Читать книгу Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire - W. F. Rawnsley - Страница 12

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The city of Lincoln was a place of some repute when Julius Cæsar landed B.C. 55. The Witham was then called the Lindis, and the province Lindisse. The Britons called the town Lindcoit, so the name the Romans gave it, about A.D. 100, “Lindum Colonia,” was partly Roman and partly British. The Roman walled town was on the top of the hill about a quarter of a mile square, with a gate in the middle of each wall. Of their four roads, the street which passed out north and south was the Via Herminia or Ermine Street. The east road went to “Banovallum”—Horncastle (or the Bain)—and “Vannona”—Wainfleet—and the west to “Segelocum”—Littleborough. The Roman milestone marking XIV miles to Segelocum is now in the cathedral cloisters.

ROMAN ARCH

This walled space included the sites of both cathedral and castle, and was thickly covered with houses in Danish and Saxon times. We hear of 166 being cleared away by the Conqueror to make his castle. The Romans themselves extended their wall southward as far as the stone-bow in order to accommodate their growing colony. Their northern gate yet exists. It is known as “Newport Gate,” and is of surpassing interest, as, with the exception of one at Colchester, there is not another Roman gateway in the kingdom. Only last October the foundations of an extremely fine gateway were uncovered at Colchester, the Roman “Camelodunum”; apparently indicating the fact that there were two chariot gates as well as two side entrances for foot passengers. The Newport Gate is sixteen feet wide, and twenty-two feet high, with a rude round arch of large stones without a key, the masonry on either side having stones some of which are six feet long. On each side of the main gate was a doorway seven feet wide for foot passengers. A fifth Roman road is the “Foss Way,” which came from Newark and joined the Ermine Street at the bottom of Canwick Hill, a mile south of Lincoln.

Newport Arch, Lincoln.

From the junction of these two roads a raised causeway, following the line of the present High Street, ran over the marshy ground to the gate of the walled town. This causeway, bearing in places the tracks of Roman wheels, is several feet below the present level, and even on the top of the hill several feet of debris have accumulated over the Roman pavements which were found in the last century where the castle now stands. Doubtless, as years went on, many villas would be planted outside the walls of the Roman city, but we know little of the history of the colony, except that it was always a place of considerable importance.

BISHOP REMIGIUS

To come to post-Roman times, Bede, who died in 785, tells us that Paulinus, who had been consecrated Bishop of York in 625, and had baptised King Ædwin and a large number of people at York in the church which stood on the site afterwards occupied by the Minster, came to Lincoln, and, after baptising numbers of people in the Trent, as he had previously done in the Swale near Richmond in Yorkshire, built a stone church in Lincoln, or caused his convert Blaeca, the Reeve of the city, to build it, in which he consecrated Honorius Archbishop of Canterbury. Bede saw the walls of this church which may well have stood where the present church of St. Paul does. William the Conqueror in 1066 built the Norman castle on the hill to keep the town, which had spread along the banks of the Witham, in order. It was about this time that Remigius, a monk of Fécamp, in Normandy, who had been made by William, Bishop of Dorchester-on-Thames in 1067, as a reward for his active help with a ship and a body of armed fighting men, got leave, after much opposition from the Archbishop of York, to build a cathedral at Lincoln on the hill near the castle. So, next after the Romans (and perhaps the Britons were there before them), it is to him that we owe the choice of this magnificent site for the cathedral. Remigius began his great work in 1075, of which the central portion of the west front, with its plain rude masonry and its round-headed tall recesses on either side of the middle door, and its interrupted band of bas-reliefs over the low Norman arches to right and left of the tall recesses, is still in situ. The sixteen stone bas-reliefs are subjects partly monkish, but mostly Scriptural, concerning Adam, Noah, Samuel, and Jesus Christ. They are genuine Norman sculptures, and they are at the same level as Welbourn’s twelve English kings under the big central window, but these are of the fourteenth century.

The church of Remigius ended in an apse, of which the foundations are now under the stalls about the middle of the choir. It probably had two towers at the west end, and possibly a central tower as well. The church of St. Mary Magdalene was swept away to clear the site, and a chapel at the north west end of the new building allotted to the parishioners in compensation. Like the Taj at Agra it was seventeen years in building, and its great founder died, May 4, 1092, a few months before its completion. This was in the reign of Rufus, a reign notable for the building of the great Westminster Hall.

