Gone Medieval - Ely Cathedral: 700 Years Since Disaster

Episode Date: February 5, 2022

During the early hours of February 13 1322, disaster struck at the vast cathedral on the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire, known now as the Ship of the Fens. At around three or four in the morning, the building's huge central tower collapsed with a mighty crash, falling where the monks had only recently been celebrating mass.As this year marks the 700th anniversary of the disaster–and it's the reason for the unusual replacement tower seen at Ely today–for this episode, Matt sits down with art and architectural historian Dr James Alexander Cameron to find out more about the night disaster struck at one of Britain's best-loved cathedrals.Don’t forget to leave us a rating and review while you're here!For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to the Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. During the early hours of the 13th of February 1322, disaster struck at the vast cathedral on the Isle of Ely, known now as the ship of the Fens. Around 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning, with a mighty crash, the huge central tower collapsed, falling, where the monks had only recently been celebrating matins.

Whether they left because of the concern caused by some noise or it just so happened that they'd finished and left just before it happened is uncertain, but fortunately no one was hurt. As this year sees the 700th anniversary of this event and it's the reason for the unusual replacement that we can see at Ely Cathedral today, I'm delighted to be joined to explore this further by art and architectural historian Dr James Cameron. Thank you very much for you. for joining us, James. What do we know about the earliest origins of Ely Cathedral?

Ely Cathedral was at first, just a monastery, and it was founded in 673, so middle of the 7th century, by a daughter of the King of East Anglia, Ethel Dreda. She was that very common thing that you get in medieval saints, that she's that impeccable virgin queen like the Virgin Mary, who also has miracles where she's miraculously percund. She, through all her suitors, she insisted that she remain a virgin. And then when one insisted that he wanted to consummate it in the normal manner, she ran off to a monastery, all the way up actually, Caldingham Priory, which is on the Scottish borders.

And when her suitor chased her and so forth, there were a number of miracles that made sure that she wasn't caught. And eventually she returned to the Isle of Ely, which was included in one of her dowries before. So she had it as her property, and obviously this is the thing these marriages were always actually political to increase territory in the English kingdoms, and established her own monastery, and at that time it would have been co, both monks and nuns. And it clearly was an important institution. It's mentioned by Bede at the beginning of the 8th century. It's not just the legends that are preserved in the cathedral itself. But it almost certainly would have been abandoned in the early 870s

due to the invasion of the Great Heathen army, which absolutely completely smashed the kingdom of East Anglia, really, and reduced the English kingdoms just down to Wesset. It wasn't until about 970 that it was decolonized, as a Benedictine monastery, so this time just male. And as part of this Benedictine reform and the Kingdom of Wessex expanding really properly as the Kingdom of England and having these religious institutions in order to strengthen up their power and so forth. So I guess that early connection to a royal lady who also becomes a saint is an important feature. Does that help to propel

Ely to some degree of importance that it might not otherwise have had? Well, the thing about these things is the reason that there's an important saint there is because it's an important site in the first place. The Isle of Ely is on the edge of the fence, a massive coastal plain that is basically it's a basin that would have been before humans started draining it. Well, they started draining it as early as the Romans, really, basically like a vast swamp. And the Isle of Ely itself is a geological deposit of sand on top of the clay basin. It's a natural defensive point at the edge of a threshold, really. And this makes it a very strategic site. It's why the Kingdom of East Anglia wanted it.

It's why the 10th century kings of England want it. And it's why the Normans are also interested in keeping it. I mean, it's used as some – it's also defensive, like against the Dane law and stuff when the Normans are establishing their kingdom. So it's kind of both ways, really. I mean, that's why she chose it in the first place. And do we know anything about the early church that was there, the location, the size, the design? I mean, I'm guessing it's not exactly where the cathedral is now.

