Interview with Jonathan Foyle on the Architecture & History of Lincoln Cathedral

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Mitchell: Today I have the privilege of speaking with Jonathan Foyle. Jonathan is a lecturer, historian, and broadcaster. He's written numerous books on British cathedrals and also hosted and contributed to several documentaries with BBC and other television outlets relating to history, specifically historic architecture. Jonathan's book titled "Lincoln Cathedral: The Biography of a Great Building" piqued my interest and my fascination with Lincoln Cathedral. This led me to reach out to him to learn more. His wealth of knowledge on the cathedral sparked a fruitful conversation touching on many subjects such as its history, cultural context, architectural features, and even the contemporary practice of architecture today. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Jonathan, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today, it's a pleasure to be able to speak with you. I'd like to just kind of start off and ask you a little bit about your, tell us a little bit about your background and your current areas of interest.

Jonathan: Thanks, my pleasure too. Okay, so I come actually from Lincolnshire, the county, no surprise there, that hosts Lincoln Cathedral, but it's a very flat landscape in the south of the county, a giant outdoor food factory. It's something like England's Nebraska, I don't know. So, you've got to go and find your fun there and the way I did it when I was a kid was to get on a bicycle and see where the wheels took me and they tended to take me to parish churches, these little monuments in the landscape. You could see where people invested their wealth in the past and every time you open the door there'll be something new to see, this little museum, I guess. So, guess how popular I was at school. But then I went on to Art College in Lincoln itself, which was in, it would have been in the shadow of Lincoln Cathedral, except it was to the south of the cathedral, so the shadow of course would fall to the north of it. But on the scarp of the hill, which Lincoln Cathedral is on top of, I was at art college for a year and deciding what I wanted to do with my life and was learning how to draw. And after an architectural training in Canterbury, another great cathedral city, I eventually secured this route through being a curator at Hampton Court Palace and working on Canterbury Cathedral. I was offered the chance to write on Canterbury first actually but then my second book was on Lincoln Cathedral so this was a great circular journey for me to go back to where I'd come from with the knowledge of having gone through architecture school and worked on some great buildings and I came back to Lincoln and I always said I'd write a book when I was 40 and Canterbury I wrote when I was 41 so I was slightly late and Lincoln was my second one. So, it took me, I guess, since I was about 18 years old, it took me over 20 years to come back and feel like I knew enough to set down an account of this amazing place I was so used to, but actually didn't feel I understood.

Photograph Copyright by Mitchell Rocheleau 2025

Mitchell: Fantastic. Well, yeah, your book is clearly, you know, a very thorough piece of history, and I think it was very informative to me. So, thank you for taking the time and those 40 years to produce it. On that subject, can you give us a bit of a high-level chronology about Lincoln Cathedral, just to give us some general context and the lay of the land?

Jonathan: Yeah, okay. So, it roughly runs like this. An old Roman city had a cathedral for the first time, just after the famous Battle of Hastings when the Normans arrived. They arrived in 1066, the new cathedral arose in 1072 was because William the Conqueror wanted new cathedrals and castles in defensible places and Lincoln was one. So, this new building never stopped building. It began 1072, probably finished more or less about 1090, but then new west doors were added into the 1130’s, possibly some vaults were inserted. We don't know because in 1185 a great earthquake struck and the thing was split from top to bottom as a chronicler said. So, the Great Rebuilding begins in 1192 and the last years of the 12th century saw the basis of the present cross-shaped building rising from the ground and the sound of chisels ringing out wouldn't have stopped for about the next 80 years because then there was serial rebuilding. Finally, by about 1311 the central tower with its spire had arisen and by the end of the 14th century the west towers finished off essentially the building we see today. The rest of the story is about the destroyers, the iconoclasts who came and wrecked the stained glass and the sculptures and then the restorers who came to fix up the problem that they caused.