Gateway of Lincoln Castle.

LINCOLN CASTLE

BISHOP ALEXANDER

The wide joints of the masonry, and the square shape of the stones, and the rude capitals of the pilasters are distinctive of Remigius’ work. Bloet succeeded Remigius, and during his thirty years he did much for the cathedral staff, but not very much to the fabric. His successor, Bishop Alexander, 1123, was a famous builder, and besides the castles of Sleaford, Newark and Banbury, the first two of which Stephen forced him to give to the Crown, he built the later Norman part of the west front, raising its gables and putting in three doors and the interlaced arcading above the arches of Remigius. He also vaulted the whole nave with stone, after a disastrous fire in 1141. There had been a previous fire just before Alexander was consecrated Bishop in 1123, of which Giraldus Cambrensis, writing about 1200, says that the roof falling on it “broke the stone with which the body of Remigius was covered into two equal parts.” This richly carved and thus fractured stone you may see to-day, where it is placed close to the north-west arch of the nave and north aisle. Bishop Alexander’s work is richer than that of Remigius, and the shafts and capitals of his west doors are beautifully carved. In these, according to Norman custom, hunters are aiming at the birds and beasts in the foliage. This is best seen in the north-west doorway. King Stephen came to Lincoln in 1141, the year of the fire, and it was there that, after a fierce fight which raged round the castle and cathedral, he was taken prisoner and sent to Bristol, but in the following year terms were arranged between him and the Empress Maud, and he was crowned at Christmas in Lincoln cathedral. After that date Bishop Alexander carried forward his work on the cathedral without intermission till his death in 1047, putting in the central western gable and the two gables over the arcading, vaulting the whole west front with stone, and adding the little north and south gables against the towers and the Norman stages of the towers, of which the northern tower was a little the highest, but looked less high because the south tower had its angles carried up higher than the walls of the square.

Bishop Alexander, like St. Hugh, died of a fever, which he caught at Auxerre in France, where he had been to meet the Pope. Those French towns seem to have been pretty pestilential at all times. Bishop Chesney succeeded him, and either he or Bishop Bloet began the episcopal palace. He assisted at the Coronation of Henry II. in Lincoln, and founded St. Catharine’s Priory. He died in 1166, and, after the lapse of six years, Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of Henry II. by Fair Rosamund, held the See for nine years, but was never consecrated. In 1182 he resigned, and was afterwards made Archbishop of York. He gave many gifts to the cathedral, and notably two “great and sonorous bells,” the putative parents of “Great Tom.” Walter de Constantiis followed him, but was in the very next year translated to Rouen, 1184, and again the See was vacant for the space of two years.

ST. HUGH

In 1185 an earthquake did great damage, and in the following year Hugh of Avalon, the famous St. Hugh of Lincoln, was appointed Bishop by Henry II. He widened the west end by putting a wing to each side of the work of Remigius, and put a gable over the central arch, and began his great work of making a new and larger cathedral with double transepts and a choir 100 feet longer and a nave ten feet wider than that of Remigius, starting at the east and building the present ritual choir and both the eastern and western transepts. In this his work was of a totally new character, with pointed arches, and “is famous as being the earliest existing work of pure English Gothic.” But Early English work, so says Murray, was already being done at Wells in 1174, twelve years earlier, and it was there that the Gothic vaulting and pointed arch was first seen in England. From the great transept to the angel choir is all his design, and it bears no trace of Norman French influence in any particular. The name of Hugh’s architect is Geoffrey de Noiers, his work is more remarkable for lightness than for strength, and in about fifty years Hugh’s tower fell, setting thereby a bad example which has been followed so frequently that Bishop Creighton’s first question on visiting a new church used generally to be, “When did your tower fall?”