Yeah, we have no idea really exactly where the original site was, and it may have not been a particularly complex building. And it would have been, rather than the, you know, cloisters and stuff that we have in the later Middle Ages, it's more like what you are might be familiar with Irish monasticism, where you have kind of more spread out individual huts and little churches and so forth. and they may have been timber structures or just very simple rubble walling and so forth. One of the things that will see is it's very hard, even in the 10th century, to build a decent masonry church because there's no good stone around in that part of Cambertshire. I mean, you've got limestone clunch, which is really not a very good building stone. It's okay for sculpture, but actually for solid building stone, it's not until the Normans come

along. And when they rebuild the Abbey Church on an absolutely vast scale, they're using William the Conqueror's stone from his own quarries at Kahn in Normandy. And it might seem a bit strange that they come all the way to England and they insist on using their own stone from Normandy, but it's always easier to move stone by water than it is by land. Once you've got it on the boat, and because they can just basically cut it out of the cliffs and put it straight onto the boat across the English Channel and up to England, you know, it's much, much cheaper than moving it by land. So that's why it probably takes a while until there's a really big church at Ely's until the Normans come along. And I think, as you mentioned, Ely's location in the Fens made it

quite a desirable and defensible place. Do we get any sense still of that kind of isolation of the place, or has draining it really changed the landscape beyond what they would have recognised in the medieval period? It definitely has changed beyond recognises. but you still get an idea when you come up from Cambridge, particularly by car, you go through like lots of little villages and suburbs and so forth. And then you get to Ely and Ely's pretty normal sort of market town with its waitros and stuff. And then you go off and that you get less and less settlements. There's a place called Littleport. And then all the way up to Whiz Beach, there's like absolutely nothing.

It's still, it's all much more drained, but they're all like raised roads and big pits. And you really do get an idea what it would have been like. when it was just essentially like swamp land. Littleport actually is where the Great Oos would have come nearest to Ely and where they would have brought the stone for the cathedral down from. The river Great Oos now, though, is totally calenised, so it's in a canal off its original course. So while it's changed a lot, and they were draining the fens in the Middle Ages as well,

one of the things is if you're willing to put the investment into draining fens, you get very good agricultural land underneath. And that's one of the reasons why Ely, first of the east, Abbey and then the cathedral was actually, despite the fact that as a cathedral, it was a very small diocese, it was actually quite a wealthy diocese because of all this very good land it had and its estates just to the north and the Thames. And they weren't the only Fendland Abbey as well. There was also Crowland, Peterborough, Ramsey and Thornie. Some of them have quite large surviving churches like Peterborough, which is now the cathedral. But Ely rose to supremacy when it became a cathedral

under the Normans in 1109. I think I come in contact with Ely Cathedral in my kind of research and writing and things as a real centre for rebellion because those marshes were so impenetrable, you get characters like Herrwood and Nigel, the Bishop of Ely, during the anarchy and people like this

are camping out at Ely because it's so hard to get to once you're in there, you kind of can't get out. And I guess that makes it an important place for the government to control and also a hotbed for rebels to head there because it's an easy place to hold. So does that add to its importance a little bit? Well, definitely, and they actually do fortify the Isle as well.

And people like Nigel really do show how it's an important secular institution as well as a religious one. I mean, Nigel of Ely, like a lot of bishops in the 12th, early 14th century, was Chancellor and so forth and worked very closely with the King. And historians know loads about Nigel, but art historians just think of, oh, he's got that polished marble limestone slab in the choir with St Michael holding up his napkin. And that's all we think about him because, you know, he wasn't, he was never there. The monks really hated him actually because he sold off loads of their relics and stuff to pay off the debts. But it shows you how, you know, was important for the strategically for the Normans to put a new cathedral there because it was such a strategic place.

