THE BUCKLER DYNASTY

The Buckler architectural dynasty began with John Buckler senior (1770–1851), who made a successful career as an antiquarian draughtsman and was renowned for his topographical views of cathedrals.Footnote ² As an architect he built several mansions, notably Pool Park in Denbighshire (1826–29), as well as churches, such as St John the Baptist at Pentrobin in Flintshire (1843), early in its adoption of ecclesiological ideas of style and internal decoration. John Chessell Buckler helped establish his own reputation by continuing his father's popular series of prints of English and Welsh cathedrals.Footnote ³ Their combined industry as antiquarian draughtsmen can be seen in the huge collection of their drawings in the British Library.Footnote ⁴ He soon became one of the rising generation of neo-Gothic architects, as seen at Costessey Hall in Norfolk (begun in 1825), built for the recusant Catholic Stafford-Jerningham family, and his award of second prize (among ninety-seven entrants) for his Tudor Gothic design for the Palace of Westminster competition in 1835. He also contributed to the promotion and development of the Gothic revival through several antiquarian publications, among them A History of the Abbey Church of St Alban (1847). Early in his career, he also published an important work on domestic architecture, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Royal Palace at Eltham (1828), which was based on youthful notes he had made in 1810.Footnote ⁵ Many other antiquarian works drew on him as an authority on medieval architecture, including Henry Shaw's Specimens of the Details of Elizabethan Architecture (1836). Buckler remained active as an architect and a topographical draughtsman into his nineties. When he died aged 100 in 1894, his obituary in the Architect and Contract Reporter labelled him, in respect of his archaeological erudition, as the ‘great Nestor of English architects’.Footnote ⁶ Yet the early intellectual capital that he enjoyed became increasingly dissipated as his long career drew to a close, and his work is not well known today, the Lincoln scandal perhaps being a contributing factor. He was succeeded by his son, the Catholic convert Charles Alban Buckler (1824–1905), who is best known for rebuilding Arundel Castle in West Sussex (1874–1901). Charles Alban, however, produced no issue, bringing the dynastic line to an end.

The Bucklers evidently saw themselves as heroic figures in the antiquarian and architectural world, as was suggested by the literal meaning of their surname — a round shield. They may have seen themselves as holding up a figurative buckler in the face of misguided antiquarianism, unnecessary destruction of medieval buildings or unattractive modern professionalism. Characteristic of this outlook is the opener to the family history, Bucleriana, compiled by Charles Alban Buckler and published in 1886:

John Chessell Buckler was especially conscious of his family's reputation, not least in favouring conservation (as we would now understand it) over restoration, and repair over rebuilding. He was, in fact, one of nineteenth-century architecture's most vocal commentators and critics on the subject of architectural restoration, well known in his time for being opinionated, not to say vainglorious. As the medievalist Catherine M. Antony pointedly remarked in 1927, ‘indifference was a fault which could never be laid to his charge’.Footnote ⁸

LINCOLN CATHEDRAL IN 1859

Buckler had been honorary architect to Lincoln Cathedral since at least 1857.Footnote ⁹ He was appointed by the precentor Richard Pretyman Tomline (1793–1866), who along with the chancellor Francis Charles Massingberd (1800–72) and the dean John Giffard Ward (c. 1780–1860) was custodian of the cathedral during the scraping debate.Footnote ¹⁰ Buckler was probably brought in when the head joiner John Willson and architect Edward James Willson (1787–1854), presumably a relative of the former, died or left the cathedral's employ.Footnote ¹¹ The latter is said to have offered ‘occasional informal suggestions’ on repair work.Footnote ¹² The Rev. John C. Jackson, an ecclesiologist and the principal of Hackney Collegiate School near London (1853–69), claimed that the cathedral, before Buckler, was in the hands of ‘a very respectable land-agent […] wholly ignorant of architecture, and not up to the situation’.Footnote ¹³ He must have meant Edward Betham, who while receiving a salary for ‘planning and valuing Fabrick Estates’ is also described in the chapter acts as the ‘Surveyor of the Fabric’ from 1830.Footnote ¹⁴ Betham, presumably alluding to Buckler, commented in 1861 that ‘on particular occasions the opinion and advice of one of the most eminent architects of the period have from time to time been resorted to’.Footnote ¹⁵ Another principal figure involved with the fabric's maintenance was William Sandall, who first came to the cathedral as a journeyman mason in 1841, progressing to mason by 1859.Footnote ¹⁶ It was standard practice at Lincoln that the surveyor-architect supervised repairs from a distance and that the workmen used their discretion on fabric repair in their absence, a matter of considerable significance to Buckler's story. As Buckler claimed, his ‘honorary’ position meant he had ‘no power to interfere with the established custom of carrying on the repairs’, apart from ‘readily giving sanction to the system adopted’.Footnote ¹⁷ He remained in the Lincoln post until 1870, when he was succeeded by John Loughborough Pearson (1817–97).

