EAST ANGLIAN Flintwork
By Stephen Hart
The Material
Flint is almost pure silica thought to be derived from
the skeletons of sponges. It was formed within chalk laid down in the
Cretaceous Period between 100 and 65 million years ago in seas then covering
what is now Britain and much of Northern Europe. Released by erosion after
sea levels had fallen, flints have been widely re-deposited, to be found
now as surface rubble in fields or as constituents of the glacial drift
that covers much of East Anglia, or as water-worn cobbles and pebbles
on beaches, in rivers and in gravel beds. Some can be seen as natural
nodules in their original setting in chalk cliffs or quarries. Typically,
fresh flint has a black lustrous core surrounded by a crusty white rind
or cortex, but after release from the chalk, land flints have usually
been stained by ground pigments to various hues of brown, orange and yellow,
and coastal flints have been battered by the sea to shades of grey.
How Flints are Used in Walls of Buildings
Flint on its own is used in walls in As-Found form as
Rubble, Nodules, Natural Fragments, Cobbles and Pebbles, and in Knapped
form as Roughly Cleft, Select, ovals, Scales, Blocks, Rough-Squared, Squared
and Flakes, and of course often in combinations of the As-Found and Knapped
varieties.
Used with Brick, the brick may be introduced randomly
or decoratively as Chequer, Diaper and banding patterns or as free motifs.
It is also used randomly and in patterns with the various
types of available stone such as Chalk, Red Chalk, Carstone, Puddingstone,
Septaria, Crag, Limestone and those random pieces of various kinds of
rock brought from afar by glacial action and now found in the drift deposits,
known as Erratics. And of course, there are countless colourful combinations
of flint in its various forms with mixtures of different stones with or
without brick
In addition to all these varieties of flint wall, the
supreme achievement of East Anglian craftsmen was the invention of Flushwork
- a local art-form, exclusive to the region, combining knapped flint and
ashlared limestone in architectural patterns on flint wall surfaces. East
Anglia has over 450 churches on which flushwork designs of Chequer, Emblems,
Tracery motifs and Panelling appear on some part of the structure. The
church towers at Redenhall and Eye, the clerestories at Cavendish and
Woolpit, the porches at Walsham-le-Willows or Preston St Mary and the
south walls of St Michael at Coslany are among the most impressive.
Details
Over the centuries, the use of flint in combination with
other materials has produced its own vocabulary of detail.
Although flints were sometimes used for the corners of
buildings, they were not very suitable for that purpose. Carstone and
puddingstone were used for quoins in the early days of flint building
and then, after the Norman Conquest, dressed limestone, and later still,
bricks.
Likewise for arches, several local techniques suited
to the material developed, for example alternating knapped flints and
brick or stone voussoirs in church arches, and the indented type of segmental
brick arches for domestic windows.
And of course, galleting - a system of decorating and
protecting the wide mortar joints that are often inevitable when building
with irregular material such as flint. Flint flakes, little pebbles, carstone
chips and even nuggets of broken brick have been used.
Ref: Flint Architecture in East Anglia by Stephen Hart.
Giles de la Mare Publishers Ltd. London. 2000. £19.99
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