5 - The Cathedral Studies: ‘Landmarks’ of Architectural History

Summary

A few examples may be found throughout the Christian period of eminent churches, of which the structures & the history are known. These may be selected as landmarks in the wilderness & all others must be referred to them by analogy of style & distribution.

One building thoroughly & minutely examined in structure & history affords more genuine instruction than a cursory review of an hundred. Let us proceed to search for the Landmarks.

Robert Willis

In the (now destroyed) Guildhall at Canterbury, at 8 p.m. on 11 September 1844, Willis presented a paper to the inaugural congress of the newly founded British Archaeological Association. Published the following year, his account of Canterbury Cathedral was the first book ever to be defined by its author as an ‘architectural history’. At the same time as Willis was becoming dissatisfied with the limitations of the membrological approach, the peripatetic format of the archaeological meetings, usually set in an ancient cathedral city, enabled him to evolve a more forensic method, focused on a single building. In the series of lectures, books and articles treating the great churches of England which he produced across the next three decades, Willis devised an approach which continues to inform architectural investigation and for which he is widely revered as ‘the father of structural archaeology’. This chapter explores how ‘architectural history’, as defined in Chapter 4, was understood by Willis's archaeological audience, and how the approach he devised in the 1840s evolved, seeing it as a response to particular circumstances, rather than as a progression towards a modern discipline.