Building Durham Cathedral E-Book

Brian K. Roberts

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 245

Beschreibung

Durham Cathedral was completed nearly 900 years ago, after 40 years of construction. Inevitably it has suffered from the effects of time: physical erosion, from the weather and increasing pollution on stone that was never of the best quality, and cultural erosion, the impact of secular and religious changes – not least the depredations of clerics, improvers, and administrators. Nevertheless, it remains: the stones speak and provide the story of themselves. Building Durham Cathedral explores this magnificent structure by questioning its architectural plans and stonework. As there have been minimal additions we catch sight of it as the Norman builders intended. Remarkably, a few early documents and the stonework itself allow us to glimpse its beginnings and some of the personalities involved. Questions remain, but there may even be a clue to the identity of its original master mason.

Leseprobe

To Jan

1939–2017

a constant companion

First published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Brian K. Roberts, 2023

The right of Brian K. Roberts to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 8039 9234 1

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If you seek his monument – look around you.

From an inscription on Christopher Wren’s tomb, St Paul’s Cathedral, London

A medieval church can be described as a series of concentric rings. The most holy area was the holy altar at the east end; the holiness lessening towards the west end and into the churchyard. All the holy areas were enclosed within the boundary of the cemetery. Concentric rings were not uniform, and even within the cemetery some areas were more holy than others.

Daniell, cited by Helen Gitto (2013) p.275

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1  Preliminaries: Stories, Histories, Myths, Measures and Masons

