Construction of the Cathedral | Durham Cathedral | Briefing | Professor Stalley

Early Architecture in Irreland & Romanesque Architecture in England

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Construction of the Cathedral | Durham Cathedral and Anglo-Norman Romanesque
Professor Roger Stalley

The cathedral took 40 years to complete, excluding the upper sections of the western towers, which were not finished until c. 1200. By the standards of the age, this was not an abnormal length of time for so large a project. Some buildings, however, were completed at greater speed. The Norman cathedral at Christchurch Canterbury, for example, is said to have been finished in seven years (1070–7), and the reconstruction of the choir there a century later (1174–84), a huge undertaking, was finished in ten years. The abbey church of Cluny in Burgundy (1088–1130) took 42 years to complete, and the church of Santiago de Compostela (1078–1122) 44 years.

It is misleading to suppose that construction work proceeded evenly over the course of the 40 years. Some sort of hiatus occurred in 1096-9 when the monks were forced to take over the funding of the work. Moreover, the continuator of Symeon's History explains that Bishop Flambard 'acted at times more assiduously and at others with more remissness (Ômodo intentius modo remissius'), depending on whether offerings made at the altar and dues from the cemetery were available or had ceased to flow in.'

The length of time taken to construct the cathedral allowed the builders to alter the design as work proceeded. Amongst the more obvious alterations are:

•	the introduction of a wall passage at clerestory level in the transepts and nave.

•	the introduction of stone vaults throughout the church (they had originally been planned only for the aisles and the main body of the choir).

•	the simplification of the minor (cylindrical) piers in the nave.

•	the introduction of chevron ornament in the nave.

•	improvements in the design of the ribbed vaults, from the type with depressed diagonals (choir aisles), to the those with semi-circular ribs and stilted transverse arches (north transept), to those with chevron and pointed transverse arches (nave).

Materials: the chief requirement was good building stone and here the monks of Durham were fortunate. The sandstone used in the building was quarried in the immediate locality, saving the expensive transport which confronted many builders.

England, Durham Cathedral, Nave pier showing construction with individual blocks

The quantity of stone required must have been unprecedented in the region, calling for a highly organised approach to quarrying. This is reflected in the masonry of the cathedral, where there is evidence for the standardization of blocks, a method designed to speed up the process of the construction. This is especially obvious in the cylindrical piers of the nave. One such pier is formed of 288 blocks, arranged in 24 courses, each comprising 12 blocks. The incised patterns were cut on the stones in advance, and they were arranged in such a way that only one or two different types were needed to assemble a pier. An awareness of the advantages of standardization may explain why the form of the piers was altered in the nave, the pure cylinder being simpler and cheaper to make than the version used in the choir, where responds were attached at the back.

The sequence of building can be determined by the irregularities and changes in the design. It is obvious that the cathedral was begun at the east end, and that the choir must have been virtually complete when the relics of St. Cuthbert were translated in 1104. This first campaign evidently extended as far as the first two arches of the nave. The rest of the nave was the last part of the building to be finished, as confirmed by the documents which indicate that the vaults had still to be completed in 1128 when Ranulph Flambard died. This order of construction is confirmed by the distribution of chevron ornament, introduced to the design after the first two arches of the nave. The chevron evidence confirms that the first two arches, plus one bay of the gallery, were erected in advance of the rest of the nave, no doubt to serve as a buttress for the western side of the crossing, a not uncommon procedure in medieval building. Chevron is also found on the ribs of the south transept vault, suggesting that this vault was erected at the same time as the vaulting of the nave (the blocking of the arches in the clerestory and the redundant vertical shafts shows that the vault was an afterthought, and probably replaced a wooden ceiling).

As the upper parts of the north transept were designed to receive a vault, most scholars have concluded that it was finished somewhat later than the transept to the south.

Once the choir was finished in 1104, a temporary screen must have been erected to protect it from the building works continuing to the west. If, as seems likely, regular worship had been transferred into the new building, the monks were now in a position to demolish the old Anglo-Saxon church.

Durham Cathedral was thus completed in two or three separate campaigns, a procedure which allowed the monks to occupy the building at the earliest opportunity.