Norman architecture
The term Norman architecture is used to categorise styles of Romanesque architecture developed by the Normans in the various lands under their dominion or influence in the 11th and 12th centuries. In particular the term is traditionally used for English Romanesque architecture; the Normans introduced large numbers of castles and fortifications including Norman keeps, at the same time monasteries, abbeys and cathedrals, in a style characterised by the usual Romanesque rounded arches and massive proportions compared to other regional variations of the style. These Romanesque styles originated in Normandy and became widespread in north western Europe in England, which contributed considerable development and has the largest number of surviving examples. At about the same time a Norman dynasty ruled in Sicily, producing a distinctive variation incorporating Byzantine and Saracen influences, known as Norman architecture, or alternatively as Sicilian Romanesque. Ancient Rome's invention of the arch is the basis of all Norman architecture.
The term may have originated with eighteenth-century antiquarians, but its usage in a sequence of styles has been attributed to Thomas Rickman in his 1817 work An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation which used the labels "Norman, Early English and Perpendicular". The more inclusive term romanesque was used of the Romance languages in English by 1715, was applied to architecture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries from 1819. Although Edward the Confessor built Westminster Abbey in Romanesque style just before the Conquest, still believed to be the earliest major Romanesque building in England, no significant remaining Romanesque architecture in Britain can be shown to predate the Conquest, although historians believe that many surviving "Norman" elements in buildings, nearly all churches, may well in fact be Anglo-Saxon; the Norman arch is a defining point of Norman architecture. Grand archways are designed to evoke feelings of awe and are commonly seen as the entrance to large religious buildings such as cathedrals.
Viking invaders arrived at the mouth of the river Seine in 911, at a time when Franks were fighting on horseback and Frankish lords were building castles. Over the next century the population of the territory ceded to the Vikings, now called Normans, adopted these customs as well as Christianity and the langue d'oïl. Norman barons built timber castles on earthen mounds, beginning the development of motte-and-bailey castles, great stone churches in the Romanesque style of the Franks. By 950, they were building stone; the Normans were among the most travelled peoples of Europe, exposing them to a wide variety of cultural influences which became incorporated in their art and architecture. They elaborated on the early Christian basilica plan. Longitudinal with side aisles and an apse they began to add in towers, as at the Church of Saint-Étienne]] at Caen, in 1067; this would form a model for the larger English cathedrals some 20 years later. In England, Norman nobles and bishops had influence before the Norman Conquest of 1066, Norman influences affected late Anglo-Saxon architecture.
Edward the Confessor was brought up in Normandy and in 1042 brought masons to work on the first Romanesque building in England, Westminster Abbey. In 1051 he brought in Norman knights. Following the invasion, Normans constructed motte-and-bailey castles along with churches and more elaborate fortifications such as Norman stone keeps; the buildings show massive proportions in simple geometries using small bands of sculpture. Paying attention to the concentrated spaces of capitals and round doorways as well as the tympanum under an arch; the "Norman arch" is the rounded with mouldings carved or incised onto it for decoration. Chevron patterns termed "zig-zag mouldings", were a frequent signature of the Normans; the cruciform churches had deep chancels and a square crossing tower which has remained a feature of English ecclesiastical architecture. Hundreds of parish churches were built and the great English cathedrals were founded from 1083. After a fire damaged Canterbury Cathedral in 1174 Norman masons introduced the new Gothic architecture.
Around 1191 Wells Cathedral and Lincoln Cathedral brought in the English Gothic style, Norman became a modest style of provincial building. Oxford Castle 1074: church tower doubles as a place of refuge St John's Chapel, Tower of London Durham Cathedral was the first to employ a ribbed vault system with pointed arches Winchester Cathedral Ely Cathedral Peterborough Cathedral Kilpeck Church, Herefordshire St Nicholas Church, Surrey Southwell Minster St Mary the Virgin, Oxfordshire St Swithun's in Nately Scures, Hampshire, an example of a Norman single-cell apsidal church. Norwich Cathedral St Edward's Church St Botolph's Priory, Colchester St John's Abbey, Colchester St Peter’s Church, Rutland – Norman chancel Dunstable PrioryBibliography Sedding, Edmund H. Norman Architecture in Cornwall: a handbook to old ecclesiastical architecture. With over 160 plates. London: Ward & Co. White Tower Rochester Castle Norwich Castle Colchester Castle, the largest Norman castle built and the first stone Keep in England Hedingham Castle, Essex Jew's House, Lincoln Boothby Pagnell Manor, Lincolnshire Oakham Castle, Rutland Moyse's Hall Museum Bury St Edmunds Suffolk Scotland came under early
Old English
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest historical form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, as the language of the upper classes by Anglo-Norman, a relative of French; this is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, as during this period the English language was influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English. Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles and Jutes; as the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain: Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, Latin, brought to Britain by Roman invasion. Old English had four main dialects, associated with particular Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: Mercian, Northumbrian and West Saxon.
