Professor Peter J. Fergusson (14 July 1934–24 January 2022)

As an Englishman studying for a Ph.D. at Harvard University, Peter Fergusson applied to join the British Archaeological Association on 1 January 1963. He was to become one of the Association’s longest standing life members, as well as one of the greatest supporters of our work and fellowship. Sadly, in his fifty-ninth year with us, Peter has died after a protracted struggle with cancer.

It was in New England that Peter forged his long and distinguished academic and teaching career, in the Art History Faculty at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1966–2007), eventually becoming the Feldberg Professor of Art. He never entirely deserted his British roots, of course, far from it. Peter was all too aware of the great good fortune that enabled him to maintain a house in Bayswater, where he and his beloved wife, Lilian, spent a good part of each summer. It was from here, for example, that he could visit his remarkable elder sister, Ruth, to whom he was no less devoted. A London base also allowed Peter to keep in close touch with a circle of like-minded English friends and colleagues, to attend lectures and conferences, and to undertake fieldwork on a variety of sites, not least those with which his name was to become synonymous, namely the Cistercian abbeys of Yorkshire.

Both in Britain and the United States, Peter will be remembered as a dedicated scholar, an original thinker, a superb teacher and a warm-hearted friend. These qualities, and more besides, permeated three moving tributes delivered at his funeral service, held in St Andrew’s Episcopal Church at Wellesley on 5 February 2022. Caroline Bruzelius, an early student of Peter’s and a distinguished architectural historian in her own right, spoke of him ‘enthralling and inspiring generations of students’. She further told of ‘his boundless and infectious intellectual curiosity and his generous collegiality’. The museum curator, Frederick Ilchman, opened our eyes to the tireless efforts of both Peter and Lilian in in their support of Save Venice, a North American foundation dedicated to preserving the artistic heritage of Italy’s magnificent island city. In many ways, though, the most touching remembrance was delivered by James O’Gorman, a fellow scholar and teacher at Wellesley, who mourned the loss of the great friend he had known for sixty years.

Peter John Fergusson was born in London, on 14 July 1934. His father, Alfred Milnthorpe Fergusson (d. 1970), was rector of St George the Martyr in Holborn and also chaplain at the then Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street. Peter’s mother, Ursula Mabel, had been brought up in a well-to-do family at Addington in Surrey. In 1937, the Fergusson family moved to St Albans, where Alfred took up the appointment as vicar of St Peter’s church. A 10th-century foundation according to Matthew Paris, the church is now dominated by its 15th-century nave arcades, though everything is cloaked in a heavy Victorian restoration of 1894–95. As a schoolboy, Peter was sent to the independent Haileybury College, south-east of Hertford, featuring imposing buildings by William Wilkins and Sir Arthur Blomfield.

Given this background, one imagines that Peter must have absorbed a potent blend of both spiritual and architectural influences, but he was neither destined for the Church, nor — at least not immediately — did it look as if he would pursue a career in academia. In the event, it may well have been the harsh reality of life in post-war Britain which directed him to the hospitality industry. Following an introduction in London, with a spell at Claridge’s in Mayfair, no less, Peter set off for the United States in the mid-1950s. He was bound for East Lansing, in the Upper Midwest, where he entered the restaurant and hotel management programme at Michigan State University. Yet his heart, one suspects, always lay elsewhere. In any case, Peter remained at Michigan State to pursue a BA (1960), part-financing his studies by washing up pots and pans in a busy kitchen environment.

The die was now firmly cast and Peter moved east to New England, to take up a postgraduate place at Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was there, in classes taught by Professor Eduard Sekler, that he was first introduced to Cistercian architecture. Following the award of an MA in 1961, Peter remained at Harvard to study for a Ph.D., under the supervision of the then Cluny maestro, Kenneth John Conant. In a thesis entitled ‘Twelfth-Century Cistercian Churches in England’, completed in 1967, Peter breathed new life into a subject which had essentially lain dormant since the Edwardian era. Meanwhile, he had also secured gainful employment. Initially, in 1965, he had taken up a post as assistant professor at McGill University, in the Canadian city of Montreal. A year later, however, he was drawn back to leafy Massachusetts, having been appointed to a similar position in the art history faculty at Wellesley College. It was at Wellesley that Peter met the fellow art historian who would eventually become his wife, Lilian Armstrong (1936–2021). He fell in love, too, with the college’s magnificently landscaped campus, where — accompanied in early years by his dog, Wyatt — he found time and space to sort through stubbornly compacted scholarly thought. Wellesley, furthermore, was the place that Peter discovered his talent for teaching, something he practised to great acclaim across four decades.

Indeed, it was possibly his commitment to teaching, combined with a certain diffidence and a degree of modesty with regard to his own scholarship, which led to an initial slow burn in Peter’s formal academic output. That said, a steady flow of papers began to appear over the course of the 1970s, and on into the 1980s, all linked to his Ph.D. work on the Cistercians in England, particularly the northern houses. In fact, one of his earliest contributions was the winner of the Association’s Reginald Taylor Essay Prize in 1970. The article, exploring the date and design sources of the presbytery and transepts at Roche Abbey, was published in the JBAA for 1971. A second piece, on the south transept elevation at Byland, appeared in the 1975 volume; and a paper drawing together the evidence for the temporary (largely wooden) buildings occupied by the founding communities of England’s white monk houses followed in 1983. Elsewhere, Peter published on other aspects of 12th-century Cistercian architecture, including the introduction of crossing towers to their churches, the rebuilding at Dundrennan Abbey (a foray into Scotland), and a piece considering who actually built the monasteries.