Mitchell: So, this is an ever-evolving building in constant development, modification. It's a living and breathing organism in a way. You mentioned a bit about the experimental nature and the inventiveness of this cathedral, and this seems like it's kind of inherent in the, I guess, that mindset of experimentation. Modification is inherent in this continual building process. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Jonathan: Yeah, for sure. Now Durham Cathedral to the north of Lincoln, now Lincoln's about 150 miles north of London, Durham is going to be the same again. And Durham on its hill is a very similar building to Lincoln. It was also a late 11th century building in origin. And it's famous for having Europe's first set of rib vaults, so replacing flammable wooden flat ceilings with stone vaults which are more coherent in a structure. It creates a shell, it has this great mass of masonry walls to support that weight, and the beginnings of buttressing. Now the thing about Durham's fame is that we don't know what was at Lincoln and whether Lincoln which was started before Durham could in fact have influenced the surviving example to its north. Now Bishop Remigius starts the cathedral in 1072. The Anglo-Saxons before that date had had cathedrals in very unlikely places. There was one at a village called Selsey on the South Coast, which then was turned to Chichester. There was another one at Elmham in Norfolk, which then became Norwich, a grander city. And the one which became Lincoln was at Dorchester on Thames, and the basis of it is still there, the Anglo-Saxon Cathedral. And in fact, when Remigius arrived, he was Bishop of Dorchester on Thames for one year, but William I wanted these defensible old cities to be the hosts of grand new cathedrals and castles very often side by side because you've got the might of the state and the righteousness of the church side by side you know it's two sides of the same coin there as a power play so what we see at Lincoln under Remigius is just a stump of the west front. But that west front is really surprising and inventive, colossal, it looks like a fortress. And there's been a lot of debate as to whether it was a fortress or maybe a bishop's house to some extent. Well, look, there are no hearths in there. You couldn't have had the cast of Aida gathered together to withstand a siege. But it was probably inventive, because it was some kind of elevated treasury, a defensible treasury, because in the immediate years after the invasion of the Normans, there were Anglo-Saxon rebellions, especially in this part of the country. And to the south of Lincoln, the gold from Peterborough Abbey was ransacked by a Saxon lord called Hereward, and he was in concert with the King of Denmark called Sweyn, and they took the gold off by Ely, never to be seen again. So, you can imagine that Remigius, a man who served under William I, he was an almoner, and that is the man who held the purse strings at Fécamp Abbey in Normandy. He arrived in this strange land with rebels surrounding him, coming from the misty lowlands around him. And therefore, this defensible west front is quite distinct. I think for that reason, you'd be nervous if you were cooped up as a bishop in Lincoln in the 1070s and 80s.

So, look, that first gambit is really inventive because it seems to be half church, half fortress. We don't know what Remigius did at the east end of that church. He could well have provided some rudimentary stone vaulting. And I mentioned in outline, the 1185 earthquake and when that happened it possibly split the church from end to end because the weight of a stone vault on untested walls could well have been structurally unstable so the whole thing came crashing down in thousands of tons of masonry so, much of the inventiveness by its nature was risky and we can only guess on what some of the early inventiveness was like but the later centuries are rather easier to understand because they still survive.

Photograph Copyright by Mitchell Rocheleau 2025

Mitchell: Interesting, yeah, I recall when visiting the cathedral bits and pieces of, well, a corner specifically of Remigius's old façade being visible from inside of, I can't remember which room it was, but I think it was underneath one of the towers and seeing that kind of, that old structure intact in that corner was fascinating.

Jonathan: To return to the inventive character. I guess after the 1185 earthquake and the beginning of the new cathedral, under a bishop called Hugh, he was from the Swiss Alps and arrived in England and was a real reformer and the slightly corrupt King Henry II wanted to appoint him as the Bishop of Lincoln and he said, "Not unless the chapter of the cathedral, votes me in.” So, he was very much for democracy, not tyranny. So that won hearts and minds. So, when he arrived, his job of rebuilding depended on that groundswell of support for him. But what he produced was one of the most inventive churches that Europe's ever seen. It was, and still is, a church of syncopation. So architecturally, of course, when you've got two elements and you're making them work in an overlapping way, much as musical syncopation has that, you know, rhythm, scraping rhythm to it, you're trying to do two different things and reconcile them. If you walk down the aisles of St. Hughes Cathedral, you're looking at not just one arcade set against the wall but an overlapping arcade of syncopation so that a column sits in the middle of an arch behind it and that layering is incredibly expensive and when the arcading comes to the end of a wall it squeezes itself in with small arches just to make up the gap and it looks like the masons are all making it up as they go along. It's beautifully built, it's expensive, but it makes you think that the patron said creativity is at the heart of this thing, make it up, you just see what you think fits. When you get to the vaults, for example, from the outside of the choir that arose after 1192, you can see that it was prepared in a fairly standard way: buttress, a bay with a window in, which, you know, can't take the support, buttress at the strong part and then a window again and on it repeats but when you get to the roof level the windows aren't where you expect them. Everything shifts around for an asymmetrical vault to go in at high level. Now what a risk that is I mean any architect wants forces to be reconciled and resolved right? Here the thing is, if you, let's say you've got your fingers together like that the vault is something like this, where that's a normal vault, but this is the Lincoln Vault. And on it goes like that. And like a split hairpin put back-to-back, it's incredible thing. And it was described in the early 13th century as being like the wings of a bird. It had that organic energy to it, a sense of movement to it, which is a really striking thing. A historian called Paul Frankl in the 20th century called it the 'crazy vault', because it was so unusual. He's no longer with us, the 'crazy vault' is, so I don't know who's crazy, but it's been there since, what, 800 years I suppose. So, it is a remarkable thing, but those two examples, the syncopated arcades, the syncopated vaulting, the whole spirit of this thing was the crucible for a very eccentric English approach to great church architecture. It really recast the mould, Lincoln.