And so then how does the church at Ely begin to develop? It becomes a diocese at some point. it becomes a cathedral at some point. And as you mentioned before, the Normans are building this kind of huge building on the Isle of Ely. Why are they so keen to have this huge structure there? Well, I mean, it's part of a huge rebuilding campaign, or should we say rather, because the thing is it's not really a campaign. It's just that a lot of these Norman bishops, as soon as they get into office,

they want to build a church that is on the scale of the things that the Normans have been building back in Normandy in the 1050s and so forth. And they're able to use the conquerors quarries to build these massive buildings that make important statements that are worthy of the size of what is bordering on being an empire at some point. So what usually marks the beginning of the building of most English cathedrals on a great scale is the appointment of the first Norman Abbott, because unlike landowners, the conqueror didn't just throw out incumbent English people. people for his friends who helped him and put money into his conquest. They tend to wait for prelates, that is, abbots or bishops, to die first in office before they replace them

with someone from the Norman court. So in 1081, 2, there's the appointment of Abbott Simeon to Ely. He was previously prior of Winchester Cathedral. That means he was head of the religious community at Winchester Cathedral, and his brother was bishop. So it's interesting. that they're putting in somebody from a monastic cathedral into Ely, and as if they have the plan right from the beginning to turn it into a cathedral. And they do start building on a very, very large scale at Ely, very much on the manner of Winchester Cathedral, which obviously Simeon would have known, that was begun in 1079, and has a enormously long East Arm, so that's where the high altar is and so forth, six days long, when the...

At this time, a lot of churches just have like one bay and then a little lapse at the end. And double-isle transeps, so that means you've got the cross-arms of the church that have aisles on both the east end and the west end. And one of the problems we have, though, is that when Abbott Simeon dies, and he's quite an old man when he's appointed, it's supposed to be 80 when he's appointed and then die at around 90. That might be an exaggeration, but also it's probably not that much of an exaggeration. there's an interregnum for about two decades. It's very difficult to convince the monks to take a replacement abbot that the court prove of. And therefore, there's one corner of the crossing that's left unfinished.

If you look in the church, if you stand in the north transept, if you look at the east side, it's got much stouter and simpler early Norman columns that were probably built in the 1080s. And then if you look on the west side, so that's towards the entrance, They're much more scalloped and sculptural capitals that are more like what's happened at Durham Cathedral by 1100. So this is a problem is that the northwest corner of the crossing seems to have been built about a generation or so later than the rest of the crossing. Now this leads to differential settlements being hard-coded into the tower. Now that maybe, we'll come back to that later actually, why that's so important for what we'll be talking about later.

And were the Normans building a lot of these big towers over the crossings of churches? Was that a new thing in England? Was there a reason that they were looking to pursue that? No, it is interesting because it wasn't normal to put a tower in the middle of your building. I mean, when you put it like that, it does sound a particularly risky business, particularly that, remember, this is, as we know from the introduction, the choir. This is where the community of monks are gathering for their divine office. That's eight services every single day of their lives.

Matanz for like two hours in the middle of the night. Go back to bed, get up in the morning. Then you've got lords, and then service every three hours, and then vespers and compline. Well, that's up to about six hours every single day. So the idea of putting a tower over there might seem a little bit risky. But they were very keen to make this statement, exactly why the Normans in the 1050s at churches such as Jumiege Abbey in Normandy are keen to do it. It's difficult to see why, but they'd certainly bring it over to

England. And pretty much every cathedral-scale church that they build in the late 11th century and into the 12th century has these crossing towers. But the fact that they're so innovative actually leads to a lot of problems. The big one actually is Winchester Cathedral. So this is the one that Simeon's been at, and he's probably building Ely Cathedral after it. This was begun in 1079, and the crossing tower collapsed in 1107, which is a remarkably short lifespan. And if you go to Winchester, now you can see again that the style of the crossing is slightly different to the style of the transects because it's rebuilt a generation later. But then it goes on. There's the now lost abbey of Evesham. The tower collapses about 1204. In Lincoln,

the tower collapses while they're building it in 1237 to 8, and that probably actually makes them rebuild more of the church than the intended to, and so forth on and on. It takes them a while to work out how to do it. And this is the thing is that cathedrals take a long time to build not just because of the man hours. It's because it's very important to let each stage of the work settle before you build the next stage of the work on top of it. Because if you don't, you're going to have the differential settlement that kind of causes upper problems in the upper stages that just multiply.

