The Eastern Arm of Norwich Cathedral and the Augustinian Priory of st Bartholomew's, Smithfield, in London

Abstract

The church of St Bartholomew the Great in West Smithfield is not generally thought of as a building of major importance, probably because the plan of its presbytery seems to suggest that it was a rather outmoded imitation of Norwich Cathedral. The first part of this paper examines the basis for such an assumption and offers an explanation for the similarities between the presbyteries of the two buildings. Affiliations between the two institutions are placed in the wider context of the aspirations of the London episcopate in the decades either side of II00. Smithfield emerges as an extraordinary building, highly untypical of contemporary Augustinian architecture. The twelfth-century foundation narrative of Smithfield implies that, while in building, the church struck onlookers as astonishingly innovative. Taken at face value, this is puzzling, since most of the elements of its design had been common architectural currency for a generation or more. This apparently paradoxical situation is explored in the second part of the paper and the basis for Smithfield's perceived modernity while under construction very tentatively reconstructed.

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