Kings College Chapel, in Cambridge, is regarded as one of the finest examples of Late Gothic architecture in England. It has the world’s largest fan-vault, superb stained glass and fine woodwork. It is also known throughout the world for its chapel choir – in particular, for the service of Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast on Christmas Eve to millions of listeners across the world.

To celebrate the 500th anniversary of the completion of the stone fabric of the chapel in 1515, a handsome volume of essays has been published, sub-titled art, music and religion in Cambridge, and edited by Jean Michel Massing and Nicolette Zeeman. The essays focus on the changing function and furnishings of the chapel, the activities associated with it and the music performed within it, in order to explore the ways in which its religious, cultural and artistic history has developed over the centuries since its completion.

Complementary to this volume is a detailed publication entitled King’s College Chapel: a history and commentary, the magnum opus of John Saltmarsh, Fellow and Archivist of the College for many years. The manuscript remained unpublished at his death in 1974. The volume is divided into two parts: history and commentary. The history charts the erection of the stonework in detail, based on an investigation of the original sources. The commentary was intended to follow the order of a guided tour of the building, for which Saltmarsh was well known, beginning with the south front and ending with an account of the side-chapels.

John Saltmarsh was a shy man and a somewhat dry lecturer, but his knowledge of the chapel was unparalleled and encyclopaedic. The college has published his manuscript as it was left at his death with annotations and a biographical introduction. He begins by describing the foundation of the college on the instruction of King Henry vi, on 18 February 1441, with a spacious great court whose ranges were closed up to one another at each corner. So, the chapel was never originally designed to be freestanding or appraised as an architectural monument complete in itself: instead, it was designed to be one side of a closed quadrangle towering over the remaining ranges, its size inspired by the king’s visit to Winchester Cathedral, but still just one element of a larger complex of buildings. Over five years later, on St James’s Day 1446, the foundation stone was laid, and under the guidance of the master mason Reginald Ely, a Norfolk man, the building began to take shape. However, the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses in 1455 and the capture of King Henry by the Yorkists slowed progress considerably, and the stonework was not completed until 1515. In 1506 King Henry vii had come to Cambridge for the Garter ceremonies, held in the first five bays, roofed with timber. Prompted by his mother, the pious Lady Margaret Beaufort, the king decided to finance the continuance of the work, and his successor, Henry viii, completed the building, ‘a work of Kings’.

In chapters three to five, Saltmarsh describes the gradual completion of the work, reproducing in detail the payments for building materials, timber, clay, tiles, lime, sand, plumbers’ and thatchers’ accounts, stone and ironwork. Chapter six describes the labour force, which in 1511 included more than 120 skilled masons working on the site, together with other craftsmen and labourers, making about 250 in all. The fourth and last of the master masons was John Wastell, who took charge in 1508 and who was the architect of the fan-vaulting, ‘the noblest stone ceiling in existence’, built in just three years between 1512 and 1515.

The second book under consideration, King’s College Chapel 1515–2015, supplements the detail of Saltmarsh’s work with essays on the history of the aesthetic reception of the chapel, and an analysis of the complex geometry of the fan-vaulting using three-dimensional laser scanning to review the structural action of the vaults. Among the furnishings and fittings, James Simpson examines the stained glass in its historical context, Nicola Pickering looks at the rich iconography of Provost Robert Hacumblen’s chantry chapel and Jean Michel Massing traces the liturgical changes within the chapel over the last 500 years as expressed in the altarpieces.

There is an exploration of the tensions between chapel and college over several centuries, an analysis of the history and origin of the Cadiz Choirbook, a study of the chapel as a tourist attraction and Gothic wonder during its first three centuries, and the paradoxical relationship which Charles Simeon, the evangelical preacher and Fellow of King’s, enjoyed with the chapel, which to him represented so much that was wrong with institutional religion. After an essay on the theatrical productions that have taken place in the chapel, the final section of the book examines its musical life with essays on the musical culture of the first 200 years: charting the suppression of late medieval musical splendour in the Reformation period and its revival under Queen Elizabeth i; then an account of the chapel organ; followed by the story of the long-running tenure of Arthur Henry Mann, organist at King’s for over fifty-three years during a crucial era in the evolution of the King’s College Choir. The final two essays explore the institution and development both of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols and of the contemporary tonal quality and technique of the choir under its present conductor, Stephen Cleobury.

It is a considerable achievement that forty-one years after his death, John Saltmarsh’s 220,000-word manuscript, still unfinished, has finally been published. His meticulous study of the muniments enabled him ‘to recreate a world in which stone was transported down the waterways from Northampton, timber came from the woods at Ashdon Hales in Essex, and clunch was hauled from the Cambridgeshire village of Barrington’. As an economic historian, he was interested in the people who helped to construct the building, their backgrounds and craft techniques, as much as in the details of the architecture.

The lavishly illustrated volume edited by Massing and Zeeman sets Saltmarsh’s meticulous scholarship in the wider context of the cultural, religious and artistic history of the last 500 years, and provides some fascinating portraits of those who have shaped the life of the chapel, including Charles Simeon and Boris Ord. Appropriately, it concludes with the musical life of the college focused on its world-famous choir, and suggests that the chapel is a beautiful and evocative space in which all who visit, whether tourist or pilgrim, can find room for contemplation and a means of appropriating for themselves something of the faith of those who caused this extraordinary structure to be built.