St. Thomas Porch – Salisbury Cathedral by Steve Dunn

 

Gone but not forgotten

At the consecration of Salisbury Cathedral on the 28th April 1258 the assembled dignitaries must have viewed the new church with some wonder.  A mere thirty-eight years since the first turfs had been cut for the foundations there now stood a vast successor to its forerunner at Old Sarum.  Designed in a new elegant, airy style that left the old cathedral with its Romanesque features that were so characteristic of the Normans, far behind.  Large windows perforated the lightest of limestone walls and rose in three levels, each different to the one beneath.  Inside, tall columns of Purbeck Marble led the eye up to the quadripartite vaulting some eighty-five feet above the nave. Today we call this Early English Gothic, classified by Thomas Rickman in 1817 as the first of the three styles of the Gothic architectural genre.

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Cut into the north side of this marvel, about forty feet from the West End a grand entrance had been cut.  The Porta Speciosa, [above] the ‘Beautiful Gate’ through which the general public would enter the wonderful new edifice.  Two storeys high, the upper level was the Parvis Room, so named after the court in front of St Peter’s in Rome.  In the shelter of the lower storey was the main entrance to the nave and a place where the poor might gather in the hope that perhaps the Church might leave them some succour from their charity and that the lay worshippers might do likewise; after all, giving alms to the poor was a key tenet of the church underwritten by the Seven Acts of Corporal Mercy and failure to do so might well count against someone when they finally stood in judgement.

The Porta Speciosa.
The interior of the cathedral had fully embraced the cult of saints.  Although Salisbury was not to receive its own saintly shrine until 1457 when St Osmund was somewhat belatedly canonised, that did not cause them to fault in their duty to ensure that a good quantity of altars were installed and that access to them for veneration and prayer was facilitated.

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Built on the form of a double crucifix with a flat walled east end to the Trinity (Lady) Chapel, the cathedral’s North and South transepts were each fitted with a trio of chapels.  Towering over the pulpitum that divided the lay space from the screened off Quire and Presbytery was the rood.  Here Christ, rumoured to be some twenty feet tall, was depicted at his crucifixion, his mother Mary and St John the Baptist looking on.  The chapels and the rood, beneath which the Altar of the Holy Cross or Altar of the Fabric as it was known, ‘was established in 1263 for the convenience of the cathedral workmen’[1] would be likely destinations for pilgrimage.  The remainder of the nave was empty of chapels save two altars on the north and south side just west of the central crossing.

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There is no doubt therefore that the siting of the chapels at the east end would have attracted pilgrims and regular worshippers alike.  Traffic was such that by the 14th century it seems likely that there was a need to insert an additional door into the North Transept, dedicated to St Thomas.  A fine porch was constructed in the prevailing architectural Perpendicular Gothic style.  [below right] A square construction open on all four sides.  Unlike its neighbour further west along the north front, this porch was shallower and was constructed in a much more elaborate style with decorative floral and vine motifs internally and flower motifs in the spandrels of the external arch facings. The porch was superficially similar to that of the North Porch of the Temple Church in London in reflecting a square shape with four open arches. [below left]  Temple Church was the main Knights Templar church in England and erected in 1160. It is unlikely that the Knights Templar had any direct effect on the building of the porch as the Templars had been dismantled in 1312.  Dr Helen Lunnon states that ‘The remarkable porch at Temple Church, London, built around 1160, is unique and plausibly owes its specific form to a penitential burial, that of Geoffrey de Mandeville. Having died excommunicate in 1144, Mandeville’s body remained unburied until 1163, when he was posthumously absolved and interred at Temple Church. The west porch is in effect a suspended canopy before a door, juxtaposing the honorific vault with the humility of burial outside the door.’[2]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This does not resonate with the St Thomas porch, especially as its structure seems to have been entirely inside the cathedral.  However, did the Templars architectural legacy in London inspire the designers of the new porch at Salisbury?  

The porch and door of Temple Church, London.
The porch entered into the north transept and serviced the three chapels that were set in line along the East wall: those to St Edmund of Abingdon a former Bishop of Sarum and Archbishop of Canterbury, St Thomas and most importantly, St John the Baptist also known as the Altar of the Relics.  From the north transept access to the other altars was possible and especially the resting place of the later to be canonised Osmund who lay in a foramina tomb on the north side of the Presbytery that can still be seen today although now moved into the Trinity Chapel.  An ambulatory that arced between the High altar and Trinity (Lady) Chapel gave access to the chapels of St Peter and St Stephen and thence to the other altars that extended into the transepts in the south side of the cathedral.