BISHOP GROSTESTE

Hugh of Avalon died in London in 1200, and William de Blois (1201) and Hugh of Wells (1209) went on with the building. The latter particularly kept to Hugh of Avalon’s plan of intercalating marble shafts with those of stone. Other characteristics of St. Hugh’s work are the double arcading in the transept and the little pigeon-hole recesses between the arcade arches, a trefoil ornament on the pillar belts and on the buttresses, and the deep-cut base mouldings. He put in the fine Early English round window in the north transept called the “Dean’s eye,” which has plate tracery. The five lancet lights, something after the “Five Sisters” window at York, were a later addition. The end of his work is easily distinguishable in the east wall of the great transept. He also built the Galilee porch, which was both a porch and an ecclesiastical court, and the Chapter house, with its ten pairs of lancet windows, its arcading and clustered pillars and beautiful central pillar to support the roof groining. He was succeeded, in 1235, by the famous Robert Grosteste, a really great man and a fine scholar, who had studied both at Oxford and Paris. He opposed the Pope, who wished to put his nephew into a canonry, declaring him to be unfit for the post, and stoutly championed the right of the English Church to be ruled by English and not Italian prelates. In his time the central tower fell, and he it was who built up in its place the first stage at least of the magnificent tower we have now. He also added the richly arcaded upper portion of the great west front, and its flanking turrets crowned by the figures of the Swineherd of Stow with his horn, on the north, and Bishop Hugh on the south. Henry Lexington, Dean of Lincoln, succeeded him as Bishop in 1254, and during his short episcopate of four years Henry III. issued a royal letter for removing the Roman city wall further east to enable the Dean and Chapter to lengthen the cathedral for the Shrine of St. Hugh after his canonisation. Then began the building of the ‘Angel Choir,’ which “for the excellence of its sculpture, the richness of its mouldings and the beauty of its windows, is not surpassed by anything in the Kingdom” (Sir C. Anderson). Its height was limited by the pitch of the vaulting of Hugh’s Ritual Choir, just as the height of Grosteste’s tower arches had been. The Angel Choir was finished by Lexington’s successor Richard of Gravesend, 1258-1279, and inaugurated in the following year with magnificent ceremony under Bishop Oliver Sutton, Edward I. and Queen Eleanor both being present with their children to see the removal of St. Hugh’s body from its first resting-place before the altar of the Chapel of St. John the Baptist in the north-east transept, where it had been placed in 1200 when King John himself acted as one of the pall bearers, to its new and beautiful gold shrine in the Angel Choir behind the high altar.

JOHN DE WELBOURN

The whole cost of the consecration ceremony was borne by Thomas Bek, son of Baron d’Eresby, who was on the same day himself consecrated Bishop of St. David’s, his brother Antony being Bishop of Durham, and Patriarch of Jerusalem. Bishop Sutton, in 1295, built the cloisters and began the charming little “Vicar’s court.” He died in 1300, his successor was Bishop John of Dalderby, the same who had a miracle-working shrine of pure silver in the south transept, and whom the people chose to call St. John of Dalderby, just as they did in the case of Bishop Grosteste, though the Pope had refused canonisation in each case. He finished the great tower, which, with its beautiful arcaded tower stage, its splendid double lights and canopies above, and its delicate lace-like parapet, seems to me to be quite the most satisfying piece of architecture that this or any other county has to show. It is finished with tall pinnacles of wood covered with lead. The exquisite stone rood-screen and the beautiful arches in the aisles were put in at the same time, the work on the screen being, as Sir C. Anderson remarks, very like the work on the Eleanor’s Cross at Geddington. He died in 1320, and the lovely tracery of the circular window in the south transept, called “The Bishop’s eye,” was inserted about 1350 above his tomb.

John de Welbourn, the munificent treasurer, who died in 1380, gave the eleven statues of kings beneath the window at the west end, which begin with William the Conqueror and end with Edward III., in whose reign they were set up. Among other benefactions Welbourn gave the beautifully carved choir stalls, and he also vaulted the towers. These were all, at one time, finished by leaded spires. Those of the western tower being 100 feet high, and that on the great central or rood tower soaring up to a height of 525 feet. This was blown down in 1547, and the western spires were removed in 1807-08, a mob of excited citizens having prevented their removal in 1727, but eighty years later the matter made no great stir, and though their removal may by some be regretted, I think it is a matter of pure congratulation that the splendid central tower, whose pinnacles attain an altitude of 265 feet, should have remained as it is. The delicate lace-like parapet was added in 1775. It is not very likely that anyone should propose to raise those spires again, but dreadful things do happen; and quite lately one of our most eminent architects prepared a design for putting a spire on the central tower at Peterborough. Think of that! and ask yourself, is there any stability in things human?

