St Stephen’s Chapel and the Palace of Westminster is more than the sum of its parts. The title might suggest a conventional monograph on a significant medieval building, but this book is nothing of the sort. Over sixteen well-paced chapters, this book recounts the history of St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster Palace, which began in 1292 as a royal chapel under Edward I, would become a collegiate foundation within the Palace of Westminster in the fourteenth century under Edward III, and continue in the wake of the Reformation to become a meeting place for the House of Commons, a role it would fill for 300 years. The chapel was repurposed and then destroyed by the fire of 1834 that engulfed much of Westminster Palace (leaving only the lower level of St Stephen’s chapel extant, which now serves as the much-restored chapel for the houses of Parliament). These facts on one hand, and the incomplete nature of the documentary record for the chapel on the other, means that this book is not simply a narrative account but an exercise in creative reconstruction of an important royal building and its broader political, religious and social environment.
This book is one output from a £1,000,000, AHRC-funded project run between 2013-17 at the University of York by two of the editors of the volume: Tim Ayers (History of Art, York), and John Cooper (History, York). The book under review here is the latest in a range of significant publications from this project by the Boydell Press. These include The Fabric Accounts of St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster 1292-1396, edited byTim Ayers and translated by Maureen Jurkowski in 2020 (an exceptionally valuable edition of the over 60 rolls of expenses for the construction of St Stephen’s Chapel--for the review, see https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/33600/37138), and Elizabeth Biggs, St Stephen’s College, Westminster: A Royal Chapel and English Kingship, 1348-1548 (2020). To this should be added their remarkable website with full digital reconstructions of the chapel (https://www.virtualststephens.org.uk/ ). This project reminds us of the profound utility of such grants and the social benefits of collaborative research.
In keeping with the remit of The Medieval Review, I will endeavor to restrict my discussion here principally to the medieval contents of the book, which broadly (but not exclusively) comprise its first half. The book opens with Tim Ayers’s generous introduction which astutely cites the important documents at Eton College (Eton College Rolls 39/81 and 39/78) that confirm that St Stephen’s chapel would provide a yardstick of sorts against which subsequent royal chapels would be compared, from Eton College to King’s College, Cambridge. The book continues to the late Mark Ormrod’s chapter on the context of the chapel in the broader movements and ideals of Plantagenet kingship, while chapters by John Harper and Elizabeth Biggs concern Edward III’s 1348 transformation of St Stephen’s into a collegiate chapel. Of particular interest to the present reviewer is James Hillson’s perceptive account of the design and chronological sequence of the chapel. St Stephen’s Chapel was one of the most significant and influential buildings in fourteenth-century Europe, so a new account of its construction will be welcomed by scholars. Necessarily working from post-medieval images and scraps of fabric on one hand and the building accounts on the other, Hillson offers a careful revision to the earlier work of Christopher Wilson and Maurice Hastings. Contrary to Wilson, who understood that over the half century in which it was erected, St Stephen’s Chapel was largely the result of Michael of Canterbury’s design of the early 1290s, Hillson opts for an “iterative” approach by which the tumultuous period of “the three Edwards,” which necessitated stoppages in the chapel’s construction, had meaningful impacts on the building’s design. Hillson’s account makes abundant sense, and it accords with the fact that aspects of the decorative repertoire of the chapel were also being worked out and executed into the 1350s.
Paul Binski’s chapter surveys the imagery of St Stephen’s chapel, which is also partial at best, comprising some wall painting fragments in the British Museum and modern antiquarian copies. As the architecture was innovative and influential, so was its imagery: as Binski suggests, Richard Smirke’s c. 1800 drawings of Edward III and his Sons, led by St George and Philippa of Hainault and her Daughters may represent the very earliest royal painted portraits in England. Jane Spooner’s chapter explores the fragments of wall painting in the British Museum, which were painted between 1350-63 under the tutelage of Hugh of St Albans and others. At present, only imagery and text from the Old Testament books of Tobit and Job survive, but the antiquarian record of the imagery was clearly more extensive. Spooner locates the imagery within the cross-currents of English fourteenth-century court art which looked equally to hallowed French royal sources (the Sainte Chapelle and the Bibles Moralisées) and to contemporary art in Italy. Magnus Williamson’s essay concludes the medieval history of the chapel with an account of the polyphony at St Stephen’s at the end of the Middle Ages. "Part II: St Stephen’s and the House of Commons" takes the story of St Stephen’s to the present day by exploring the complex processes by which the royal chapel was transformed from a religious/collegiate chapel into a political centre (the House of Commons), recorded, destroyed, and reused from the Renaissance to the present.
St Stephen’s Chapel and the Palace of Westminster is a fine book and one well worth buying by libraries and scholars alike. It is well conceived, beautifully edited, and it offers just about the most coherent picture of the overall physical, social and political history of an important English royal building that one could ask for. Boydell have done the field a service in producing a handsome volume: while it is not a glossy book similar to the monographs available by Yale and other university presses, this volume contains a good deal of decent colour and black and white illustration and costs a relatively modest $125.00 or $29.95 as an eBook. It also reminds us, in a particularly poignant way, that medievalist history is A Melancholy Art (to paraphrase Michael Ann Holly), that is so often spurred on by mourning for a lost past and by the desire to reconstruct, reimagine and fictively rebuild that past from scraps and pieces, documents and (when we are lucky to have them), photographs. This book beautifully charts this process across time, space and material. Perhaps the only lacuna from this project overall is the lack of a one-volume account of the architecture and imagery of the chapel. It is hoped that James Hillson’s PhD thesis on the architecture of the chapel will soon emerge in print to fill this very gap.