In 1859, Lincoln Cathedral was largely as it is today, although its condition was fast deteriorating. Founded under Bishop Remigius de Fécamp in the mid-1070s, it was consecrated in 1092. What remains of this Romanesque building are the three central portals of the west front, which was widened during the thirteenth century in the Early English style.Footnote ¹⁸ The treatment of this great façade in the early nineteenth century (Fig. 3) was to be a central element in the Buckler controversy. Already by the eighteenth century, the west front had been the subject of much-needed restoration. James Essex of Cambridge (1722–84) was the superintendent of work conducted between 1761 and 1784, which included adding tall pinnacles to the central tower, as well as substantial interventions on the west front from 1778 onwards.Footnote ¹⁹ Much of this work was documented by Buckler. As Thomas Cocke has explained, Essex renewed the parapets and gables and replaced various decorative details.Footnote ²⁰ In addition, he substituted the carved pillars that flanked the portals with plain ones, refaced the lower parts of the piers between them, and replaced some beakhead carvings and moulded column bases.Footnote ²¹

Fig. 3. Lincoln Cathedral, west front, photograph by Francis Frith, 1850–70 (Victoria and Albert Museum, E.208:1934–1994)

Buckler's sketchbooks include two measured sketches from 1860 detailing Essex's interventions to the ‘pronaos’, or west front (Fig. 4). One of his annotations draws attention in his typically archaic prose to the previous architect's shortcomings:

In other words, Buckler was attempting to reconstruct a clear stratigraphy in the pronaos between the Norman and Gothic work that Essex had obscured in favour of a more harmonious visual appearance.

Fig. 4. Lincoln Cathedral, Romanesque ‘pronaos’, measured elevation drawing by John Chessell Buckler annotated with comments on James Essex's interventions, 1860 (British Library, Add MS 36417, f. 6)

Buckler was keen to stress that the cathedral had a complex history of repairs, which in many places was hard to discern, and he worried that casual or ill-informed viewers might mistake earlier, heavy-handed interventions for his own. He attributed most of the previous repair work to Essex, using his name, as Cocke has put it, ‘as a catch-all for any post-medieval interventions’.Footnote ²³ Essex had in fact rarely visited the cathedral, and many decisions from his time would have been made by his clerk of works Thomas Lumby and mason James Pink, who died after the restoration to the west front was begun. Yet the survival of much of this eighteenth-century repair work at Lincoln is testament to Buckler's own light-handed approach to restoration; Essex's work at Ely, by contrast, scarcely survived the nineteenth-century restorations of George Gilbert Scott (1811–78).Footnote ²⁴

By 1859, Buckler had completed a long-term programme of external restoration on the cathedral's south-east corner (possibly including the south porch).Footnote ²⁵ Efforts were now to be focused on the west front. Over centuries, the build-up of ‘scum’ or surface patina, which Buckler characterised as ‘an inimitable hue, permanent, indurated, and lustrous’, had left the thirteenth-century masonry of the front's towers grey and that of the Norman pronaos between them black.Footnote ²⁶ Some sense of this darkening is conveyed in a photograph by Roger Fenton from the 1850s (Fig. 5). To remedy the disfigurement, it was standard practice to carry out a process of ‘scraping’. The process generally meant removing the outer layer of stone to achieve a new, smooth surface, but eradicating the marks of tooling and the patina of age in the process or, worse, exposing the softer centre of the stone and hastening decay. Complaints about such work were already emerging in the 1840s and 1850s. To John Ruskin (1819–1900), this was ‘the most dreadful fate which could befall any building’.Footnote ²⁷ It was precisely what Buckler was attacked for doing. Accusations against him, as well as the dean and chapter, also involved speculations about the removal of carved-stone mouldings and sculptures, in particular the beakhead and chevron mouldings and other ornaments on the jambs of the Norman portal, as well as images and figures, including the gallery of kings above the great west door (Fig. 6).

Fig. 5. Lincoln Cathedral, west front, photograph by Roger Fenton, c. 1856 (Victoria and Albert Museum, RPS.4492–2018)

Fig. 6. Lincoln Cathedral, west door, photograph by Francis Frith, 1850–70 (Victoria and Albert Museum, E.208:1939–1994)

Exactly what Buckler did and where is hard to establish, as the records of the cathedral fabric fund, including the audits from 1859 to 1866, offer remarkably little precise information. This ambiguity also existed during the scandal, which was exacerbated by speculation about the precise nature of Buckler's involvement with the work. Although the Stamford Mercury had noted Buckler's employment in April 1859, the same newspaper claimed in August 1861 that the dean and chapter employed ‘no architect whatever to watch the works’, thereby leaving the cathedral ‘to whistle its lament to the winds’.Footnote ²⁸ A belief that no overseeing architect was involved, and the assumption that the cathedral's fabric was in the care of the clergy, masons and local surveyors alone, inevitably led to complaints.Footnote ²⁹ As late as 1865, Reverend Jackson communicated to the Ecclesiological Society a vague report ‘that Mr. Buckler of Oxford […] has had some sort of connexion with the cathedral’.Footnote ³⁰ Such ambiguity could indicate that Buckler was rarely on site to oversee work.

Whatever the case, Buckler and the on-site masons appear to have taken a restrained, non-interventionist approach to fabric repair. Although Sandall was criticised in the press for being heavy-handed as mason, he defended himself in 1861 by describing the process he actually followed.

