The Dean and Canons’ Houses of St George’s Chapel, Windsor. An Architectural History.

Abstract

Since the great fire in the late Queen’s annus horribilis of 1992, Windsor Castle has become the most thoroughly investigated royal residence in England. In the Upper Ward, where the fire started, the destruction of so much of Sir Jeffry Wyatville’s early-19th-century work in the state apartments made possible, for the first time, the systematic investigation of Edward III’s extensive rebuilding of 500 years earlier, which made Windsor the grandest royal residence of its day. In more recent times, since the ending of works in the Upper Ward, the spotlight has turned to its lower counterpart, where the need for urgent refurbishment of the canons’ cloister created the opportunity for comparable analysis of the accommodation of the canons and vicars attached to Edward’s new college of St George. For over a decade John Crook, the consultant archaeologist to the dean and canons, enjoyed unrivalled access to the buildings as plaster was stripped, roof tiles removed and floorboards pulled up; and it is the fruits of his meticulous recording which are the subject of this comprehensive and beautifully illustrated study, which offers significant revisions to Sir William St John Hope’s account in his monumental history of the castle over a century ago. The significance of the canons’ cloister can easily be overlooked when so much of the original 14th-century fabric has been overlain with later additions and accretions. Yet, this unassuming-looking block of buildings not only constitutes the earliest surviving timber-framed collegiate accommodation in England; remarkably, its construction is also documented in what is perhaps the fullest surviving set of medieval fabric accounts. The space occupied by the cloister is a small and awkwardly shaped one, squashed between the dean’s cloister and warden’s quarters immediately to the south, and the castle’s curtain wall to the north, resulting in a strangely elongated garth, much narrower north–south than east–west. Around this space are grouped dwellings which originally accommodated both canons and vicars, each house occupying a bay, and each one comprising two storeys with a single room upstairs and downstairs, with the upstairs room both rising to the roof and oversailing the cloister walkway. A useful cut-away artist’s reconstruction by Stephen Conlin (fig. 3.41) gives an idea of the dwellings’ likely appearance when completed. Among the most fascinating of the recent findings has been the clear evidence that in the first-floor room, which constituted the main living room of the house, fireplaces were provided, each with a wooden smoke hood above and a plaster-lined flue carrying the smoke up to the chimney. It had earlier been supposed that heating had been provided only by flues inserted into the stone walls immediately to the north and south. The use of such a fireplace in a timber-framed building obviously constituted a major incendiary hazard, but there is no evidence that any of