Photograph Copyright by Mitchell Rocheleau 2025

Mitchell: So, do we believe that that the kind of offset vault and syncopated columns, was that planned or was that just a product of kind of, you know,  designing as you go? Do we know?

Jonathan: Well, all we've got is some mention of a designer called Geoffrey de Noiers for that part of the cathedral, but we know nothing about him. We don't know anything really about the instructions of the patron. So, was it designed? The vaults were certainly not designed in the first place because the elevations were changed to accompany them. The preparation of the buttressing on the outside is not for the present permutation of vaults. So, everything had to shift to make way for it. And it's probably that syncopation, I think, made the vault spread more widely so the windows could be larger in the top, letting more light in to what would otherwise be a dark space at the heart of the church. It could be something as pragmatic as that. That's how we'd normally explain it. But the fact is that the writers in the 13th century who wanted to present this building as a giant metaphor, a spiritual metaphor, thought that it had the wings of a bird. So, I'm going to say that there was a revision in the course of construction because ideas were rapidly changing. In fact, when it began in 1192, Hugh was just the present bishop. He was much respected, but he died halfway through construction. So, in 1200, he died and his apparently incorruptible body was brought up from London to Lincoln, working miracles as it went, so suddenly you've got a shrine church on your hands and therefore the language of metaphor and spirituality might well be quite different to how you imagined when you started.

Mitchell: Sure, sure. It's interesting to compare and contrast that maybe more experimental, natural way of building with the way that we do buildings design buildings in contemporary society, you know, very planned out structurally designed from the conception of I think there's let's say rare occurrences or when major changes during construction are implemented such as that you know what I'm imagining, but it there is something exciting about maybe that more naturalistic evolving, imaginative way of designing that is attractive to me, at least in a world where everything has to be so precise and planned out and rigid. So, I guess what I'm saying is it sounds fun and I'm kind of envious of that.

Jonathan: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. It feels to me a bit, this is going to sound slightly, slightly crazy, but it feels like the Rolling Stones might be halfway through making an album and then they come across a different musician and the last couple of tracks are different than they'd intended because the 60s was just such a big time of invention and you know so many influences coming in. I get that sense in the late 12th century in English architecture. Suddenly France has taken off with Gothic style. How much of that do we want? How much of old English character do we want? How much of Roman character do we want? They're putting it together in new ways here. Some of that feels very fresh and modern but what you’re looking for as an architect is a certain elegance and efficiency right? You don’t want to overengineer things, you want to create lightness and understand how materials behave and express that. Is that fair to say?

Mitchell: Mhmm.

Jonathan: I think that’s exactly what’s happening here. So, there's a certain modernity to it. If it were old fashioned in that period, it would be massive, over structured, like an aqueduct, you know, but it's not like that at all. It becomes skeletal as if the flesh is being taken off the body to understand how the bones and the limbs move and interact with each other. It's got that kind of sense of anatomy behind Lincoln Cathedral.

Mitchell: Yeah, it yeah, it kind of suggests that the builders, designers of the building were able to get outside of the rigidity of the formulaic way of doing architecture and make adjustments, make reflections, make modifications. And in that way, it is very modern. That's the premise of modern architecture is kind of escaping that historical pastiche.

Jonathan: Definitely and I think there are some historical circumstances behind that. At the end of the 12th century there was conflict in the air and where there's conflict the groups are trying hard to assert themselves and that can be quite a creative process. So that conflict you'll find in the King, Henry II, who fell responsible ultimately for the death of Thomas Beckett at Canterbury, the Archbishop who was struck down in 1170 by knights apparently sent on the command of Henry II or believing they were his instructions to kill Thomas Beckett as someone who dared defy the tyranny of Henry II and then Henry II had to pay penance for that. I mean the king as a murderer of an archbishop, it sent shockwaves across Europe.

So, you've got the English church now set against the tyranny of kingship, and then you've got the papacy as well and the level to which both kings and the bishops in England felt that they had to toe the line with Rome. So, this power play starts to create tensions, I think, which end up with expressions of “this is us, this is what we do,” which is different to you. And I think this idea of what makes an English church has another facet in the celebration of native saints at that point. So, everyone needed a shrine. Because of Beckett at Canterbury, pilgrimage started in a really big way. I mean, of course, Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales in the 14th century, made that a form of entertainment. But it began in the late 12th century and the money that poured in from pilgrimages made builders of churches realize that having a shrine was their fundamental fundraising strategy. So, the better a claim you had, the better of a saint then the grander the church would be. So, turning this bishop, Hugh, into a saint halfway through building, really made his rebuilding from 1192 the start of almost 100 years of constant redevelopment because the money kept pouring in.

