Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)

MATTHEW PALMER The English Cathedral: Prom Description to Analysis

78 Matthew Palmer merely designing new Gothic churches, they also went about "improving" or "correcting" errors perceived to have been committed by the medieval architects themselves. The results could be disastrous, as seen in J. M. Neale's wish, fortunately not acted upon, for Peterborough Cathedral to be pulled down, "if it could be replaced by a middle-pointed [cf. Decorated] cathedral as good of its sort".

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8 It was the eagerness of the Victorians to restore and partly rebuild England's parish churches and cathedrals which led William Morris the founder of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877 to demand that the original fabric be respected. This has been more or less accepted up to this day.

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9 Nevertheless, one still has to be wary, especially at cathedrals as heavily restored as My and Lichfield, of looking at 19

th century and not medieval masonry. Nation At no time during the Middle Ages do we hear of buildings in England being described as "English" in the same way as we hear of churches on the continent being described as opus francigenum.

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0 Erom this, one can assume that people were not aware that English Gothic constituted an individual style, in the same way that those looking at French, or rather Parisian, Gothic did. For Burchard von Hall, writing in about 1280, "French" was a recognisable style, the sculpted saints on the interior and exterior, the windows and the piers provoking comment. English was a variation of the opus francigenum

, and architects in England decided to take what elements they wanted from it. It is perhaps wrong to suggest that architects in England willfully rejected the iYench style. Rather, rejection was of a passive nature caused by what Crossley 1

8 Dixon, R. and Muthesius, S., Victorian Architecture (London, Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 194; White, James F., The Cambridge Movement: The Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 87 and p. 164. 1

9 More recently, however, surveyors of the fabric like Donald Buttress, who was responsible for restoration work at Chichester Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, have been prepared to defend the interventions of some of his Victorian predecessors whilst doing a little "improving" themselves. 2

0 Franki (op. cit., p. 55) quotes from Burchard von Hall's Chronicle (c. 1280) describing building operations at the monastery of St Peter in Wimpfen on the River Neckar. "Richard caused the basilica to be constructed in the French style (opus francigenum) by a very experienced architect who had recently come from the city of Paris". Branner, Robert, St Louis and the Court Style (London, A. Zwemmer Ltd, 1965), pp. 122-3.