In 1851, plans were made for extensive restoration of the cathedral including the installation of a heating system. Between 1856 and 1860, the floors of the choir area and side aisles were lifted to build brick flues which would carry heated air. In the course of the work foundations for two earlier buildings were revealed. A detailed survey of the foundation walls was made by the stonemason John Hamlet with assistance given by James Rawson a local physician and George Clarke, the clerk of works to George Gilbert Scott the architect for the restoration. A large drawing showed a well-defined, large choir foundation wall continuous with an apsidal ending. Abutted, but not attached, to this apsidal ending was a rectangular chapel.[1] Revd Robert Willis, 1800–75, an authority on church architecture, visited the Cathedral for two days in August 1859.[2] He saw the foundations resting on the sandstone bedrock 1.5‑2.1 m (5–7 ft) below the pavement of the side aisles of the current cathedral, took measurements, made observations, and published his interpretation in 1861.[3]
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| Foundation of the choir-apse and abutting chamber superimposed on the plan of the current cathedral. |
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| Robert Willis |
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| Choir in 1860 with its floor uncovered |
Willis’s drawing of the choir-apse foundation with dimensions
The remarkable size of the choir-apse
foundation was too great to have sustained a roof without internal pillars, so
Willis imagined it had an inner apse of pier arches supporting the roof. Willis
found ‘no architectural detail’ to fix a date of build for the foundation and
concluded it was of ‘uncertain date’. Despite this he called it a Norman
church, presumably reasoning such a large choir-apse in stone would be
extraordinary for an Anglo-Saxon building. There was nothing comparable. The
foundation was internally 15.9 m (52 ft 3 in.) wide and 21.4 m (70 ft 1.5 in.)
long. The outer boundary of its lateral walls ‘seemed to lie’ in contact with the bench table of the side
aisles of the current cathedral.[4]
Both the north and south walls measured 1.7 m (5 ft 8.5 in.) in width which
gave a total span for the choir-apse of 19.4 m (63 ft 8 in.). Willis measured
the foundation height as c. 1.8 m (6 ft).
In the 1990s, part of the
foundation was seen again and its exceptional size merited the labels ‘massive’
and ‘a great apse’. Rodwell fixed a start of build in 1085 and described it as
Norman Romanesque in style.[5]
Willis had conjectured the inner columns were wood, but Rodwell saw them as
drum columns, 1.5 m in diameter. Roofing material has not been found apart from
small amounts of Roman brick and tile,[6]
which could have come from the first 7th-century cathedral.[7]
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Photograph taken 1994 of the foundation in the north choir aisle.
The nature of the foundation was
atypical, being well mortared, buff-cream, dense, and described as like
concrete. During the 1856
installation of heating ducts, men had to force a way through concrete of
‘unusual hardness’.[8] Willis noted the wall had rough
masonry in courses about 150 mm (6 in.) high. He thought the external face
‘appeared intended to receive a coat of plaster’. Rodwell described the lower
levels as layers of mortared rubble. The upper layers were faced with rough
ashlar behind which was a poured concrete core, of such strength that it was
assiduously avoided by grave-diggers of all periods. It was an immensely strong monolithic construction comprising
lime mortar and rubble poured into a trench.[9]
It was like a section of an apse uncovered at Rochester, part of an
early-7th-century Anglo-Saxon church.[10]
The use of rubble in the foundation
resembled Clapham’s description of the early-9th-century crypt at Wing church,
Buckinghamshire, in which the whole structure was built of the rudest rubble
masonry with barrel vaulting in the same material.[11]
Examination of the foundations at Deerhurst found they all contained 5 ft or more
of coursed rubble laid in trenches with good mortar. Similarly, the walls at
Brixworth contained random rubble.[12] There was no mention of uniform, dressed stone, typical of
Anglo-Norman buildings.[13]
A very simple radiocarbon dating of the mortar would give resolution on
the age of the cathedral. The foundation is a mere 300 mm below the floor of
the choir aisle floor. Extracting two samples and having them dated would cost
around £2.5K.
NB. There
is a problem with naming the people Saxon or Anglo-Saxon (the preferred title
in academic publications). Based on surviving texts, early inhabitants of the
region were commonly called englisc and angelcynn. From
410 A.D. when the Romans left to shortly after 1066, the term only
appears three times in legal charters in the entire corpus of Old English
literature and all in the tenth century. It is used here because Anglo-Saxon is
understood.
[1] John Hamlet’s ‘General plan shewing the position of old foundation as
discovered during progress of excavations for hot air flues’ is held in the
Staffordshire Record Office LD 289/16. The drawing has a few revisions with
pen overlaying pencil. Willis’s notes are kept in Cambridge, Cambridge
University Library, MS 5042, with the title ‘Architectural drawings and notes
of Lichfield Cathedral 1861‑64’. Willis saw only the south east part of the
apse. The greatest amount of the foundation wall was observed by Rawson and
Hamlet in 1856 and 1860. Map reference for the apse is SK1159 0978 and the
chamber is SK1157 0977.
[2] A. R. Dufty, ‘Lichfield Cathedral’ in The
Archaeol. J., 120 Report of the Summer Meeting of the Royal Archaeological
Institute at Keele in 1963 (1963), 294.4
[3] R. Willis, ‘On foundations
of early buildings recently discovered in Lichfield Cathedral’ The Archaeol.
J. (1861) 18, 1–24. Willis visited the Cathedral in 1849 to examine window
tracery. In 1854, he was invited to forward a drawing for the restoration of the
choir area. Before publication Willis gave a lecture reported in The
Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1861, vol 210, 296‑300.
[4] ‘Seemed to lie’ was
Willis’s phrase. The gap between the lateral wall and cathedral wall is
estimated to be
c. 180 mm (7
in.). Hamlet’s drawing showed the bottom of the foundation was wider than the
top.
[5] Fragments of moulded
masonry identified as Romanesque were found Rodwell 1992a, 29; R. K. Morris,
‘The lapidary collections of Lichfield Cathedral’, in J. Maddison ed., 13th
Medieval Archaeology and Architecture at Lichfield (Leeds: The British
Archaeological Association 1993), 101–108; Rodwell 1994, 29.
[6] Rodwell 1992a, 28
[7] Hamlet noted on his
drawing a clay pit that contained a quantity of molten lead. Was this for the
roof?
[8] J. G. Lonsdale, Recollections
of work done in and upon Lichfield Cathedral from 1856—1894 (Lichfield
1895), 6.
[9] W. Rodwell, ‘An interim
report on archaeological excavations in the south quire aisle of Lichfield
Cathedral’, (Unpub. report held in Lichfield Cathedral Library 1992b), 4; W.
Rodwell, J. Hawkes, E. Howe and R. Cramp, ‘The Lichfield Angel: A spectacular
Anglo-Saxon painted sculpture.’ The Antiquaries Journal (2008), 88, 51
note 24.
[10] G. M. Livett,
‘Foundations of the Saxon Cathedral Church at Rochester’ Archaeologia
Cantiana (1889) 18, 264.
[11] A.W. Clapham, English
Romanesque architecture (Oxford 1930), 156.
[12] H. M. Taylor, Anglo-Saxon
architecture: vol III (Cambridge 1978), 761 and 964.
[13] H. M. Taylor and J.
Taylor, Anglo-Saxon architecture: vols I and II (Cambridge 1965),
7 and 1978, 756.
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