Never mind Bayou! Here’s some other great medieval art – and it’s free | art

THere’s a carved stone figure scowling ferociously in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral and you can see why – a man sitting on his head, legs apart, holding a fish and a bowl in his outstretched arms. Other figures atop slender stone columns include a snake-tailed creature wrestling a dog-like beast, a griffon eating a siren, and a (now separate) sculpture of a horned devil. All this nefariousness in the depths of the holiest shrine in England.

But medieval British art is full of wonder, mystery and humour. They are also so abundant that they are taken for granted. But now, nearly 1,000 years later, there is about to be a moment. This week, contestants will start getting £33 tickets to spend 40 minutes in the company of a medieval British work of art. The Bayeux Tapestry, a 70-metre-long embroidery depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066, was certainly embroidered by the women of Kent and commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux in the 1070s.

After surviving for centuries as a Bayeux treasure in Normandy, its loan to the British Museum in London is exciting but ironic – because while the hype is understandable, it’s not as if we don’t have other great medieval art and architecture. Maybe Bayeuxmania should make us dust off our Romanesque and Gothic treasures and appreciate them more. And if you stand in line to see the tapestry, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that most of these other wonders require far less money and hassle.

Medieval art came to Britain with the Normans. I don’t mean to insult Anglo-Saxon England, but as the Bayeux Tapestry shows, with its images of William (later known as the Conqueror) and his men riding around on horseback or building a castle, continental Europe was a little more advanced. By 1066, it had crystallized into feudal societies – a world of nobility, knights and peasants bound by oath and united by Christianity. This was an artistic golden age in France and throughout Europe, with the building of great Romanesque monasteries and churches. Immediately after the invasion, this approach struck Britain, led by Lanfranc, the Italian monk appointed by King William I as Archbishop of Canterbury.

It costs nothing to look at the view and the Middle Ages created some of the best views in Britain. Glastonbury Tor haunts the imagination with its mysterious tower built on top of a steep hill. Is this where King Arthur died? The question remains that although the tower dates back to a 14th-century church, its dreamy location is typical of a picturesque medieval eye.

Conwy Castle, located at the mouth of the river of the same name, occupies a very strategic position atop a massive rocky outcrop. However, you can’t tell me that the 13th century architect James St George didn’t have an eye for beauty. The towers and towers of this Gothic castle dance in an intricate rhythm against the mountains and sea. With the original roofs, pendants and signage, it must look like something out of a fairytale.

I got my first artistic thrill as a child staring at them. As an adult, I felt that childlike excitement again when I first stood beside the River Wear and looked up at the two square towers of Durham Cathedral perfectly placed – as if this were the Lord’s castle – atop a high promontory dominating the wooded landscape, dark flowing river and bridges. These are the gold standard scenes – or so JMW Turner thought, and who’s to argue? The landscape artist painted wonderful views of these and other medieval sites across Britain.

Medieval Britain had a compelling sense of landscape because it was more in touch with nature than we are. In the 14th-century Lady Chapel of Ely, flowers and seeds such as grapes and nuts hang in steep arched niches, creating the effect of a spring hedge bursting with life. It’s the visual equivalent of Chaucer’s: “Is April with its shores warming…”

However, although the medieval world was in touch with nature, it was also addicted to fashion. New styles continued to replace old ones. Is that stained glass window Romanesque or Gothic? Romanesque arches and vaults, dating from the 11th and early 12th centuries, are semicircular, while the Gothic style that quickly took hold had pointed arches and expanses of glass made possible by flying buttresses that directed the weight of buildings away from their walls. Then there are complex variations of Gothic: Ornate and Perpendicular.

In fact, all of these approaches evolve upward (literally) toward the same dream: the depiction of heaven on earth. The most ambitious creations of this era, the cathedrals, are as much compositional art as architecture, using light, space, sculpture and massive scale to create a sense of God’s enveloping power. Medieval Christianity was not something I chose. It surrounded you and defined the world. Cathedral vaults surround you, just as the dome of the sky of the medieval universe arched over the little earth with its villages, fields and towers.

