Bricks

In my last post I asked "What have the Normans ever done for us?" I didn't say much about architecture, because I was most interested on the impact on ordinary people when one set of rulers was replaced by another. The Norman have certainly left us more impressive buildings than the Anglo-Saxons, but the buildings that impress us are of two types - castles and places of worship. There was a revolution in the size and ambition of buildings intended to enforce and cement the authority of a more centralized state and the semi-autonomous church that stood alongside the state, providing literate administrators.

The places where ordinary folk lived didn't, I think, change much with the conquest. What I've read suggests that peasants, farmers and most other people lived in timber-framed houses with wattle and daub walls and an earth floor, pre and post-1066. Further up the social scale, there may have been some improvements - an Anglo-Saxon lord's great hall was a scaled-up version of the wattle-and-daub house, whereas some of the manors where the Norman nobs and their retinue lived were made of stone or flint.

There's one architectural advance the Normans seem to have brought along which eventually changed more lives, although it took a few centuries to make a real impact. Several years ago, I went on a guided walk around St. Albans. There were a few interesting little snippets of local history, but one piece of information stuck in my head because it seemed so surprising at the time. About a decade after the Norman Conquest, work started on The Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban. The tour guide told us that much of the building material for the Abbey Church (now Cathedral) at St Albans was recycled from the ruins of the old Roman town of Verulamium, just down the hill. Those building materials included bricks, which, the tour guide said, the English no longer knew how to make. The Romans had made and used bricks, but throughout the Dark Ages, apparently, brick making was a lost art in England (and, presumably, the rest of the British Isles).

Never mind losing heated baths, straight, paved roads, sewage disposal, public libraries, firemen, police and the rest - during the Dark Ages, we even lost the ability to make the humble brick. For over six and a half centuries. It's an almost shocking indication of how far the level of civilization in these islands fell after the Romans went. The Romans may have been militaristic, authoritarian oppressors, but they also brought practical technological and cultural advances from all overs their vast, cosmopolitan empire. The Romans may not have originated many important inventions themselves, but who cares where a good idea comes from, so long as a lot of people benefit from it?

Elsewhere in Europe, the brick maker's art survived. Bricks were still being manufactured in Italy and the information I've been able to uncover suggests that the Normans, and their allies in the religious orders, were instrumental in introducing brick making back into England. Although the Normans preferred to use materials like white Caen limestone for their grand fortifications and ecclesiastical buildings, they would also use whatever came to hand, whether old Roman bricks in St Albans Abbey or flint cobbles in Canterbury Cathedral.

Traditionally, the story of the English brick renaissance seems to start at Coggeshall in Essex. In 1140, Savigniac monks founded Coggeshall Abbey. By 1147, the Saviginiac Order, in the grip of terminal financial and administrative difficulties, was merged with the Cistercians. Now the Cistercians were a clever and enterprising bunch, responsible for the development and diffusion of a wide range of technical skills and they were particuarly good at architecture, project management and the various building trades. In particular, they have been credited with introducing bricks to England. Brickwork at Coggeshall Abbey, dated at between 1190-1220 was generally considered the earliest post-Roman brickwork in England.

It's a story which seems to hang together neatly, although in 1996 British Archaeology reported that even earlier brickwork had been identified at the nearby church of Bradwell-juxta-Coggeshall, the bricks having apparently been made by local builders, rather than the Cistercians. It's an interesting discovery, although I still suspect that the re-introduction of bricks had something to do with the diffusion of technology from the continent, via the Normans and the religious orders they patronised. It seems unlikely than a group of Essex locals suddenly getting the idea to make bricks out of nowhere after the art had been forgotten for nearly seven centuries. Even if it was the Essex builders, not the Cistercian monks who brought back the brick, they started out by making floor and roof tiles, a continental import, so the original impetus for re-discovery probably still came from the Normans, who created the conditions that allowed specialised trades to reappear and and the continental religious orders, busily propagating the diffusion of skills and technologies.

Brick architecture took a long time to develop and spread in this country, but we've probably got the Normans and their allies to thank for the rediscovery. Eventually, bricks would have made a comeback anyway, either through trade, migration or invasion by somebody else, but it was the Normans and the monks who probably put an end to the dark, brickless centuries.