Princes of the Church

Bishops and their Palaces

David Rollason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138714946
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351859400
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Archéologie

Princes of the Church brings together the latest research exploring the importance of bishops' palaces for social and political history, landscape history, architectural history and archaeology. It is the first book-length study of such sites since Michael Thompson's Medieval Bishops' Houses (1998), and the first work ever to adopt such a wide-ranging approach to them in terms of themes and geographical and chronological range.

Including contributions from the late Antique period through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it deals with bishops' residences in England, Scotland, Wales, the Byzantine Empire, France, and Italy. It is structured in three sections: design and function, which considers how bishops' palaces and houses differed from the palaces and houses of secular magnates, in their layout, design, furnishings, and functions; landscape and urban context, which considers the relationship between bishops' palaces and houses and their political and cultural context, the landscapes and towns or cities in which they were set, and the parks, forests, and towns that were planned and designed around them; and architectural form, which considers the extent of shared features between bishops' palaces and houses, and their relationship to the houses of other Church potentates and to the houses of secular magnates.

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INTRODUCTION

Researching the palaces of princes of the Church

David Rollason

This volume is the outcome of a conference of the same title held in the summer of 2015 at Auckland Castle (County Durham), formerly a palace of Bishops of Durham (Plates 1 and 2). That remarkable monument not only provided an appropriate and stimulating setting for the conference, but it had been the immediate inspiration for it. For, in 2010, through the munificence and vision of Mr Jonathan Ruffer, Auckland Castle ceased to be a residence of the Bishop of Durham, although it continued to house his office, and was transferred to the newly formed Auckland Castle Trust with the ‘aim of restoring the Castle, its art collection, the deer park, and gardens to their former glory, ensuring they remain open to the public for generations to come’.¹ This marked the beginning of the Castle’s development as an historical monument of the first importance, as well as initiating its role as a cultural centre and the home of a new Museum of Faith, the latter to be housed partly in the original structure, partly in a new wing. Important surveys and excavations have already taken place on the site, and more are planned in the context of the University of Durham Archaeology Department’s training excavations, which are to be transferred to Auckland Castle. Mr Ruffer’s initiatives have also ensured that, in addition to the park, the immediate landscape of the palace will be conserved, and that much of the town’s ancient market place, into which the Castle opens, will equally be developed as a cultural resource.

The very substantial investment of money and time, and the efforts of a dedicated team of specialists at the Castle led by Dr Christopher Ferguson, are fully justified. In the first place, the monument, in common with other bishops’ and archbishops’ palaces in England, was vulnerable to suffering inappropriate change of use, as the needs and resources of the Church of England change, and the Church Commissioners, who are responsible for its finances, seek to rationalise its holdings of property, of which bishops’ and archbishops’ palaces are a significant part. At broadly the same time that Auckland Castle Trust was taking possession of Auckland Castle and setting it on the new path sketched above, the Church Commissioners made an attempt to transfer the Bishop of Wells’ residence away from his medieval palace in the City of Wells (Somerset). This was successfully resisted so part at least of the palace remains the bishop’s residence, and the palace as a whole, like Auckland Castle, has become the responsibility of a trust with the mission ‘to open to members of the public the bishop’s palace in Wells for their interest, learning and enjoyment’.² Likewise, the palace of the Bishops of Worcester, Hartlebury Castle (Worcestershire), has been purchased by the Hartlebury Castle Preservation Trust (Plate 4).³ For other bishops’ and archbishops’ palaces, however, the future is less certain – that of the Bishops of Carlisle, Rose Castle (Cumberland), is threatened with being sold at the time of writing⁴ – so that the fullest possible understanding of the nature and importance of these monuments is imperative.⁵ Hence one important stimulus for the organisation of the conference and the publication of this volume.