Apart from its commanding situation, the whole pile is very magnificent, and, viewed as a whole, outside, it has nothing to touch it, though the west front is not to compare in beauty with that of Peterborough. Inside, York is larger and grander, and Ely surpasses both in effect. But if we take both the situation and the outside view and the inside effect together, Lincoln stands first and Durham second.

GREAT TOM

THE CENTRAL TOWER

I was once at an Archæological society’s meeting in Durham when Dean Lake addressed us from the pulpit, and he began by saying: “We are now met in what by universal consent is considered the finest church in England but one; need I say that that one is Lincoln?” The chuckle of delight which this remark elicited from my neighbour, Precentor Venables, was a thing I shall never forget. We will now take a look at the building, and begin first with the outside, and, starting at the west, walk slowly along the south side of the close. If we begin near the Exchequer Gate we see the west front with its fine combination of the massive work of Remigius, the fine Norman doors of Alexander (with the English kings over the central door), the rich arcading of Grosteste along the top and at the two sides, and the flanking turrets with spirelets surmounted by the statues of St. Hugh and the Stow Swineherd. We look up to the gable over the centre flanked by the two great towers on either side of it. Norman below, Gothic above, with their very long Perpendicular double lights, octagonal angle buttresses and lofty pinnacles. The northern tower once held the big bell “Great Tom,” and the southern (“St. Hugh’s”) has still its peal of eight. Lincoln had a big bell in Elizabeth’s reign, which was re-cast in that of James I., and christened “Great Tom of Lincoln,” 1610. This second great bell being cracked in 1828, was re-cast in 1855, and the Dean and chapter of the time actually took down the beautiful peal of six, called the “Lady Bells,” which had been hung in Bishop Dalderby’s great central tower about 1311 and gave that tower its name of the “Lady Bell Steeple,” and had them melted down to add to the weight of “Great Tom,” thus depriving the minster, by this act of vandalism, of its second ring of bells. The third, or new, “Great Tom,” now hangs alone in the central tower. It weighs five tons eight hundredweight, and is only surpassed in size in England by those at St. Paul’s, at Exeter Cathedral, and Christ Church, Oxford. It is six feet high, six feet ten inches in diameter, and twenty-one and a half feet round the rim, and the hammer, which strikes the hours, weighs two hundredweight.

The Rood Tower and South Transept, Lincoln.

THE SOUTH SIDE

From the west front we should walk along the south side, passing first the consistory court with its three lancet windows, and high pitched gable, where is the little figure of “the devil looking over Lincoln.” This forms a small western transept, and has a corresponding transept on the north side, containing the ringers’ chapel and that of St. Mary Magdalene.

