Durham is a small city in the north of England, built on a steep hill inside a tight loop of the River Wear. The old centre sits on a narrow peninsula almost surrounded by water, and on the highest point of it stand two great Norman buildings facing each other across a green: the cathedral and the castle. Together they are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and together they are really one story, the church and the fortress of the same rulers. We had only one day, so we gave it to those two buildings.

A Saint and the Vikings

Saint Cuthbert was the great holy man of early northern England, a monk and bishop who lived on the island of Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast, and died in 687. After his death he became the most revered saint in the north, and his tomb on Lindisfarne a place of pilgrimage.

Then the Vikings came. In 793 Norse raiders from Scandinavia attacked Lindisfarne, one of the first great Viking raids on Britain, and over the following century the raids went on. These Vikings were still pagans, worshippers of the old Norse gods like Odin and Thor, and the sight of them plundering one of the holiest Christian sites in Britain horrified all of Christian Europe. The monks eventually fled, and they took Cuthbert’s body with them rather than leave it to the raiders. They wandered the north for over a hundred years, carrying the saint from place to place, until in 995 they settled on this rock in the loop of the Wear and built a church to hold him. That church, and the saint inside it, is the reason Durham exists at all.

The Normans Invasion

Nearly three centuries after that first raid, a different people took England, the Normans. The Normans were, distantly, descended from Vikings who had settled in northern France, in the land still called Normandy. But by now they were something else entirely: they spoke French, they were Christian, and they had long left sea-raiding behind. In 1066 their duke, William, crossed the Channel, killed the English king Harold at the Battle of Hastings, and made himself King of England. History remembers him as William the Conqueror.

Winning the battle was not the same as holding the country, and the north would not submit. The people here were Anglo-Saxons and the descendants of earlier Danish settlers, with their own strong sense of independence, and they rose against the Normans again and again. In 1069 the men of the north massacred a Norman earl and his 900 men inside Durham itself. William’s answer was terrible. In the winter of 1069 to 1070 he laid waste to the entire north in what became known as the Harrying of the North. His army burned the villages, killed the livestock, and destroyed the crops and the seed corn across the land between York and Durham, deliberately creating famine. Perhaps a hundred thousand people died of starvation in the months that followed. It was one of the cruelest acts of any English king, and it broke the north’s resistance by killing the people who might have resisted.

Only after that devastation did the Normans truly hold the north. They planted castles across the region, at York (now a ruin, only its later keep, Clifford’s Tower, still stands), at Richmond (a ruin, though its great keep survives), at Newcastle (mostly gone, but the Norman keep that gave the city its name still stands), and at Durham (the one that survives whole, and where we were standing). These strongholds did two jobs: to hold down a beaten but resentful people, and to guard against Scotland just to the north.

Scotland was a real danger, not a distant one. The border between the two kingdoms was not yet fixed, and the Scottish king, Malcolm the Third, claimed the northern English lands of Northumbria and Cumbria as rightfully his. The threat was close enough that a Scottish king could appear before the city walls, and that is why the fortress on the rock had to be strong.

Durham’s castle and cathedral rose out of all this: not a peaceful act of faith, but the architecture of conquest, built to dominate a subjugated land, to hold the Scottish frontier, and to show, in stone too big to argue with, who now ruled.

The Viking Age and the Norman Conquest are each a huge story, and each will get a primer of its own, because sorting out these two waves of northerners, who came when, from where, pagan raiders against Christian conquerors, is exactly what those primers are for. Here, keep them apart simply: the Vikings drove the saint’s monks into exile around 793; the Normans, their much-changed descendants, conquered the north after 1066 and built over the saint’s grave.

The Cathedral

When the Normans came to Durham they pulled down the old church of the wandering monks and raised in its place one of the finest buildings they built anywhere. Durham Cathedral went up between 1093 and 1133, fast for its size, and because it was built in a single push it is unusually unified in style. It is also one of the most important buildings in the history of architecture because of the problems its builders solved.