Photograph Copyright by Mitchell Rocheleau 2025

Photograph Copyright by Mitchell Rocheleau 2025

Mitchell: Yeah, this is that really kind of goes full circle with your idea about music. And you've seen music trends, music, certain music being influenced by outside sources, economical, political, societal, whatever that may be. And just as that would happen in music, that's happening in architecture. The architecture is reflecting outside events. And in that way, it's a storybook unfolding. The architecture is a storybook telling us about what was happening, or giving us insight, maybe, about what was happening at that time. So, it's a beautiful way to think about it.

Jonathan: Absolutely agree. You can read buildings in the way that you read a book, that's absolutely for sure. And for the metaphor of music, Lincoln was a breakthrough album, you know, it's the first genre, you know, it's like Miles Davis and in the late fifties or something, it just changed everything.

Mitchell: Yeah, probably shook a lot of people upset a lot of people, but living on the edge.

Jonathan: Yeah, quite right. Yeah. And it did shake people as well. And it was supposed to shake people. So, when you approach the cathedral today, you see the doors that were inserted by a modestly titled bishop Alexander the Magnificent who arrives in the 1130s as a great builder. He's very well connected back to royalty, his family are wealthy as treasurers of the king, own several castles and this guy inserts the three entrance doors in the present cathedral and they're exquisite in their sculpture. They're magnificent. You see little characters climbing up the columns and they're naked. They're like Adam and Eve and they're clambering amongst beasts because they're going from this stripped state where mankind was expelled from paradise and they're climbing up to the light. And this is what the person entering the church must seek to do. You've got to get in there and find the light, I suppose. But above those doors, he had carved a great series of sculptures which goes from the expulsion of Adam and Eve. It's probably missing a few at the outset, the creation of Adam typically is the start. But there's the expulsion and the lot of humankind, and then biblical episodes of salvation like Noah's Ark, and Daniel in the lion's den being protected from you know, what would otherwise be voracious beasts. You know, he calms them through his spirituality and each of those episodes is to say that you can be saved. It's above your head, but what's below your eye line is this scrambling up to, up from scene of expulsion and having lost paradise. So, you are supposed to be given a polarized choice, you know, are you with us, or are you against us? And that sort of resonates through time, doesn't it, that particular message. But every way you look, this storybook that you describe is manifest in stone, both in inscriptions and sculptures. And to the medieval eye, which was very much used to seeing the world as an encyclopedia of interrelated symbols and forms, this building was entirely legible. And it remains so to this day because there's a surprising amount of early sculpture that's still in there that conveys big stories about mankind's fate.

Photograph Copyright by Mitchell Rocheleau 2025

Mitchell: Yeah, I love it that you can see or get a glimpse into maybe the human brain or psyche, their values, their thought processes through stone. I mean, that's just something kind of phenomenal to think about. And maybe at first intuition, not so apparent, but once you look a bit closer and you focus on it, it starts to become relatively clear.

Jonathan: You do know that the Da Vinci code was partly filmed inside the chapter house of Lincoln Cathedral?

Mitchell: Really, I didn't, I didn't, well, that turned out nicely.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, and I like that because the irony is that the cathedral is much more interesting than the book.

Mitchell: Yeah, yeah. Well, we've talked a little bit about the, you know, kind of cathedrals role in its later years, but I kind of want to return to talk about, it's maybe Roman roots. And we had discussed a little bit about how the cathedral had leveraged perhaps its Roman roots or its Roman origins. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jonathan: Yeah, so Lincoln was a grand Roman city. It was a place for retired legionnaires. So, think of it as like a holiday camp, a retirement camp up on a hill, a defensible place. The center of the city was the highest point in a 200-foot limestone scarf, which leads to a plateau. So, the plateau had a neatly laid out square city, and that in the second century was complemented with a suburb that came spilling down the hill toward the river at the bottom of the scarf. So, you have like a digital number eight, I suppose, as a city, the oldest part being on the top of the hill. And still today, when you walk around Lincoln, you can see relics of the north gate. There are still two arches of the gate that the Romans took to go north toward York. And the east gate has been excavated next to a 1960s hotel just to the north of the cathedral actually. And then the south gate, a couple of stones within the walls of shops on what's called Steep Hill, which must have really annoyed those retired legionnaires, probably with a bit of a hip issue after fighting for 30 years and they're scrambling up this very steep road into the south gate of the city. And then there's the Westgate, which is on the side of the castle, which was excavated. So, we know that the entrances all survive in part. And in the middle of the city, there's the remains of the wall of the Roman Basilica in striped stone and brickwork. It's about 16 feet high. It's called the Mint Wall. And Lincoln was one of the royal mints which produced coinage in the later Middle Ages. And then there are in people's basements the remains of Roman columns so it's an incredible remnant of a Roman city, largely survives so well because the stone on this plateau is golden Jurassic limestone, is as good a limestone as you'll get I guess it's like Indiana limestone in the US.