THE EAST END

Going on we get a view of the clerestory windows in the nave, above which is the parapet relieved by canopied niches, once filled with figures. The flying nave buttresses now come into view, and next we reach, at the south-western corner of the great transept, the beautifully built and highly ornamented “Galilee Porch,” which was meant for the bishop’s entrance from his palace into the cathedral. The room over it is now the muniment room. From this point we get a striking view of the western towers with the southern turret of the west front. The buttresses of the transept run up to the top of the clerestory, and end in tall pinnacles with statue-niches and crockets. The transept gable has a delicately pierced parapet and lofty pinnacles. Above is a five-light Decorated window, and below this a broad stone frieze, and then the large round window, “The Bishop’s Eye,” with its unspeakably lovely tracery, a marvel of lace-work in stone; below this comes a row of pointed arcading. The eastern transept is the next feature, with another fine high-pitched gable. Here the work of St. Hugh ends. The apsidal chapels of St. Paul and St. Peter are at the east side of this transept, and then, along the south side of the Angel Choir, the chapels of Bishops Longland and Russell, with the splendid south-east porch between them. This, from its position, is unique in English churches, and was probably designed for the state entrance of the bishop after the presbytery had been added, in place of the Galilee porch entrance. It has a deeply recessed arch, with four canopied niches holding fine figures. The doorway has two trefoil headed arches, divided by a central shaft with a canopied niche above it, once containing the figures of the Virgin and Child. Above this, and in the tympanum, is represented the Last Judgment. The buttresses of the Angel Choir are beautifully and harmoniously enriched with canopy and crocket, and the upper windows are perfect in design and execution. Apart from its splendid position, it is this exquisite finish to the beautifully designed building that makes Lincoln Cathedral so “facile princeps” among English cathedrals. At the south-east buttress are finely conceived figures of Edward I. trampling on a Saracen, and his Queen Eleanor; and another figure possibly represents his second queen, Margaret. Coming round to the east we look with delighted eyes on what has been called “the finest example of Geometrical Decorated Architecture to be found in the kingdom.” The window is not so fine as that at Carlisle, and no east end competes with that at York, but York is Perpendicular, and Lincoln is Geometrical. Here we have not only a grand window, fifty-seven feet high, but another great five-light window above it, and over that a beautiful figure of the Virgin and Child, and all finished by a much enriched gable surmounted by a cross. The two windows, one above the other, seem not to be quite harmonious, in fact, one does not want the upper window, nor perhaps the windows in the aisle gables, but the buttresses and their finials are so extraordinarily good that they make the east end an extremely beautiful whole. Close to the north-east angle is a little stone well cover, and the chapter-house, with its off-standing buttress-piers and conical roof, comes into view at the north. The north side is like the south, but has near it the cloisters, which are reached by a short passage from the north-east transept. From the north-east corner of these cloisters you get an extremely good view of the cathedral and all its three towers. Steps from this corner lead up to the cathedral library. The north side of the cloisters of Bishop Oliver Sutton, unable to bear the thrust of the timber-vaulted ceiling, fell, and was replaced in 1674 by the present inharmonious pillars and ugly arches designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

We must now look inside the cathedral, and if we enter the north-east transept from the cloisters we shall pass over a large stone inscribed “Elizabeth Penrose, 1837.” This is the resting-place of “Mrs. Markham,” once the authority on English history in every schoolroom, and deservedly so. She took her nom de plume from the little village of East Markham, Notts., in which she lived for many years.

THE INTERIOR

Passing through the north-east transept, with its stained glass windows by Canon Sutton, and its curious “Dean’s Chapel,” once the minster dispensary, and turning eastwards, we enter the north aisle of the Angel Choir and find the chapel of Bishop Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College, Oxford. In this the effigy of the bishop is on the south side, and there is a window to the memory of Sir Charles Anderson, of Lea, and a reredos with a painting of the Annunciation, lately put up in memory of Arthur Roland Maddison, minor canon and librarian, who died April 24, 1912, and is buried in his parish churchyard at Burton, by Lincoln. He is a great loss, for he was a charming personality, and, having been for many years a painstaking student of heraldry, he was always an accurate writer on matters of genealogy, and on the relationships and wills of the leading Lincolnshire families, subjects of which he had a special and unique knowledge. Bishop Fleming was not the only Bishop of Lincoln who founded a college at Oxford, as William Smith, founder of Brasenose, Cardinal Wolsey, founder of Christchurch, and William of Wykeham, founder of New College, were all once bishops here. Opposite to the Fleming chapel is the Russell chapel, just east of the south porch and between these lies the Retro Choir, which contained once the rich shrine of St. Hugh, its site now marked, next to Bishop Fuller’s tomb, by a black marble memorial. Here is the beautiful monument to the reverend Bishop Christopher Wordsworth. This is a very perfect piece of work, with a rich, but not heavy, canopy, designed by Bodley and executed by M. Guillemin, who carved the figures in the reredos of St. Paul’s. This rises over a recumbent figure of the bishop in robes and mitre. The face is undoubtedly an excellent likeness.

