Historic buildings : $b as seen and described by great writers
History
Historic buildings : $b as seen and described by great writers
Architecture -- History; Art -- Study and teaching; Historic buildings
After about two hundred years from the beginning of the present
building in the days of Jocelin, we may look on the cathedral church
of Saint Andrew as at last finished. It was finished, in a sense,
before the end of the Thirteenth Century, when everything had been
built which was needed for its ecclesiastical completeness. But it was
in the course of the Fifteenth Century that it finally assumed the
shape with which we are all familiar, and which has from that time
remained unchanged. Now then we have reached the point at which we can
estimate the place which fairly belongs to the church of Wells among
the other churches of England and of Christendom. As it seems to me,
that position, as I began by saying, is a special and remarkable one; I
need not say that in point of size and splendour, the church of Wells
has no claim to a place in the first rank of European, or even English
churches. Setting aside the Welsh churches, and the churches which have
become cathedral without being originally meant for this rank, Wells is
one of the very smallest of English episcopal churches. It is hardly
fair to compare it with Carlisle, which is a mere fragment, or with
Hereford, which has lost its western tower, and with it a part of its
nave. But it is, in point of scale, with Carlisle, Hereford, Lincoln,
and Rochester, or again with non-cathedral churches like Southwell,
Beverley, and Tewkesbury, that Wells must fairly be compared, not
with churches like Canterbury and York, or even like Salisbury and
Gloucester. And among churches of its own class it certainly ranks high.
I have seen many fine churches both in our own country and abroad,
many of them of course on a scale which might seem to put Wells out of
all comparison. But I can honestly say that I know of no architectural
group which surpasses the harmony and variety of our own cathedral, as
seen by the traveller as he first enters the city from Shepton Mallet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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