I'm imagining lots of very nervous monks sitting under these towers for six or seven hours a day, celebrating their services, wondering if they're in any kind of danger. Was there an effort to always build these cathedrals to be the biggest, the best, the tallest? Was Ely an expression of that kind of idea we're going to have the biggest cathedral here or the tallest tower? I think there's a little bit of competition, but there's also actually building things to the size of a prototype. A lot of, in the 11th century, so after the year 1000, which kind of has a sort of celebratory thing that, oh, we've got to 1,000 and nothing's happened, that they do start building with a new scale of ambition, but also because economies are starting to become more centralised and states are becoming more stable, that you're actually able to build on the scale of imperial Rome. So you have states like the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, building things like Spier Cathedral, the maritime supremacy state of Pisa building their cathedral, which you'll know has the tower next to it. And that's an interesting point about why you don't build towers in the centre of your building, because if Pisa's Campanila had been built inside it, I don't think it would have survived as well.

But these churches are all built to the length of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, which was constructed in the 320s by Emperor Constantine. And, well, everybody went to Rome. everybody, all these prelates and stuff have always been to councils in Rome, been to papal audiences and so forth. So Rome is kind of a contact point for all of Western Europe. And all St. Peter's Basilica, which is now totally replaced by St. Peter's Basilica on Vatican Hill, it was replaced by that in the 16th and 17th century. They were really imitating the length of that, because this is the first time that they're able to build on that sort of scale and have that sort of institutional organisation to manage that sort of build.

But yes, there is also about building higher as well. And Ely's West Tower, which is actually the one that you kind of see from the Fens, it's much taller, it's over 60 metres tall. And when that was capped out probably in about the 1190s and then got a spire on top of it in the 1230s or so forth, that would have been one of the tallest spires in England and certainly in Europe as well. Now it has a little masonry lantern on top of it. But I think sometimes people often get that mixed up with the octagon because you see it from far away, then you don't notice it as much when you're inside.

There was an effort to make it the tallest, and it probably would have competed with the tallest buildings around Europe at the time. Yes, yeah, I didn't. Hello, I'm James Rogers, and over on the history hit warfare podcast, I bring you cutting-edge military histories from around the world. Why was Sitting Bull such a remarkable leader? What was Napoleon's greatest ever battle? How did the Cuban Missile Crisis almost turn the Cold War high? and who dropped the world's largest nuclear bomb on the Arctic. Through interviews with world-leading historians, policy experts,

and the veterans who served, we find the answers to these questions and so much more. So come and join us on the history hit warfare podcast, where we're on the front lines of military history. So the collapse that we're talking about 700 years ago this year in 1322, was there other building work going on at the cathedral at the time? that might have caused this? Well, there was an interesting series of events, really,

to put it in context about what was going on and how Ely Cathedral was actually placed to cope with this. So the last bit of major building work that they'd done was extending the East Arm by four bays for the shine of St. Ethelreder to make it more accessible for pilgrims, but also to give it a much more lavish architectural space. And that was finished around 1252. Then we go forward and we're on Lady Day in 1321, so the calendar year before, the 28th of March,

the foundations were laid to the north side of the church for a new Lady Chapel. And the guy who laid the foundation stone is someone who's quite important in the story. This is Alan of Walsingham, who I will call Alan from now, because I just think he's called Alan. It's a very normal name. You have to give him his full title. Do not go as far as calling him now yet. And this was probably a rubber stamp, you know, really getting this important project of the Lady Chapel, this very important symbolic project of the Lady Chapel into the calendar. Once you've got that foundation stone set, then, you know, it's going to happen.