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The St Thomas porch facilitated a smooth entry and exit route for those who came to pray reflecting the Temple church porch design.  Clearly the three additional access points must have provided some form of particular function, however, at Salisbury it is not at all clear what these may have been and how they were positioned.  The clearest impression that we have of the St Thomas porch is that the bulk of the porch lay within the cathedral permitting a single archivolted entrance.  This suggests that the internal bays in the porch would have specific functions, perhaps part of a routing system for pilgrims entering and exiting the transept.

Detail of ‘View of Salisbury Cathedral, with coat of arms and cartouche at top left; illustration by Wenceslas Hollar to William Dugdale’s ‘Monasticon Anglicanum’ III (London: 1673, p.375). 1672.
The porch remained in situ until 1790 when it was removed as part of the re-ordering of the Cathedral by James Wyatt acting under a commission from Bishop Shute Barrington.  The reasoning appears to have been that it spoiled the otherwise entirely single style architectural façade of the north side of the cathedral.  As a final act to entirely obliterate any trace of the porch at the Cathedral, the tomb of Bishop John Blyth (d.1499) was moved from the east end of the cathedral to stop up the hole left by its removal.  The tomb remains in situ today. [figure 8]

Tomb of Bishop John Blyth (d.1499)
Wyatt has often been criticised for his work at Salisbury, and it is the case that he removed much of the surviving medieval fittings significantly altering the internal layout.  Several years after Wyatt’s death in 1813 Pugin called him ‘destructive’, a soubriquet that stuck and it is not uncommon to still hear him referred to as Wyatt the ‘Destroyer’. 

 

Wyatt disposed of the porch to the gardens of a local manor house, now a public park and later a pinnacle was placed on it although the reason for this is now lost.  The house is now occupied by Wiltshire Council.  The porch can still be visited and whilst its surroundings are more modest, there is no mistaking the sense of grandeur that this now ‘folly’ had once.

[1] Ceremonies and Processions of the Cathedral Church of Salisbury. 

[2] Helen Lunnon, “Inventio Porticus—Imagining Solomon’s Porches in Late Medieval England”, British Art Studies, Issue 6, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-06/hlunnon

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Salisbury's cadaver tombs and their historical context
By Sue Stileman

I joined the Wednesday morning guiding team in February 2023. I'm an early medievalist by training but since being at the cathedral have found myself becoming more and more fascinated by the late medieval period. This is thanks in part to the presence of two cadaver tombs in the cathedral, those of Thomas Bennett and George Sydenham. 

Bennett was Precentor between 1542 and 1558 (prior to that he'd been secretary to Cardinal Wolsey), while Sydenham (d 1524) was Archdeacon and Chaplain to Henry VIII. The two tombs lie close to one another in the north-east transept and north choir aisle respectively. The identification of Sydenham's tomb, which lacks the tomb chest and identifying features of Bennett's, was surmised from an inscription and heraldry contained in a window that once stood opposite the tomb but was lost in the 18th century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1 Thomas Bennett's cadaver tomb, Salisbury cathedral

Figure 2 George Sydenham's cadaver tomb, Salisbury cathedral

These two tombs were historically referred to as the 'fasting men' because of the wasted appearance of the effigies. From this, a legend developed that they'd fasted for forty days and nights, reducing themselves to the condition of skeletons and starving to death, but as Canon Fletcher noted in his lecture on Bennett delivered at Salisbury cathedral on May 2nd 1924 (a copy of which is in the archive), this was not correct. They are actually part of a specific funerary tradition that belongs to a precise period of history and are steeped in the rich symbolism of the medieval Catholic Church.

Cadaver tombs such as the two in the cathedral are a type of transi tomb where the effigy is designed to show the deceased's corpse in a specific state of decay. They are part of the Memento Mori tradition which translates as 'remember you must die’ and are rare outside the Continent. There are only forty-four extant examples in England and Wales, one in Scotland and either nine or eleven (depending which sources you read) in Ireland. There were probably more of them before the Reformation but to date they have not received much scholarly attention and the little we know about them is the result of the work of a handful of academics.

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Cadaver tombs begin to appear around 1400 and stopped being made around 1550. Thomas Bennett's (1554) is therefore one of the last. Thomas was mortally sick in 1554 and asked for his tomb to be completed, which it was with the date duly inscribed, then he recovered and lived for another four years, eventually dying in 1558. His tomb belongs to the brief period of Catholic restoration under Mary Tudor, sandwiched between the Protestant reigns of King Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth I. As such it is unique.

