Cottingham's Crossing bosses, 1840

The crossing ceiling was rebuilt several times in the C19th. The crossing bosses designed by Lewis Cottingham in 1840 are based on medieval Green Men and grotesques in the Nave Transept and the North and South Quire Aisles and are painted as vividly as they would once have been.

The Cathedral’s 10m vertical access platform (the cherry picker) is tall enough to provide up-close access to almost all the sculpture in the building below the level of the clerestory. Bosses higher than this (unless fortuitously accessible by scaffold during works to the vaulting) had to be modelled with photographs taken with a zoom lens. The nave transept bosses were photographed from the clerestory, but the bosses within the dark recess of the nave crossing arches required getting as close as possible to the bosses with the cherry picker. 

The cherry picker is getting on for 13 years old now and is notorious for its creaking and swaying at its maximum extension. Accounting for movement, each boss had to be photographed many times from each of the thirteen positions around the nave platform. To add to complications, the long-suffering photographer was required to sit cross-legged for the duration to prevent further vibrations. Roll on the drone revolution!

Cottingham was ahead of his time in reflecting the medieval fabric within his rebuilding campaigns, taking inspiration for the bosses in the timber crossing ceiling (the bell ringing chamber floor) from a number of medieval sculptural elements throughout the nave crossing. Cottingham’s crossing bosses feature the common architectural motiff of the Green Man. These are images of a face surrounded by or made of leaves, often with foliage coming out of the mouth or ears. 

Superficially, the use of the Green Man in later medieval church architecture appeared to be a continuation of a pagan theme, perhaps a fertility figure or a nature spirit, similar to the wild man of the woods. However, it has been proposed that architectural Green Men were a continental import around the 13th century. At any rate, comparisons do seem to have been drawn with Christian themes of spring and rebirth.

The nineteenth century saw a renewed interest in the Green Man motif, seeing use in a wider variety of secular architecture such as park furniture and houses (or pubs). It is well worth saying that although we have referred to the bosses as ‘Cottingham’s’ throughout, they were likely produced by carpenters working under Cottingham’s general direction. Carpenters have maintained a range of traditions and techniques for centuries. The nave crossing Green Men are based on medieval designs present within the Cathedral, such as one of two thirteenth-century bosses among those in the vaulting of the North Quire Aisle.

Most Green Men are depicted disgorging, with foliage streaming from their mouths, or flowing from facial hair. Another form of Green Men are depicted hidden or emerging from the foliation, such as those in the purbeck marble corbel of the Quire next to the nineteenth-century Bishop’s Throne.

Although far less common, Green Women are also known of, such as this apparent depiction of an emergent Green Women on the north side of the Quire Stalls.

A significant portion of designs also feature animals or grotesques (distorted or nightmarish). A bull is depicted in the boss from the nave crossing ceiling, apparently based on an almost identical boss in the thirteenth-century north nave transept. The bosses of the nave crossing, although believed to be medieval, have been repainted, probably in the nineteenth century and possibly at the same time as the installation of Cottingham’s crossing ceiling.

A less common motif is a grotesque wolf-like creature. Cottingham has copied one of the five bosses in the south nave transept, where a rare example is preserved. There is some confusion as to the date of the south transept bosses, with much of the fabric dating from the mid-thirteenth century, but with McAleer suggesting the bosses resemble a mid-fourteenth century style.

Many more Green Men can be found around the cathedral, such as those among the foliated bosses in the North Nave Transept and South Nave Transept, the South Quire Aisle. Several late nineteenth-century examples are found over the Great West Window of the West façade.

Some green creatures also appear in the sculpture above the west portal, although aren’t quite as they seem.

Scholars have shown that the Green Man was an import of the thirteenth century, some time after the c.1150 construction of the West Facade. These are actually disgorging cats, a very political image in its time included as a warning against heresy, and particularly a warning against the growing Catharism movement in the twelfth and thirteenth century. The Roman Catholic Church would eventually condone a brutal and bloody crackdown on Cathars in the Albigensian Crusade.

Jacob Scott

Research Guild

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