We're going to do it. And also the actual size of the Lady Chapel, its shape is important in itself symbolically. It's a double square, which is the description of the size of the House of Solomon in the Old Testament, which is. It's very interesting how it's bound up with actually Alan's Toponym, Walsingham. Walsingham Priory, which people will know from as the pilgrimage place, there was this construction of a vision that had been had of the Holy House in Nazareth. And this was probably connected to the actual Holy House that was in Nazareth Cathedral after it was built after the Crusades. And this was also in a purpose-built Gothic shrine building on the north side of Walsingham Priory Church. So, Alan, this was clearly a pet project of his. And then Alan, probably very pleased that he got this idea into the cathedral's to-do list. In December 1321, he becomes a sacristan, which means that he's kind of in charge of the purchasing power of the cathedral.

He's in charge of the sacristy and all the copes and liturgical bits and bobs and so forth. But also importantly, the building fabric. So we have to remember that a couple of months later, on February 13th, it was actually his fault that the tower fell down. So here he is. He's now faced with this massive problem that they've not looked after the crossing tower well enough. And now they're going to have to spend an awful lot of money trying to undo the problem. And they're certainly going to put the Lady Chapel thing on the back burner until it's sorted out. And I think that while Alan was not a gentleman architect like his Wikipedia article says,

he clearly needs to bring in masons and designers to do it for him. He was very likely trained as a goldsmith, which is certainly like an arts degree, that goldsmiths were very respected for their craft. So he's an artie fellow. He's got lots of ideas. And I think that he needs to make a statement with the Octagon project that isn't just rebuilding what was there before because he doesn't want to go down as the, guy where the tower fell down on his watch and cost them loads of money. He wants to like make

something good out of it. It's not what you want two months into a new job. Is it? You're suddenly responsible for these buildings and two months later part of it falls down and everyone's looking at you saying, well, why didn't you look after that, Alan? It's my first day. So what, if we turn to that night then on the 13th of February 13, 32, what sources do we have for what happened and what do they say was the sequence of events on that night? Well, we have two basically, and the one we usually get is originally from a local chronicle, so it was probably written certainly in the same year that it happened, and that is that the monks were together in the choir, they hear something is wrong, so they left, and then

the tower collapsed. There is then the sign that there's a warning sign, but there's no acknowledgement really that they knew in the long term that anything was wrong before it. The more interesting source is actually what would have been an internal Abbey Chronicle written in the 1360s. And I'll say that Alan dies around 1364, so he may have written this himself with the permission. And this one differs slightly in that the monks were not in the choir saying matanz. They'd moved to the west block, so that's by the West Tower, which also actually isn't the most stable thing, but never mind. And they were saying Matins there because they knew something was wrong with the tower in the first place. And then it goes into this story about how Alan himself first feels despair, but then has this

heroic rush to make sure that all the debris is cleared and the foundations repaired and eight great columns raised around crossing and so forth. And it's very much a narrative of his heroic defeat of this disaster, really, and his triumph over it. So while actually people tend to prefer the earlier source, I mean, that is just written by a look. local chronicler, and local people aren't necessarily knowing that much that's going on in the abbey at the time. They'll want to know what's happened. I mean, you can see the north side of the church from the town, but the rest of the place would be an inaccessible precinct, remember. It's a Benedictine monastery. People can't just go in these churches, and while they do

have access to the name and so forth, they tends to not really know what's going on within the months. The 1361, even though it's written years later, it's still been approved by the community at large and Alan's probably been able to write about himself. So I think that's actually more accurate, to be honest. But remember, nobody would have seen the tower collapse because it collapsed in the middle of the night. And I looked and there wasn't a moon that night. So no one would be able to see it come down. So you wouldn't be able to see exactly how it collapsed.