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The development of cadaver tombs was almost certainly a response to the Black Death (1348-1350) which claimed the lives of around a third of the population. Mortality rates were highest amongst the poor where inadequate nutrition, poor hygiene and low living standards greatly influenced survival rates, but while the peasant classes bore the immediate brunt of the infection all sections of society were eventually affected by it, either directly or indirectly. The loss of agricultural labourers meant fewer hands to work the land and as a result, over time the countryside began to look different. Deserted villages, lone churches marooned in empty fields and, eventually, the steep ridge-and-furrow field systems eroding into shallow ripples were all physical reminders of the ravages of the Black Death that persisted long after the disease itself was over, but it also remained vivid in people's minds. By 1400, when the first cadaver tombs begin to appear, the disease was still well within living memory, the spectre of death having haunted the formative years of the older members of communities. It's understandable then that people were consumed with trying to explain death. It's no coincidence that the Danse Macabre also appears at this time, with its images of skeletons rising up from the earth to dance with each other or the living. Both the Danse Macabre and cadaver tombs reveal an obsession with death and a fixation on the afterlife, a desire to manage and influence both and so make them less terrifying. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 3 Image of Danse Macabre courtesy of Wikipedia

Both are also physical manifestations of the Catholic idea of purgatory, the place where everyone except Saints (who went straight to heaven) and really naughty people (who went straight to hell) could expect to spend time paying off their sins. By praying for the recently deceased, friends and family could reduce the amount of time their loved ones spent in purgatory. The same idea finds expression in chantry chapels, although these predate cadaver tombs by more than a century. The sole purpose of a cadaver tomb was to elicit prayers for the soul of the departed. They achieve this in two ways: 1) moving the onlooker to pity and 2) reflecting the onlooker's fate. Many cadaver tombs have an inscription which read: as I am so shall you be. The message is clear: it doesn't matter who you are in life, the same fate awaits us all. 

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Cadaver tombs are formulaic almost to the point of uniformity. That's an incredible thought for the 15th century and it raises the intriguing possibility of a team of specialist stone sculptors, probably trained on the continent (most likely in Italy), travelling the country creating them. I asked some of the cathedral mason team what they thought of this theory and they thought it quite likely, given the level of craftsmanship, skill and expertise involved.

All cadaver tombs show the body in the same state of decomposition, known in the medieval period as the wet stage of death. There was a widespread belief during this period that corpses in the wet stage retained sentience. This is important, because if a corpse could still feel, then whoever saw the tomb would be moved to pray for it. Many cadaver tombs were located on main pilgrimage routes, so we know they were designed to be seen. 

Most of them are also anatomically correct. This is something we take for granted today, but it was an extraordinary achievement in the medieval period when books on anatomy weren't widely available and human dissection was forbidden. In conversation with cathedral librarian, Dr Anne Dutton, I learnt that the first major illustrated anatomical treatise, De humani corporis fabrica (on the fabric of the human body) by Vesalius wasn't published until 1543. The illustrations it contained would have made it very expensive so it is unlikely it would have been widely available. At that date, it's also too late to have influenced the makers of most of the UK's cadaver tombs. So how did the creators of these tombs become sufficiently familiar with the inside of a human body to reproduce it so accurately in stone?

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Opposition from the Church meant that dissection of human bodies was illegal in England until the 1752 Murder Act (which allowed the bodies of murderers to be dissected by the Company of Surgeons in London);, however it had been practised in the 3rd Century in Alexandria by the Greek physician Herophilus of Chalcedon; by Galen (130-210) in Rome (when it was limited to observations made through the wounds of dead or injured gladiators), and once at the behest of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) in southern Italy after a suspicious death. 

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In the last decades of the 13th century, human dissection had been practised in northern and central Italy to help the understanding of the nature and structure of human bodies, and by 1300 it was being used for researching and teaching by anatomists such as Guillaume of Salicet, who was working in Bologna around 1275, and Brunus in Padova in 1252. The late 13th and early 14th centuries were therefore rich times for anatomical research in Europe, with publications by French surgeons Henri of Mondeville, (1306-1320) and Guy of Chauliac (1298-1368), but these are unlikely to have been available in England, where a strict 'no dissection' law prevailed. In 1315, the first public dissection was held in Bologna, but it would take until 1477 for such things to happen closer to home at the University of Paris. 

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I have a working hypothesis that the sculptors who made the anatomically detailed cadaver tombs found on main pilgrim routes in England, including the two in Salisbury, must therefore have either gone to Italy to train, or were themselves Italians who came to England on commission specifically to make these tombs. Bennett's Will might conceivably contain information on the construction of his tomb. I'm waiting for the National Archives to furnish me with a copy.

