Saltmarsh’s legacy to the college he loved is a book that brims over with snapshots of the achievements not only of the rich and powerful but also of the ordinary people.
In the mid-1950s a fellow and archivist of King’s College, Cambridge, was asked to write a 10,000-word history of the building closest to his heart. John Saltmarsh never tired of showing visitors around King’s College Chapel, one of the world’s finest examples of late perpendicular gothic architecture and a building ablaze with Tudor symbolism. Saltmarsh was the perfect man for the task: he was an economic historian with a particular interest in the medieval world; he was a meticulous researcher; and he was a gifted writer.
But Saltmarsh was also an eccentric. He exceeded his 10,000 word brief – or rather he totally ignored it. By the time he died, in September 1974, Saltmarsh had turned his extraordinarily detailed research in the King’s College archives, or ‘muniments’ as he knew them, into a manuscript of approximately 220,000 words typed on a manual typewriter. There was yet another snag: when cancer overtook Saltmarsh, he had still not completed his manuscript, which bore copious notes and handwritten corrections. Impressively, none of the facts that he marked with the word “check” have later been found to be incorrect.
Writing two months before he died, Saltmarsh expressed the hope that King’s College Chapel: A History and Commentary would one day be finished: “This is a large book on which I have been engaged for many years, and on which many years’ work remains to do. If I am unable to complete and publish it, I hope that a typescript copy will be kept in King’s College Library for the use of future scholars.” For four decades, several versions of Saltmarsh’s manuscript lay safely in King’s College archive while the college struggled with the problem of publication.
Meanwhile the chapel itself approached its 500th anniversary. It was in 1515 that the extraordinarily ambitious stonework, conceived by Henry VI and begun by the master mason Reginald Ely, was completed by workmen overseen by John Wastell. Beneath a timber roof, which was clad with lead to keep out the weather, teams of masons spent months perched on scaffolding to assemble the chapel’s celebrated fan vaulting which ascends to the elaborate bosses punctuating the great spine of the building.
Last year, the decision was made to publish Saltmarsh’s unfinished work in full, complete with his many notes.
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Image: King’s College Chapel: A History and Commentary by John Saltmarsh (Jarrold Publishing)
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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