2  Of People: Bishop William and Prior Turgot

3  The Church at Warkworth, Northumberland

4  Durham Cathedral: Assessing the Site and Plan

5  The Columns and Piers

6  The ‘Twin Towers West-Work’ and Building Phases

7  Measurements and Stones: A Reassessment

8  Durham Cathedral in Photographs

TEXT BOXES

1  Sculptural Comparisons

2  Medieval Measures

3  Stonework Replacement

4  A Master Mason?

5  The Cathedral Churchyard

6  Church Measurement

7  Constructional Details

8  The Politics of Early Norman Durham

9  South Transept Details

10 Invisible Details

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Exploring the Cathedral

Figure 1: The Plan: A Naming of the Parts

Figure 2: Schematic Plan of a Sun-Divided Village

Figure 3: Warkworth and its Church, Northumberland

Figure 4a: Durham Cathedral and Monastery

Figure 4b: Some Details

Figure 5: Eleventh-Century Sketch Plan: A Speculation

Figure 6: Key Elements of Structural Design

Figure 7: The Norman Cathedral: Pattern of Vaults and Roofing

Figure 8: East Walls of Transepts: A Cross Section

Figure 9: Building Phase Analysis

Figure 10a: Column Bases of the Nave and the Decorative Scheme

Figure 10b: Column Decoration

Figure 11: Columns of the Nave and External Arcade of the Fire

Figure 12: The Norman Cathedral: A Reconstructed Plan

APPENDICES

Appendix 1:Anglo-Saxon Cathedral to Norman Transition

Appendix 2:Great South Doorway Sutures: Masons’ Marks

Figure Ap. 2a and b: Walling Sutures Adjacent to the Great South Doorway

Appendix 3:Tower Stair of the South Transept

Figure Ap. 3: South Transept Tower Stair: Detail

Appendix 4:Anomalous Interior Arcade Capitals

Figure Ap. 4: Anomalous Interior Arcade Capitals

Appendix 5:Column and Pier Chamfers and Column Decoration

Appendix 6:Dramatis Personae

Appendix 7:Masons’ Marks

Figure Ap. 7: Masons’ Marks Within Arcading

Appendix 8:Cathedral Plan by R.W. Billings 1842

Figure Ap. 8: Cathedral Plan by R.W. Billings 1842

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I begin by expressing my gratitude for the friendship, guidance and professional advice I have had from Eric Cambridge over many years: he has been extraordinarily patient. In our discussions he has guided, criticised – albeit gently – and assisted my understanding of Romanesque architecture. His input has been sustained and wholly essential, for he is indeed a ‘church scholar’ and was always ‘on hand’. Nevertheless … and there is always a ‘nevertheless’ … I apologise to him for the occasions when his advice has been ignored, and even worse, when I have sometimes disagreed with him, although this is always done with trepidation and circumspection! Of course, I alone am responsible for the opinions, questions and hypotheses expressed here. At a later stage I owe a debt to Eric Fernie for taking me seriously and for sustained input and support. His scholarly contribution to the field of study creates an indispensable foundation. In Scotland, Davy Guild and Farrell Dewar have carried me enthusiastically to the details of Dunfermline with its demonstrable links with Durham; they have been entertaining, supportive and generous companions in our explorations; I have learned much from them. More distantly, Hugh McCague offered kind comment from Canada; and in even earlier decades John McNeil and Richard Plant – on tours organised by Martin Randall – revealed and illuminated the Romanesque architecture of Europe, from Italy and Sicily to the mountains of Catalonia, along the pilgrim route to Compostella, and eventually across the plains and scarps of northern Europe. I only wish I could recall all they communicated with the clarity I could desire, for the topic and its scholarly base is immense. How I wish I could repeat those journeys. Tadhg O’Keefe in Ireland has been a friend and support over many years and I am deeply grateful for the supply of stimulating books: his output is remarkable, and I like his drawings, maps and models – they are exemplary! Many could learn from them.1

And then, I come to my beloved wife, Jan; now deceased: she never curtailed my travel intentions or book-buying propensities, and it is to her generosity that I now owe many happy memories and my excellent library. She was, and in many senses still remains, a valued and much-loved companion.

Finally, I need to acknowledge debts to the many professional and volunteer staff of Durham Cathedral: they have been most kind, all of them, from the welcoming ‘desk team’, the men who move the furniture – the ‘stagehands’ as I call them – and the lady cleaners of this much-used building, the café staff, and the stewards and guides, vergers and priests. By name I must mention Brian Young: his geological knowledge opened my eyes; Eric Frizby for revealing to me his work on masons’ marks, Mike Donnelly for slogging through my draft at an earlier stage and removing some at least of my textual errors, Libby Towns of the bookshop for help and advice, and finally Peter Lowis for patient responses to my queries about photographs. The people I met and talked to during my investigations have been sources of much delight: the Chinese quantity surveyor, the many local families, mothers, children, fathers and grandparents, the Japanese family with a daughter translating for an inscrutable father, the archaeologist and the masons, miners, engineers, builders, architects, and ship-builders and, not least, the TV ‘face’, who must all remain nameless, but they enliven my days in the building. I have deeply missed their warmth and humanity, although visitors are now returning as society gradually opens, and I recently met a Chinese family; the first of the swallows.

COVID-19 (which I personally have thus far mercifully escaped) brought investigations and contacts to a shuddering halt: I am deeply thankful that I had just reached that threshold when a more formal committal to publication of my explorations was necessary. Risks have always been part of the evolution of our species, and some of our ancestors, the survivors of course, escaped the attentions of Dinofelis (a medium-sized, leopard-like cat whose diet included our antecedent australopithicus), the grim lottery of the Black Death and the prodigious killing power of Great Influenza epidemic of 1918. What the future holds we cannot see, a fact for which we must be very thankful and should always keep in mind; of course, these were the circumstances in which all our ancestors lived and, whatsoever else it is, the cathedral is a testimony to these uncertainties. Amid all this, The History Press, in the person of Nicola Guy, were brave enough to decide to publish my work; I am deeply grateful.

Much remains to be done; I have not attempted to gain permission to penetrate the upper levels of Durham. To reach an appropriate level of preparedness for this demands much reading and thought – and probably an intimate knowledge of the Health and Safety at Work Act and full climbing equipment – for a visit not equipped with vicarious experience and questions would be of only limited value. Familiarity with the building at ground level underlines the need for sustained and considered observation; in order to do this, time and repeated visits have been obligatory. Overall, a clear need for a planned and sustained research campaign has emerged. What has been argued here is that the design of Durham Cathedral was framed around a series of essentially simple basic measurements. My observations and speculations are documented in a series of plans, ‘warts and all’, so that if the interpretations are incorrect, even wrong, the evidence is laid out for the reader. Two primary sources have been used: Billings’s remarkable plan, compiled in 1842 and published a year later, is used as the basis for my drawings, followed by the evidence of the great building itself. What I believe I have seen, I have revealed, so that my arguments can be dissected and evaluated: in scientific terms, the experiment can be repeated. Of course – should a spiteful scholarly option be applied (an approach more exercised than is usually admitted) – it can be wholly ignored; in this case, the task of evaluation will fall upon the shoulders of future generations. I can live with this, for the building will endure and there is time enough. That more, much more, could be done, seeking masons’ marks, the variations in the stone jointing and sutures and the presence of put-log holes in the masonry, indicative of the location of basic mason-supporting scaffolding, is not in doubt, but, as I will suggest, active work at Dunfermline in Fife, Scotland, at least points a way to the former, while work on a Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland offers further pleasures touching the sculptured details of the great Norman doorways.2 The building is an endless delight, and no such statement can be supported without reference to the impact of changing light upon what we see and what we can interpret. This is, and remains for this author, utterly magical, and the recently installed ‘searchlights’ can only be regretted.

