ABSTRACT

Between the Norman Conquest and the first issue of Magna Carta, the rural and urban landscape of England was transformed by a wave of new building. This chapter will concentrate on the role of the church and its patrons in, first, the reconstruction of existing Anglo-Saxon cathedrals, monasteries and nunneries, and parish churches, which was followed by the foundation of houses for the new monastic orders of the twelfth century and then by yet more rebuilding in the new Gothic style of architecture which reached England in the last decades of that century. What must not be forgotten, however, is that there was a parallel building or rebuilding of castles, manor houses, barns and mills, of new towns and bridges and merchants’ houses, and that the two, ecclesiastical and lay, went hand in hand. 1 A new castle, and there were many, would be accompanied by a new priory and a new or rebuilt parish church, often with the same patron for all three. This was a remarkable period of construction and reconstruction, yet it all took place within an economy that was literally strapped for cash, where the money supply, that is, the amount of coin in circulation, was at its lowest medieval levels. The two seem irreconcilable. Major construction in stone was, and still is, expensive. Admittedly, building or rebuilding a cathedral or castle could take years, thus spreading the costs over long periods, but resources still had to be found to finance it, at a time when the endowment of new monastic houses was proceeding apace. The purpose here is to examine the old and some startlingly new evidence for scale of the rebuilding; to discuss the very real problem of the twelfth-century money supply; and then to pose, although not necessarily to answer, questions asking how the two might be reconciled.