The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
St Peter, St Paul and St Andrew (now)
Cathedral, formerly Benedictine monastery
The first abbey on the site dated from c.655 and was destroyed by the Danes at the end of the 9c. It was rebuilt by Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, and consecrated in 972. Aethelwold’s abbey was damaged by a fire in 1116 and, according to the contemporary chronicler Hugh Candidus, completely rebuilt from 1118, the present church being consecrated in 1238 by Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln.
The church is therefore a generation later than the first wave of post-Conquest great churches, including the other East Anglian foundations of Ely (begun 1082) and Norwich (1096). The church consists of an aisled chancel, transepts with eastern aisles for chapels and an aisled nave with a west transept. It is described from east to west in more detail below.
Chancel and New Building
The aisled chancel originally had apses at the ends of the main vessel and aisles. The main apse is still there; it is stilted in plan, i.e. it consists of a straight-sided bay and 3 turning bays. On the interior the apse arch responds survive to the level of the capitals, but the arch itself, and the rib-vaulting of the apse itself (indicated by the vault shafts) are gone. As for the elevation, the arches of the two upper storeys survive on the interior, but on the exterior the top level window openings are 12thc and those below have been reframed. The exterior elevation also has blind arcading between the clerestorey and gallery levels of the apse.The 12thc apse is now enclosed by the so-called New Building; a square-ended eastern termination five bays wide, entered from the chancel aisles. When the abbey was suppressed it contained three altars with scenes of the Passion. The New Building was begun by Abbot Ashton in 1438 and completed by Abbot Kirton (1496-1528), and the transition from the narrow Norman aisle into the bright, fan-vaulted space beyond is one of the delights of a visit to Peterborough.
The four-bay chancel is three storeys high, with a main arcade carried on three piers of different plans, cylindrical, octagonal and dodecagonal, and triple shafted responds at either end, against the crossing pier and the pier of the apse arch. The gallery above has double openings with decorated and pierced tympana under an enclosing arch, and the clerestorey has a passage with triple openings, a tall central arch flanked by lower ones. Vault shafts run up the piers to the level of the springing of the central clerestorey arches, where they support a wooden fan-vaulted 15c ceiling. The chancel aisles are divided by depressed arches into quadripartite rib-vaulted bays. The transverse arches fall onto the main arcade pier capitals and onto responds against the aisle wall. One of the 12c aisle windows remains in the north aisle, as do parts of the intersecting arcading decorating the aisle walls.
On the exterior there are turrets with spirelets above the piers of the apse arch. The aisle walls have 12c buttresses with angle shafts between the bays, and these have been strengthened by the addition of later medieval buttresses at the lower levels. All the chancel aisle and gallery windows have been replaced, except for one in the north aisle. The clerestorey windows retain their 12c form, except for those in the turning bays of the apse, which have been replaced with larger segmental headed windows. All windows are now filled with tracery; panelled in the chancel clerestorey and aisles, and at all levels in the apse, and flowing in the chancel galleries. The apse is decorated with intersecting blind arcading in a band below the top windows, and there is evidence on the north side of more arcading that originally decorated the aisle walls below the gallery windows. The aisle walls have chevron stringcourses between the storeys. The tops of the clerestorey walls of the chancel and apse have been rebuilt; the chancel with a plain nebuly corbel table and a parapet decorated with quatrefoils, and the apse with a similar corbel table and a plain parapet decorated with five 13c busts in trefoils.
The main transepts are of 3 projecting bays with chapels on the E side and no aisle on the W. The position of the cloister square, one bay W of the S transept W wall, indicates that an aisle was originally envisaged, as at Winchester and Ely, and there is antiqaurian evidence for the foundations of these aisles (see Fernie (2019), 169). The end walls are treated as 4 storeys: 3 with windows and the lowest decorated with blind arcading. These and the crossing tower were the work of Abbot William of Waterville (1155-74).
The nave is of ten bays with four different compound pier designs and a three-storey elevation of arcade gallery and clerestorey with passage. Part of the explanation of the varied pier designs stems from an original scheme for a nine-bay nave, in which pier 9 was conceived as the W respond. The change of base profile on the E and W sides of this pier in the S arcade make this clear. A detailed breakdown of the building sequence has been attempted by Donald Mackreth. It is usefully summarised in Fernie (2019) and divides work into the abbacies of Martin (1133-55), William (1155-74 and Benedict (1177-94). At arcade level Martin was responsible for 9 bays of the S side and the first 2 on the N, William for the next 2 on the S, and Benedict for the remainder on both sides. In the 10th bay angled shafts and vault springers survive at the W side indicating that Benedict intended to vault, but the scheme was never taken forward and the present 13thc nave ceiling was constructed instead.
The W transept, which extends as a single space from N to S, projecting by one short bay at either end. The E wall of this continues the forms of the nave in its gallery and clerestorey arcades, but it also includes very tall and narrow windows with pointed arches in the projecting sections. On the W wall all details are Early English, so that the (slightly pointed) transverse arches of the vault spring from scallop capitals in the E and fall onto moulded ones at the W, while the arches between them are decorated with elaborate free-standing chevron forms found nowhere else in the cathedral.
The end date for the W facade as it was ultimately completed is usually assumed to correspond with the consecration of the church in 1238, in the abbacy of Walter of Bury St Edmunds, but as Luxford (2019, 216) points out it may have stood unconsecrated for a few years before that. The design at any rate is unique in England, consisting of a galilee faced by three mighty arches of equal heights, each with a gable with a rose. There are carved figures in niches in the gable and the spandrels of the arches, spirelets between the gables and a tower with a spire at each end of the compostion. The galilee is some 5 m. deep , with a central doorway and blind arcading decorating the inner wall. The Trinity chapel, elevated above a lower vaulted entrance arch was later added at the front of the central arch. The upper storey has housed the library since the 18thc., and is accessed by a pair of flanking stair turrets decorated externally with blind tracery panels and niches for statues, none of which remain in place. The date of this is a matter of dispute; and it might contain elements of different periods. The consensus seems to point to a date c.1370-80, with a suggestion that the W window could be a 15thc insertion, although the present author sees no reason to suppose this (see Reilly (2019).