It was West Saxon that formed the basis for the literary standard of the Old English period, although the dominant forms of Middle and Modern English would develop from Mercian. The speech of eastern and northern parts of England was subject to strong Old Norse influence due to Scandinavian rule and settlement beginning in the 9th century. Old English is one of the West Germanic languages, its closest relatives are Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Like other old Germanic languages, it is different from Modern English and difficult for Modern English speakers to understand without study. Old English grammar is similar to that of modern German: nouns, adjectives and verbs have many inflectional endings and forms, word order is much freer; the oldest Old English inscriptions were written using a runic system, but from about the 9th century this was replaced by a version of the Latin alphabet. Englisc, which the term English is derived from, means'pertaining to the Angles'. In Old English, this word was derived from Angles.
During the 9th century, all invading Germanic tribes were referred to as Englisc. It has been hypothesised that the Angles acquired their name because their land on the coast of Jutland resembled a fishhook. Proto-Germanic *anguz had the meaning of'narrow', referring to the shallow waters near the coast; that word goes back to Proto-Indo-European *h₂enǵʰ- meaning'narrow'. Another theory is that the derivation of'narrow' is the more connection to angling, which itself stems from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning bend, angle; the semantic link is the fishing hook, curved or bent at an angle. In any case, the Angles may have been called such because they were a fishing people or were descended from such, therefore England would mean'land of the fishermen', English would be'the fishermen's language'. Old English was not static, its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman invasion. While indicating that the establishment of dates is an arbitrary process, Albert Baugh dates Old English from 450 to 1150, a period of full inflections, a synthetic language.
Around 85 per cent of Old English words are no longer in use, but those that survived are basic elements of Modern English vocabulary. Old English is a West Germanic language, it came to be spoken over most of the territory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which became the Kingdom of England. This included most of present-day England, as well as part of what is now southeastern Scotland, which for several centuries belonged to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Other parts of the island – Wales and most of Scotland – continued to use Celtic languages, except in the areas of Scandinavian settlements where Old Norse was spoken. Celtic speech remained established in certain parts of England: Medieval Cornish was spoken all over Cornwall and in adjacent parts of Devon, while Cumbric survived to the 12th century in parts of Cumbria, Welsh may have been spoken on the English side of the Anglo-Welsh border. Norse was widely spoken in the parts of England which fell under Danish law. Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the late 7th century.
The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is Cædmon's Hymn, composed between 658 and 680. There is a limited corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries, but the oldest coherent runic texts date to the 8th century; the Old English Latin alphabet was introduced around the 9th century. With the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Alfred the Great in the 9th century, the language of government and literature became standardised around the West Saxon dialect. Alfred advocated education in English alongside Latin, had many works translated into the English language. In Old English, typical of the development of literature, poetry arose before prose, but King Alfred the Great chiefly inspired the growth of prose. A literary standard, dating from the 10th century, arose under the influence of Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, was followed by such writers as the prolific Ælfric of Eynsham. Th
Domesday Book
Domesday Book is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William the Conqueror. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states: Then, at the midwinter, was the king in Gloucester with his council.... After this had the king a large meeting, deep consultation with his council, about this land. Sent he his men over all England into each shire, it was written in Medieval Latin, was abbreviated, included some vernacular native terms without Latin equivalents. The survey's main purpose was to determine what taxes had been owed during the reign of King Edward the Confessor, which allowed William to reassert the rights of the Crown and assess where power lay after a wholesale redistribution of land following the Norman conquest; the assessors' reckoning of a man's holdings and their values, as recorded in Domesday Book, was dispositive and without appeal. The name "Domesday Book" came into use in the 12th century; as Richard FitzNeal wrote in the Dialogus de Scaccario: for as the sentence of that strict and terrible last account cannot be evaded by any skilful subterfuge, so when this book is appealed to... its sentence cannot be quashed or set aside with impunity.
