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August 2003

Parish History Episode 28

An Age of Transition

The old church at Houghton-le-Spring, the Norman church, had been built, naturally enough, in “Norman”, or Romanesque, style. However, the new church, the church that would be built to serve the people who were returning to Houghton after the wars which had arisen following King David’s invasion of England, would show the first traces of “Gothic” - of the new developments in architecture which were sweeping across Twelfth-Century Europe.

As with windmills and many other innovations for good or ill, contacts with the Near East through the Crusades may have played an important role in the development of the so-called Gothic style. There stone buildings needed to be built very strongly to withstand earthquake shocks, and the Crusaders may have noticed buttresses in use on the churches built by their local allies in the East, the Maronites of the Lebanon and the Armenians. The idea was brought back to Europe, and buttresses and flying buttresses were soon being erected for Western churches, not to strengthen the buildings against earthquakes, but to enable lighter and more attenuated masonry to soar heavenward, and, hopefully, to provide a sense of spiritual uplift to the worshippers within. The magnificent cathedral erected in Chartres, a city some sixty miles or so South-West of Paris, during the thirty years from 1134 to 1164, is commonly seen as one of the earliest examples of the new architectural style.

Chartres had by then been, for about two centuries, the main centre of learning in France, though scholars were, at that time, beginning to move from the great abbeys and cathedrals of France to regroup in Paris, which would soon become France’s intellectual as well as political capital. But Hugh de Puiset, a young priest on the staff of Chartres Cathedral, who had seen the start of the construction of the new cathedral, on the site of a demolished Romanesque predecessor, was in the middle of the century to migrate to Durham, and there to become, from 1152 to 1195, Prince-Bishop, the man who put the region back on its feet after the disaster of the Scottish invasion.

Architecture in England was not so advanced as in France, perhaps because the land was poorer, and had suffered so much, both from the predatory habits of its Norman conquerors, and from the chaos of the civil wars in which Norman rule ended. A vast amount of reconstruction work was required, and most of it had to be done with tried-and-tested traditional methods. There were some innovations, and pointed arches and other features begin to be adopted by English masons, but the works for which Bishop Hugh was directly responsible, such as the Galilee Chapel in Durham Cathedral, tend to be conservative. The style of this period is described by historians as “Transitional” (transitional from Romanesque to Gothic). Such a style was also used in the churches being rebuilt in places like Houghton-le-Spring.

There is no mention of a church at Houghton at the time, 1183, when the Boldon Book was compiled, and the rebuilding of our church perhaps did not begin until the 1190’s. Little enough survives of this church, apart from the chancel and transepts, and even those have seen much subsequent reconstruction. We do not know whether the church had a tower, and though there would certainly have been a nave, no more evidence survives of it than of the nave of the Norman church which preceded it. The church would have seemed poor and simple by the standards attained in the later Middle Ages, but it yet displayed some of the promise of the ages to come.

Stone tracery (such as is to be seen in the surrounds of the four great windows in our church : the East window, over the Communion Table; the West window, over the font; and the North and South windows, at the end of each transept) was unknown to the English masons of this “Transitional” age. Instead, they liked to use “batteries” of narrow, pointed lancet windows, often arranged in odd-numbered sets, with a gradation of size, the central one being the tallest, with the windows to each side of it falling away in height, giving an effect something like that of organ-pipes. Good examples of such “organ-pipe” effects can be seen in the batteries of stepped lancets in the East ends of our neighbouring churches of Dalton-le-Dale and Easington, probably rebuilt at much the same time as Houghton church, after the retreat of the Scots.

Lancet windows are not used in the same way at Houghton-le-Spring, but rows of lancets, rather wider than most of those in our neighbouring churches, and arranged in rows of equal height, are to be seen in the South wall of our chancel. Not all of them date to this period - the two most easterly of the eight lancets were inserted in the Nineteenth Century, the other six are original. (The stonework around them is now becoming insecure. At the time of writing, some urgent restorative work is needed, and the Friends of Houghton Church are hoping to be able to raise the money necessary to preserve them for posterity).

More unusual are the windows in the West walls (the “back walls”, nearer to the main doorway into the church) of the transepts (the extensions to the left and right, from the main body of the church, close to the front of the nave, the nave being the area where most of the seating is). Here, each window consists of a pair of lancets, topped by a quatrefoil, at present containing stained glass, all sheltered within a single hood-mould. Nikolaus Pevsner, in his book “County Durham”, in the Penguin “Buildings of England” series, describes these as “pre-tracery Gothic”, and implies that they come from an age when masons had not yet learned how to create stone tracery in window-work. They are certainly not as impressive as well-executed tracery, but they might be seen as a perfectly adequate substitute in a small country church, installed at a time when much other rebuilding work was in progress, and the most highly skilled masons were not necessarily available for this poor parish.

What would this church have looked like when it reached completion? It would certainly have seemed more impressive than surviving Anglian churches, such as those at Escomb and Seaham. Those form simple rectangles, like a farmer’s barn, but Houghton church was “cruciform”, Cross-shaped, with the transepts standing out from the West-East line of the nave and chancel. There were probably no side-aisles, so the nave was no wider than the chancel, thus giving the worshippers better visibility of the Rite.

The lancet windows would have probably provided better lighting than the windows in the preceding Norman church. We do not know whether or not they contained stained glass: during the first generation or so of use, they probably did not. But the installation of the later great windows, in “Decorated” style, at the East, West, North and South extremities of the church, during the Fourteenth Century, would almost certainly have made the church appear brighter and lighter.

Did the church contain pews, pulpit, rood-screen, the sort of furnishings which later churches displayed? Probably not. It would obviously contain an altar, possibly more than one altar, each with an altar-cloth. A lectern would also have been normal. Some ornaments or utensils - a crucifix, candle-sticks, cruets, a hanging pyx, a thurible (for incense) - would have been seen as almost essential. There would also be images, probably made of plaster, of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and of other saints and angels, including - obviously enough, considering the Dedication of the church - one of the Archangel Michael. There may well have been murals painted on the walls. Wood panelling and draperies are possible, but less likely, as such things would be expensive.

There is one item of furniture which might have been installed at this period, during the 1190’s, and which might still be in the church: that is the font. There is no certainty as to how old it is, but some historians of art suggest that it dates from “about 1200”. If that is the case, this plain, octagonal font must be by far the oldest man-made object in Houghton-le-Spring. The priest who baptises a bairn there to-day is literally standing where Bernard Gilpin stood, to perform the same rite. The font would seem to have been in use for over eight hundred years, and must have been used for baptising a hundred thousand, perhaps several hundred thousand babies.

The priest to-day stands beneath a stained glass window representing Bernard Gilpin. Eight hundred years ago, he would have stood beneath a row of lancet windows, of what we would now call “Transitional” style. It was indeed an age of transition, and not only in architectural styles. The older “Middle Ages”, with their endless war and strife, and constant insecurity of life, were passing away, and King and Church, and Law and Commerce, would, in these “High Middle Ages”, bring in a wealthier, more stable society, in which there was more to think of than the simple alternatives of fighting or praying. It would eventually come to be a society in which men and women chose for themselves whether to follow Church or State or neither. But, for centuries to come, every last one of them would have been offered, at this font, Salvation through the rite of Baptism.