medieval-atlas/the-church/370

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Church plans from about 1120 to 1560 Church planning A study of the ways in which the designers of Scottish ecclesiastical buildings responded to the needs of their patrons in the lay-out of the churches they built is of value both in assessing the influences at work on our ecclesiastical architecture, and in determining the relationships between individual buildings. Although the most ambitious varieties ofplanning employed elsewhere in north-west- Greater churches The first plans of many of the great abbeys and cathedrals which began to rise from the 1I20s onwards, as the momentum of new foundations gathered strength, are no longer known. But the surviving evidence indicates that it was to English sources that Scottish patrons were initially looking -albeit continental inspiration lay behind many of these sources. At Dunfermline and Kirkwall the original form of the aisled choirs with apsidal east ends suggests reference to such as Durham, and ultimately to Normandy, whilst the exotic double cross plan of Kelso may have come from eastern England, although the English masons possibly derived their own inspiration for such plans from the Rhineland. As the twelfth century progresses and the evidence becomes more complete, the preponderant influence of northern England becomes more apparent. (In the western Highlands the earlier tradition of dependence on Ireland continued, although Ireland itself was by then at least partly under the tutelage of western England.) As in England, a growing preference for some form of rectangular eastern termination, rather than a curved apse, may be seen to emerge. Starting with St Andrews in the 1160s a type of plan with a squareended presbytery projecting beyond an aisled choir came to be widely employed; possibly first developed at South well Minister before 1114 as a variant on the apse echelon arrangement, such plans were to be as popular in northern England -at Lanercost for example -as in lowland Scotland. At about the same time a simpler plan form, almost certainly originally evolved in Burgundy to meet the austere requirements of the Cistercian order, also came to be widely current in Scotland, not for Cistercian churches alone, but almost equally amongst several of the orders responsive to Cistercian thought. This form, which had no structurally distinct choir, but only a square presbytery flanked by transepts with eastern chapels, was almost certainly imported to Scotland from north Yorkshire, an area with a high concentration of Cistercian houses, where the missionary house of Rievaulx was one of the earlier English embodiments of the type. One of the additional attractions of this Cistercian type for other orders was doubtlessly its relative cheapness, and it was probably a similar urge towards economy which led to a wide-spread preference for churches with extended aisle-less choirs, either directly adjoining the nave, or separated from it by transepts. One of the first churches to have had such a plan must have been em Europe were not reflected in Scotland and, indeed, a clear majority of our lesser churches were never of more than unaugmented rectangular form. A considerable range of plan types may still be observed. A preliminary attempt is here made broadly to categorise those churches of which the plan is known, or ascertainable with reasonable confidence. Coldingham, where the foundations discovered below the existing late twelfth-century choir are of this form, and variants on such plans were to be employed throughout the rest of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, a number of more complex types were also adopted to meet the changing liturgical requirements of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Extended choirs flanked to their full length by aisles -a markedly English type perhaps first em ployed at Winchester St Cross before becoming a firm favourite in the north at such as lervaulx -were added to several buildings, including Kirkwall. In some cases, such as Dunfermline and per haps also Whithorn, the southern English preference for softening the verticality of such choirs by providing a lower eastern chapel was reflected. At Glasgow the mid-thirteenth-century choir was provided with an eastern ambulatory with a row of chapels beyond, an arrangement possibly first developed in England, and later in Burgundy, to meet the Cistercian need for additional altars within a simple framework. It was used at Dore in Herefordshire and a variant was employed in North Yorkshire at 8yland. It has recently been suggested that the plan may have been first used in Scotland at Cistercian Newbattle, an attractive idea despite the ambiguity of the excavated plan. The tendency of Scottish patrons and masons to move out of the northern English architectural ambience after the Wars of Independence is less evident in planning than it is in architectural details. Many of the established plan types continued to be used with only minor changes to indicate their later date, although fewer buildings were laid out on the great scale common in earlier centu. ries, as lay patronage of the religious houses diminished. It is perhaps in only two aspects of planning that Scotland may be seen to mark its greater artistic independence in the later Middle Ages: the use of polygonal apses to choirs or even transeptal chapels, and the tendency to add laterally projecting chapels either irregularly or in a more fully articulated transeptal relationship with the main body. The first suggests a new direct European guidance in architecture; the second is essentially a nati ve response to the need to accommodate growing numbers of altars for particular cults or for chantry purposes, andcin at least one case -Restalrig -the additions were of strikingly idiosyncratic form. 370

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