No one should sail under false colours: the author is not a member of any Christian faith, or indeed of any faith. This need not be referenced here. Nevertheless, Margaret Visser’s book The Geometry of Love – Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning (Viking, 2001) provides a remarkable insight into what a church – Sant’ Agnese fuori le Mura, ‘St Agnes outside the Walls’ – can mean to a Roman Catholic, and Durham, we should always remember, was constructed as a Roman Catholic church. The holy water stoups have gone, but their savage wounds remain. Visser’s rumination explains Christianity and faith without assuming that the reader does, can or will, accept the beliefs involved. Her work is a refreshing, remarkably open and illuminating analysis. She focusses upon one small, fairly well-known but not too famous church in Rome and this demands excursions into history and technology, iconography, hagiography and folklore to discover meanings in the building and the symbols it contains. Her study – one could almost say meditation – is a revealing insight into belief, explored in sympathetic terms, with warm echoes of Dame Julian of Norwich, that most humane of religious mystics. Artfully deceptive in its apparent simplicity, it is acceptably well-supported by references and explanations for the uninitiated, of which I am one. In this study I have unashamedly focussed upon Durham Cathedral’s structural history and the technology involved, while not wholly ignoring the other aspects. David Brown’s great edited volume Durham Cathedral – History, Fabric and Culture (Paul Mellon Centre with Yale University Press and the Chapter of Durham Cathedral, 2015) touches upon many of the building’s cultural dimensions. Margaret Harvey and Lynda Rollason’s 2020 new edition of the Rites of Durham (Surtees Society vol. 226 and Catholic Record Society, Records Series vol. 88), an account created in the years after 1593, carries the reader deeply into the pre-Reformation cathedral and the liturgical practices enacted there: it is a rich source from which to nourish imagination and enquiry. Furthermore, the broader pattern of studies cited here, together with the multitude of references they use – which sustain and support them – attest the great quantities of material on Norman Romanesque architecture available, some of which is ‘evidences’ (to apply a word acquired by me from Sir William Dugdale, that great seventeenth-century scholar). Much is interpretation and comment, relating to the edifice, its history, its use and its meaning, and this short study is no more than one contribution to the debates.

In conclusion, a word on the illustrations; these are integrated into the text and speak for me. This poses questions, for a given graphic image is not just presented, discussed and then dismissed – now characteristic of so many publications – but is used and revisited at different stages in the discussion. This offers challenges, so that careful attention has been paid to signposting, offering the reader a direction back (and very rarely forward) to given drawings. Some will find this irritating, but perhaps no more than the author does when reading a text in which the graphics are merely adjuncts, without any points of cross-reference. Why have them if they are not used! To avoid adding a further layer of citations, the plates using photographs have been drawn together into a separate unit, freestanding, but integrated by its own cross-references.

My sincere thanks are due to the staff of History Press – some known to me, some not – for their care, patience and professional input during the production of this book. Any deficiencies are mine alone, but they have steered, facilitated and advised me. They have my gratitude.

As a final point, any royalties that accrue from this study are to be directed into the building fund of the cathedral … my version of deep thanks for what it offers me.