Through his Ph.D. work, together with these various papers, Peter effectively set out the prelude to his first book, Architecture of Solitude: Cistercian Abbeys in Twelfth-Century England. This was completed in 1981, though not published by Princeton University Press until 1984. The volume offered an exposition of the author’s maturing thought on his subject, yet at the same time it was openly presented as a contribution to a neglected subject, something which might foster discussion and encourage further research. As the title indicates, the focus was very much on the abbey churches, which, Peter suggested, stood ‘witness to the order’s spiritual and temporal ideals’. Importantly, though, and in contrast to some prevailing scholarship, he recognized that any belief in a single, or fixed, Cistercian architecture was ‘to fail to grasp the living quality of twelfth-century monastic life’.

The book was widely reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic, and on the Continent. For François Bucher, for example, it was ‘indispensable for any serious student of the Cistercian expansion across the Channel’, while Anne Prache considered it simply ‘une remarquable étude d’ensemble de l’architecture des Cisterciens en Angleterre au cours du XII^e siècle’. Even for those reviewers who were not entirely won over by its arguments, the volume was seen as a notable achievement. Christopher Wilson concluded that through Peter’s unflinching approach to difficult questions ‘the discussion of this important episode in English architecture has been raised to a higher level than it occupied before’; and, for Lindy Grant, it was ‘that rare thing, a book of considerable and lasting value’.

We might remember that prior to Architecture of Solitude, the principal account of early Cistercian buildings in England had been produced by John Bilson, in an extended article published in The Archaeological Journal, in 1909. Now, though, Peter’s work was to spearhead a considerable revival of interest during the 1980s, marked notably by a comprehensive volume of essays, edited by Christopher Norton and David Park, covering the art and architecture of the Cistercians throughout the British Isles (1986), and by Roger Stalley’s study of the white monk monasteries of Ireland (1987).

The Norton and Park volume was based on a conference held in Cambridge in 1983, at which Peter had delivered a thought-provoking paper on the 12th-century refectories at Rievaulx and Byland. It was a work which dealt not just with the mechanics of the way these abbeys abandoned their east–west dining halls, rebuilding them on a north–south axis, but one which proceeded to search for meaning in the architectural change. Broadly, it might be argued, this was an increasing concern in Peter’s work, as for example in his consideration of early Cistercian gatehouses in the north of England (1990), and in a study of the chapter house at Rievaulx (1994). The latter was a collaboration with Stuart Harrison, a foretaste of their highly praised and award-winning study, Rievaulx Abbey: Community, Architecture, Memory, published by Yale University Press in 1999. The volume undoubtedly set new standards for studies of monastic architecture and archaeology, primarily through its academic content, but also in its presentation, with lavish and informative illustration featuring throughout.

It would be wrong, though, to give the impression that Peter’s work was solely focussed on the Cistercians. As early as 1989, he turned to the Premonstratensian abbey at Easby, in North Yorkshire, and to a consideration of the wonderful surviving first-floor refectory at that house. Using the Easby example as a springing point, Peter drew attention to the common occurrence of first-floor refectories among houses of the regular canons in England more generally, arguing that in iconographic terms these were deliberate evocations of the Cenaculum, the upper room in which the Last Supper took place.

In later years, Peter’s studies of meaning within monastic sites extended to the Benedictines and, in particular, to the works of notable superiors at two of the greatest English houses of the order. In a paper published in the double-volume festschrift for Paul Crossley (2011), he set out a persuasive argument for the influence of Old St Peter’s in Rome on the building programmes of Abbot Anselm (1121–48) at Bury St Edmunds, of which the great gate tower (St James’s Gate) is the prominent survival. Meanwhile, for a number of years, Peter had been thinking hard about the 12th-century priory buildings at Canterbury. He had already produced papers looking at the treasury, the Green Court gatehouse and something of the elaborate water system, but these and all other features of the precinct were brought together in his final book, Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the Age of Becket, published by Yale University Press in 2011. Not surprisingly, given his years of experience, it is the work which might come to epitomize Peter’s distinctive approach to architectural history. At its core, as always, the text reflects a close and well-informed reading of the architectural fabric. From there, Peter is once again unflinching, setting out his arguments for why we should see the priory complex as having been masterminded by a single dynamic figure, namely the hitherto largely unsung Prior Wibert (1152/53–67). But beyond this, and with the so-called ‘waterworks’ drawing from the Eadwine Psalter (Trinity College Cambridge, MS R.17.1) as his anchor point, Peter’s particular interest is in the symbolism behind each structure. We are, for example, directed to the influence of contemporary scholarship and to biblical descriptions of archetypes for several of the Canterbury structures. Ultimately, Peter encourages us to acknowledge that for the 12th-century monks at Canterbury, their priory was readily understood as a manifestation of a Jerusalem, both celestial and earthly.

