Forgotten Worlds: Reimagining a medieval parish church, St Marys - AD1260 - Part I

The original form of the medieval parish church, St Marys in North Yorkshire is hidden by time. Still, perhaps there are enough leads to let us reimagine the church.

Built to serve a military post, trading post and fishing village, the church was pressed into use as a lead smelter, a Court of the Hundred and a Grammar School. Achieving great statue in late Medieval times, it suffered though coastal earth collapses and then during bombardment during the Civil War (1645). It has been disfigured and sometimes improved by a hundred different hands. For a while a tree grew unhindered in one of the western towers. Its roof was recrafted a dozen times, its western towers cut down, new chapels added to replace the southern wall cut down when the central tower collapsed, the original northern wall, transept and the great choir lost. A sympathetic restoration (completed 1850) has given us a form that conforms "to the rules of ecclesiastical architecture" - but it is still 900 years away from the original form of the building.

The ancients delighted in a paradox they termed 'The Ship of Theseus'. The ship itself was saved after the great battle and displayed for the ages. But the planks rotted in time and were replaced. Eventually there was no part of the original ship remaining, although it may have looked similar to the original ship. Is this still "the Ship of Theseus"?  Is that still Notre Dame?

Heraclitus dismissed the doubt with "upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow". Indeed, if the rock base of a river changes only slightly, does this give Heraclitus's river a persistent identity? Plutarch would take the contrary view as water is integral to the concept of a river as "it scatters and again comes together, and approaches and recedes".

So too, the remaining temples, churches and other religious buildings that still stand against the ages. Even the most resilient suffers the same fate of the Ship of Thesus - time challenges all things. In some cases, under the weight of change, it may become difficult to remember the original form. Surprisingly, we are stubbornly reluctant to reimagine the past: we cling to the idea that the modern Ship or Church before us still retains the essence of the original. Tourism trades on such beliefs.

So too history. The story of the collapse of the West after the expulsion of the Roman Governors from Britain in AD 409 seems underscored by careful study of Roman Imperial History. It also commands a powerful hold on our imagination even though emerging archeological study and a reassessment of old undated finds suggest that we might not know as much as we thought. The history books have been built on a brutal curation of evidence which may have dismissed bits of the past a bit too quickly. 

Along the coast of North Yorkshire, the locals have been digging up a different past: one that might see Roman commerce continuing 300 years beyond the withdrawal to the time of the apostate Justinian. Perhaps, in time, a different picture may emerge: maybe one where we accept that Roman navigation stations remained at key locations supported by local fishing villages living in areas formerly rich in Roman villas and bath houses. Inevitably this old infrastructure decayed - one of the navigation stations part collapsed into the sea. The stones of the past were repurposed to the needs of medieval times, just as the stones of the great medieval monasteries were in turn thieved by more modern needs. A keystone of the old Roman navigation station with an inscription which might date to 300 years post the withdrawal has been found in the basement of a farmhouse miles from its origin. The old bathhouses, temple and villas of Roman coastal life were eventually levelled to the ground - it seems not by fire or violent overthrow. Instead, the stone was removed to be reused to construct stone ramparts, walls, castles, houses, churches and monasteries to suit the changed risks and needs of medieval towns. 

Prototyping the medieval church

I am presently engaged in preparing a short film collecting some of these thoughts - and am in the process of trying to reimagine a church (and its town and port) from the late thirteenth century. There is a fair amount of literature available about the form of medieval churches - and I have been able to find a detailed examination of the church and its antecedent form from the period of the last great restoration. 

The goal here is to create a 3D virtual model of the medieval church that can be 'walked' around and into, using Unreal Engine (a software engine designed for gaming and now being used for cinematography).

The first stage is to build a rough prototype of the building as it might have been in 1260. This might serve as a basis for following the later construction alterations to the church - helping envision the changes over time. While, inevitable, much of the reconstruction is speculative, where possible, we will try to recreate it as best possible. 

In the first stage, geometric primitives are created to build a rough 3D image of the original church, based on research of the site. All innovations to the southern and northern walls since the late thirteenth century have been removed. The two great western towers have been restored and the roof brought back to meet the ancient clerestory (the north and south walls). 

*notes 

1. the actual height of each building segment is awaiting confirmation. The first primate image below understates the vertical height of the building - eg, at least at one stage, one transept had an upper story. This was corrected in the second draft image below.
2. the shape of the two western towers is based on foundations, a single roughly contemporaneous report (Leland, 1534 - "whereof two Towers be at the west end of the Church") and practice in other similar churches. The final form will be similarly speculative as there is the possibility that the towers mounted wooden spires at an earlier date although the notion of two towers conforms to ecclesiastic practice and held sway during the 1850 restoration.
3. the texture used to render the exterior and interior is purely to demonstrate progress and possibilities - it is not intended to be a serious representation of the church at this stage.
4. this building is being prototyped outside the port/town environment and the exterior will be brought into the old-town level when complete - the interior will remain as a stand-alone level to allow walk-throughs and cinematic work.
5. externally, the surrounding land falls away, although the interior is flat.
6. on my reading of the literature, the provenance of the Northern Aisle (called St Nicholas's Aisle) postdates 1260, although there is no certainty. 

 

Having established the basic form, the virtual model is now being enhanced by replacing the basic forms with more detailed forms. A set of very basic textures have been applied to the surfaces to give you some idea of the progress to this stage - still a mile off the final form.

edit: A final form of the church (as at 1264) is now complete. At that time, it towered over the town - and would have been a magnificent sight.