to arguments with the personal abuse of which he was a better master than he was of architecture. His critics were “the usual howlers”; Street to him was “the immortal author of the worst great Gothic building in the world,” by which, of course, he meant the Law Courts; the foremost architects and antiquaries talked “ignorant nonsense,” and were persons who would “call everything destruction on which they have not got a percentage.” Here, indeed, be “words that sting, and thoughts that burn.” They are vehement, and they hurt, which was the object of them. Like Alan Breck, he was a “bonnie fighter,” even though, as an architect, he did not begin to exist. One of his worst atrocities was the hateful wash-tub done in stone, which serves for pulpit in the nave.

His work is, indeed, only too evident all over the building, and he himself is represented in sculptured stone in a spandrel over one of the western porches; and is shown in the likeness of a recording angel, with a pen and a scroll upon which he is probably entering the sins of architects, or writing some new Evangel on matters architectural. But the sculptor, although the portrait is excellent, has made a mistake in representing him apparently at a loss for a word. Whether pleading a case in court, or abusing fellow-controversialists, his eloquence suffered from no such impediment.

But enough of Lord Grimthorpe and his doings. Let us see the “holy of holies” of this Cathedral: the Shrine of St. Alban, in its beautiful chapel, directly east of the great altar-screen. After the Shrine was destroyed, in the troubles attendant upon the Reformation, none expected it to be ever seen again. It disappeared utterly, and only the worn pavement, where the pilgrims had knelt, showed where it had stood. All around were signs that this had been no lightly regarded Shrine; and to this day the mid-fifteenth-century Watching Loft remains, in which the Feretrarius, or Relic Keeper, and his monastic brethren kept guard night and day.

It was in 1866 that, during some alterations to the Lady Chapel, many pieces of carved Purbeck marble were found, built up with bricks and rubble into some sixteenth-century work. It was readily guessed that they were portions of the vanished Shrine, and in 1872, when Sir Gilbert Scott was at work in the south choir-aisle, an immense quantity of carved fragments were discovered. A further quest led to the recovery of nearly the whole of the marble Shrine; and it now stands, pieced together, in its ancient place.

The carved work of this strangely found relic is particularly beautiful, and includes groups representing the beheading of St. Alban and the scourging of St. Amphibalus. The cresting of the structure is of the most ornate character.

All this elaborate work was, however, but the support for the actual reliquary, the casket containing the relics of the Saint, which was gorgeous in silver and gold, and blazing with jewels. This was too precious a sight to be on view every day, and was covered at most times with an “operculum,” which could be raised or lowered at will by means of cords or pulleys. On special high days and holy days it was displayed to view. The twisted shaft seen outside the Shrine is a fragment of the six that formerly supported the six wax lights kept burning on those special days.

The Shrine of St. Amphibalus was discovered in a similar manner, and was also pieced together in the same way. It stands now in a darkling corner of the North Choir Aisle. There have been sceptical antiquaries daring enough to suggest that Amphibalus, the persecuted Christian who was secreted by Alban, with the result that both were martyred, is a myth. No such person, they contend, ever existed. “Amphibalus,” it seems, was really the name of a kind of long cloak worn at that period; and such a cloak was worn by Alban when he was taken to execution. Monkish legends personified it, and it was, thus marvellously changed from an article of clothing into a human being, at length canonized. It is a little shocking to find old clothes admitted into the hierarchy of saints, and considerably lessens the very slight modicum of respect one might entertain for monastic lore.