Brian K. RobertsProfessor Emeritus,Department of Geography,University of [email protected] 2022

______

1  For instance, Medieval Irish Buildings, 1100–1600 (Four Courts Press, 2015).

2  www.crsbi.wc.uk

1

PRELIMINARIES: STORIES, HISTORIES, MYTHS, MEASURES AND MASONS

It is paradoxical that the research described here began in 2001, the year when ‘Foot and Mouth’ disease devastated Northern England. Rural fieldwork was impossible so that work was begun on the church at Warkworth, Northumberland, based on close observation undertaken in a relaxed and leisurely way. The author is not an architectural or church historian but a historical geographer who has spent a career teaching, researching and writing about rural landscapes, some of the results of which appear below. Of course, when writing an account of architectural observations, evidences, assessments, speculations and results, a ‘story’ must be told, a version of events and affairs that attempts to be structured and coherent and that draws the reader into the arguments.1 A ‘story’ – perhaps a history – generally involves a narrative, a story set in time that is presumed to be true, but in contrast a ‘myth’ now tends to be seen as a wholly or partially fictitious traditional account. In practice in human experience these two words and worlds interweave like the ribbon decorations seen upon ancient sculptural artworks. Any account – a useful neutral word – may be ‘true’ or ‘untrue’, and the ‘story’ told by any historian, architect, archaeologist or geographer must inevitably cut through much obfuscating detail to create and then emphasise threads that the author feels are both ‘true’ and important. If accepted, it becomes part of ‘history’, a ‘story’, but is in fact almost certainly a myth, for it may contain elements, facts and interpretations that are … not wholly true! Small details, and necessarily so, get swept aside, omitted or side-tracked. This is inevitable, indeed necessary, for no reader can absorb the reportage and analysis of all and everything. Felicia Lamport’s palindrome ‘IN WORDS ALAS DROWN I’ is true of much writing.

Nevertheless, no enquiry can exist in isolation and ragged edges need to be assessed, so it is that this study, much-concerned with ragged edges, is supported by footnotes. These attachments to the main text refer to the works of other scholars, both alive and dead, noting where they are available and sometimes commenting upon them generally in a complimentary way but sometimes critically. Victorian researchers, who used footnotes extensively, well understood that these departures allow facts and ideas to be intruded without leading to a major digression from a main line of reasoning, that is, the story. As computers now make them easy to include, footnotes can be used to embroider and enhance an argument, indeed – possibly with tongue in cheek – one may suspect that at times they can be at least as interesting as some of the main text! Their presence can be off-putting, but to use architectural terms, they are the pillars supporting the main vaults of the argument that can be read without digressing deeply into their knock-on effects. In addition, within the text, ‘boxes’ are inserted to enlarge on points that would demand lengthy footnotes; in a longer study each would probably merit a further chapter, but in this way ‘ragged edges’ can be circumvented and turned into constructive parts of the argument. Additional to these boxes are ‘appendices’, notes added to the end of the text, allowing some interesting hares to be chased, ragged ends, where preliminary statements can be made, often indicating where further research is needed.2

In what follows, while many technical terms must be used these are normally explained in the text in an effort to make them clear for the uninitiated. They also allow those interested, professional scholar or amateur – and the line between these can be remarkably thin – to pursue matters further by bringing closer the thoughts, questions and prejudices of the author. In addition, a certain amount of repetition reiterates some of the points being made. For the non-expert, not least the present author, this helps to sustain the thread of the argument, illuminate and focus upon critical areas for discussion. In all architectural history there are terminological difficulties: write for ‘professionals’ only and what emerges can be near incomprehensible to the lay reader; write for a wider public (indeed, even scholars in related fields) and repetitions and interpolated explanations create diffuse and obfuscating arguments. A ‘mid-ground’ compromise is sought, but this is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish, part of an effort to bring to the non-expert reader the incredible coherence of what was achieved in Durham in the forty years following 1093. Further, if there is pedantry in making statements about the measurements, the columns and piers and the vaults, the present author has spent some weeks in the building with published texts, seeking to clarify the words, sentences, paragraphs and arguments of other scholars in the face of the actual structures – and there is indeed criticism here! Let it be said that in 90 per cent of the cases, close inspections of texts and the building brings agreement, but the remaining 10 per cent does raise interesting questions about the interpretations of what can be seen and indeed the clarity and accuracy of the texts. All in all, the building is the record of its own creation, for we have little else.

