Your Places or Mine

• A Spymaster's Lair: The Unmissable Splendour of Hatfield House

  Send us a textClive has just been to an event at Hatfield House, the palace to the North of London which stands as a monument to the political gene of the Cecil family.  John is more than equal to discussing this great country house and its treasures, which the present Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury are subtly making even more special.In the 16th-century, Robert Cecil inherited it from his father Lord Burghley, whom he followed as Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister.  It was Cecil who did more than anyone to negotiate the succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne on Elizabeth’s death as James I.  James stopped at Cecil’s house of Theobalds on his stately journey south to claim the crown.  Sickly and, like the King, somewhat misshapen, Cecil became James’s first minister, a position bolstered after the role he played in uncovering the Gunpowder Plot; he was created Earl of Salisbury. James had little affection for the old palace at Hatfield, which had been little used since Queen Elizabeth had spent her girlhood there.  On the other hand, as an addict of hunting he enjoyed his visits to Theobalds, expressing his admiration by the backhanded means of proposing a swop.  At Hatfield, Cecil showed his disgust for the old building by demolishing three-quarters of it, and building the present house to the designs of Robert Lemyinge, who had begun life as a carpenter.  Help was enlisted from the Surveyor of the King’s Works, Simon Basil, and the great Inigo Jones – too late, presumably, for him to do more than sprinkle some Italianate stardust on the south front of an otherwise old-fashioned pile.Hatfield has always been a political house and so it remains.  The present Lord Salisbury, great-great-grandson of the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, was responsible, as leader of the opposition in the House of Lords, for the coup of negotiating the survival of 91 hereditary peers when Tony Blair reformed the upper house in 1999.

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• Cathedral on Fire: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Notre-Dame

  Send us a textIn 2019 a devastating fire consumed the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, one of the towering symbols of French identity, and it seemed that one of the greatest cultural monuments in Europe had, literally, gone up in smoke. But after only two short years, it has now been restored and John has been to see – and celebrate – the result.  The old Notre Dame had evolved over many centuries and lived through dramatic times.  Sacked during the Revolution, it was returned to glory for Napoleon’s coronation.  John not only discusses these aspects of its history with Clive but probes the contribution of the great 19th-century restorer Eugene Violet-le-Duc, a rationalist whose approach was unlike that of his English contemporaries, John Ruskin and William Morris. Whereas the latter believed that old buildings bore witness to the lives of the masons who created them, and that every ancient stone was therefore sacred and irreplaceable, Violet-le-Duc held that a cathedral such as Notre-Dame could be returned to an ideal medieval state.  So he ruthlessly swept away later work.  Not all that he did was bad.  As Victor Hugo attests, the state of the cathedral in 1831, when The Hunchback of Notre-Dame appeared, was lamentable.  Viollet-le-Duc, working there for 20 years, put it back in shape; but much of the decoration and roofline – the spire that has fallen, for example, as well as the gargoyles and carved monsters on the roof – were his.  Now a new layer of history has been added to the great medieval edifice. What does John make of it?

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• The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry: A Threaded Tale of Heroes and Conquerors

  Send us a textAn extraordinary cultural loan is about to take place: soon, while its home in France is being improved, the Bayeux Tapestry will be displayed in the British Museum for two years.  This will give members of the British public, along with visitors to London from overseas, the chance to get up close to one of the founding documents of England’s story.  One of the foremost medievalists in the country, John is in a prime position to lead the discussion with Clive on this unparallelled work of art.The survival of the so-called tapestry – really a piece of embroidery – is itself remarkable. Only one section of this ancient textile has disappeared; the rest of the 224ft composition remains almost incredibly intact. Where was it made?  Who stitched it?  Who composed the design?  These questions cannot be answered with certainty.  There is a likely candidate, though, for the patron who commissioned it.  This was William the Conqueror’s half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, who was also Earl of Kent; he may have ordered it for the consecration of his cathedral in Bayeux.  If the origins of the Bayeux Tapestry are obscure, the story-telling is not.  John and Clive delight in the vivid and economical narrative, as well as the information it coincidentally displays about palaces, boats, horses, feasting and Norman armour.   Although celebrated in its time, the tapestry was largely forgotten until ‘rediscovered’ by an 18th-century monk.  Later, Hitler regarded the Bayeux Tapestry as an object he was anxious to display in Berlin but luckily the liberation of Paris occurred before he was able to take it out of the country.

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• War Memorials Of WW1: The Secret Meaning of The Stone

  Send us a textIn advance of Remembrance Sunday on November 11, Clive has been visiting the Commonwealth War Graves in France.  The Imperial War Graves Commission, as it was called when established in 1917, was the brain child of Fabian Ware, a civil servant turned newspaper editor who commanded a Red Cross dressing station during the First World War and was therefore saw the horror at first hand.  Ware realised that the hundreds of thousands of young men who died for Britain deserved proper burial and commemoration. The losses were on a scale unknown in previous wars, and the monuments and cemeteries built to remember them were also completely without precedent. The British government rose to the challenge, finding a solution that was supremely well-adapted to the character of the nation.  The result was one of the greatest commissions of public art ever seen.Clive and John discuss this epic achievement.  On the Somme alone there were about 450 cemeteries, requiring monumental expression. Architecturally, this gave the lead architects -- Sir Edwin Lutyens, Sir Reginald Blomfield and Sir Herbert Baker, who were later joined by Charles Holden (who twice rejected a knighthood) – an unparallelled opportunity to design structures that were both poetic and abstract, akin to music in having no practical value than in the remembering the Fallen.  Today no one can see the cemeteries of the First World War without feeling deeply moved by the experience.  Fortunately, the need arose at time when it was possible to find a shared architectural language for the profoundest emotions, centred on a nation’s sense of loss.

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• The History of Salisbury Cathedral: How Did They Move a Medieval Marvel?

  Send us a textWhich cathedral is closest to the English heart?  Impossible to say but it may be Salisbury, the subject of this week’s Your Places or Mine.  On September 28 a special service will be held to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the dedication of the altars at Salisbury’s east end in 1225. To many people, Salisbury Cathedral approaches architectural perfection more nearly than any of the other cathedrals in England.  It is the most harmonious; the spire is the tallest (404 feet); and still see it surrounded by water meadows that are a survival of medieval farming practice. This was the view famously painted by John Constable.Whereas other cathedral builders in the Middle Ages had to contend with previously developed sites, Salisbury’s Bishop Roger Poore had no such bother.  In 1219, he abandoned the previous cathedral at Old Sarum, which stood inside the banks of an Iron Age hill fort.  Old Sarum had little water and was inconveniently close to a castle full of disputatious knights.  ‘Let us descend joyfully to the plains, where the valley abounds in corn, where the fields are beautiful and where there is freedom from oppression,’ declaimed the papal bull of Honorius III which approved the move.  Poore and his unknown architect could lay out at the cathedral as they liked; except for the 14th spire, most of it was built over a period of sixty years – hence it is unified in style.  Whereas the stone used to build Old Sarum had come from Caen in Normandy, Salisbury was made of English stones; the nave is an unusually disciplined essay in creamy Chilmark limestone, from around Tisbury in Wiltshire, and dark grey Purbeck ‘marble’ – not actually marble but a polished limestone -- from the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset.  Purbeck marble, rich in fossils, was also used for the floor.John and Clive discuss all these points as well as controversial 18th and 19th century restorations, not to mention a clock that may be the old working piece of machinery in the world.

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