THE CHOIR

The view from here of the perfect Geometrical Gothic east window, with its eight lights, is very striking; beneath it are the three chapels of St. Catherine, St. Mary, and St. Nicholas, and on either side of it are two monuments, those on the south side to Wymbish, prior of Nocton, and Sir Nicolas de Cantelupe; and on the north side to Bishop Henry Burghersh, Chancellor of Edward III., 1340, and his father, Robert. On each tomb are canopied niches, each holding two figures, among which are Edward III. and his four sons—the Black Prince, Lionel Duke of Clarence, John of Gaunt, and Edmund of Langley. Adjoining the chapel of St. Catherine, which was founded by the Burghersh family, is a fine effigy of Bartholomew Lord Burghersh, who fought at Crécy, in full armour with his head resting on a helmet. A fine monument of Queen Eleanor once stood beneath the great window where her heart was buried before the great procession to London began. The effigy was of copper gilt, but, having been destroyed, it has been recently replaced by a generous Lincoln citizen from drawings which were in existence and from a comparison with her monument in Westminster Abbey. A stone at the west of St. Catherine’s chapel shows a deep indentation worn by the scrape of the foot of each person who bowed at the shrine. A similar one is to be seen at St. Cuthbert’s shrine, Durham.

In the east windows of both the choir aisles is some good Early English glass.

THE PRESBYTERY

We will now turn westwards, past the south porch, and come to the south-east transept; here the line of the old Roman wall and ditch runs right through the cathedral, the apsidal chapels of the eastern transepts and the whole of the presbytery, as well as the chapter-house, lying all outside it. Two apsidal chapels in this transept are dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul. It was in St. Peter’s that sub-dean Bramfield was murdered by a sub-deacon, September 25, 1205, who paid the penalty immediately at the hands of the sub-dean’s servants. The exquisite white marble tomb and recumbent figure of John Kaye, bishop 1827 to 1853, by Westmacott, is in this chapel. Opposite to these apsidal chapels are the canons’ and choristers’ vestries; under the former is a crypt; the latter has the monks’ lavatory, and a fireplace for the baking of the sacramental wafers by the sacristan. Passing along the south choir-aisle we reach the shrine of little St. Hugh, and here the work all around us, in choir, aisles, and transepts, is that of the great St. Hugh. The whole of the centre of the cathedral, with its double transept and the choir between them, being his; and we must notice in two of the transept chapels his peculiar work in the double capitals above slender pillars of alternate stone and marble, and projecting figures of saints and angels low down in each spandrel. We now enter the choir, and pause to admire the magnificent work and all its beauty. On either side are the sixty-two beautiful and richly carved canopied stalls. They are only excelled, perhaps, by those at Winchester. The carving of the Miserere seats is much like that at Boston, where humorous scenes are introduced. The fox in a monk’s cowl, the goose, and the monkey being the chief animals represented. Here, on a poppy-head in the precentor’s seat, a baboon is seen stealing the butter churned by two monkeys; he is caught and hanged, and on the Miserere he is being carried forth for burial. A finely carved oak pulpit, designed by Gilbert Scott, is at the north-east end of the stalls. The brass eagle is a seventeenth century copy of an earlier one. We notice overhead the stone vaulting, springing from Purbeck shafts; notice, too, the beauty of the mouldings and carved capitals, and the groups of arches forming the triforium with clerestory window above, which, however, only show between the ribs of the vaulting; and, then, the length of it! For now, by taking in two from the Angel Choir, the chancel has seven bays. It is a very striking view as you look eastwards, but it has the defect of a rather plain, low vaulting, and west of it the nave, which is a generation later, is more splendidly arranged, while east of it the Angel Choir, which is nearly half a century later than the nave, admittedly surpasses all the rest in delicacy and beauty. The choir vaulting being low, caused both nave and presbytery to be lower than they would otherwise have been, so that it has been said that when the tower fell it was a pity the chancel did not fall with it, all would then have been built with loftier roofs and with more perfect symmetry.