First, the style the Normans brought, which in England we call Norman and elsewhere Romanesque. It is a heavy, solid, fortress-like way of building: massive thick walls, huge round columns, small windows that leave the inside dim, and above all the round arch, a plain half-circle, over every door and window. The decoration is bold and geometric, deep zig-zags and lozenges cut into the stone. It is an architecture of weight and permanence, meant to impress by sheer mass. Durham has all of it, and the great drum columns of the nave, carved with spirals and chevrons, are among the finest examples anywhere.

The round arch, though, sets a limit. A great stone church needs a stone roof, a vault, over a wide and high space, and the round arch is strong but constrained, because the height of a round arch is fixed by its width. To roof a wide space you must either keep it low or make the whole thing vast. That limit is the problem Durham’s builders solved when they looked to the ceiling.

Then look up at the ceiling, because that is where Durham changed everything. The first new idea is the ribbed vault: instead of one heavy stone shell, the roof is a framework of crossing stone ribs, with lighter panels filling the gaps, so the weight runs down the ribs to the columns and the roof can be lighter and higher. Durham was the first building in England roofed entirely with ribbed vaults. The second, and the greater, is the pointed arch. Rising to a point instead of a round top, a pointed arch escapes the round arch’s rule: its height no longer depends on its width, so a builder can throw a high roof over a space of any width. Durham holds the first successful use of the structural pointed arch on a large scale in Europe. That single idea, worked out here in the roof of a Norman church, is the seed of the whole Gothic style, the tall, light, soaring cathedrals that followed across Europe all grew from it.

There is a third innovation here. A high stone vault does not only press down; it pushes outward too, trying to shove the walls apart. The solution is the flying buttress, a stone arch that leans against the upper wall from outside and pushes back, holding it in so the wall can stay thin and tall. On the great Gothic cathedrals that came later these props stand out in the open, a row of stone arms flying from the walls. At Durham they are early and experimental, and the builders tucked them out of sight, up in the dark spaces over the side aisles, under the roofs, quietly bracing the high nave wall where no visitor would see them. So Durham has all three of the ideas that would make Gothic architecture possible, the pointed arch, the ribbed vault, and the flying buttress, all present together, decades before they came out into the open and defined the new style. Scholars argue about the very first of everything, and small experiments existed elsewhere earlier, but Durham is where these ideas were first brought together and made to work at full scale.

The two men buried here

Saint Cuthbert, whose wandering body brought everyone here, rests behind the high altar. His shrine is the heart of the building and the reason the city grew rich, on the pilgrims who came to it.

The Venerable Bede lies at the west end, in the Galilee Chapel. Bede was a monk at nearby Jarrow, and around 730 he wrote the first real history of the English people, the book that gives us most of what we know about early England. He is often called the father of English history. The saint who made the north believe and the scholar who first wrote its story lie a few steps apart under one roof.

The Prince-Bishops: churchmen who ruled like kings

The man who ruled from the castle was no mere bishop in the ordinary sense. The bishops of Durham were Prince-Bishops, and for centuries they governed the whole region almost as independent kings.

This did not happen all at once. It began with William the Conqueror, who saw that the far north was too distant to govern from London and too dangerous to leave loosely held. In the 1070s he made the Bishop of Durham the earl as well, fusing church and secular power in one man so the bishop could hold the frontier for him. Over the next two centuries later kings added to those powers piece by piece, until the Bishop of Durham held rights no other bishop had. He could raise his own army, mint his own coins, hold his own courts, appoint his own sheriffs and judges, and tax his own people. Where an ordinary bishop answered to the king in such matters, the Bishop of Durham answered to almost no one within his own territory. He was the king’s man on the frontier, and very nearly a king himself. The arrangement, in one form or another, lasted some seven hundred years, until Parliament finally stripped the powers away in 1836.

The quarrel that changed the church

The cathedral was built as a Catholic church, because in the eleventh century all of western Europe was Catholic and answered to the Pope in Rome. There was only one Church, and Durham was one of its great houses. For the next four and a half centuries it was a Benedictine monastery, home to a community of monks who kept the round of prayer and tended Cuthbert’s shrine. Pilgrims came in thousands, rich and poor alike, walking sometimes for weeks to reach the saint, and each left an offering. The wealthy gave lavishly, gold, silver, and jewels, and over the centuries the shrine behind the high altar grew into one of the richest and most magnificent in England.