That is why we have called the book "the Book of Judgement"... because its decisions, like those of the Last Judgement, are unalterable. The manuscript is held at The National Archives at London. In 2011, the Open Domesday site made the manuscript available online; the book is an invaluable primary source for historical economists. No survey approaching the scope and extent of Domesday Book was attempted again in Britain until the 1873 Return of Owners of Land which presented the first complete, post-Domesday picture of the distribution of landed property in the British Isles. Domesday Book encompasses two independent works; these were "Little Domesday", "Great Domesday" No surveys were made of the City of London, Winchester, or some other towns due to their tax-exempt status. Most of Cumberland and Westmorland are missing. County Durham is missing; the omission of the other counties and towns is not explained, although in particular Cumberland and Westmorland had yet to be conquered. "Little Domesday" – so named because its format is physically smaller than its companion's – is the more detailed survey, down to numbers of livestock.
It may have represented the first attempt, resulting in a decision to avoid such level of detail in "Great Domesday". Both volumes are organised into a series of chapters listing the fees, held by a named tenant-in-chief of the king, namely religious institutions, Norman warrior magnates and a few Saxon thegns who had made peace with the Norman regime; some of the largest such magnates held several hundred fees, in a few cases in more than one county. For example, the chapter of the Domesday Book Devonshire section concerning Baldwin the Sheriff lists 176 holdings held in-chief by him. Only a few of the holdings of the large magnates were held in demesne, most having been subinfeudated to knights military followers of the tenant-in-chief which latter thus became their overlord; the fees listed within the chapter concerning a particular tenant-in-chief were ordered, but not in a systematic or rigorous fashion, by the Hundred Court under the jurisdiction of which they were situated, not by geographic location.
As a review of taxes owed, it was unpopular. Each county's list opened with the king's demesne lands, it should be borne in mind that under the feudal system the king was the only true "owner" of land in England, under his allodial title. He was thus the ultimate overlord and the greatest magnate could do no more than "hold" land from him as a tenant under one of the various contracts of feudal land tenure. Holdings of Bishops followed of the abbeys and religious houses of lay tenants-in-chief and lastly the king's serjeants, Saxon thegns who had survived the Conquest, all in hierarchical order. In some counties, one or more principal towns formed the subject of a separate section: in some the clamores were treated separately; this principle applies more to the larger volume: in the smaller one, the system is more confused, the execution less perfect. Domesday names a total of 13,418 places. Apart from the wholly rural portions, which constitute its bulk, Domesday contains entries of interest concerning most of t
Transept
A transept is a transverse part of any building, which lies across the main body of the edifice. In churches, a transept is an area set crosswise to the nave in a cruciform building within the Romanesque and Gothic Christian church architectural traditions; each half of a transept is known as a semitransept. The transept of a church separates the nave from the sanctuary, choir, presbytery, or chancel; the transepts cross the nave at the crossing, which belongs to the main nave axis and to the transept. Upon its four piers, the crossing may support a central tower or a crossing dome. Since the altar is located at the east end of a church, a transept extends to the north and south; the north and south end walls hold decorated windows of stained glass, such as rose windows, in stone tracery. The basilicas and the church and cathedral planning that descended from them were built without transepts. More the transepts extended well beyond the sides of the rest of the building, forming the shape of a cross.
This design is called a "Latin cross" ground plan, these extensions are known as the arms of the transept. A "Greek cross" ground plan, with all four extensions the same length, produces a central-plan structure; when churches have only one transept, as at Pershore Abbey, there is a historical disaster, war or funding problem, to explain the anomaly. At Beauvais only the chevet and transepts stand. At St. Vitus Cathedral, only the choir and part of a southern transept were completed until a renewed building campaign in the 19th century; the word "transept" is extended to mean any subsidiary corridor crossing a larger main corridor, such as the cross-halls or "transepts" of The Crystal Palace, London, of glass and iron, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851. In a metro station or similar construction, a transept is a space over the platforms and tracks of a station with side platforms, containing the bridge between the platforms. Placing the bridge in a transept rather than an enclosed tunnel allows passengers to see the platforms, creating a less cramped feeling and making orientation easier.