This account deals with Durham Cathedral (Fig. 1).3 A tendency in the discussions of the architecture of Norman cathedrals is to offer comparisons drawn from the wealth of British and European buildings, cathedrals, abbeys and lesser churches, using structures thought to be of approximately the same date. This is wholly legitimate and scholarly, but one is at times tempted to speculate on late eleventh to early twelfth-century travel conditions and the advantages of the runabout tickets on offer, not to mention the availability of scaled plans and elevations for visitors!4 This is indisputably an unwarranted and unkind caricature, for churchmen and nobles did travel widely, with clerics being transferred between institutions, for promotion or when an individual monk or small groups were used as ‘seed corn’ for developing newly founded or revived institutions. So it was that monks from Canterbury were in the twelfth century sent as far north as Dunfermline in Scotland – one can only say ‘poor souls’!5 The manuscript volumes they carried may have brought ‘Canterbury’ detail to doorway capitals in their new home (see Box One: Sculptural Comparisons). This raises important questions about the mental baggage they and others could carry; about their capacity to observe, describe and even sketch architectural features they had seen elsewhere. How observant were they? What was the duration of a visit or transfer? What practical skills did they possess?

QUESTIONS OF SCULPTURAL COMPARISONS

Richard Fawcett in 2011, in Architecture of the Scottish Medieval Church, pp.26-27, illustrates (fig. 26) the south-east doorway of Dunfermline Abbey Church and states quite emphatically that ‘the closest analogies for these capitals are to be found in Durham in the south-west nave doorway and in the Chapter House corbels; parallels may also be traced in a number of manuscripts from the Durham scriptorium’ (see also Fawcett, 2002, Scottish Medieval Church – Architecture, fig. 3.39). This assessment is supported by great professional experience, but it does illustrate a knotty problem: access to James King’s superb photographs of the Dunfermline capitals on the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (www.crsbi.ac.uk) raises important questions touching the comparison of such sculptural material. Deborah Kahn’s equally magnificent illustrations in her 1991 study Canterbury Cathedral shows capitals (figs. 57, 59, 136, 139, 141 and Plate X) that are surely closer to the Dunfermline examples than the Durham case (one of which she illustrates, see fig. 138); indeed, this author has on numerous occasions speculated if this Durham item is a post-Romanesque replacement and interpretation (no doubt carefully copied), without – it must be admitted – reaching any clear conclusion!

In Canterbury, Deborah Kahn is able to show the relationship between this material and manuscript illustrations (fig. 54). Of course, the designs and expressions have roots in Continental and ultimately Classical manuscripts and sculpture, but we have here one possible transmission thread between two surviving structures: Canterbury, whose ‘seed corn’ clergy were transplanted, was remarkably a sophisticated foundation, with wide Continental links, while Dunfermline, the recipient foundation, was more peripheral and, one might even say, marginal. Further, the Hayward Gallery, 1984, English Romanesque Art 1066–1200, illustrates similar and often even more splendid materials from Norwich Cathedral (fig. 126) and the abbeys at Reading (fig. 127a-s and 128a-c) and Glastonbury (fig. 149a-d), all of which echo the examples from Durham and Dunfermline, and this is only to cast a few small dip-nets. Discussion of the Durham/Dunfermline comparison by Neil Cameron is also to be found in ‘The Romanesque Sculpture of Dunfermline Abbey versus the Vicinal’, in Higgett (ed.), 1994, Medieval Architecture in St. Andrews, pp.118–23, again opting for a strong Durham link.

Amid this welter of scholarly opinions, debates and sculptural detail, the present author confesses to be rather taken with a face on one Dunfermline capital, set at the angle of the stone, with sharply pointed ears and well-defined large bulbous eyes, possibly a top-knot, and two ribbons (both undoubtedly partially restored) emerging from the mouth to intermingle at each side with foliage swirls bearing binding clasps and ornamental curlicues. The platform above (the abacus) carries the many-tongued chevroned voussoirs of a classic Norman arch, and is decorated by small strongly modelled curls, resembling a type of Danish pastry. Below is a decorated ring or annulus, deeply cut, and again echoing pastry! Admittedly, there is nothing exactly the same in Canterbury or found amid any of the cases cited above, and this is hardly to be expected: nevertheless, it is in this author’s view the Canterbury material that reveals numerous parallels, some very close, some more eccentric. Comparisons and the identification of exemplars is challenging and fraught with problems for all investigators. We all use ‘eyeballed’ comparisons framed by our experiences, but answers may lie in more closely documented precision and in scaled illustrations set in parallel on a page, necessitating a patient assembly of the evidence.