Do we know how much damage it did to the church when it came down? Did it sort of just collapse in on itself or did it cause damage to the rest of the fabric of the building as well? Yeah, that's a. It's always a really interesting question to think about how exactly these buildings come down. So the problem is with Ely, because they cut off the corners and completely demolish the piers, we can't really be sure exactly how much it destroyed. But it does seem that it collapsed eastwards because the four bays of the 1080s Presbytery were totally rebuilt. Well, one's chopped off by the octagon, and then the other three were totally rebuilt in 14th century style.

So it is actually a bit of a shame for that we don't have the earliest part of the Romanesque building because of the tower collapse. There's a tiny little sliver of it between 13th century East End and the new bays, but otherwise the whole elevation was replaced. But the thing is that towers don't collapse like Del Boy falling through the bar. They tend to have a failure, and then part of the load is basically completely off centre, and it falls a little bit, but then it just comes. straight down. And one of the best ways if you want to see what it probably looked like in the crossing after the tower had collapsed and the dust had settled, if you look at the pictures of Chichester Cathedral in 1861, where the medieval crossing tower collapsed, actually this happened about one o'clock, and then was subsequently totally rebuilt by Gilbert Scott.

But if you look at the pictures, like the two west piers this way, because the descriptions of people who saw it. A lot of people saw it from the train actually is that the masonry spire on top tilted to the southwest and then the whole thing just came down like a telescope. And the west peers were obliterated and the east piers kind of have big chumps taken out of them. So I think you should think here that they could at Ely and certainly if Ely's tower had collapsed in the 19th century, build it back exactly as it was. The idea of doing the octagon and so forth was a choice and it was, they were making certain statements with it. There's this Alan's big moment.

He's in charge of this building that's now fallen down. He's presumably lost his Lady Chapel project if there's going to be some big expensive building work inside the cathedral. So as you say, what they build back is an octagonal tower. So was that a conscious decision to make a really big statement? Was there an artistic reason for doing that, a structural reason for doing that? Or was it just something Alan like the look of?

Well, there's a lot goes in. into the idea of the octagon. So obviously, the Lady Chapel project is put on the back burner, and probably the masons that they'd intended to work on that were now working, certainly working on the octagon. So remember that a monastic cathedral, in fact, all cathedrals actually have two institutions. You've got the office of the bishop and the office of the monks or the secular canons in normal European cathedrals. But half of English cathedrals are weird, and that they're run by monks rather than cannons. And it was decided that the bishop, Bishop Hotton,

would pay for the three bays of the Presbytery, and that the monks would pay for the octagon. Because remember, it is their space, because it's where their choir is, it's where they're spending most of the time. So the actual construction of the octagon, it's actually useful if you have an idea exactly what it is. So they cut off the corners of the crossing

and build up against them big, tall walls, with windows above. And then when you look up above you in the octagon, everything you're seeing there is painted timber. There's no stone vaulting above. It's supposed to look like stone, but it's not. So when what you've got inside is you've got the inner skin that you can see from the floor,

and then obviously a separate roof on top. And then right in the centre of the whole octagon shape itself is a lantern. The bottom half of the lantern is within the roof face of the construction itself. If you go up into the octagon, which you can do on tours, you can open windows in that lower part of the lantern and look down onto the floor below. And then that same lantern shape in the middle

continues up with a lantern on the top. So once you get the idea of it, it's a fairly straightforward structure. But it's certainly not a structural thing. It's basically just a very fancy roof over a very big space. So I think this was Alan making a kind of design choice, that he didn't want to just build back a square tower, he was going to go for something a little bit different, maybe to make Ely stand out?