Aisle Apse Cathedral architecture Cathedral diagram Glossary of the Catholic Church Transom Chisholm, Hugh, ed.. "Transept". Encyclopædia Britannica. 27. Cambridge University Press. P. 172
Nikolaus Pevsner
Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner was a German British scholar of the history of art of architecture. Pevsner is best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England simply referred to by his surname. Nikolaus Pevsner was born in Leipzig, the son of Hugo Pevsner, a Russian-Jewish fur merchant, his wife, Anna, he attended St. Thomas School and went on to study at several universities, Munich and Frankfurt am Main, before being awarded a doctorate by Leipzig in 1924 for a thesis on the Baroque architecture of Leipzig. In 1923, he married the daughter of distinguished Leipzig lawyer, Alfred Kurlbaum, he worked as an assistant keeper at the Dresden Gallery. He converted to Lutheranism early in life. During this period he became interested in establishing the supremacy of German modernist architecture after becoming aware of Le Corbusier's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau at the Paris Exhibition of 1925. In 1928 he contributed the volume on Italian baroque painting to the Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft, a multi-volume series providing an overview of the history of European art.
He taught at the University of Göttingen, offering a specialist course on English art and architecture. According to biographer Stephen Games, Pevsner welcomed many of the economic and cultural policies of the early Hitler regime. However, due to Nazi race laws he was forced to resign his lectureship in 1933; that year Pevsner moved to England, settling in Hampstead, where poet Geoffrey Grigson was his neighbour in Wildwood Terrace. Pevsner's first post was an 18-month research fellowship at the University of Birmingham, found for him by friends in Birmingham and funded by the Academic Assistance Council. A study of the role of the designer in the industrial process, the research produced a critical account of design standards in Britain which he published as An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England, he was subsequently employed as a buyer of modern textiles and ceramics for the Gordon Russell furniture showrooms in London. By this time Pevsner had completed Pioneers of the Modern Movement: from William Morris to Walter Gropius, his influential pre-history of what he saw as Walter Gropius's dominance of contemporary design.
Pioneers ardently championed Gropius's first two buildings on the grounds that they summed up all the essential goals of 20th-century architecture. In spite of that, the book remains an important point of reference in the teaching of the history of modern design, helped lay the foundation of Pevsner's career in England as an architectural historian. Since its first publication by Faber & Faber in 1936, it has gone through several editions and been translated into many languages; the English-language edition has been renamed Pioneers of Modern Design. Pevsner was "more German than the Germans" to the extent that he supported "Goebbels in his drive for'pure' non-decadent German art", he was reported as saying of the Nazis: "I want this movement to succeed. There is no alternative but chaos.... There are things worse than Hitlerism." Nonetheless, he was included in the Nazi Black Book as hostile to the Hitler regime. In 1940, Pevsner was taken to the internment camp at Liverpool, as an enemy alien.
Geoffrey Grigson wrote in his Recollections: "When at last two hard-faced Bow Street runners arrived in the early hours of the morning to take... I managed, clutching my pyjama trousers, to catch them up with the best parting present I could think of, an elegant little edition, a new edition, of Shakespeare's Sonnets." Pevsner was released after three months on the intervention of, among others, Frank Pick Director-General of the Ministry of Information. He spent some time in the months after the Blitz clearing bomb debris, wrote reviews and art criticism for the Ministry of Information's Die Zeitung, an anti-Nazi publication for Germans living in England, he completed for Penguin Books the Pelican paperback An Outline of European Architecture, which he had begun to develop while in internment. Outline would go into seven editions, be translated into 16 languages, sell more than half a million copies. In 1942, Pevsner secured two regular positions. From 1936 onwards he had been a frequent contributor to the Architectural Review and from 1943 to 1945 he stood in as its acting editor while the regular editor J. M. Richards was on active service.
Under the AR's influence, Pevsner's approach to modern architecture became more complex and more moderate. Early signs of a lifelong interest in Victorian architecture influenced by the Architectural Review, appeared in a series written under the pseudonym of "Peter F. R. Donner": Pevsner's "Treasure Hunts" guided readers down selected London streets, pointing out architectural treasures of the 19th century, he was closely involved with the Review's proprietor, H. de C. Hastings, in evolving the magazine's theories on picturesque planning. In 1942, Pevsner was appointed a part-time lecturer at Birkbeck College, London, he lectured at Cambridge University for 30 years, having been Slade professor there for a record six years from 1949 to 1955, would become the Slade professorship at Oxford in 1968. Framing all this was his career as a writer and editor. After moving to England, Pevsn
Earl of Leicester
Earl of Leicester is a title, created seven times. The first title was granted during the 12th century in the Peerage of England; the current title is in the Peerage of the United Kingdom and was created in 1837. The title was first created for Robert de Beaumont, but he nearly always used his French title of Count of Meulan. Three generations of his descendants, all named Robert, called themselves Earls of Leicester; the Beaumont male line ended with the death of the 4th Earl. His property was split between his two sisters, with Simon IV de Montfort, the son of the eldest sister, acquiring Leicester and the rights to the earldom. However, Simon IV de Montfort was never formally recognized as earl, due to the antipathy between France and England at that time, his second son, Simon V de Montfort, did succeed in taking possession of the earldom and its associated properties. He is the Simon de Montfort who became so prominent during the reign of Henry III, he was killed at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, his lands and titles were forfeited.