Clearly the masons felt that they knew their job and got on with it.Footnote ³² Buckler later claimed — perhaps hiding behind the clergy's bad reputation — that Sandall's heavy-handedness was encouraged by the ‘watchful eye’ of the then-deceased precentor Tomline, who had observed the restoration with ‘jealous carefulness’.Footnote ³³ In his book on his restoration of the cathedral (discussed below), Buckler confirmed Sandall's description of the technique that the masons were to follow.Footnote ³⁴ As he explained,

Buckler's description seems intentionally vague, avoiding any mention of ‘violence’, no matter how innocuous. Nor did he specify the type or size of the instrument to be used for removing the ‘scum’. Nevertheless, Sandall's testimony, corroborated by Buckler, suggests that while some scraping was taking place, its extent and damaging effects were subsequently exaggerated.

‘SCRAPING’ ATTACKS AND EARLY DEFENCES

The catalyst for the ‘scraping’ attacks appears to have been a letter of 1 July 1859 from George Gilbert Scott to the cathedral's dean, which Buckler subsequently published.Footnote ³⁶ In his letter, Scott mentioned that he had been made aware of apparent scraping at the cathedral several years before, but had been reluctant to interfere, confident that the practice would cease in line with a changing culture of restoration. When he heard that the ‘destructive process’ was continuing, however, he decided to intervene, alarmed by the approach being adopted on ‘that gem of English art, the south-eastern [‘Judgement’] portal’, dating to 1260.Footnote ³⁷ He then cautioned the dean about conventional restoration in the past, which entailed removing the ancient fabric and bringing the ‘building back to the appearance of a new structure’.Footnote ³⁸ Imploring the dean to cease restoration of this kind, he described his own preferred method by quoting from his book A Plea for the Faithful Restoration of Our Ancient Churches (1850), asserting that ‘even one or two old bemossed stones, in a window or cornice, give value and truthfulness to the work’.Footnote ³⁹ He later claimed not to have had any further involvement in the issue until the summer of 1861; nor was he aware of Buckler's connection with the cathedral until several years later.Footnote ⁴⁰

Scott's 1859 missive, as he hinted to the dean, was in tune with broad changes in the perception of restoration. As Chris Miele has argued, for many early Victorian architects the authenticity of an ancient artefact ‘was a function of the design carved into the stone, not of the substance of the stone itself’.Footnote ⁴¹ However, from around 1860, wholesale and extensive reconstruction was moderated by a growing appreciation of the intrinsic value of original fabric and its patina, a decisive change of emphasis from form to materiality.Footnote ⁴² Characterised by Miele as a ‘change in sensibility’, this shift from ‘the speculative reconstruction and large-scale rebuilding’ in the 1840s to a lighter approach resulted from a growing appreciation of weathered surfaces, as admired especially by Ruskin.Footnote ⁴³ Ruskin had a say in the Buckler controversy, mentioning it in 1861 and arguing that modern architects had hitherto misunderstood the thirteenth century ‘in tracing out certain lines and figures’ rather than seeking out the ‘precious treasures’ that were the marks of ‘real tenderness’ and ‘human skill’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Seminal to this turn of sensibility were the 1859 restoration of Waltham Abbey in Essex by William Burges (1827–81) and the careful 1860 restoration of Stone church near Dartford in Kent by George Edmund Street (1824–81).Footnote ⁴⁵ Both projects were notable for their restraint, the restorers shunning the temptation to replace old parts, deemed to be incongruous with a church's dominant style, with new work.

It was within this context that the Lincoln scandal exploded. The case was reported widely, over half a decade, in The Times, the Builder, the Building News, the Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury (usually referred to as the Stamford Mercury) and, most importantly, the Ecclesiologist.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the spring of 1859, the Stamford Mercury talked admiringly of ‘Mr. Buckler, the celebrated Gothic architect, who revives the original beauty of our grand old cathedral structures with masterly faithfulness and exquisite skill’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet the same newspaper, without mentioning Buckler, had replaced its admiration with disdain by the summer of 1861, when it published a brief summary of the twenty-second anniversary meeting of the Ecclesiological Society, which led to scraping accusations erupting publicly.Footnote ⁴⁸

This meeting on 13 June was later described by the Ecclesiologist. Alexander Beresford Hope (1820–87) took the chair, with Benjamin Webb (1819–85) as secretary. Those in attendance included the Lincoln antiquary Sir Charles Anderson (1804–91), the Rev. John Jackson, the architects Scott, Street and William White (1825–1900), the writer and publisher John Henry Parker (1806–84), the cleric and ecclesiologist John Mason Neale (1818–66) and Ruskin. With ‘conservatism’ firmly on the agenda, Anderson took the first opportunity to raise concerns about the restoration of Lincoln Cathedral, fearing that the ‘scraping’ perceived to be taking place there would soon move from the Gothic fabric of the building to the Norman parts of the west front.Footnote ⁴⁹ By this time, Scott had made his visit to the cathedral. As the Ecclesiologist paraphrased, he ‘found that the work was very much over-done and that harm had ensued’, adding that the ‘colour given to the cathedral was frightful’ and that the work had ‘destroyed its beauty in point of colour’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The correspondent further recorded that ‘Mr J. H. Parker deprecated any scraping of the work at Lincoln cathedral — (hear, hear) — or any other improper interference with it’.Footnote ⁵¹ Street voiced his own fears that restorers were tooling over medieval work ‘with very bad effect’.Footnote ⁵²

