DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.6886#0175
WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 143
vaulting now covering the choir, though it be more tricked and gilded, is without
due care in the masonry, and is the worst performed of all done before.
It is said to have been fifty years in building*, which, if we reckon from 1220
to when he laid the first stone in St. Mary's chapel (now buried under that
of King Henry VII.) ends two years before his death: but it was in 1245 he
pulled down the old, which surely must be before he built the new work: then
the stone vault was performed twenty-three years after his death, in the reign of
King Edward I. But, alas! it was now like to have been all spoiled : the monks
would have a cloister, but scrupled, I suppose, at moving some venerable bodies
laid between the buttresses. Then comes a bold but ignorant architect, who
undertakes to build the cloister, so that the buttresses should be without the cloister-
spanning over it, as may be seen in the section. This was a dangerous attempt,
as it is by due consideration of the static principles, and the right poising of the
weight of the butments to the arches, that good architecture depends, and the
butments ought to have equal gravity on both sides.
Although this was done to flatter the humour of the monks, the architect
should have considered, that new work carried very high would shrink: from
hence the walls above the windows are forced out ten inches, and the ribs broken.
I could not discern this failure to be so bad, till the scaffold over the choir was
raised to give a close view of it, and then I was amazed to find it had not quite
fallen. This is now amended with all care, and I dare promise it shall be much
stronger and securer than ever the first builders left it.
After what had been done by King Henry III. and his successor, it is said the work
* It appears in the Chronicle of Thomas Wykes, that on the 13th of October, 1269, the body of
the Confessor was removed, with great ceremony, into the new shrine or tomb made for it; and that
• on the same day the monks performed divine service, for the first time, in the new-built church. It
may here be repeated, that the interval of 1220 and 1209 is precisely fifty years.
vaulting now covering the choir, though it be more tricked and gilded, is without
due care in the masonry, and is the worst performed of all done before.
It is said to have been fifty years in building*, which, if we reckon from 1220
to when he laid the first stone in St. Mary's chapel (now buried under that
of King Henry VII.) ends two years before his death: but it was in 1245 he
pulled down the old, which surely must be before he built the new work: then
the stone vault was performed twenty-three years after his death, in the reign of
King Edward I. But, alas! it was now like to have been all spoiled : the monks
would have a cloister, but scrupled, I suppose, at moving some venerable bodies
laid between the buttresses. Then comes a bold but ignorant architect, who
undertakes to build the cloister, so that the buttresses should be without the cloister-
spanning over it, as may be seen in the section. This was a dangerous attempt,
as it is by due consideration of the static principles, and the right poising of the
weight of the butments to the arches, that good architecture depends, and the
butments ought to have equal gravity on both sides.
Although this was done to flatter the humour of the monks, the architect
should have considered, that new work carried very high would shrink: from
hence the walls above the windows are forced out ten inches, and the ribs broken.
I could not discern this failure to be so bad, till the scaffold over the choir was
raised to give a close view of it, and then I was amazed to find it had not quite
fallen. This is now amended with all care, and I dare promise it shall be much
stronger and securer than ever the first builders left it.
After what had been done by King Henry III. and his successor, it is said the work
* It appears in the Chronicle of Thomas Wykes, that on the 13th of October, 1269, the body of
the Confessor was removed, with great ceremony, into the new shrine or tomb made for it; and that
• on the same day the monks performed divine service, for the first time, in the new-built church. It
may here be repeated, that the interval of 1220 and 1209 is precisely fifty years.