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I have visited cadaver tombs in churches sited away from main pilgrim routes and interestingly, these are often noticeably less anatomically correct than those on the more well-travelled routes; they have comically long necks or the wrong number of ribs or the details of the fingers and toes are clumsily done. Perhaps the sculptors or masons who made them had seen the finely detailed cadaver tombs on the pilgrim routes of Salisbury, Lincoln, Bury St Edmunds and Winchester and done their best to copy them, one hopes for a somewhat reduced fee! 

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Figure 4 Unknown Cadaver at St Marys, Stalbridge. Note the elongated neck and the simplistic carving style of the face.
Figure 5 John Baret's cadaver tomb (1467), St Mary’s, Bury St Edmunds, on a main pilgrim route. By comparison, correct proportions, detailed expression, anatomically correct

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 6 John John Baret's cadaver tomb. St Mary’s church is located beside a hugely influential medieval abbey where the Barons met in 1214 and swore an oath to compel King John to accept the Charter of Liberties which led directly to Magna Carta. As such, it was on a central pilgrim route and would have received a lot of visitors.

  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 7 These images from Baret's tomb show the quality of the sculptor's work. Note the fine lines in the skin of the fingers, the detail of the bones in the hands and the feet, and the definition of the nails.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 8 Sydenham's tomb in Salisbury, also on a pilgrim route, showing the correct number of ribs (7 true pairs), the detailed musculature of the arm and bone detail on the hand.

The great irony of cadaver tombs is that, for all their efforts to demonstrate that status and worldly riches mean nothing once death, the great equaliser, has got hold of you, they were extraordinarily expensive to commission and only the very wealthiest in society could afford them. Edward IV intended to have one. He left instructions in his will of 1475 that "oure body be buried lowe in the grownde, and upon the same a stone to bee laied and wrought with the figure of Dethe"”. His wish for a cadaver tomb was never carried out, presumably because the country entered a turbulent phase immediately after his death in 1483 and by 1485 the Crown had moved out of Yorkist hands into Lancastrian ones.
 

Cadaver tombs can be single, like Bennett's and Sydenham's (showing just the cadaver effigy), or they can be tiered (with a life-like effigy above and the cadaver effigy below). A superb example of a fifteenth century tiered cadaver tomb can be seen at St Mary’s in Ewelme, Oxfordshire. It belongs to Alice de la Pole and is the only surviving cadaver monument to a woman in this country. 

Alice's tomb is made of high-status alabaster as befits an extraordinary woman who led an extraordinary life, much of it around the high politics of the Wars of the Roses. She was the granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer and wife of the Duke of Suffolk and in 1472 was made custodian of Henry VI's defeated Queen, Margaret of Anjou. You have to contort yourself to see them, but there are some beautifully preserved medieval paintings on the roof portion above her cadaver. If you get the chance to visit, do seek out Stephen, Alice's chantry priest. He's a font of knowledge about Alice, her legacy, tomb and chantry chapel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 9 Alice de la Pole's magnificent 15th century tiered cadaver tomb 
Figure 10 Alice de la Pole's tomb, life-like effigy above...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 11 ....cadaver effigy below

Figure 12 Medieval painting on the roof above the cadaver effigy
 

Part of the uniformity of the cadaver tomb is the way its funerary shroud is positioned. It is almost always knotted behind the head from where it runs down the length of the body, rising to cover the modesty of the deceased, before knotting again at the feet. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 13 John Baret's cadaver showing shroud detail

Figure 14 Thomas Bennett's tomb showing the same shroud detail
 

The head rests on a pillow and the feet among, beside or on symbols of death. These are very different to other funerary monuments which utilise greyhounds or lions to symbolise loyalty, purity and bravery (see John Cheney's tomb for comparison). Thomas Bennett's feet rest beside a skull and on a mole. The symbolism of the skull is obvious, the mole is used to symbolise death and the afterlife because it spends its life below ground in the darkness of the soil.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 15 Thomas Bennett's mole

Cadaver tombs were polychrome (painted to look life-like). A spot of red paint is still visible in the eye socket of the skull at Thomas' feet. They also have their eyes either fully open or half open, again reinforcing this idea of sentience. In the medieval period, the belief was that once you'd reached the skeletal stage (the dry stage) of death you no longer felt anything, so by that point you didn't need praying for. For this reason, scholars separate cadaver tombs from those transi tombs that bear a skeleton effigy as belonging to a different tradition.