In 1267 the title was created a second time and granted to the king's youngest son, Edmund Crouchback. In 1276 he became Earl of Lancaster, the titles became united. Crouchback's son Thomas lost the earldom when he was executed for treason in 1322, but a few years it was restored to his younger brother Henry. Henry's son Henry of Grosmont left only two daughters, his estate was divided between them, the eldest daughter Matilda receiving the earldom, held by her husband William V of Holland. Matilda, soon died, the title passed to John of Gaunt, husband of her younger sister, created Duke of Lancaster. Both the dukedom and the earldom were inherited by John of Gaunt's son, Henry Bolingbroke, both titles ceased to exist when Henry usurped the throne, as the titles "merged into the crown"; the properties associated with the earldom became part of what was called the Duchy of Lancaster. In 1564 the earldom was again created for Robert Dudley. Since Dudley died without heirs, the title became extinct at his death.
The title was again created in 1618 for his nephew. Prior to being granted the earldom Robert Sidney was granted the subsidiary title of Viscount Lisle on 4 May 1605; the Sidneys retained the titles until the death of the seventh Earl in 1743, when the titles again became extinct. The title of earl was recreated for Thomas Coke, but it became extinct when he, died without heirs; the title was again bestowed upon George Townshend, 16th Baron Ferrers of Chartley and 8th Baron Compton, eldest son and heir apparent of George Townshend, 4th Viscount Townshend the first Marquess Townshend. Townshend was a female-line great-great-great-grandson of Lady Lucy Sydney, daughter of the second Earl of the 1618 creation; the earldom became extinct yet again upon the death of his son, the third Marquess and second Earl, in 1855. The Coke family is descended from the noted judge and politician Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice from 1613 to 1616. Through his son Henry Coke, his great-great-great-grandson Thomas Coke was a landowner and patron of arts.
In 1728 he was raised to the Peerage of Great Britain as Baron Lovel, of Minster Lovel in the County of Oxford, in 1744 he was created Viscount Coke, of Holkham in the County of Norfolk, Earl of Leicester in the Peerage of Great Britain. Lord Leicester began the construction of Holkham Hall in Norfolk, he married 19th Baroness de Clifford. Their only child Edward Coke, Viscount Coke, predeceased both his parents, without issue. Lord Leicester's titles became extinct on his death in 1759 while the barony of de Clifford fell into abeyance on Lady de Clifford's death in 1775; the Coke estates were passed on to the late Earl's nephew Wenman Coke. Born Wenman Roberts, he was the son of Philip Roberts and Anne, sister of Lord Leicester, assumed the surname of Coke in lieu of Roberts, his son Thomas Coke was noted agriculturalist. Known as "Coke of Norfolk", he sat as a Member of Parliament for many years but is best remembered for his interest in agricultural improvements and is seen as one of the instigators of the British Agricultural Revolution.
In 1837 the titles held by his great-uncle were revived when Coke was raised to the Peerage of the United Kingdom as Viscount Coke and Earl of Leicester, of Holkham in the County of Norfolk. This was despite the fact that the 1784 creation of the earldom held by the Townshend family was still extant. Lord Leicester was succeeded by his eldest son from the second Earl, he served as Lord-Lieutenant of Norfolk for sixty years and was made a Knight of the Garter in 1873. On his death in 1909 the titles passed to the third Earl, he was a colonel in the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards and served as Lord-Lieutenant of Norfolk. He was succeeded by the fourth Earl, he was Lord-Lieutenant of Norfolk. When he died the titles passed to his son, the fifth Earl, he was an Extra Equerry to both George VI and Elizabeth II. He was succeeded by his first cousin, the sixth Earl, he was the son of the Hon. Arthur G
