Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [309]
“Statues of whom?” Edward asked.
“Kings, bishops, saints,” Osmund replied. For in the cathedral at least, if not in the world outside, the perfect medieval marriage of the spiritual and the temporal worlds was celebrated at every opportunity.
This was the one wall of the cathedral that rose, sheer, to its apex at the top of the roof, nearly a hundred feet above. Edward gazed at the wall, across at the high belfry tower in admiration, and then started back instinctively as a veil of cloud passed overhead and made the great wall seem to move towards him.
Osmund laughed.
“When the clouds pass over,” he said, “it always looks as if the west front is going to topple. Come inside.”
If the outside of the building was impressive, the inside was astonishing. It was not only the huge spacious nave and side aisles which seemed, like huge tunnels, to disappear into the distance, not only the airy transepts, flooding the centre of the church with light: it was the fact that the whole of the inside was painted. For the gothic cathedral of the medieval world was a riot of colour. The vaults, the pillars, the carvings and the tombs that lay in the chantry chapels were all painted in brilliant blues, reds and greens. The effect was as bright and vivid as the market place; its carved and painted foliage seemed as lush as the Avon valley from which they had come. As the little boy gazed enraptured down the lines of graceful pillars he cried: “It’s like a forest.” And so it was.
“Now I will show you the carvings,” his father said.
There were many to see. There were the carvings on the great stone screen that separated the nave from the long choir beyond, where the services were sung: set in the choirscreen in a line across the church stood the solemn figures of the kings of England splendidly painted in red, blue and gold, from Saxon Egbert to the present King Henry III.
“There is the great King Alfred, ancestor of them all, who ruled first Wessex and then all England,” Osmund showed him. “And Edward the Confessor, the pious; then William of Normandy; and there, Richard Coeur de Lion, the crusader. Our greatest kings.” For the centuries had done their work, and to Osmund it was an article of faith that all these figures, though the blood line that linked them was only a very tenuous one in reality, formed a single family of island kings. In the cathedral, the world became God’s world, as it ought to be.
He pointed up to the brightly painted bosses in the roof of the choir, and led the boy to the east end of the nave where, on a high scaffolding, the painters were busy on the final section of the ceiling.
Then he showed him the great stout pillars, one tiered above the other, that supported the three rows of arches that led to the vaults. He led him to the central crossing of the transepts where the eye travelled up the huge pillars that stretched, not in three tiers but in a single, sheer, unbroken line right up to the crossing of the vaults.
“Feel the stone,” he ordered his son, and Edward felt the smooth, hard stone of the massive nest of pillars.
“That’s solid Purbeck marble,” he explained. “It came all the way from Corfe, round by the sea and up the river. It’s stronger than any other stone so it takes the central tower. And we never paint it.”
Edward could see why. The stone’s polished, blue-grey surface was a delight to the eye.
He took him up to the upper level next, and showed him the cathedral’s construction.
“See how the vaults are made,” he explained. “When they used to build them before, a vault was just a half circle across from side to side – like cutting a barrel in half from top to bottom. But that way, you had to support every stone of the roof while you were building it – great wooden boards on scaffolding, thousands of them. But now – look from here.” From the clerestory level he pointed across the nave, and now Edward saw clearly that the pointed Gothic vaults he had seen from below were achieved by crossing pairs