Attracting professional support from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), not long before this body published its own anti-renewal guidance, the Ecclesiologist described the saga in its August 1861 issue as that of the RIBA and the Ecclesiological Society ‘versus the Lincoln Cathedral chapter’.Footnote ⁵³ The magazine, however, sought to remain neutral, or perhaps to play both sides. Inflaming the controversy, it printed an anonymous poem in the same edition titled ‘Lincoln Minster and the Lay of Lincoln’. Aside from its ecclesiastical inferences, the word ‘lay’ neatly referred both to a form of narrative poem, often with a heightened sense of saga, and to architectural ‘lay’ figures of questionable knowledge. The poem opens by dismissing the ecclesiological clique's putative expertise, and their willingness to stand (often blindly) behind their leaders:

Although anonymous, the bard must have been Buckler, as the language bears considerable similarities to his rhetorical style.Footnote ⁵⁵ Scott himself surmised as much in 1866: the ‘exquisite poem must have been from none other than the tasteful pen of Mr. Buckler himself’.Footnote ⁵⁶

After this dramatic start came nearly three years of calm, but disquiet soon resurfaced. In August 1864, the architect E. W. Godwin (1833–86), a proponent of Ruskinian principles, resurrected the issue in The Times, objecting to the restorers’ ‘destruction of art detail and architectural history’ on Lincoln Cathedral's west front.Footnote ⁵⁷ Around the same time, Scott made another visit to the cathedral, at the invitation of the precentor, while on a sketching tour of Lincolnshire. Observing the condition of the fabric on the west front, he presented his views to the cathedral authorities on the process of cleaning by ‘scraping’. As he later recalled:

Buckler later zealously defended himself against having overseen any process analogous to ‘scraping’. He was convinced that a cabal was being led against him by Scott, which accounts for his scathing riposte:

Buckler's defence was to villainise the accuser and turn him into a perpetrator of this same practice.

Further criticism of the dean and chapter appeared in early January 1865, in a letter to the Stamford Mercury from a correspondent adopting the nom de plume ‘Preservando’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Here, for the first time, specific mention of Buckler's involvement was made. Referring — presumably ironically — to the ‘great works Mr. Buckler has accomplished’, the author questioned ‘how often he has been at Lincoln to superintend the works which are said to be under his guidance [… and] how often he has ever mounted the scaffold for to see what is really done?’Footnote ⁶¹

As a response to ‘Preservando’, the dean and chapter sent a letter to the Builder, which was published soon after.Footnote ⁶² They maintained that the work should continue under Buckler and explained that they were in the process of collecting remains of the original Norman colonettes removed earlier in the century, so as to ‘copy them in the minutest details in Lincoln stone’; these shafts survive today in the cathedral's lapidarium. They also claimed only to be replacing those parts of the Norman doorways where the fabric was ‘absolutely perishing from age’. However, the question remained over whether the cathedral would remain a patchwork, with the replacement stone lacking the ‘scum’ of the old, or whether the ‘scum’ should be removed from the older work. In response, the chapter again described and defended the method of repair:

These repeated assurances seemed to do no good, and the controversy continued to do the rounds.Footnote ⁶⁴ Discontent was voiced in March 1865 by the Building News. Under the title ‘Vandalism in Cathedrals’, the periodical expressed incredulity that the scraping at Lincoln went on ‘in spite of all remonstrance’, adding that the cathedral ‘deserves better than to be entrusted to an authority with the powers of an autocrat and the propensities of a charwoman’.Footnote ⁶⁵

The following months brought several defences of the Lincoln chapter, including one in May 1865 from the well-known Cambridge antiquary the Rev. George Williams (1814–78).Footnote ⁶⁶ After a recent visit to Lincoln, he concluded that the restoration programme was of a conservative nature and Buckler's supervision worthy of the task. He then offered his own supposedly objective account of the fabric's condition and the methods that had been used. He noted that the substitution (early in the nineteenth century) of a soft Yorkshire stone for the locally quarried oolite on the decayed Norman doorways had hastened their decay; that fragments of the original Norman colonettes were being collected to provide models for the new work; that ornaments retaining any patterns of the original sculpture were being left untouched; that the build-up of a thick layer of ‘scum’ had both concealed the sculptural decorations and obliterated many of the original tool marks; that the discrepancy between old and new masonry was severe and the two needed to be brought together; and that, in the careful process of ‘scum’ removal, the medieval workmanship could now sometimes be seen.

Williams's defence did little to calm the storm, however, and the ecclesiologists raised the issue once more at their twenty-sixth anniversary meeting on 14 June 1865. Anderson, Street and White brought the saga to a head and their responses were recorded in the minutes published in the August edition of the Ecclesiologist, including the following contribution made by Street:

Street, supported by White, believed that a patchwork appearance was actually desirable, which made any ‘cleaning’ redundant. White (who had been a close friend of Street in the office of Scott and Moffatt) added that the process at Lincoln was ‘one of the most dangerous and destructive elements in church restoration’ and that ‘no tool, no scraper, no instrument whatever, ought to be used […] harder than a common clothes-brush’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Massingberd, the cathedral's chancellor, stepped in to defend the dean and chapter in the following October instalment of the Ecclesiologist.Footnote ⁶⁹ He feared that a completely non-interventionist approach would allow the building to crumble, and he therefore supported the current approach of carefully removing crumbling stonework and replacing it with fine imitations. He also insisted that restorations had been carried out under ‘the advice of a responsible architect’, with the Norman relief sculpture remaining ‘almost untouched’. The ‘scum’ on the west front was likewise being carefully removed from old stone ‘by a small instrument about three inches long, used by the hand, without a mallet, and with the aid of water’.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the same issue, the Rev. John Jackson also offered qualified support for the continuing restoration, following a recent visit to Lincoln. He admitted that he may have previously been ‘instrumental in giving a stronger colouring to some of the remarks made than is altogether warranted by the circumstances’.Footnote ⁷¹ He then praised the dean and chapter for basic weatherproofing and for replacing irretrievably decayed stone or badly crafted stone of recent date. He added, however, that ‘there we must stop’ because ‘scraping of any sort should have been wholly dispensed with; no piece of carved stone should have been discarded unless utterly perished’.Footnote ⁷²