This also leaves aside other troubled questions about the masons who were employed. On the whole, however, the objective here is to treat Durham without lengthy comparative speculations, as these often mean little to those unfamiliar with the source examples, with Ely and Peterborough, with Winchester and St Albans, with Jumièges, Cluny, Caen, Corvey or Speyer. Such comparisons are for experienced scholars and for the master masons of the earlier centuries. However, this is not an illegitimate narrowing of focus, for Durham is Durham: it is a unique building developed on a unique site, whatsoever the mental baggage of those involved in its planning and construction. Furthermore, in all architectural analysis the line between description and explanation is normally blurred, so that a crystal-clear description often conceals a sad – if wholly understandable – ignorance of causation, why and how things were done and concepts and details transferred. This will be touched upon again in the final paragraphs of this study.

The plan of Durham Cathedral has been considered by numerous scholars; as early as 1801 it was recorded by John Carter, with considerable truthfulness, including the location of former altars and dividing screens, while in 1843 Robert William Billings published a version compiled in 1842 purporting to be accurate to half an inch (1.27cm).6 This latter is impressive and remains the foundation for all subsequent work, and from this fine source it ought to be possible to establish an understanding of the manner in which the original master conceived the layout of the great building and the measures he used (Fig. Ap. 8). Nevertheless, from the beginning assumptions abound, for the arguments presented here follow Eric Fernie, the leading scholar in such matters, of supposing the use of a foot that is essentially identical to the Statute Foot of later centuries based upon twelve inches, with three barleycorns to the inch (see Box Two: Medieval Measures). We have a hint of this in the great Durham columns enriched with deeply incised diamonds (Fig.1; Bilson 1922, columns 15 and 16; Fig. 10), for, if we exclude with care later inserted repairs, then the central squares of some of the decorations bear slight engraved lines used by the Norman masons marking out the stones. Essentially these are set one inch from the edges of each small square, possibly created using a simple ruler engraved with nicks, or – if one man was involved in laying out the designs on the stones – the use of a thumb-width is as likely.7

In this study measurements are given in Imperial terms, feet and inches, to which (in key contexts only) a metric equivalent is bracketed. This is a pragmatic approach rather than false antiquarianism, but is also adopted by other scholars for it presents the argument in terms of the measurements likely to have been used by the Norman masons. To give both Imperial and metric units in all contexts is messy and seriously affects the flow of the text. All diagrams incorporate both scales. Anyone desirous of converting can find or add an appropriate app for any laptop or phone, so that it seems tortured to keep converting from feet to centimetres and vice versa. Undoubtedly one statute foot is equal to 30.48cm, but a Roman foot, which may have been used in some portions of the building, varied between about 29.486cm – let us say 29.5cm – and as much as 30.065cm, but the foot of 30.48cm is the Imperial or Statute foot or, and this seems to have been – or perhaps near enough – the foot used in Anglo-Saxon times.8 One may also have reservations about Billings’s surveys being accurate to half an inch because the outer surface dressing of the stone work shows, as we can still see, variations that easily – in many cases – embrace half an inch or even more.

MEDIEVAL MEASURES

Medieval measures are a fascinating wilderness where much ink has been spilt. There are three broad categories of length: short measures, inches, feet and yards, applied to carpentry, masonry and the like; longer measures, ells, fathoms and yards, the latter often applied to cloth – hence a ‘cloth yard’ to describe the length of the shaft of an arrow; and finally longer measurements, not least those for land, where length and area, the furlong and the acre, are bonded together by the ‘land yard’, known to later generations as the rod, pole or perch, with 16.5ft (5.03m) being an eventual compromise. It was not until the second half of the thirteenth century that the English crown sought to standardise these, and there were many local variations, some of which survived into the nineteenth century. At the pragmatic level these things mattered: how much land a tenant farmer possessed affected the tax he or she paid – for there were many widows.

Nevertheless, a thumb is a thumb, and a thumb is an inch, and twelve thumbs make a foot! In this matter, however, one simple fact must be appreciated: in real terms it matters not how long is an inch, a foot, an ell, a yard or a rod, so long as a ‘site standard’ is used consistently for any ‘task in hand’. Thus, the measures used may vary from task to task as the work proceeds. There are hints in Durham of a standard foot: see Fernie, 1985, ‘Anglo-Saxon Lengths’, Archaeological Journal, pp.246–54; Fernie, 1991, ‘Anglo-Saxon Lengths and Buildings’, Medieval Archaeology