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In the second place, Auckland Castle has many rich and important features, which made it a particularly suitable context in which to develop the conference and to plan the volume. Among those features are the surviving medieval portions of the palace, especially the spectacular great hall attributed to Hugh of le Puiset, Bishop of Durham (1153–95), and the adjacent wing built by Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham (1284–1311).⁶ These are remains of the first importance, especially the great hall. But their interest is matched by the developments made to the palace in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. It was maltreated and partially demolished by Sir Arthur Hesilrige (died 1661), the governor of Newcastle-upon-Tyne from 1647 to the mid-1650s on behalf of the then victorious Parliament during the English Civil War, who built himself a residence on the site.⁷ After the restoration of the monarchy, John Cosin, Bishop of Durham (1660–72), restored the Castle, and, in particular, the great hall, which he converted into a chapel (Plate 2).⁸ This was followed by a series of modifications by bishops in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially Richard Trevor (1752–71) and Shute Barrington (1791–1826), which created architectural and decorative features of the greatest interest, including the state dining room designed to display the important series of paintings by the eighteenth-century Spanish artist, Francis Zurbaran, which remain in the positions in which Bishop Trevor originally had them hung.⁹ The significance of these early modern developments is evidently of the first importance for understanding the position, attitudes, and culture of bishops.

The importance of Auckland Castle, however, is not limited to the palace’s buildings. The park adjacent to the palace is equally deserving of study. Its medieval history is extremely well documented in archives preserved at Durham University Library and in the National Archives at Kew, and much of its extent is still traceable on the ground.¹⁰ As with the palace, the park’s development in the early modern period is of considerable interest, involving the creation of a landscaped park in the contemporary romantic idiom, and also the provision of architectural features – one of which, the remarkable inverted cloister which forms the deer-house, survives.¹¹ The view westwards from the palace, however, serves to underline another aspect of its importance, namely its close proximity to the Forest of Weardale, visible as the high ground surrounding the higher reaches of the River Wear. This was in the hands of the bishops until the modern period, and was evidently of considerable importance to them.¹² To the east of the palace, and immediately beyond its eighteenth-century gatehouse, lies the market place of Bishop Auckland. This town seems to have been in origin a borough founded by the bishops,¹³ so that Auckland Castle provides an example not only of the relationship between the palace and its landscape context, but also its relationship to its urban context, and in particular an urban context which was itself the result of the bishop’s activities.

The richness of these constituents of Auckland Castle and its context provided the other stimulus for the conference and the volume. Bishops’ palaces had, of course, been studied before. In the case of medieval England and Wales, Michael Thompson had published a book on the subject in 1998, while Anthony Emery’s catalogue of greater medieval houses had included substantial material on bishops’ residences.¹⁴ But these works were limited to the medieval period, and they were more in the nature of surveys than they were intended to set agendas. In terms of early modern palaces, a ground-breaking thesis on Georgian palaces by Michael Ashby was only in a relatively preliminary stage of preparation when the present volume was planned.¹⁵ There had been important work on individual bishops’ and archbishops’ palaces in the British Isles, including a series of studies of the bishop’s palace at Wells, notably a PhD thesis by Matthew Reeve,¹⁶ a monograph on Lambeth Palace by Tim Tatton-Brown,¹⁷ an important study of that at St Davids (Pembrokeshire) (Plate 3),¹⁸ a discussion of the thirteenth-century hall of the bishop’s palace at Canterbury (Kent),¹⁹ and papers on Durham Castle as the bishop’s palace in the city.²⁰ But, even for such individual sites, publication of research had not been prolific. The important Wolvesey Palace, palace of the Bishops of Winchester in that city, had been excavated, but no definitive publication has appeared,²¹ while Auckland Castle, although the subject of some specialised papers on its Romanesque architecture and sculptural decoration, and some detailed surveys carried out as preparation for renovation and conservation,²² had never been examined as a whole in d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Princes of the Church
• The Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Researching the palaces of Princes of the Church
• Part I Projecting images of power
• Part II Palaces, forests, and parks
• Part III Palaces and the work of the bishop
• Part IV Design, Function, and Decoration
• References
• Index