In October, the Building News weighed in with a rejoinder to Massingberd. It was moot, argued the journal, whether a tool used for repairs measured only some two or three inches in length, since ‘a boy with a small file would be able to destroy the surface of the most beautiful stone carving in the cathedral’.Footnote ⁷³ The Ecclesiologist echoed this sentiment in its own response that month.Footnote ⁷⁴ Street advanced more forceful arguments in a lengthy letter published in the Ecclesiologist's December edition, following a visit to the cathedral. Although he had hoped to exonerate the dean and chapter, the visit confirmed his worst fears.Footnote ⁷⁵ He first dismissed the cleaning as redundant, not only because Lincoln stone was hard and resilient, but because it would be covered again by lichen in a few years. He admitted that some stonework may have required renewal, while commending the replacement of modern shafts with new ones based on medieval examples.Footnote ⁷⁶ On balance, however, Street thought that the restoration was inadequate if not destructive. The masons’ tools had left the ancient stonework disfigured with arbitrary and irregular furrows, and the carved figures and foliage decoration on the west front had been subjected to a ‘long catalogue of errors’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In fact, he maintained, most of the enrichments, including the statues of kings, had been destroyed by extensive recutting. His conclusion was that the workmen were ‘not sufficiently skilled, or not sufficiently superintended’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Similar accusations continued to be made well into 1866, including the final grim words on the matter that December from the Ecclesiologist, which declared Buckler to be ‘utterly unqualified for the task of restoring Lincoln’.Footnote ⁷⁹

UNFOUNDED ACCUSATIONS?

Despite these published testimonies, what Buckler actually did at Lincoln Cathedral remains unclear. His internal repairs and enrichments were uncontroversial. They included adding a canopy and crockets to the medieval east wall of the choir screen behind Essex's reredos.Footnote ⁸⁰ As part of this remodelling, Buckler added Decorated tracery to the screen and pierced the reredos to make it easier to see the east window beyond.Footnote ⁸¹ He also relaid the floor of the sanctuary in front of the screen and either side of the altar, arranging the Minton tiles and marble to resemble Cosmati work.Footnote ⁸² As for Buckler's other work on the cathedral, it is difficult to find evidence of anything very substantial. In 1863, proposed works were itemised in a fabric fund audit, when it was resolved ‘that the following sums be expended on the restoration of the cathedral during the ensuing year, namely £250 for the repairs to the roof of the southern aisle and, £350 for the central arch of the west front, as well as £20 for the buttresses and £50 for the cloister ceiling’.Footnote ⁸³ None of these sums is large compared to other restorations at the time, or to those planned for the cathedral in the 1870s and 1880s (discussed below). Thomas Cocke has appraised the work carried out during Buckler's time in detail:

In addition, then, to his sensitive undoing of post-medieval reparation, Buckler's work largely continued the routine repairs carried out since the mid-eighteenth century, which Cocke has described as merely cleaning and polishing. These routine repairs, however, were receiving external scrutiny perhaps for the first time, and were regarded as insensitive or worse.Footnote ⁸⁵

That Buckler's approach was, in his own words, ‘conscientious preservation’ rather than ‘destructive’ restoration stands.Footnote ⁸⁶ It is, moreover, backed up by a report of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, to whom the dean and chapter transferred their estates following Buckler's retirement in 1870.Footnote ⁸⁷ As Francis Hill has noted, the commissioners judged the cathedral to be ‘in such a satisfactory state of repair that the comparatively small sum of £20,000 was allotted for the repair and improvement of the fabric’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Buckler's successor, Pearson, gave a higher estimate in 1885 for the cost of necessary repairs — ‘at not less than £70,470’ — but this sum did not necessarily rebuke Buckler's work either.Footnote ⁸⁹ Indeed, a recent assessment by the cathedral's current architect, Nicholas Rank, goes further in exonerating Buckler of ‘scraping’ in any extreme form.Footnote ⁹⁰ In quantity and intensity, the attacks against Buckler's methods appear greatly disproportionate to the work that took place.

