Westwork

Abstract: A number of churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries have supports at the east end of the nave which break the pattern, whether uniform or alternating, of the rest of the arcade. English and French examples of this phenomenon are normally explained as the result of a change of plan after a building break. Further examination of some of these examples, namely the abbeys of Romsey and Peterborough and the cathedrals of Norwich and Laon, indicates that it is more in accordance with the evidence to consider these as special supports designed to mark the position of the nave altar or the division between the lay and the clerical parts of the building.

Abstract: The nave of Saint-Pierre at Lisieux, like other early Gothic structures in Normandy, presents formidable problems of analysis for historians of medieval architecture.1 While modern scholarship has provided new insights into the first appearances and subsequently developed regional variants of Gothic architecture in areas from Burgundy and the north to Anjou and even England, Normandy has remained unstudied.2 Our understanding of the situation is further complicated by such factors as the political and cultural ties across the channel and the rich Anglo-Norman Romanesque architectural tradition. In

Abstract: Archaeological analysis of the fabric suggests that the nave of the Romanesque church was built from east to west in the usual way and not, as the current literature proposes, from west to east. This conclusion has implications for the iconography of the architecture in that various features in the two eastern bays of the nave can be assessed, not as pure decoration, but as liturgical markers for the position of the nave altar. Comparative study of individual features and related buildings suggest that the master mason was trained in East Anglia but worked to a brief drawn up in the ambient of the ‘school’ of Durham Cathedral. The same evidence confirms the established date bracket of the first two-thirds of the twelfth century, while the case for identifying the lost eastern half as part of Harold's mid eleventh-century foundation is rejected in favour of its belonging to the same twelfth-century build as the start of the nave.