Bristol Cathedral
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Thursday 24 March 2022
(1.15pm for 1.30pm start - meet inside West Door) - Leader: John McNeill
The former Victorine Priory of St Augustine at Bristol was one of six monasteries saved from demolition by having been granted cathedral status by Henry VIII in 1542, hence the survival of several twelfth-century monastic buildings in addition to the eastern parts of the medieval church. Famously praised by Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘the most important, and at the same time architecturally the most brilliant building of the period about 1300 in the whole of Europe’, Bristol’s nave seems to have been demolished in the early sixteenth century, not to be replaced until George Edmund Street built the present nave between 1867 and 1877. But of the medieval church much survives in addition to the epoch-making choir of c.1300 – the remarkable pair of monastic gatehouses, chapter-house and east cloister walk, the transepts and night-stair, the early-thirteenth-century Elder Lady Chapel, Abbot Elyot’s superb early-sixteenth-century choir stalls and the famous suite of Berkeley tombs and effigies.
Leader
John McNeill is an architectural historian. He took degrees in art history at the University of East Anglia and Courtauld Institute, and went on to specialise in medieval architectural history, lecturing at Camberwell School of Art, London University’s Extra-Mural department, Birkbeck College and the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. He lectures regularly to the Society and leads tours for Martin Randall Travel. He was appointed Secretary of the British Archaeological Association in 2000, for whom he also subsequently convened and edited conferences on Medieval Anjou, cloisters, medieval chantries, and King’s Lynn and the Fens. He founded the BAA’s biennial series of International Conferences on Romanesque, and is both a member of its steering committee and a co-editor of its transactions. His most recent effort in this field, Romanesque and the Year 1000 is due to be published at the end of 2024. Besides the BAA Conference Transactions, John has published numerous articles and is author of the Blue Guides to both Normandy and the Loire Valley. He is a Vice-President of the London Art History Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
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