BUCKLER'S INTEMPERATE BOOK

The Bucklers rallied to defend the family name. In the August 1865 issue of the Gentleman's Magazine, Charles Alban Buckler confronted ‘the ignorant and invidious aspersions and misstatements’ coming from the Ecclesiological Society related to the Lincoln restoration, writing that the ‘very persons who speak and write most pathetically, and with assumed disinterestedness, about hoar antiquity and “bemossed stones” […] have proved by deeds which belie their words to be the most unscrupulous and destructive of innovators’.Footnote ⁹¹ Buckler himself, who was never supine in the face of an injustice, went a large step further in 1866 by issuing an entire book on the scandal, titled A Description and Defence of the Restorations of the Exterior of Lincoln Cathedral: With a Comparative Examination of the Restorations of Other Cathedrals, Parish Churches, &c.Footnote ⁹² The book was published by Rivingtons of Oxford and Cousans and Gale of Lincoln, and the costs were met by the Lincoln Cathedral chapter. An angry defence of his actions, running to 282 unillustrated pages, the work was also a polemic against what Buckler called ‘architectural innovation’ or ‘the destructive method’ of restoration.Footnote ⁹³ It has an epistolary composition that draws copiously on letters between Scott, Buckler and the dean and chapter. In the preface, Buckler outlined his primary motives as

As he informed the reader, Buckler had prepared the defence in 1859 (following Scott's first letter to the dean), but had laid it aside in the hope that Scott would drop his charges.

Buckler expected his book would provoke outrage. Writing in March 1866 to his confidant, the Rev. William Dyke (fellow and later vice-principal of Jesus College, Oxford), he declared that he was ready to publish his manuscript ‘without the dread of the score of angry critics by whom I shall be assailed’, but assailed by them he most certainly was.Footnote ⁹⁵ One damning response to the book appeared in the Building News, arguing that it was ‘really a most virulent, blind, and furious attack upon ecclesiologists in general and Mr G G Scott in particular [… with] almost profanity of language’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The review of the book in the Ecclesiologist opened with the regret that ‘we cannot congratulate the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln upon their defender’ and concluded that ‘we have never, to our recollection, had to get through so irksome, vulgar, prejudiced, and in every way unsatisfactory a book’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The Ecclesiological Society defended its own, strenuously denying Buckler's accusation that it was ‘entirely careless of antiquity’.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Saturday Review, established by Beresford Hope in 1855 and loyal to Scott, was likewise scathing.Footnote ⁹⁹ It called Buckler's criticisms of Scott an appeal to hypocrisy; and, on the issue of patina, it claimed that while to Buckler the ‘scum’ was ‘nothing but an external coating of dirt and smoke’, to Street and others it was ‘the very true original surface itself, blackened and lichened over by nature's kindly hand’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The Athenæum gave a more balanced account and, although it ultimately sided with Buckler's detractors, raised the interesting point that the controversy was not only acrimonious but novel: ‘Rare is it that one member of this profession comments on the acts of another […] Etiquette has generally mastered love for Art, and wrecking gone unheeded.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ The Buckler scandal, it suggested, had changed the nature of architectural debate for the better.

Support for Buckler was more limited. The Anti-Teapot Review and Union Review: A Magazine of Catholic Literature and Art were two of Buckler's few steadfast champions.Footnote ¹⁰² The short-lived Anti-Teapot Society had been founded to stand against ‘Pharisaism’, or hypocrisy, the name referring to a belief that such discussions were prone to take place at the tea parties popular with dissenters.Footnote ¹⁰³ The Anti-Teapot Review declared that a ‘great injustice has been committed by certain architectural and ecclesiological busybodies against the dean and chapter of Lincoln’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Observing that the west front was still so deeply coloured that ‘strangers can scarcely be persuaded that anything has been done to it’, it argued that the cathedral officials had authorised the best means of restoration.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Union Review was adamant that

Both magazines were evidently baffled by the accusations of Bucklers’ critics.

Buckler's Description and Defence, despite its many longueurs, is a work of passionate invective, incautious criticism and hyper-emotionality.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As such, it forms part of an enduring tradition of the architectural protest book, one followed into the twentieth century in such works as Colin Amery's and Dan Cruickshank's no less bellicose The Rape of Britain (1975).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ An earlier work by Buckler, comparable in tone, was his strongly worded pamphlet aimed at preventing the demolition of the Old Quadrangle of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1823.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The outrage voiced by Buckler and others mostly saved the cloister of the north range from destruction, with the demolished parts quickly rebuilt in a manner advocated by Buckler and his father.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Yet, while the language of protest may have served its purpose well at the time of the Magdalen scandal, it did little to aid its author's cause in 1866. This time, it was his name and reputation rather than architecture that Buckler sought to defend.

Buckler's book was preoccupied with Scott, treating the latter's criticism as a personal attack. As Scott quipped, ‘my name appears to be the catchword throughout his volume’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Buckler adopted a rhetorical style of jocund malice, for example, by ironically likening Scott's sentimentality to the emotional outpourings of Goethe's romantic hero Werther:

Ultimately, Scott would be judged by history more harshly than Buckler, his reputation being especially damaged by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). He was no stranger to contemporary criticism, even from the Ecclesiological Society; but at the time of the Lincoln saga he was one of the society's heroes.Footnote ¹¹³ Moreover, Buckler's vitriolic attacks on Scott in his book were not limited to the Lincoln controversy, but also cited several instances of ‘havoc’ for which Buckler held Scott responsible. He drew attention, for example, to Scott's restoration of the fourteenth-century chantry chapel of St Mary the Virgin on Wakefield Bridge in Yorkshire, going into this matter at some length. A competition had been advertised by the Yorkshire Architectural Society in 1843 for designs to bring the chapel back into church use. Buckler had proposed a conservative restoration, but Scott, who won the commission, replaced the original fabric wholesale in 1847, using a perishable Caen stone.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Buckler, in his Description and Defence, not only chronicled Scott's malpractices, but set out his own superior antiquarian credentials for restoring the chapel, having collected archaeological memoranda on it for thirty years.Footnote ¹¹⁵

