Buildings and fine arts

There is a sense by the fifteenth century, not just that Englishmen had more material possessions, a better diet than that of their predecessors, more luxurious furnishings, access to better supplied markets, but of England itself being increasingly cluttered up with the debris of the English past. Men and women expressed nostalgia for a heritage that they believed to be vanishing or crumbling around them even as they reached out to record or preserve it or to acquire the consumer goods and fashions of an increasingly commercialized age. The cathedrals and churches raised by the Normans, originally new and shocking reminders of a social revolution, had been transformed even by 1350 into venerable and ancient reminders of a long vanished past. The age of epic had ended. Lincoln Cathedral had been rebuilt three times since the Norman Conquest, its final incarnation completed in the reign of Henry III. Thereafter, from the 1250s, whilst the cathedral’s masons repaired the old, and mended the damaged, there was no proposal to rebuild from scratch.

Partly this was the result of rising labour costs, which from the 1380s became positively prohibitive: estimates of the cost of building even a peasant cottage rose from 10s or 20s in the 1290s, to £3 for the simplest sort of dwelling by 1400, an instance of house-price inflation every bit as remarkable as that of the late twentieth-century property ‘bubble’. Partly, however, it reflects a sense of respect for the past: the appreciation of a heritage that was no longer to be pulled down and improved, but was regarded as something precious, to be admired and preserved. Henceforth, although the old might be tampered with, as with the rebuilding of the naves of Canterbury and Winchester cathedrals, or Richard II’s reroofing of Westminster Hall, it was already recognized that to build anew was not always to ‘improve’ upon what had gone before.

Abandoning the epic structures of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, challenging heaven in their height and scale, the later Middle Ages prized decoration and the sumptuous arts. Its greatest monuments are often on a modest or even a miniature scale: painted manuscripts and books of hours, or the remarkable gold and enamel toys exchanged as Christmas or New Year presents between kings, represented in England by the Dunstable swan, an exquisite gold livery badge perhaps associated with the Bohun earls of Hereford. The fifteenth century marked a high point in the painting of stained glass, and above all perhaps in the carving of alabaster. Beginning in the 1330s with the tomb of Edward II at Gloucester, alabaster, a distinctively English fine-grained form of gypsum quarried principally in Staffordshire and Derbyshire, became the stone of choice for the tomb effigies of kings, aristocrats and bishops. Whilst the very best stained glass continued to be imported into England from Burgundy, the Rhineland and especially from Normandy, rather than produced in the glass factories of the Weald of Kent, European buyers were only too keen to export English alabaster images of the saints, altar-pieces and other elaborately carved panels, a native English art, in its way just as remarkable as the bronze, ceramic and marble figures that Donatello or Lucca Della Robbia were in the process of fashioning for the churches, palaces and piazzas of fifteenth-century Florence. Pewter, made from an alloy 80 per cent tin and therefore dependent upon the Cornish tin deposits, used as an alternative to ceramics or glass for plates and drinking vessels, was another late-medieval export. Like the Opus Anglicanum of the Anglo-Saxons, these were mass-produced luxury goods, sumptuous arts that were distinctively English.