20 - Religious Buildings

Summary

THE abbey's most expensive single commitment in the twelfth century was the probably the provision of new monastic buildings. They demanded great sums to construct, decorate, and furnish, because only the best masons and craftsmen were to be engaged and the best materials used to make the work a glory to behold. There was no absolute necessity to replace the pre-Conquest buildings — even in the 1150s parts of them were only 100 years old — but the impulse to do so was irresistible. Whatever the expense, God and the Virgin were to be glorified; and there might be selfish considerations too, such as the urge to emulate or surpass another great church or, for an abbot, to create a lasting memorial of his abbacy. In 1104 Abbot Walter had left his church incomplete, without a nave or a central tower of full height, but it already enclosed proper spaces for the essentials of monastic worship, the daily offices and the Mass, and for the cult of saints. Nevertheless, it wanted a nave to give it all the dignity of the Anglo-Norman grand manner and to allow impressive religious processions to take place. Because sufficient money was not continuously available several separate campaigns were needed in the course of the twelfth century to finish every stage of the new church and of the cloister attached to it. In the mean time, some part of the Anglo-Saxon church complex had to remain standing until the detached chapels of St Lawrence and All Saints were built in the later twelfth century, because until then the people of Evesham had no other place of worship.

When Abbot Walter died in 1104 the monks were using the pre-Conquest cloister and domestic buildings, which included an infirmary, a cellar, a kitchen, a bakehouse, and a bath-house as well as a chapter house adorned with hangings (dorselli), a dormitory, and a refectory. Presumably the main components were already arranged about a square cloister according to the usual Benedictine pattern, which the abbey had probably adopted at the tenth-century reform if not before. Walter's new church, though unfinished in 1104, was already adequate for daily use by the monks and so they decided to turn their limited funds towards something less expensive and more useful than a new nave.