All of the charges made by Buckler in reference to Scott's work were duly answered by Scott himself in the pages of the Ecclesiologist.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Scott admitted instances where he had failed, for various reasons, to carry out restorations according to the new conservative model, identifying early contradictions between his practice and his preaching. As regards the Wakefield commission, for instance, he commented that ‘the importance of retaining the ipsissimi lapides [the very stones themselves] had not then been duly appreciated’, and so stonework in advanced decay was renewed.Footnote ¹¹⁷ He also added that, should Buckler's account of his undertakings at Lincoln be true, then he could scarcely object to them. He was thus surprisingly forgiving of Buckler, hoping that some good could still come of the controversy, since it had provoked a widespread debate about restoration.

As for Buckler's other detractors, only Street is mentioned in the book and only briefly. In this notable passage, Buckler criticised the restoration of the medieval church of St James at Cowley in Oxfordshire, which Street largely rebuilt in 1862–65.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Throwing Street's criticisms back at him, Buckler wrote that ‘he who tosses ancient architecture to the right and to the left, and maltreats and disfigures with architectural coxcombery the remains he spares, must needs exhibit his ecclesiological veracity at Lincoln’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Part of his reticence to say any more about Street is explained by a remark to Dyke: ‘I intend to be severe, but do not wish to approach the Vulgarity of Street.’Footnote ¹²⁰ Otherwise, Buckler's reserve is difficult to account for, since Street was an intimate member of the ecclesiological clique and a favourite of the society's leading light Benjamin Webb — although it may be that Buckler considered it sufficient to aim his vitriol at his long-term antagonist Scott.

PROFESSIONAL RIVALRIES

The severity of the attacks that Buckler faced over his repair work at Lincoln Cathedral can be explained by noting an essential difference between him and many of his critics. Buckler was a late Georgian proponent of the Gothic rather than a Victorian one, much less a ‘High Victorian’. He generally built in the Gothic revival style from a conservative antiquarian perspective. His traditionalism extended to his restoration work, which was usually diligent but muted in its execution. In this regard, too, he was aloof from the work of the fashionable mainstream of the profession.Footnote ¹²¹ He may, therefore, have felt a sense of estrangement, exacerbated by the increasingly archaic appellation ‘antiquary’ with which he was firmly associated. He was an outsider, forced to confront the challenge posed by the rise of High Victorianism and the professionalisation of architecture, tendencies that went against traditional antiquarianism. Embedded within the debates about ‘scraping’ was a notion of the old guard typified by Buckler's generation, which sought to defend the judgement of the individual relying on experience. By mid-century, however, a younger generation of architects was beginning to engage with the emerging codification of the profession that would follow.

Indicative of this divide is William Morris. His view of Buckler was formed as an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford, where he witnessed Buckler's restoration of the pinnacles of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford (1848–52). As Morris's biographer John William Mackail put it in 1891, Morris pigeonholed Buckler at the time as having belonged to the previous ‘Gothic generation’ or the ‘second period of Gothic knowledge’, which he held in ‘profound contempt’.Footnote ¹²² Before mid-century, however, the position of Buckler and his family had been very different. In fact, John Buckler senior had been closely associated with an early preservationist faction within the Society of Antiquaries, which was led by the architect-draughtsman John Carter (1748–1817) and the veteran antiquary and former society director Richard Gough (1735–1809). This faction helped develop a new, scientific form of what we would now call medieval archaeology while fighting against the contemporary craze for ‘innovations’ in restoration work that were spearheaded in the 1790s by James Wyatt.Footnote ¹²³ John Chessell Buckler later declared himself an ‘antiquary of the school of Carter’.Footnote ¹²⁴ But now he was being accused, much like Wyatt had been, of ‘having the hand of the spoiler about him’.Footnote ¹²⁵ The scandal at Lincoln, therefore, marked a serious turn in the fortunes of the Buckler dynasty. In short, a professional gulf between Buckler and his adversaries underpinned the scraping controversy. This was also reflected in a difference in philosophical approach towards restoration.

BUCKLER'S RESTORATION PHILOSOPHY

Beyond Lincoln, Buckler's restoration works were generally on the ‘conservative’ end of the spectrum, to use a term employed in a debate held at the Ecclesiological Society in 1847.Footnote ¹²⁶ His experience was largely one of success. One of his first projects was the remodelling of the early fifteenth-century chancel at Adderbury church in Oxfordshire (1834). Of the restored east window, Buckler's contemporary E. A. Freeman said that ‘nothing can be more creditable to the restorers’.Footnote ¹²⁷ Buckler also enjoyed the early favour of the ecclesiologist John Mason Neale when he assisted him on the restoration of the church of St Nicholas at Old Shoreham in Sussex (1838).Footnote ¹²⁸ The Ecclesiological Society itself approved of his work on St Mary's at Iffley in Oxfordshire (1856–58), even though he uncharacteristically replaced the then existing Perpendicular window on the west front with a Norman oculus, based on surviving traces.Footnote ¹²⁹ His retention, during his restoration of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, of the statues at the bases of the pinnacles would even succeed in pleasing the SPAB four decades later.Footnote ¹³⁰ He displayed a similarly conservative approach during his restoration of Brockhampton Manor, Herefordshire, a timber-framed building dating mostly to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, with which he was involved from 1866 or before. As was usual, he set out clear objectives for the work, resolving that ‘at Brockhampton it was an indispensable requisite that nothing on the plea of amendment should be derogatory to the antiquity of the place’.Footnote ¹³¹