Then, in the sixteenth century, King Henry VIII quarreled with the Pope, broke with Rome, and made himself head of a new Church of England. He dissolved the monasteries across the land and seized their wealth, and this reached Durham directly. The monastic community that had run the cathedral for four and a half centuries was shut down. In 1539 the king’s commissioners came for the shrine. They stripped it of its gold, silver, and jewels, carried the treasure off to the crown, and levelled the shrine to the ground. Pilgrimage itself was banned, so the very thing the cathedral had been built to do, house a saint and receive those who came to him, simply stopped.

One thing stopped them. When the commissioners opened Cuthbert’s coffin to clear it away, they found not dust and bones but a body that had barely decayed in eight hundred and fifty years, still in its priestly robes. Shaken, they did not destroy it. They reburied Cuthbert in the same place, under a plain stone slab, and there he lies today, the slab worn smooth by the knees of the pilgrims who, quietly, never entirely stopped coming.

Stand behind the high altar now and you see that plain slab where the greatest shrine in the north once blazed with gold. The emptiness is the mark of the Reformation, cut into this building. And it was the same act, the dissolution of the monasteries, that we met at the other end in our post on Richard III: there it tore down the church in Leicester and lost a king’s grave for five centuries; here it stripped a saint’s shrine but left the cathedral standing.

The cathedral survived, but changed. It became a plain church of the Church of England, later called Anglican, rather than a Catholic one. This break with Rome and the Reformation that followed run through much of what we have seen, the roofless abbeys, the graves of Henry’s queens, the lost king at Leicester, and now a stripped shrine at Durham. It is one of the turning points of English history, and it is bound for a primer of its own.

The Castle

Across the green stands Durham Castle, and it was William the Conqueror himself who ordered it built, in 1072, only six years after Hastings and just after the Harrying, to hold the newly beaten north and to guard against Scotland. It is a classic Norman castle of earth and stone, of the earth-mound-and-tower kind the Normans threw up across England to pin down the land. It soon became the home of the Prince-Bishops, the palace from which they governed their frontier. For most of its life the castle and the cathedral were the two halves of one power: the bishop prayed in one and ruled from the other.

The Prince-Bishops kept the castle for nearly eight hundred years. Their great powers were finally taken away by Parliament in 1836, and with the prince-bishopric ended, the castle had no ruler left to house. In 1837 it was given to the newly founded University of Durham, and it has belonged to the university ever since. Students live in it today, in one of the oldest inhabited castles in Britain, studying and sleeping inside the fortress of the Prince-Bishops. You can visit only on a guided tour, since it is a working college, but the Norman chapel, the great hall, and the old stairs are there to see.

The two buildings are one story. William the Conqueror crushed the north, then raised a church and a fortress on the same rock, over the grave of a saint the Vikings had once driven into exile, and set one man to rule from both. For seven hundred years the Prince-Bishop worshipped in the cathedral and governed from the castle. When his power ended, the church went on as it always had, and the castle became a college.

The land around the two great buildings is worth the walk as well. The cathedral and castle share a broad open square called Palace Green, once the town’s marketplace, now a quiet lawn ringed by old stone buildings that belong to the university. From the green, a narrow cobbled street called Owengate runs down the hill and joins Saddler Street, which curves down toward the market place following the line of an old Roman road. These streets are the medieval town, narrow and steep, the houses pressed tight against the pavement, the whole plan almost unchanged for eight hundred years and still enclosed within the loop of the river. Walking down them from the cathedral, you are following the same route the medieval pilgrims took up to the saint. The peninsula is small enough to cross on foot in a quarter of an hour, and doing so is the best way to feel why the Normans chose this rock: a high place in a river’s bend, easy to defend, hard to reach, with room at the top for a church and a fortress and nothing else.