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42
BCD Special Report on
Historic Churches
18th annual edition
Separating the high altar and the
feretory was the magnificence of the Neville
screen. Architectural separations, however
grand, between these sacred spaces were
visual by degrees, not aural separations, so
their texts and chanting and petitionary
prayers were overlapping and interwoven in
simultaneous, although differently geared,
cycles of monastic and lay worship. It was
not perfectly integrated, but was rather
all-embracing. The great processions took
the host, relics, crosses and banners round
all the spaces of the cathedral and on great
festivals they went out into the town linking
other churches into the liturgy as well.
The rites swept sacred objects, sacred
spaces and sanctified people into a great
cycle of worship and praise and thanksgiving,
united with the saints and the whole company
of heaven. The author of the Rites had seen
it all pass away, fondly recording his vivid
memories before they too were extinguished
with his aging generation. The Reformation
seemed to have effaced this grand and
dignified unity of liturgy and architecture,
but during the 1620s and 1630s, John Cosin,
first as Prebend, then after the Restoration
as Bishop of Durham, began to recover some
of the lost glory. He was owner of one of the
manuscripts of the Rites of Durham and had
a good deal of sympathy for the old ways.
With the Reformation, a defining chapter
had closed for the liturgy and architecture
of Durham, as it had throughout England.
Nevertheless, successive adaptation of both
the liturgy and the architecture, including the
involvement of ‘Wyatt the Destroyer’,
16
Sir George
Gilbert Scott and the cathedral’s modern re-
branding as a World Heritage Site, all provide
fascinating insights into a local distinctiveness
tempered by broad national similarities.
Recommended Reading
John Crook, The Architectural Setting of the
Cult of Saints in the Early Christian West
c300–1200, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2000
Joseph Thomas Fowler (ed), Rites of Durham:
being a Description or Brief Declaration
of all the Ancient Monuments, Rites, &
Customs belonging or being within the
Monastical Church of Durham before
the Suppression, 1593, Surtees Society
Publications, Durham, 1903
Arnold Klukas, ‘Durham Cathedral in the
Gothic Era: Liturgy, Design, Ornament’,
in Artistic Integration in Gothic Buildings,
Virginia Chieffo Raguin et al (eds), Toronto
University Press, Toronto, 1995
Allan Doig
PhD FSA, fellow and chaplain
of Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford,
read architecture at Cambridge and held
research fellowships at the universities of Hull
and Delft. He is a member of the Diocesan
Advisory Committee for the Care of Churches
and the fabric advisory committees of Ely and
Salisbury cathedrals.
Acknowledgements
This article is a foretaste of a longer essay that
will be published in 2012 as part of a new book
on Durham Cathedral edited by David Brown,
a professor at the University of St Andrews and
previously professor and canon at Durham.
I am indebted to many in the cathedral for
their help including Canon Rosalind Brown;
Alastair Fraser, Gabriel Sewell, and Catherine
Turner in the Cathedral Library; Andrew
Gray in the Archive and Special Collections;
and Ruth Robson, the Events Coordinator.
Notes
1
Published in 1903 by the Surtees Society in a
critical edition by Canon Fowler showing the
variations (see entry in Recommended Reading)
2
Roll, c1600, in
Rites of Durham
, p63, (English
quotations have been largely modernised).
The coffin made for him in 698 is in the Treasury.
The lid is carved with an image of Christ in
Majesty surrounded by the four Evangelists; the
end has the earliest English representation of the
Virgin and Child.
3
Ibid, p66
4
Ibid, p66–67
5
Crook, p167, n40; and Roll in
Rites
, p68
6
On this confusion see also the note in
Rites
, p249
7
Rites
, p72
8
Roll in
Rites
, p67, & MS Cosin, c1620, pp74–75
9
Modified by MS Hunter 45
10 Crook, pp168–9
11
Roll in
Rites
, pp76–77
12 MS Cosin, p73
13 Crook, p168
14
For a detailed description, see MS Rawle 1603, in
Rites
, pp118–22
15
MS Cosin, interpolation from H 45, c1655, in
Rites
, p4
16 Georgian architect James Wyatt (1746–1813), who
earned a reputation for over-zealous ‘restoration’
work at the cathedrals of Salisbury, Hereford and
Durham
The feretory of St Cuthbert (Photo: The Chapter of Durham Cathedral)