Yes. The reason, though, is that there is having a centrally planned space like that is becoming quite pop-oo in England with chapter houses. One of the closest buildings actually to Ely's Optigan is the chapter house at York Cathedral, which was probably built in the 1280s. And that is a massive central space with no central support. port, so it's just got a great big ceiling above it. And that ceiling looks like stone, but it's actually timber, and it's partly held up by its own root structure. So it's quite a clever bit

of carpentry. But the symbolism of the octagon itself goes surprisingly a field. So we've said that medieval people were often looking to imperial Rome for prototypes. Centurally planned buildings are quite common in the Roman world, so mausolea and so forth, which was used for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem that was also built in the early 4th century under Constantine. However, it's the Ethel Drida thing that makes quite a surprising connection. So remember that St. Etheldreda is a virgin princess, and there are actually, at the angles of the octagon, sculptures of her life. Actually, very nice 1320 sculptures. And so we're evoking this idea of this as being almost like a tribute really to her and her virgin status.

And one of the most famous churches of the Virgin back then was Santa Maria Rotonda, which we now know as the pantheon. It had been Christianised and it was used as a model because it was such a spectacular structure for a surprising amount of buildings such as Speer Cathedral as I've noticed, as I've mentioned. And the actual internal height of the pantheon, 43 metres, is exactly the same as that of Pantheon's dome. And it's got that Oculus in the middle, which also alludes in a sort of medieval copy way to that structure. And the principles of the construction of the Eleopteryon is like a double dome, such as at the baptistery at Florence, which was also definitely in the late 11th or about 1,100 built. as an allusion to the pantheon. So you've got what is almost like a pantheon to Ethelreda inside a Roman-scaled building. And as I say that given the initial imperial Roman size of the church, you know, this illusion actually starts to make sense when you look at it. And there are

plenty of times that they're using proportions in the medieval world as copies. Most notably, for instance, the round churches that the Templars like are all based on measurements of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Jerusalem. So I guess the last question then is, did Alan and his brothers do a good job? The octagonal tower is still standing today. We can still go and see it and stand in the middle of it without too much fear. But has it been at any danger at any point, or did Alan do a good job? It's an interesting point, really, that a lot of people tend to say, oh, it's a medieval marvel and we could never do anything like that today. Well, actually, the principles it was originally constructed on, even though that they got in the Royal Carpenter, William Hurley,

to do the job, is that the principles that it's built on are essentially those of masonry construction, is that the main structural supports of the octagon, they're actually some of the ribs that you can see from the ground, are actually built on a curved arch, which is good because it transmits the load effectively. However, with timber, it's not about the load with masonry. The timber structure you're actually aiming more for internal stability. So when the cathedral was being restored in the later 18th century, when James Essex, a cathedral restorer and architect, came to repair the octagon because there were structural problems with it, it was more than just replacing rotten timbers. It was actually found to be structurally not brilliant. And he put in two

more internal diagonal supports that make sure that the internal structure of the octagon was much more secure than it was originally. I mean, it is unusual why they're using masonry principles for a timber structure, but we have to remember that like the towers, these were very innovative structures and they were building them as best they could, really. And we should think that even now when we think we have all our computer aid in design and so forth, and we think we know exactly how everything works. We still don't understand the principles of how structures stay up. But you have to remember that every model really is wrong. It's just how wrong it is. So we shouldn't really, while they were wrong, we're also often wrong about how medieval structures and masonry structures

work as well. So I think we can say overall they did a very good job. I guess we need maybe to stop thinking about some of these structures as being a collapse and a rebuild and that's a full stop. they're organic, they're forever being slightly altered and preserved and changed and reinforced to make sure that we can still look at them today. That's great, James. Thank you so much for sharing that. So 700 years ago this year, the central tower at Ely Cathedral collapsed and we can go and stand under Alan of Walsingham's octagonal replacement for that today, albeit with some

18th century shoring up to make sure that we're safe to stand there. Next time you're at Ely Cathedral then, why not take a look at that octagonal tower and think for a moment what it must have been like for those monks to have a narrow escape 700 years ago. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts and tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you have a moment, please drop us a review or rate us anywhere you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify.

It really does help new listeners to find the podcast. If you're enjoying this podcast and looking for a bit more. medieval goodness in your life, then subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just follow the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.