So this Roman city had a reputation and even before the cathedral was created, a church in that southern suburb arose in probably the 10th into the 11th century and it's called St. Mary Wigford and a stone is laid into the tower which was built by a Saxon architect called Ertig, and that stone is a Roman memorial stone, on which Ertig put a triangular top. He was playing with Roman forms, even in the 9th to 10th century, no doubt because he was witnessing what he saw in Lincoln as much more substantially Roman than we see it today. Now, if you arrive in 1072, as Remigius of Fecamp did on the orders of William I and said build a cathedral in this place, you have a long Roman history to it but you also have experience of Rome and the reason is that our man Remigius funded part of a ship for the Norman conquest and the Pope absolutely took umbrage at this and said you must come to Rome and faced charges of simony, of taking favours and money in return for what a military investment as a bishop, you know, what are you playing at? So the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Abbot of Bury St. Edmunds and Remigius, went down to Rome together to plead his case, and when he was in Rome he would have been able to see the Arch of Constantine, which is the grandest of all of the Roman imperial triumphal arches and what was believed in medieval England is that Constantine was born in England and there's a reasonable case for that because he was crowned in York that much as fact. I mean it turns out he wasn't born in England but that's what they believed you see and so if you think that Constantine the builder of the greatest triumphal arch was actually English and he was called English, called Our Constantine in that period, and you've seen his great arch in Rome as one of its major monuments, and you think Lincoln is filled with similar triple arches, the North Gate still has one of those, why not turn the West Front into a version of that Roman history? We also know that in 314 AD, way back, the earliest, earliest dawn of the Christian church becoming formalized, there was a council at Arles in France and three bishops were sent from England and one of them was from Lincoln. So, there was something in Lincoln in the late Roman era of a Christian identity. We don't know what that would have been like at this point. There was no cathedral as such, as we know them today. Christianity was an underground religion, of course, for a long time. But anyway, the point is this. It had a Roman history in Lincoln because it had an early bishop. It had a fairly intact walled Roman city. And we know the Anglo-Saxons recognized the power of that identity and architecture. So, when you turn up in 1072, that is your context. You are in a Roman setting.

Photograph Copyright by Mitchell Rocheleau 2025

Mitchell: Understood, yeah, so you honor that in a way, you refer to that, and just as if you were designing a new building, yeah, you look at your context and try to make it, let's say, respect or honor it and assimilate in some ways.

Jonathan: Yeah, I think so. Context counts for such a lot, doesn't it, in design, because you're looking for the way not to mimic but to contribute, right, to a pattern. Is that how you feel?

Mitchell: Yeah, yeah, I think so yeah to contributes a nice word to be sensitive to it to be aware of it and implement it not in a replication but in some sort of suggestion that there's an awareness that you're not designing out in outer space or this is not a something from the outside brought in and implemented forcefully into the landscape.

Jonathan: Yeah, we could go back onto that music reference, couldn't we, 'cause the way in which you bring influences together and create something new, whether it's music or cooking or literature, there's just, that's the way art evolves, isn't it? It's by strands doing something new together and synthesizing. And I think what Remigius did, taking those Roman influences, he synthesized his triple arched take on a triumphal entrance and this is now the triumph of God. He did that by building a church to the Virgin Mary where in that period the Virgin Mary was the patron saint of soldiers because if you think about her remaining a virgin then her body is incorrupted and the Holy Spirit enters her and Jesus Christ, she remains a virgin. That's the whole point of her. Now, if you think about her body as a kind of fortress, open only to God, then that's what this church is doing at the same time. And there's a lot of literature about this where if you think of castle chapels around Europe, you might think of Prague, places like Spain, Portchester down in Hampshire in England, Leicester, the churches and chapels that sit within castles are almost always to the Virgin Mary because in this age of militancy her body was synonymous with a fortress and she's often shown in medieval paintings as sitting within a crenellated walled paradise garden. So, the space she occupies is a perennial May with flowers growing around her, but actually no one gets in because the gates are otherwise shut. If you do want to get in, metaphorically, you've got to be a good Christian and then the gates will open and you spend your eternity in the presence of the Virgin, the Queen of Heaven. Well, that's what this church is doing. The doors open to the faithful and as a church of Mary, Lincoln resembles both a fortress and a kind of paradise. So, when you look up at the arches in Remigius's West Front, what's really striking is there is a slit like an arrow slit. They're much disputed. Some people will say “no that's where banners were laid or dropped down for ceremonial”, but then why doesn't every cathedral have them? Instead, I think they're arrow loops because he was afraid of people like Hereward coming to steal the gold. So, you take it upstairs there, you defend it, and Mary's on your side. So, she's the patron saint of soldiers, she provides the defense. It's a kind of spiritual fortress. I think that's what that West Front's doing. So, the syncopation in this case is taking a Roman form, but then putting it through the lens of Marian theology and identity and dedicating your church to the Virgin in a post-Roman sense, demands another lens, another take, another layer. And that's what makes it really fizzy and interesting, I think.