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During the course of researching this article I dug into Bennett's life and discovered some apparent inconsistencies. His tomb is all about modesty and death being the great leveller, and he did seem to care for those in less privileged positions than himself (his will records that he was so concerned by the lack of formal provision for lodgings and food for the cathedral choirboys that he left them a milking cow so they would have access to daily milk), but he was also the man who sentenced the eminent musician John Marbeck to death by burning for heresy in 1543 (Marbeck was later pardoned by Bishop Gardiner and so avoided that dreadful fate). That Bennett was rich and powerful is evidenced by documents that show he was on a list of persons applied to for a loan to meet the expenses of an invasion of France in 1544 (he gave 100 marks). He was also in a position of trust with Cromwell, communicating directly with him, and offered Leadenhall (his home from 1524) to Henry VIII when he visited Salisbury in 1535. He signed the 10 Articles (an Act that promoted Protestant ideas over Catholic) in 1536, yet when Mary Tudor came to the throne in 1553 he was able to demonstrate sufficient commitment to the Catholic faith that Mary confirmed him in his role as Precentor at the cathedral. 

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So how do we reconcile these apparent contradictions? This was an unsettled period in English history when nothing, neither religion nor loyalty, was clear or straightforward and those in positions of authority could easily find themselves out of Royal favour and losing their heads for it. Bennett witnessed first-hand Wolsey's fall from grace after Henry VIII lost patience with him over his divorce from Katherine of Aragon; as a result of his connection to Wolsey, Bennett was stripped of his post of Chancellor of the cathedral in 1529, only to be reinstated in 1533. I suspect Bennett, living in uncertain, unsafe and changeable times, had simply learned over his long career to do what he had to do to keep his position and his head, while trying to help those he felt he had a responsibility to. 

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I hope I have shown in this article that cadaver tombs are historically important objects and that we are very fortunate to have two in such good condition in the cathedral. They are rare survivors of a turbulent period, one where the Church of England was being forged. For a historian like me, they are one of the few ways we have of getting a real glimpse inside the medieval mind, providing us as they do with an opportunity to roll back six hundred years and step into a world that's long gone.

I think the best way to understand the power that a cadaver tomb wielded (still wields?), is to pay Thomas Bennett's a visit. Look at his arm. It's shiny. How many times over the centuries must his tomb have provoked that unconscious act of solidarity, empathy and pity that is suggested by the polish on that arm? For the shine can only have come from countless hands reaching out to touch him, most of them long after a belief in purgatory had faded. The impulse to care about another human being, someone we don't know but nevertheless perceive as being in pain and therefore needing our help is epitomised by that shiny arm on Thomas' tomb. There's something very powerful and reassuring in that. 

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Useful further reading:
Adams, A. Barker, J. (2016) Revisiting the Monument. Fifty years since Panoksky's Tomb Sculpture. Available at https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/60866/1/Chapter_6.pdf
Antonczak, E. (2016) In a futile search of transi tombs in Scotland. Available at https://journals.indexcopernicus.com/api/file/viewByFileId/145935.pdf
British Library Online. Chronicle of the Black Death, 1348. Available at https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item103973.html
Chalier, P. (2013) A glimpse into the early origins of medieval anatomy through the oldest conserved human dissection (Western Europe, 13th C A.D.). Available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4042035/
Churches Conservation Trust. (2022) Medieval Death: Exploring cadaver tombs. Available at https://www.visitchurches.org.uk/what-we-do/blog/english-and-welsh-carved-cadavers-an-overview-with-dr-christina-welch.html
Fletcher. (1924) Thomas Bennett, LL.D, Chancellor of the diocese and precentor of Salisbury cathedral, popularly called 'the fasting man' (1558). Salisbury Cathedral Archives.
King, P. (1987) Contexts of the cadaver tomb in fifteenth century England. PhD Thesis, University of York. Available at https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/4274/
King, P. (2003) 'My image to be made all naked': Cadaver Tombs and the Commemoration of Women in Fifteenth Century England. Available at http://www.thericardian.online/downloads/Ricardian/13/28.pdf
Panofsky, E. (1964) Tomb sculpture: its changing aspect from ancient Egypt to Bernini. London: Thames & Hudson
Mann, Z. (2021) Art of the Black Death: Medieval Artists Facing a Pandemic. Available at https://www.thecollector.com/black-death-medieval-art-and-artists/
Roe, H. (1969) Cadaver monuments in Ireland. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/25509699
Victoria and Albert Museum. (2003) Conservation of an English cadaver tomb. Conservation Journal, Issue 45.
Welch, C. (2014) Cadaver monuments in England. Available at https://www.academia.edu/11710105/Cadaver_Monuments_In_England
Welch, C. (2021) English and Welsh carved cadavers: an overview. Available at https://www.visitchurches.org.uk/what-we-do/blog/english-and-welsh-carved-cadavers-an-overview-with-dr-christina-welch.html