Such heady stuff aside, Peter was an absolutely charming man of perfect manners, with time for everyone. Friends speak warmly of his courtesy and politeness, and of his refreshing collegiality, not least in the support and encouragement he regularly offered to younger scholars. Although thoroughly assimilated into American academic life, with a wide circle of close friends in Massachusetts and beyond, there was always a feeling that he felt comfortable among colleagues here, whether based on a common outlook, or even his essentially British sense of humour.

In July and August each year, one could usually guarantee that Peter and Lilian would be in Bayswater, avoiding the sweltering heat of Wellesley. Peter would plan his stay around trips to Yorkshire, where he would spend time with his sister, Ruth, make site visits (latterly for work on several English Heritage guidebooks), and often attend the International Medieval Congress in Leeds. As a matter of course, however, one of the first things in the diary was attendance at the Association’s annual conference. Nobody can quite remember whether Peter was at the first gathering at Worcester in 1975, but there is a strong feeling he must have been. Indeed, his smiling face, his warm greetings to everyone he met, and his thoughtful contributions to the debate (whether in the lecture theatre or at the dining table) were features of almost every conference until shortly before the Covid years.

Back in London, Peter would try to catch up a little further with friends, perhaps over lunch or dinner. An invitation was always very welcome, since one could be sure it meant a chance for a convivial couple of hours, chatting over a snack somewhere close to the Antiquaries in Piccadilly, or perhaps near to the Warburg in Bloomsbury, where Peter might have done a morning’s work. He would always be self-deprecating about his own achievements since one had last met him. Instead, he had the knack of turning the subject around, preferring to talk about the person he was sitting with, enquiring about projects, praising accomplishments, asking about family and the progress of children.

Quietly, however, and with so little fuss on his part, Peter’s contributions to cultural life on both sides of the Atlantic (and further afield) were recognized in a series of awards and honours. He held a number of early American fellowships, for instance, and was made a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1986. The following year he was appointed the Theodora and Stanley Feldberg Professor of Art at Wellesley. By this point, Peter and Lilian had for many years been great supporters of the Save Venice foundation. Peter chaired the Boston chapter in 1981–86 (and again in 1999–2001). His commitment to Venice was such that, in 1988, he was appointed a Cavaliere dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. At much the same time, his academic achievements were again recognized in prestigious awards for the volume on Rievaulx, published in 1999: the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion, awarded by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, and the Haskins Medal, given by the Medieval Academy of America.

The esteem and affection in which Peter was held by his peers was evident in 2004, the year of his seventieth birthday, and four decades since publication of Architecture of Solitude. In May, a conference was held in his honour at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Organized by Paul Crossley and Alexandra Gajewski, ‘Between Ideal and Reality: Reassessing Cistercian Art and Architecture’, provided an opportunity for friends and colleagues to present a range of papers on white monk themes, inspired not a little by Peter’s work. Later in the year, Peter was presented with a magnificent festschrift entitled Perspectives for an Architecture of Solitude, with contributions by no fewer than thirty-four scholars, offered in warmth and admiration.

In January 2009, quite unexpectedly, Peter suffered a heart attack on the platform of a London underground station, breaking a foot in the fall. He fully recognized that his life had been saved by the emergency actions of a cardiac specialist, Dr David Brull, who happened to be on hand. Back in Wellesley, and fully recuperated, Peter was able to resume progress on the Canterbury book. He continued to work thereafter, and indeed gave a paper at the Association’s inaugural Romanesque conference, in April 2010. In recent years however, Peter’s health had begun to decline. Stoically, one of his final contributions was a charming paper given, virtually, at the ‘Our Ailred’ conference, jointly organized by the Association and English Heritage, and held in January 2021. Within months, Peter had, alas, been diagnosed with cancer. Although a tumour was removed from his spine in October, he never quite made a full recovery. Lilian’s death, in November 2021, was a devastating blow. Moreover, his dear sister, Ruth, died on 9 January 2022. Peter then had pneumonia, but refused to go to hospital. He died, peacefully at home, on 24 January.

Among the many generous bequests in Peter’s will, he leaves a substantial sum to the Courtauld Institute of Art, which is to be used specifically for graduate students working on the history of medieval architecture in England. Furthermore, the high regard in which our Association was held by Peter is marked by a second substantial gift, with the monies offered in general support of our ongoing aims and objectives.

Always an Englishman at heart, Peter’s ashes have appropriately now come home. How supremely fitting that they were scattered at Rievaulx on 14 July, where they will rest in peace alongside the bones of St William, St Ailred, and the many anonymous monks of that great Cistercian abbey.

For assistance in the compilation of this tribute, thanks are due to Jill Armstrong, Nicola Coldstream, Peter Draper, Eric Fernie, Alexandra Gajewski, Richard Halsey, Stuart Harrison, Ann Hignell and John McNeill.

Peter Fergusson at his beloved Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire, September 2012

Photo: Caroline Bruzelius

David M. Robinson