Mitchell: Yeah, with, let's call it the building typology of a cathedral, I think that typology is interesting because there was a formula, somewhat of a formula too and you see it being implemented all over Britain and Europe, but then you see these beautiful little nuances that are directly related to the local history, the vernacular materials, maybe all of these little nuances and changes that make it beautiful, make it unique, and in studying all of the cathedrals, you can pick out those nuances and that seems revealing to me about the local people there, which yeah, it's just it's learning of that. This was yes, a formulaic building type, but it very much embodies kind of the local history and uniqueness there. I'd love that, yeah character and depth behind it.

Photograph Copyright by Mitchell Rocheleau 2025

Jonathan: You can always spot a cathedral, can't you? In England, at least, the central tower is the big thing. It's right there. It's like this great pin in the middle of the structure, and although they are asymmetrical, the nave, the public west end, is always longer than where the action is with the altars at the east end. But that big central tower seems to be an anchor point in an asymmetrical composition and it works really well. In France, of course, the central towers hardly exist. It's the west towers that rise up in the west front and that triumph of the point of entrance with the big portals surrounded by sculpture. That's the theater of the French church. And so, yeah, there's definitely an amount of local identity. And then, I mean, gosh, you've been to Florence how many times?

Mitchell: Yes, many times. Are you mentioning the Duomo?

Jonathan: Yeah, exactly. And the duomo, of course, is something entirely different. Rather like Sienna, it is a domical form. And what have they got? They've got the pantheon in Rome not far away, and again, a different kind of game of influence. What's really remarkable about Lincoln is that in this medieval period, although the people in the towns can be expected to more or less stay within their locale. I mean, some of them are merchants, clearly. Some of them travel, some go on pilgrimage, but the bishops, I think, are constantly travelling. They travel to the royal court. They're very often schooled in European universities. Many of them came from Europe, like Remigius, France or Lanfranc of Canterbury. At the same period Lincoln first was built, Canterbury Cathedral was built by Lanfranc of Iosta in northern Italy. So, they came from around Europe and they travelled to councils and between courts and they're very cosmopolitan. And the chapter house in Lincoln was described in an early 13th century book called The Metrical Life of St. Hugh. It's basically an attempt to try and make Bishop Hugh a saint. And it describes the ten-sided chapter house with its vault on a shafted marble stem. And it compared it and it talked about, “has a roof that never Roman roof possessed.” And you have to unpick and think what do you mean Roman Roof? Are you talking about local Roman roofs? And then you realize there's a round structure. The Pantheon by this time was dedicated to St Mary. Once all the Roman gods, as its name implies, now it's a Christian church and dedicated to Mary. And so, these travelling bishops, if they went to a council in Rome, the Pantheon would be one of the churches that they would be aware of and will have visited, one of the marvels of the world, described in 12th century tourist books. It strikes me that the chapter house in its form is an evolution of the pantheon, and that's what they're describing in this early poem. So, in fact, there can be some surprisingly cosmopolitan takes on these buildings simply because the patrons were so well-travelled and were versed in Latin and of course they're able to talk to each other in a common language so there's a wonderful transference I think of influence who going on.

Mitchell: Yeah I think about our contemporary world now that transference is imagery on the internet you know and I think gosh that's, it's just sped up and kind of, it's overwhelming in a way. Whereas, you know, back at that time, it may have been a couple of different sources amalgamated. Now we're just inundated with so much imagery and it's almost too much. So, there's a little bit of romance about that old way of kind of honoring a source of inspiration or influence in a couple of buildings and then bringing it into your work.

Jonathan: I think so. There’s a paper written in 1942 by Richard Krautheimer. and he describes the character of medieval influence. And he says that in an age where they didn't have the photography that we do. I mean, gosh, Krautheimer, could hardly have imagined the internet and what you're used to working with as an architect. But he described the character of influence as being, for example, counting the number of columns in a building or measuring its absolute height or its length and that kind of competition it's about scale and geometry and pattern and that's the essential thing that you're copying and one of the examples of that are churches which are based on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as a centralized building and we have several of them in England and they're all of them round like that like the Holy Sepulchre. But no one's been to Jerusalem with a drawing book and drawn everything precisely. It's not very similitude. It's not copying like for like. It's taking the essential character and making a version of it. And that allows for a certain creativity, I think. I mean, the pressure's off. You know roughly what the reference points are, but then you make it your own. And that seems to be quite a liberating way of doing things. As you say today, we've got so much information, it's so precise, that we live, you know, you think of Vegas, an entire city based on copies of Venice and Paris. And, you know, it's kind of, it's inevitably inferior and quite boring when you copy things. But the joy is in interpreting, isn't it? And creating something new and slightly different.

