Yorkshire’s two rare chapels on bridges

There’s something engaging about houses on bridges – in Florence or in pictures of the old London bridge. London bridge had its own chaplain for the chapel of St Thomas, which survived as a house until 1757. Only three medieval chapels on bridges survive in England (four if you count Bradfordon-avon’s, turned into a domed lock-up). Two are in the same half of the West Riding of Yorkshire.

The fortunes of St Mary the Virgin chapel on Wakefield bridge (pictured) are traced by Ruth Harman in her impressive new volume in the Pevsner architectural guides series, Yorkshire West Riding: Sheffield and the South. It was, she points out, usual to have chapels on bridges in the Middle Ages.

In Seeking Salvation, a fascinating survey of the commemoration of the dead in the late-medieval English parish, Sally Badham brings out two aspects of bridge-building: the religious merit it was accorded and its great cost. In 1233, the Archbishop of

York declared a remission of penance due for sins to those who helped build Wetherby bridge. A century later, the Bishop of Worcester called the building of bridges a work of mercy pleasing to God. Between 5 and 10 per cent of wills in late medieval Bedfordshire contained a bequest for a bridge.

As for the mundane cost, the building of a bridge in Abingdon in 1416 was funded by Geoffrey Barbour, a retired merchant, with the huge sum of 1,000 marks (a mark being 13s 4d, making his gift worth £666 13s 4d). That summer, 300 men worked on the bridge, stone being hauled to the site, a coffer dam built and, later, timber centring and scaffolding being erected to build the stone arches.

Miss Badham touches on another element that I feel played a large if often implicit part in the religious status of bridges: that they symbolised the road to heaven, indeed Christ himself. The idea of Christ as a bridge, she notes, was explored in The Orchard of Syon, a translation of the visions of St Catherine of Siena, who died in 1380.

The book was printed by the enterprising Wynkyn de Worde in 1519 for popular devotion. So I think it unnecessarily reductive to see chantry chapels on bridges as mechanisms for raising money for repair.

Once prayers for dead benefactors were outlawed, however, the chapels fell on hard times. Rotherham’s chapel of Our Lady became an almshouse after 1547, then a prison and finally a shop, before restoration and reconsecration in 1924. It was locked last Saturday when I was there, but I’m glad it exists to counteract the chain shops and empty sites in the streets nearby.

Wakefield’s “sumptuous” chapel, in Ruth Harman’s words, was begun in about 1342, in the reign of Edward III, whose head, and Queen Philippa’s, are carved inside on the window arches at the altar end. Outside, niches in the spired buttresses house statues of the Virgin Mary and St Christopher, of course, with Sts Paulinus, Oswald, James and Botolph. On the battlemented parapet, are carved reliefs of the Annunciation, Nativity, and Resurrection – and Pentecost, with which Sir Gilbert Scott chose in 1848 to replace a sculpture of the Coronation in Heaven of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Its centuries of neglect after the Reformation, as a warehouse, shop and offices, ended with Scott’s restoration, which was so thorough (rebuilding, for most of it) that he looked back on it with “shame and chagrin”. He also chose the wrong stone, which had to be repaired in 1890 and again in 1939. But at least the chapel stands, an ornament in itself and a historical reminder of social customs in past centuries.