In The Architecture of Norman England, Eric Fernie has produced the first indispensable study of medieval architecture for the new millennium. He achieves an admirable balance between a good introductory survey for the uninitiated and a new handbook for specialists. All of us are in his debt for making the material both interesting and accessible. The book will have a long and useful shelf life, all the more because it is, ultimately, a book about ideas and theoretical conceptions in architecture carefully grounded in archaeology, building analysis, and documents. It belongs in every reference library, as well as in the personal library of every scholar of medieval architecture.

As the dust jacket proclaims, The Architecture of Norman England (that is, Romanesque architecture) is the first serious book on the topic since 1934. Fernie’s admirable tome is a totally new, long-overdue look at the subject by someone who has been involved in the study of its every aspect for most of his professional career. This involvement shows in the way he perceptively discusses secular construction side by side with ecclesiastical and monastic buildings. Fernie has profited from the amazing burst of scholarship during the last two generations and has rethought most of the important issues surrounding Norman architecture. As a keen student of Western architecture from late antiquity to the Gothic, Fernie brings a formidable background knowledge to the topic. For him the English Channel is a route of communication, not an insurmountable barrier.

The text is divided into four parts and nine chapters, each on a clearly established theme. Part 1, “The Period,” includes two chapters: The first introduces the historical and architectural context up to the Norman Conquest, and the second treats the period from 1066 to the later twelfth century. The five chapters of Part 2 will be regarded by most as the core of the study, since each chapter is devoted to a particular building type. Part 3, a single chapter, consists of a discussion of the elements of plan and structure, while Part 4, also one chapter, is devoted to planning and construction, areas of special interest to Fernie. The thoughtful conclusion is followed by two appendices, the second of which, “Methods”, should be read as the introduction. In fact, these five succinct pages should be required reading for every student and scholar of medieval architecture because Fernie deals with issues most authors take for granted or deliberately avoid, including the carefully defined parameters of the topic.

The five chapters of Part 2 are organized by building category in chronological order. The first deals with castles, halls, and chamber blocks, which in itself is both unusual (most books on Norman buildings simply ignore secular architecture) and appropriate. William the Conqueror’s primary concern after Hastings was the establishment of control over his vast new kingdom through strategically placed castles. Only after this did his thoughts turn to ecclesiastical construction, using the wholesale appointment of new bishops as a means of ensuring loyalty. More than fifty significant surviving structures are individually discussed, beginning with a brief history and including a few sentences assessing importance and outlining the major scholarly questions. Since much of the evidence rests on the interpretation of archaeology and building analysis, Fernie is as judicious in laying out the arguments as he is in evaluating them. His assessments have the balance that comes only from long and direct involvement. To put it another way: His passion for the material is everywhere evident, but never overshadows the rationality of the argument. He synthesizes quantities of evidence and opposing arguments without losing sight of the fundamental issues, or of how the monument is contextualized in the fabric of Romanesque architecture. The reader’s understanding of familiar buildings and issues are regularly challenged. Reading this text brings constant surprises; buildings you thought you knew reasonably well emerge as if you were encountering them for the first time. The result is a series of extraordinarily engaging discussions that bring the buildings to life.

The studies of the Tower of London (55–61, of which three pages are illustrations) and of Durham Cathedral (131–40, with a single page of illustrations) are representative. Both begin with construction histories, building descriptions, assessments of important issues, and context. In the case of the White Tower, for example, this includes possible Continental sources, from Loches to Ivry-la-Bataille and the destroyed ducal château at Rouen. Each story of the London tower is precisely described and characterized, with special emphasis on the question of whether the two halls rose uninterrupted through the two top stories or were divided by flooring. The arguments in favor of each position are laid out and followed by additional observations. Assessing the evidence, Fernie favors unseparated, two-storied halls, noting the parallels offered by the castles at Colchester, Norwich, Castle Hedingham, and Rochester, which taken together with the White Tower “form a small group of buildings which warrant the adjective palatial” (60). He goes on to analyze the functions of wall passages, staircases, and even roof drains. In the end, he concludes there are two possibilities: that the design was contradictory from the beginning, or that it was begun as a consistent design and became contradictory as a result of alteration during construction, which is the solution he favors. The discussion is exemplary in its balance and thorough in its details, and leaves the reader feeling as though he or she has just been given a complete guided tour by the most qualified professional. The clarity of the presentation and the ways that Fernie artfully incorporates evidence into the arguments, effectively directing the reader to the major issues, result in a presentation of the monument that manages to include all of its complexities, yet allows it to emerge in all of its fullness.

