5 - Fire! Accounts of Destruction and Survival at Canterbury and Bury St Edmunds in the Late Twelfth Century

Summary

On 15 April 2019 a fire started in the roof of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. As the flames spread, Parisians massed on the streets and many more people around the world watched the destruction on screens. Members of the clergy, together with the ministry of culture and the fire brigade, acted quickly to remove relics, art works and the sacrament from the building. As the fire was extinguished and the sun rose the following morning the initial horror was tempered with widespread astonishment at how much of the building and its contents had survived. In the following days, an investigation was launched into the cause of the fire and pledges were made to ensure the reconstruction of the cathedral. Commentators attempted to compare this fire with those at other major sites, including, in Britain, fires at Windsor Castle in 1992 and York Minster in 1984. In all of this, the coverage of the Notre-Dame fire had parallels in medieval accounts of fires in major churches. Such fires were not uncommon in the Middle Ages. Detailed written accounts of fires described the fate of relics, showed interest in the causes, demonstrated a desire to contextualise events and combined the creation of a record of the damage with an argument for reconstruction. In many cases the emphasis was on what was saved rather than lost. Some fires, like that at Reims in 1210, prompted complete reconstruction of a church. Other fires left parts of the structure intact, as at Canterbury Cathedral in 1174 and Chartres Cathedral in 1194. Written accounts of these events have therefore been of interest to architectural historians studying the surviving fabric of medieval buildings. Fires discovered and extinguished more promptly damaged the contents of a church without impacting the structure. Such a fire in 1198 was recorded in Jocelin of Brakelond's Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds.

However, much of what survived medieval fires has since been destroyed, in an English context typically as a result of the Reformation. The great monastic complex at Bury St Edmunds, for example, is now in ruins, with its contents destroyed or dispersed to museums and libraries.