Arts
Norman conquests
Gavin Stamp
English Romanesque Art 1066-1200 (Hayward Gallery till 8 July)
when the shrine of St Thomas Becket was destroyed by Henry VIII, the King's receiver confessed that the gold and silver, precious stones and sacred vestments looted from Canterbury Cathe- dral filled 26 carts. This statistic about the Reformation despoilation gives us some idea of how much was lost and, therefore, how little survives to tell us of the scope and splendour of English Romanesque Art. What does survive and is movable is now mostly in the Hayward Gallery and ought to be seen.
Those solid buildings we call, with appropriate insularity, 'Norman' are, of course, well known and impressively vast and durable. Although some monasteries have gone, Durham, Ely, Winchester, Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Norwich, Peter- borough and more survive to testify to the vigour of the Normans and to the great ambitions of their architectural policy. Arch after arch, column after column of prodigious girth, create some of the most impressive Romanesque buildings of Europe, but we tend to see them as merely monumental and Sublime, for, despite some commendable Victorian attempts at refurnishing, the colour and the splendour of the devotional fittings contained by these great buildings have all long gone. Only at St Albans do fragments of colour survive to suggest how gorgeously vulgar Norman buildings originally were. How wrong we may be, therefore, to be awed by the chilling vastness of Ely, seemingly so appropriate in the depressing remoteness of the Fens: St Etheldreda would have deserved a more colourful tribute.
What we still have on the buildings, fortunately, is the sculpture, so animated and so intricate that even the later Gothic builders often respected it when they en- larged and modernised Norman structures. Kilpeck in Herefordshire is one of the most impressive examples, with its door sur- rounded by sinuous, almost Viking orna- ment in a miraculous state of preservation. Fortunately, no attempt has been made to re-erect this magical little building on the South Bank (where it would undoubtedly be an improvement), although there is a wonderful font removed from Castle Frome in the same county, as well as several lintels and tympana and many vigorously carved capitals, all of which, one feels, ought to be holding up buildings rather than sitting in museums. But we must blame Henry VIII for that.
The colour now missing from the stone is
provided, however, by what is collected in the Hayward of surviving illuminated manuscripts, devotional sculpture, vest, ments and textiles, jewellery and staineu glass, all of which create an overwhelming impression of the vigour and sophisticatioh of what historians choose to call flflgliS Romanesque Art. The period illustrate begins with the utterly ruthless Conquest and ends with the beginnings of Gothic with an English king fighting in the H(0 Land and English art well able to hold it5 own in Europe. This is one of the best exhibitions I recall in the Hayward and one in which the exhibition designer has triumphed °ye/. that barbaric building. Modern displaY techniques have been combined with,a, welcome attempt to create atmosphere '1 the erection of simple arcades and vatilt5' but the beautiful objects are allowed 10 speak for themselves. Architecture "t largely dealt with by one of the sophisticated slide shows I have seen we b exhibition is didactic, as it surely nInes about a period so remote, and yet .,",is enthralling and vivid. The exhibition en" with a section devoted to the histntif: graphy of the Romanesque, a very sary corrective to the biases in our unue': standing of Mediaeval art left to us by th! Gothic Revival. it is splendid to se' paintings by those most sympatheticII trators of the qualities of Norman builu ings: Cotman and Turner.
But there is one exhibit conspicuous hY its absence; a work of English
manship which is of immenseil crafts' as a document of our nation's his°tr°tiaYn'.c..1, refer, of course, to the tapestry cortunibri sioned by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and 5 of Kent. No doubt the French authorithieis had good reasons for declining to lend t te precious relic., but it is interesting to n°„f that, at the time of the 40th anniversarY the D-Day invasion, it wa- s reported thas't among Frenchmen, Britain is the tilt, unpopular country after Russia. So he Perhaps the tapestry is so precious to tu; French as it records the last time tilw; scored a significant victory over us. ns must travel to Bayeux to see it, Perharq combining the visit with a tour of the cemeteries, full of those who died liberoaii ting France from the European tun created by the Fiihrer. This wonderful exhibition promptsvire; fiections on the nature of nationhonu. ,01 Norman Conquest was a particularly hruse`i, colonial invasion and the subsequent, en zures as ruthless as those which have ue 4 imposed on Eastern Europe since 194;1; But the Anglo-Saxon and the Nor° were eventually fused, culturally and ,s°e, lallY, and those distant battles created the instinctive national cohesion which we take for granted. Nevertheless, the Con- 9uest still has an active legacy, and not just in 19th-century Romantic fiction about Hereward the Wake; Cobbett's view of the Norman Conquest as a political and social catastrophe seems justified when linguists argue that the difference between educated and demotic language in Britain — painfully evident today more than ever — still reflects the linguistic consequences of the Con- rest, when French was imposed as the language of government and law. Wounds lake a very long time to heal and marriages I.9ng to cement: how on earth can pious liberals really expect democratic institu- tions and political settlements quickly to trI.Unlph over ancient hatreds and racial divisions in modern, invented nations so very much younger than our own?
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