U is for Undercroft
Canterbury Cathedral’s crypt or ‘Undercroft’ was designed and built to St Anselm’s instructions and begun around 1097. It is the largest and most elaborate Romanesque crypt in Britain and the carved reliefs on the column shafts feature some of the finest best examples of early medieval stone sculpture in the world — as befits a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
St Anselm chose a particularly significant resonant date to begin work on the rebuilding of the eastern end of Canterbury Cathedral; 1097 was the five hundredth anniversary of St Augustine’s mission to the Kentish King at the behest of Pope Gregory the Great. The new Undercroft, completed in just five years, supported the new quire where the monks sang the liturgy, and was designed to emphasise Canterbury’s continuing links to the papal curia in Rome by echoing the size and ground plan of St Peter’s. Ecclesiastical politics aside, Anselm’s design celebrated Christ and the Virgin Mary; for Canterbury Cathedral was and is the Christ Church and the mother church of England. Thus it was apt that the Undercroft’s central chapel was dedicated to St Mary. Although Anselm’s beautiful light-filled quire was largely destroyed by fire in 1174, the Undercroft survived and is now the oldest visible part of the Cathedral. It remains a witness to Anselm’s spiritual and cultural renewal of English monasticism.
Historians are now using documentary sources and standing archaeology to understand this unique space in terms of the history of emotions. Whereas crypts are traditionally pitch-black and mysterious places, the huge enclosed space of the undercroft is not dark but dimly-lit and shadowy. It is a subtle, spectral light that renders the Undercroft’s Romanesque shaft capital carvings even more arresting. Although the Undercroft is now mainly a palette of soft-greys, flecks of colour reveal that the walls, shafts, and ceilings were once coloured in red, blue, and ochre as the rare surviving wall-painting in St Gabriel’s Chapel demonstrate. These glimmering carvings and once-bright paintings aid our experience of this remarkable space; they form a multi-layered invocation of the natural and the numinous. The stained glass in the quire above would have flooded the interior space with coloured light; below the painted Undercroft would have resembled an illuminated manuscript, heightened by the smell incense, the sounds of the sung liturgy, and the candlelit ritual processions of medieval monastic life in this elaborate, richly sensory and enchanting space. The effect was to create a spiritual pilgrimage to a celestial Jerusalem.
The Undercroft shaft capital carvings also allow tantalising glimpses of past emotional responses to space, place, and faith. Some of the Romanesque carvings are readily identifiable animals, such as the serpent, stag, eagle, and lion that still magically slither, leap, soar and roar into our imaginations from over nine hundred years ago. Then there are the fantastic creatures — double-faced centaurs, satyrs, dragons, griffins, and hybrids; asses with claws, goats with wings, singing, dancing, and making music. The Undercroft’s sacred space is a conversation and hymn in stone, a concerto on divine Creation and human imagination and emotion. Anselm sought to help his brethren and his people understand and feel spiritual love through his parables and writings. In the same way, his cathedral rebuilding, of which the Undercroft was such a key part, was equally designed to make the supernatural accessible to all.
Dr Diane Heath is Research Fellow and Assistant Lecturer in Medieval & Early Modern History, the Centre for Kent History and Heritage, School of Humanities, at Canterbury Christ Church University.
The University will also be hosting a two-day conference on Canterbury and other UNESCO World Heritage Sites around the world on Friday 24 and Saturday 25 May at Old Sessions House, Longport.
