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THE NINE ALTARS AT FOUNTAINS AND AT DURHAM. 383

Altars at Fountains is not known, but it was finally finished before the death of abbot John of Kent, which occurred in 1247, and as the Nine Altars at Durham was begun in 1242 it may be said that the one building was finished before the other was begun. A careful comparison of the two, and especially their plans, supports this view. Mr. Reeve has shown that the Fountains work failed owing to faulty construction and insufficient foundation, and its vault was removed and a wooden roof of low pitch substituted for it in the days of abbot John Dernton (1478-1494). The primary cause of this failure was the insufficient buttressing, especially on the east wall, to take the thrust of a lofty vault, there being no aisle over which flying buttresses could be stretched to carry such a thrust by easy stages to the ground. Although the plan of the two buildings is identical in the disposition of all the component parts, and the dimensions are the same in both to within a few inches, they are additions to two buildings planned on different scales. It is a significant fact that the vault at Durham is not only on a very different system to that at Fountains, but is most amply buttressed everywhere, and the walls are as much as two feet thicker. The central buttresses also on the east front in the same relative position as those at Fountains have nearly four times their area." At the two eastern angles we find the two angle buttresses at Fountains changed in the case of Durham to solid polygonal masses of masonry of enormous strength carrying heavy pinnacles or spires of stone. At the opposite angles, although the newel stairs for gaining access to the upper galleries are in the same relative positions in both buildings, at Durham they are placed in octagonal turrets appended to the main angle turrets, which arrangement leaves the full mass of the latter unbroken, whereas at Fountains these staircases placed in the polygonal angle buttresses themselves, thereby leaving them a mere shell, and having a strength which is more apparent than real. The result of all these precautions is that the massive and lofty vault of the Nine Altars at Durham has stood unshaken to this day, and the building which it encloses is still, as it was, unsurpassed and unsurpassable in its strength and beauty amongst the thirteenth century buildings in England.

Those at Fountains were more than doubled in their substance in abbot Dernton's time.

The only possible conclusion that we can arrive at from this most interesting comparison is that it was the architect of the Nine Altars at Fountains who planned and reared the similar building at Durham, and as we have seen, the one was finished before the other was begun, he had the opportunity not only of generally improving the design and detail, but of correcting its constructive weaknesses. The Fountains work was done under the Kentish abbot John, and the Durham 'new work' under bishop Nicholas de Farnham, another south country man. The two ecclesiastics would naturally become known to one another, and nothing was more likely than that both would engage the services of the same architect.

The work at Fountains, like all that carried out by the Cistercians, is remarkably plain in character, there being no carved ornament in it. At Durham a much freer hand was given, and the detail is rich throughout, without being overloaded with ornament. The beauty

of the carved decoration culminates in the capitals to the main piers, and here we find conventional foliated forms full of nerve and spirit combined with clever adaptations of animal and bird forms in the utmost profusion. A moment's comparison of these with the capitals at Sedgefield is enough to show that both were designed and executed by the same man,10 they are so exactly alike and so different from the general run of work executed at the same period.

Having identified the work of the southern architect at Sedgefield by the carving, we may carry the investigation further to see if there are other indications of its not having been done by a local man. The plan and proportions of the building are not those of the local churches, the width is much greater in comparison with the length than is usual in the north,11 and the whole feeling of the design has a lightness and delicacy about it which indicates the product of another mind than that which originated the designs of the majority of the ecclesiastical buildings in the county.

By a fortunate circumstance the name of the architect has been

10 It is not pretended that the architect did the carving with his own hands any more than he does now, but according to the custom of the time he would take a certain number of craftsmen from one building to another along with him.

11 I am, of course, speaking here of the proportions of the church as originally built, not of what they are now with the later transepts, chancel, and tower added.

[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][merged small]

(Reduced from plate in Billings's Architectural Antiquities of the County of Durham)

THE ARCHITECT, AND RYTON CHURCH.

385

preserved. Canon Greenwell has found it as a witness to a deed in the treasury at Durham, which conveys land in the Bailey from Willelmus aurifaber to Thomas carnifex son of Lewinus, the witness being 'Magister Ricardus de Farinham tunc architector novae fabricae Dunelm.' This clearly identifies the architect as having been born at Farnham, notably the place of that name in Surrey,12 and no doubt the same place from which bishop Farnham also came. It is so rarely that the name of a medieval architect or other craftsman can be identified with his work that this instance is one of special interest, and is made more so from the fact that an inscription cut on the plinth of one of the central buttresses of the Nine Altars at Durham gives us the name of the master mason also. It reads:

POSUIT HANC PETRAM THOmas Moises,

and is cut in good Lombardic letters. The name of this man also occurs in a Durham deed, dated 1240, only two years before the Nine Altars was begun.13

Having established the above facts, it is interesting to carry our investigation a little further and to find out if the southern architect did any more work in the north. We have seen that the plan of Sedgefield church is not that of the district, and having noted its peculiarities the same are easily recognised elsewhere. At the northern extremity of the county is another church with a very southern look about it, that of Ryton. In plan it has a nave of three bays as has Sedgefield with a curiously arranged engaged western tower, and a west front with long lancets and buttresses, which remind one more of the work in Kent and Surrey than that in Northumberland and Durham. The outline of the tower, with its leaden spire, is what one sees amongst the heaths of Surrey, the downs of Sussex, or the pretty leafy villages of Kent, rather than that of the sturdy pele-like towers of the northern moorland churches. It is impossible to believe that Ryton. church was designed by a north countryman. Its nave capitals are

unfortunately plain, as the work is generally, but where the spire rises from the tower is a corbel table, the corbels of which are carved with a variety of ornaments, and here we see the familiar Nine Altars details in the most unmistakable manner. There is the same fecundity of

12 The other Farnhams are all in the southern counties.
13 Greenwell's Durham Cathedral, fourth edition, pp. 55-56.

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