Mitchell: Right. And I guess that's what that's what my fear is that with the inundation of all this imagery and information readily available, it kind of robs the creative act of some of its, you know, flow or ability to innovate, to produce new and more interesting results that you can't find on Instagram. So maybe I'm romanticizing it, but it just seems that..

Jonathan: Well, I don't know. Do you feel that when you look at Lincoln Cathedral and you can see that experiments are being made in real time? Are you envious of that creative freedom in the process of trial and error? Or if a patron said to you, you know, you’ve got a client and they say halfway through a building project. “Actually, can you give me an entirely new roof?” Would you pull your hair out? Where would you stand on that one?

Mitchell: I think I'd have a nervous breakdown if they did that during the middle of a middle of a project because it's so unfamiliar to me, you know, because this rigid, very planned out way of doing architecture has just been ingrained in the process. And I think it would, yeah, I think it would create all kinds of feelings inside me, but it would certainly make me grow as an architect.

Jonathan: The closest we had to a contract in the Middle Ages was at Glacier, the east end of York Minster. We're talking a little north of Lincoln at this point and the years around 1400, but a Glacier called John Thornton was given a contract to produce a tennis court sized window. I mean, a magnificent thing. But he was paid only if he stayed there for three years, you know, to see it through. And that's quite a contract.

Mitchell: Yeah, that's a contract.

Jonathan: Exactly. Otherwise, people are paid a day rate and you see ledgers with masons and carters and sculptors and so on. And they're paid a certain amount per day. And that's just the way it was done. So, if you change your mind, you didn't have to rip up the contract and start again and that whole legal basis really.

Mitchell: Well, I'd like to kind of round it out Jonathan and ask you how did the cathedral’s construction and existence positively contribute to the individuals and the community's development?

Jonathan: You know, I think the cathedrals existence was a positive and a negative contributor actually to Lincoln. I say negative because when it was first begun 166 houses were levelled on this plateau in the within the walls of the old Roman city to make way for this massive building site of both the castle already begun in 1067 and then the cathedral next door. I mean maybe we can blame the castle more for that you know, very totalitarian thing to do but people must have looked at the new cathedral thinking “well we didn't ask for that to be built.” It's right next to this castle which has destroyed our house, what must have been going through their minds, those were tough days. When you get into the completion of this cathedral, a couple of generations on, you know, people must have felt that it was theirs at that point, you know, this is our, this has been built with local stone and by local masons. This is not the importation of shiploads of Norman masons. It's new, it would have been in terms of an economy and the evolution of a skill set in the masonry trade. We wouldn't see nothing like it before or since. So, a lot of people would have been involved and engaged and contributed to building and you can't help but stand back and feel like you've done something quite extraordinary when the first cathedral was finished. So, it had to have had a positive economic effect. When pilgrims start to arrive there's the basis for trade, other churches develop around this burgeoning city. The pool at the bottom of the hill the cathedral sits on becomes a transportation thoroughfare and Lincoln is a well-connected and wealthy city. It has a royal house built on the road heading south toward London by a major intersection of the old Roman roads. It's now called St. Mary's Guildhall but there's a great 11th century building there. So, you can see the cathedral is part of this transformation of a city.

But one dark episode comes in the middle of the 13th century because Hugh's rebuilding after the earthquake was completed by this point. He was now accepted as a saint and installed at the east end of the new church. But there was a bishop called Grossteste, Robert Grosseteste, who comes in 1235. He's a great Oxford scientist, skilled in optics, has theories about, I mean, the Big Bang and so on, comes from his thoughts about the universe and its forces and shape, an extraordinary thinker. And he arrives at Bishop 1235, and he has a couple of programs and one of them is essentially anti -Jewish so he talks about how Jews stalled the fore coming of Christ and tried to obscure the truth as he saw it and his departure in the 1250s coincides with the murder of a boy also called Hugh in Lincoln and he was found in the bottom of a well and his pitiful body was dragged up and the Jewish community was blamed for that. And so, this is part of the growing antagonism attacks on Jewish communities in England at that time. They could lend money, Christians couldn't. There's no doubt a certain amount of jealousy over wealth but by 1290 the Jewish communities were entirely exiled from England. They didn't come back until the middle of the 17th century and Lincoln plays a part in that actually. So, there's a point where pilgrimage and the consolidation of a Christian identity creates a sense of otherness of communities and it actually fractures society. So, it's a mixed bag and these tides of history come and go and they will continue to do so.

