Old parish churches are wonderful ways of experiencing the ways in which architectural tastes changed over many centuries. As well as being rewarding in their own right, these ever-shifting styles can be used to help put a date on the parts of a building as it develops. They also help make it a ‘time machine’ to medieval culture and medieval ideas. This lecture will outline the main identifying features of the succeeding styles- known as Anglo-Saxon, Norman or Romanesque, early Gothic or Transitional, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular; it will also aim to give a picture of how these styles unfolded ‘in the present’, and how they might evoke the attitudes of the past.
Jon Cannon is a writer and architectural historian. His book on medieval style, ‘Medieval Church Architecture’, is available from Shire books. He also presented BBCTV’s ‘How to Build a Cathedral’ and wrote ‘Cathedral: the great English cathedrals and the world that made them’, ‘The Secret Language of Sacred Spaces: Decoding temples, mosques, churches churches and other places of worship’, and other titles. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, Cathedral Historian at Bristol cathedral, and in demand as a lecturer and tour leader. His ‘Stones of Britain: Geology and history in the British landscape’ is out next Autumn.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries is often characterised as a simple story of greed and appropriation enacted by Thomas Cromwell on behalf Henry VIII, which saw the religious evicted and all England's great abbeys and priories destroyed in less than a decade. Whilst clearly a devastating experie...
In late 1348, the Black Death entered London. Over the next 9 months, it ravaged the populace killing thousands. This paper provides a detailed look at its arrival, spread and eventual disappearance, and looks at some of the archaeological and architectural evidence for its passage, its final dea...
Medieval tombs often depict husband and wife lying side-by-side and hand-in-hand, their love immortalised in elegantly carved stone: what Philip Larkin's poem An Arundel Tomb later described as their "stone fidelity". But there is more to these declarations of post-mortem love than meets the eye....