The same is true for that most splendid of Norman Romanesque buildings, Durham Cathedral. Fernie’s introduction opens with a challenge to the center/periphery model: Durham was located at the edge of the Norman world, yet is more than merely “up-to-date” in comparison with such centers as Winchester or London. The technical knowledge and sheer inventive genius that it took to plan the individual blocks of the spiral columns, as well as the lower course of the presbytery walls and other details, all testify to the remarkable ability of the Durham master, whose plan has its basis in that ultimate centrist monument, Old Saint Peter’s in Rome.

Fernie captures the inventive excitement surrounding the building of the cathedral, even as he rightly downplays emphasis on the rib vaults. The text focuses on the vaulting of the main vessel, agreeing that the eastern wing, which should have been illustrated, was planned to be vaulted from the beginning. In fact, the aisles were planned with rib vaults from 1093, but there is no confirmation for the high vaults until construction reached the top of the gallery level. This is one place where I felt the discussion would have benefited from inclusion of the aisle vaults. And they should also have been illustrated, in photographs and/or in the analytical drawings of John Bilson (cited in the bibliography), which in themselves would have made a welcome contribution to Fernie’s discussion of the role of the rib. That discussion is important because it deflates the overemphasis on ribs that has plagued the study of Norman architecture. Inclusion of the aisle vaults would have contextualized the discussion of the high vaults and provided additional confirmation of the technical sophistication of the Durham builder.

Otherwise, the treatment of Durham is exemplary in balancing the technical with the decorative, in reminding us of the importance of the shrine of St. Cuthbert, and, above all, in demonstrating that the particular importance of Durham does not lie in its rib vaults. Fernie rightly sees the question of high vaulting in Norman architecture as having little overall importance and having been greatly overemphasized by scholars of the Gothic period in their search for origins. True, high vaulting is more significant in the duchy than in the kingdom, but the building achievements in the kingdom dwarf most buildings in the duchy. The extraordinary scale of the architecture created in England finally receives its just due in this volume.

A few quibbles are in order, none damaging to the whole. There are only 200 illustrations, which means that a major monument like Durham is allotted only four (and not just two, as indicated in the index), while three of the four color plates are duplicated in black and white. The color plates make their points better than the halftones, which might have been replaced with other illustrations. Overall, the choice of reproductions is exceptional—after all, as director of the Courtauld Institute, Fernie has the incredible resources of the Conway Library at his disposal—but, as in the case of Durham, they could have been better coordinated with the text. The photographs are far better in quality than the recent volumes of Yale University Press’s Pelican History of Art, whose size and format were obviously adopted here by Oxford. The ground plans vary in usefulness; some appear outside the specialized literature for the first time. Occasionally there are odd disagreements between text and plans, as when the plan of Reading Abbey (170 fig. 135) fails to exhibit “an ambulatory with three radiating chapels” as described in the text (171). These slips can be corrected in subsequent editions; they will hardly matter to the specialist who knows the literature. In this wealth of riches the plans constitute the one weakness. A number are shown, according to the graphic standard explained on page x, as “reconstructions,” although they do not always reflect the often substantial archaeological remains on which they are supposedly based. The most severe cases are the “reconstructions” of the Anglo-Saxon cathedral at Canterbury (fig. 17) and of Archbishop Lanfranc’s rebuilding of same (fig. 82). In both cases, the important archaeological remains on which the plans are based were revealed in the nave excavations under the direction of Kevin Blockley and could have been incorporated to produce a happier visual solution, such as in the plan of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury (fig. 83), that indicates the surviving masonry. One more serious lacuna: there are no cross sections of ecclesiastical structures that would help the nonspecialist understand the positioning of wall passages (270–72), nor any elevations that might convey the proportional relationships between stories, not all of which are readable from the photographs.

The book is completed by a glossary and a bibliography, ruthlessly restricted to the Romanesque, that should have included overlapping studies such as Yoshio L. Kusaba’s “The Architectural History of the Church of the Hospital of St. Cross in Winchester and Its Place in the Development of English Gothic Architecture,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Indiana, Bloomington, 1983), and Sheila A. Bonde’s “Castle and Church Building at the Time of the Norman Conquest,” in The Medieval Castle: Romance and Reality (eds. Kathryn Reyerson and Faye Powe, [Dubuque: Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1984], 79-96), as well as the works of Francis Bond, Charles Herbert Moore, Arthur Kingsley Porter, Victor Ruprich-Robert, and Geoffrey Webb, even though, like the renowned A. W. Clapham, all are now superseded by Fernie.