The Gothic Architecture of Coventry Cathedral and Priory: Keeping Up Appearances?

The Phoenix Initiative excavations of 1999-2003 produced extensive new physical evidence for the buildings of the lost cathedral priory of St Mary, Coventry, and this paper is a brief account of the main findings relating to the Gothic architecture. In the cathedral, the picture was a fairly typical one of keeping up appearances in an ageing Romanesque great church piecemeal new fenestration of the nave through the 14th century, structural problems with the crossing tower (perhaps newly built) in the mid-14th century, and a new transept vault around 1400. However, investigation of the conventual buildings revealed a much more pro-active story. Most of the accommodation around the cloister was reconstructed in the second and third quarters of the 13th century, as evidenced by the partial survival of a fine series of undercrofts, including one with the earliest known tierceron rib-vault in Coventry. Then, in the next century, two impressive new ceremonial rooms were created with the rebuilding of the chapter-house (c..1310-30), later to be embellished with a cycle of Apocalypse paintings, and of the refectory (c. 1340) with a polychromed stone pulpit of the same date. In the early 15th century, an ambitious renovation of the cloister was undertaken on the model of that at Gloucester, but by then more limited resources would not stretch to vaulting its alleys in stone.