But Lincoln's, there is a wonderful, wonderful consequence, I think, of Lincoln's existence. When it was in its full form, with its three spires on its towers, and the stained glass was still in place, and the figure of the Virgin would still be on the Mary altar and the altar to Christ was still in the nave and its screen was still there. All these things have been taken down and taken out by reformers since the 16th century but in about 1500 the entrance of the city itself was given something called a stone bow, Lincoln's stone bow, the gateway into the city. And if you walk up to the stone bow today, you see a figure of Gabriel in one of the turrets, and then Mary in another turret, and it's the Annunciation. You know, it's the good news, it's the arrival of Christ. And this gate, you just know, slammed shut, probably about 9pm, to keep the darkness and the evil out, and that the city was defined by what was within its walls. And Lincoln Central Tower has something called the Great Tom Bell, it's a very big base bell. And I know about this 'cause I did a BBC program where I was climbing up the tower and trying to deliver a piece to camera. And the thing was struck by a clapper and it's terrifying. It's like a train approaching, it's incredible. Now this bell rings out over the city and it was standing in front of the stone bow and I realized that the cathedral was actually a part of this infrastructure in the Middle Ages of defining the nature of a city and what is evil and outside and what is good and inside and these portals and gateways all play a part in that. It's not just the doors into the building itself. It's the city where the Virgin Mary is announced, and this idea of fortification and defense extends to the very walls of the city itself. Suddenly, you come to an understanding of what people lived with and how they felt protected in that city, but also, no doubt, energized and invigorated and nourished by the trade in pilgrimage that came along the old Roman roads or by the waterways and people made their way up the steep steps to the cathedral door. All of that I think is the lifeblood, it's like hemoglobin in the veins of the old city oxygenating everything and the cathedral would be the magnet, that's the pool. When its Spire was on the city, on the central tower rather, and that incredible height sitting on a 200 foot high limestone scarf, you've got something like 600 feet elevation to whatever was on the top of the old Spire, and that was apparently visible from about 40 miles away so you know that that’s the ultimate gift of the city, the cathedral and every writer that talks about it recognizes the majesty of that building and how visible it is from so far away and how it creates a beacon it's the ultimate gift I think for Lincoln is that the cathedral is always going to be its focus nothing will ever supersede it. London of course St. Paul's, dwarfed now by buildings of commerce. Lincoln, I suspect for centuries that that building will be unassailable.

Mitchell: Yeah, yeah, I can imagine the sense of safety, solace, identity that that building played within the city and to the people there. It reminds me of, Lewis Mumford wrote a bit about kind of enclosure in the walls of cities and specific buildings in cities and how the presence of maybe those walls or fortifications, they may have induced a bit of a sense of fear, but they also induced a sense of safety and which allowed people, individuals, to let their guard down a bit and begin to think about other things in their world outside of survival and you know you can imagine what types of thoughts and spaces that were created in their own minds to be able to be inventive, to think about different subjects, literature, whatever it may be so that some ways may have been a result of the usual.

Jonathan: It's had one really remarkable legacy and that is that the East End, which was built after 1256 to where all the money that came from pilgrimage, from the boy who was buried in there, and the old Bishop St. Hugh, all the money that poured in created the Angel Choir, probably the most expensive building in Europe per square foot at that time. Marble, double everything, massive eight light window, like a great flower, no doubt a metaphor for the Virgin Mary herself. But in the middle of this thing is a great sculptural cycle that tells about the expulsion of Adam and Eve and then the triumph of the Virgin and Christ as redeemers. And in the middle of that whole cycle is a little imp and he's the most charming charismatic bit of sculpture. He's a little horned character. Two horns coming up and you can see feathers on his body and little hooves and he sits there with his legs folded looking down on pilgrims as if to say “Is that all the money you've got? Come on you better leave some more because I might yet tempt you.” And this little devil character, the Lincoln Imp, gosh you see replicas of him everywhere, Lincoln Cathedral's gift shop will be full of them now, but he's even adopted by the local county council, you know, the authority responsible for the town's improvements and management. And it's the only council I know that has a symbol of evil as its logo. And that's the power of charisma, of the little Lincoln Imp. And he's only about what, that high, something like that. He's a tiny character. But boy, does the devil speak loud.

Photograph by Jonathan Foyle

Mitchell: I'm going to get one of those and put it outside my son's room.

Jonathan: The message may filter.

Mitchell: Yeah. Well, thanks so much, Jonathan. The conversation was enlightening. And I definitely learned a lot. And thank you for bestowing the knowledge about the Cathedral onto us. And I really appreciate you taking the time.

Jonathan: No, it's a pleasure. And really nice to get to know you and hear about your creative process too.

Mitchell: Right, right. Well, thanks so much, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Pleasure. Bye for now.