Also illustrative of Buckler's approach is the subtle repair work he undertook at Brasenose, Jesus, Magdalen and Oriel Colleges in Oxford, particularly in the 1850s and 1860s.Footnote ¹³² For example, at Oriel, where he restored the exteriors of the chapel and hall (1852), he specifically advised the fellows against a ‘scraping’ approach.Footnote ¹³³ It was as though, like medieval masons working on cathedrals over centuries, he conceived of his role as contributing to a broader tradition of maintenance, seeking to preserve harmony over time through quiet repair work rather than by adding new work and bringing about chronological disjuncture — as was likely the case at Lincoln Cathedral too.Footnote ¹³⁴ As the unnamed bard, speaking for Buckler, puts it in ‘The Lay of Lincoln’:

As regards his interventions at Lincoln, Buckler claimed that they ‘seek not applause’, adding that they were ‘doing good to the fabric; making it, as far as they extend, such as it once was’.Footnote ¹³⁶

In his book, under the heading ‘Restoration by Repair’, Buckler described his ‘honest, wholesome restoration’ of the decayed features of the cathedral, claiming that his ambition was ‘to maintain the character of the ancient detail, wherever necessity obliges its renewal’.Footnote ¹³⁷ In this respect, his project had a didactic dimension comparable to Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's interests in restoring Gothic buildings to show their histories of construction; for, in Buckler's view, Lincoln Cathedral ‘relates its periodical changes circumstantially; its accessions of strength, of adornment, of usefulness, all are explained and illustrated in due order’.Footnote ¹³⁸ Yet his account is far from limpid. Elsewhere he argued that ‘age has given an air — an aspect — to ancient buildings, which add indescribably to the interest which their origin and their architecture forcibly excite’.Footnote ¹³⁹ That ‘aspect’ is not defined, but it is still clear that he felt a building's patina should not obscure its architectural history.

It is useful to draw an analogy between Buckler's approaches to fabric restoration and topographical draughtsmanship. After all, Buckler learned his trade in an age when, as Giles Worsley put it, ‘the connection between the topographical artist and the architect was close, with the one slipping easily into the role of the other’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In the monumental view of Lincoln Cathedral from the south-west, which is characteristic of Buckler's topographical prints (Fig. 1), the subject is almost autonomous, extending up to the plate mark. Whereas the figures and landscape are made to appear inessential, architectural details are all carefully delineated. Buckler, as a scion of John Carter, inherited an approach to topographical drawing that thus aimed to provide an empirical record of a building, delineating both its details and its historical layers.

Insight into the specifics of such an approach can be gleaned from Ruskin's essay ‘Of Turnerian Topography’, published in his Modern Painters (1856).Footnote ¹⁴¹ Writing in the 1850s but looking back on past tradition, Ruskin outlined three approaches to topographical art: the first involving a priori knowledge and the other two, which he was more concerned with, being the ‘simple’ and the ‘Turnerian’. These latter two approaches, he argued, were different in their representations of ‘facts’. He argued that the former favoured the primacy of the outward eye, whereas the latter gave primacy to the inward eye, and he further contended that there was a pristine subjectivity out of which a so-called ‘Turnerian’ topographical image emerged, which can be better understood as the outcome of the artist's mind rather than the more traditional kind of image still being produced by others — who would include Buckler. If we view the ‘simple’ approach as akin to Buckler's (in a tradition of record-making going back to William Stukeley), in the eyes of Ruskin it lacked ‘soul’.

It may therefore be that, under Buckler's supervision, the west front of Lincoln Cathedral was being conceived in a manner akin to a frozen pictorial representation, rather than as part of a ‘living’ tradition. The problem with the sentimentality that Buckler crudely caricatured in Scott's work lay not only in a belief in its hypocrisy. It also encapsulated Buckler's unease about the very notion of so-called ‘pleasing decay’. A restoration approach that favoured the retention of patina and crumbling fabric could obfuscate edges and details, or even the ‘lines and figures’ that Ruskin had alluded to, and confuse the archaeological record. Thus, as Julian Munby has shown, Buckler was chiefly motivated in his drawings by record-making, and a corresponding concern would appear to underpin his restoration work.Footnote ¹⁴² In fact, this very position comes to light in the ‘Lay of Lincoln’, in a mocking jibe at the Ruskinian mindset:

John Chessell Buckler wanted to see the details, not a vague overall patina. The Lincoln episode epitomised the Ruskinian conflict between the ‘simple’ topographical position (upheld by the Bucklers) and the ‘Turnerian’ outlook (embraced by their detractors). Individual positions could be more nuanced than either conservative or destructive, but the two parties still disagreed on their interpretation of sensitive repair in line with contrasting philosophical positions.

Buckler neatly summarised his championing of the ‘archaeological record’ in his book:

The notion of ‘honest’ repair, or light restoration, therefore, was adopted — or at least intended — a decade before the SPAB produced its manifesto.