A Short Account of King's College ChapelLittlechild, Walter Poole
Religion
A Short Account of King's College Chapel
Littlechild, Walter Poole
King's College (University of Cambridge). Chapel
Henry VII, who has been credited with an excessive tendency to
accumulate treasure, was, next to the Founder, much the largest
contributor. A short time before his death in 1509[5], moved perhaps to
emulate the liberal example of his pious mother, he gave £5,000 to the
college, with instructions to his executors to finish the building. May
we not also think that Richard Fox, Founder of Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, Bishop of Winchester from 1500 to 1528, who was Henry VII's
constant adviser, Privy Seal, and one of his executors, had something to
do with this mark of Henry's generosity and favour? This sum of £5,000
was probably all spent by the beginning of 1512, when the King's
executors made over to the Provost and scholars, in 1511-12, a second
sum of £5,000.
Thus in 1515, in the 7th year of King Henry VIII's reign, the stonework
of the chapel was completed; it had cost, in the present value of money,
about £160,000. The stone used in the construction is of different
kinds. The white magnesian limestone from Huddlestone in Yorkshire is
that which was chiefly used in the lifetime of the Founder. The lower
part of the walls was built of this; the upper part was built with stone
brought from Clipsham in Rutlandshire in 1477. A third kind, from Weldon
in Northamptonshire, was used for the vaulting of the choir and
ante-chapel, executed in 1512 and the following years. The north and
south porches were vaulted with a magnesian limestone, more yellow in
colour, from the Yorkshire quarry of Hampole.
The outside measurement of the chapel from turret to turret is 310 feet,
the said turrets being 146 feet high. The four westernmost buttresses on
the south and five on the north side are ornamented with heraldic
devices, crowns, roses, and portcullises, while on the set-offs
separating the stages are dragons, greyhounds, and antelopes bearing
shields.
[Illustration: THE SCREEN FROM WEST END]
Inside, the chapel is 289 feet long, 40 feet wide from pier to pier,
and 80 feet high from the floor to the central point of the stone vault.
The _tracery_ of the roof is a fine specimen of the fan-vault which is
rarely to be found in Continental architecture, but is the peculiar
glory of the English style. It can truly be said that stone seems, by
the cunning labour of the chisel, to have been robbed of its weight and
density and suspended aloft as if by magic, while the fretted roof is
achieved with the wonderful minuteness and airy security of a cobweb.
Similar roofs appear in Bath Abbey (the architect of which was Dr.
Oliver King, a member of King's), in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, in
Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster, in Sherborne Minster, and in the
ambulatory of the choir of Peterborough; but the earliest example of
this kind of vaulting is the cloister of Gloucester (1381-1412), of
which the late Dean Spence speaks in the following lines:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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