Salisbury Cathedral in Wiltshire makes the connection between heaven and earth clear with its tower, the tallest in Britain. Does this pure peak seem to emerge from the building, architecture or sculpture? This is perhaps land art, because as well as pointing upward, it provides focus on Salisbury Plain itself, as if directing the landscape into a single bolt of energy.

The interior of Durham Cathedral works in reverse: the massive circular columns along its nave seem to plant themselves into the ground like the legs of a giant elephant. God’s power seems to have swollen and fattened it – but its mass has been softened by geometry. Each stone cylinder is engraved with zigzags, spirals, lozenges or grooves. You start in awe of the immensity and end up amazed by the ingenuity of the builders.

James St. George made Conwy Towers a perfect circuit game. But he built Carnarvon Castle without any curves at all: its impressive towers are polygonal. Caernarfon also has sculptures. Three stone eagles shine from them, the embodiment of the power of Edward I, who commissioned these castles to suppress the Welsh. Conquest and ownership: we have returned to the themes of the Bayeux Tapestry. The art and architecture of medieval Britain create visions of order: cathedrals are meant to overwhelm you, castles are meant to intimidate you.

However, even in the early Middle Ages, this sense of discipline, of gazing at the heavens of God and the rule of the king, with a kind of natural disgust, produced images of chaos. The grotesque carvings in the Canterbury Crypt are an antidote to the cathedral’s majesty. This is the cosmopolitan underside of medieval art, where monsters and scoundrels inhabit the margins of manuscripts, naked figures leap on the borders of the Bayeux Tapestry, and a mermaid with exposed breasts is carved into Durham Castle’s chapel.

Gradually, the margins engulfed the center. Christian austerity and military power were transformed into a fantasy world of brave knights who entered tournaments to woo their ladies. Beaumaris on Anglesey looks like a play castle, with low towers surrounded by reflective water. Chivalry and courtly love infect Gothic religious art. One of the reasons that Ely Church offended the Protestant iconoclasts, who destroyed its statues, was that it served as a huge sculptural love hymn to the Virgin Mary, courting the Virgin with artistic gifts.

Late English Gothic was swept by sensual and languid romanticism. Hopper jumping, a uniquely English style, is a far cry from Durham’s stern, divine power. The interior of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge looks like a cluster of fanciful mushrooms growing from the ground on long stone stems, radiating above you in an almost hallucinatory canopy of exaggerated natural forms.

Sensuality almost defeats religion in Wilton’s Diptych, a portable prayer aid painted for King Richard II in 1395–99. Richard kneels before a vision of the Virgin Mary and a group of blue-and-white-winged angels: the game of blue against gold and the king’s selfish romance with the Virgin are a far cry from the single-minded Normans. It is an anonymous painting, but by the 15th century, more artists were becoming celebrities. In the 1570s, Holy Trinity Church in Edinburgh commissioned a great altarpiece with angels playing the organ and a saint in shining armor by the famous Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes. Today the painting is in the Scottish National Gallery, while Trinity Church still survives as a tiny shell of the Old Town, having been moved to make way for the town’s Victorian railway station.

If the art of feudal Christendom arrived in Britain with the Normans in 1066, its end can also be accurately dated. When Henry VIII began destroying the monasteries in 1536, an entire cultural world was demolished. Yet it is surprising how much British art has remained medieval – igniting our imagination with its sublime, otherworldly messages.

Great medieval art that you can see for free

Durham Cathedral
Entrance to the most magnificent British cathedral of all is free, although a £5 donation is considered good manners and is worth purchasing a ticket to visit its museum to see the relics of St Cuthbert.

Louis chess
The Scandinavian-style carved ivory chess pieces depict feudal society with all its ranks, including knights like those on the Bayeux Tapestry. In the free permanent exhibitions of the British Museum.

Norham Castle
The towering bastion of this castle in Northumberland once guarded the border country, and later inspired one of Turner’s most enigmatic paintings – English Heritage, No Entry Fee.

Trinity altar

Holy Trinity Church in Edinburgh commissioned Hugo van der Goes to paint this Gothic masterpiece with its playing angel and saint in shining armour. Free at the Scottish National Gallery.

Flint Castle
This free-to-enter coastal ruin in North Wales is where Richard II sat on the floor and told sad stories about the deaths of kings, waiting for Bolingbroke to overthrow him.