If we pass down the Ritual Choir eastwards, we enter the presbytery, and at once see the origin of the name “Angel Choir” in the thirty figures of angels in the spandrels. It was built to accommodate the enormous number of pilgrims who flocked to St. Hugh’s shrine, and is, according to G. A. Freeman, “one of the loveliest of human works; the proportion of the side elevation and the beauty of the details being simply perfect,” and it would seem to be uncontested that all throughout, whether in its piers, its triforium, its aisles, or its carved detail, it shows a delicacy and finish never surpassed in the whole history of Gothic architecture. One of its large clerestory windows was filled, in 1900, with excellent glass by H. Holiday, to mark the seven-hundredth anniversary of St. Hugh’s death.

The angels sculptured in stone, and mostly carrying scrolls, fill the triforium spandrels in groups of three, five groups on either side. They are probably not all by the master’s hand. The Virgin and Child in the south-west bay and the angel with drawn sword in the north-west seem finer than the rest. The stone inscribed in Lombardic letters “Cantate Hic,” marks the place for chanting the Litany; this is chanted by two lay clerks. There are nine of these, one being vestry clerk; also four choristers in black gowns with white facings (a reminiscence of the earliest dress for the Lincoln choir, and a unique costume in England), eight Burghersh choristers or “Chanters” (lineal descendants of the Burghersh chantry of St. Catherine with its separate band of choristers), and some supernumerary boys and men. There are four canons residentiary, viz., the sub-dean, chancellor, precentor, and Archdeacon of Lincoln, and fifty-three prebendaries.

In the first bay of the north side of the Angel Choir is a remarkable monument, part of which once served for an Easter sepulchre. This, like those of Navenby and Heckington of the same date, is richly carved with oak and vine and fig-tree foliage, and shows the Roman soldiers sleeping. Opposite, on the south side, are the tombs of Katharine Swynford of Ketilthorpe, Duchess of Lancaster, Chaucer’s sister-in-law, whose marriage to John of Gaunt took place in the minster in 1396. Like so many of the monuments, these are sadly mutilated, and are not now quite in their original position.

It is on one of the pillars of the east bay, the second from the east end, that the curious grotesque, familiar to all as the “Lincoln Imp,” is perched.

THE NAVE

If we now turn westwards we shall come to the fine stone organ screen, and pass through to the tower, whose predecessor fell through faultiness of construction, and was rebuilt by Grosteste as far as the nave roof, and we shall look down the nave, which is forty-two feet wide, each aisle being another twenty feet in width. The planning and execution of the nave we owe to the two Bishops Hugh. Its great length (524 feet with the choir and presbytery) makes the whole building, when viewed from the west, look lower than it is, for it is really eighty-two feet high. Looking west this is not felt so much, and there is a feeling of great dignity which the best Early English work always gives. The piers may seem lacking in massive strength, but they vary in pattern, those to the east being the most elaborate, and so gain in interest. One curious thing about the nave, though not discernible to the uninitiated, is that the axis, which is continuous from the east end for the first five of the seven bays, here diverges somewhat to the north, and so runs into the centre of the Norman west front. The two western bays are five and a quarter feet less in span than the others. Probably the architect, as he brought the nave down westwards with that light-hearted disregard of a previous style of architecture which characterised the medieval builder and his predecessors of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, intended to sweep away all the old Norman work at the west end and carry the line straight on with equal-sized arches, but funds failed and he had to join up the new with the old as best he could; and we have cause to be thankful for this, since it has preserved for us the original and most interesting work of Remigius.

THE TRANSEPTS

Before we leave our place beneath the tower, we must look at the two great transepts. These have piers, triforium and clerestory similar to those in the choir, and each has three chapels along the eastern wall; these, from north to south, are dedicated to St. Nicholas, St. Denis, St. Thomas; and in the south transept to St. Edward, St. John and St. Giles. Of these, St. Edward’s is called the chanters’ chapel, and it has four little figures of singers carved in stone, two on each side of the door. This was fitted up for use and opened in August, 1913, for a choristers’ chapel, the tombstone of Precentor Smith, 1717, being introduced for an altar. Everybody is attracted by the rose windows. That to the north has beneath it five lancet windows, something like those at York, filled with white silvery glass, but the rose above has still its original Early English stained glass, and is a notable example of the work of the period. A central quatrefoil has four trefoils outside it and sixteen circles round, all filled with tall bold figures and strongly coloured. It is best seen from the triforium. Below is the dean’s door, with a lancet window on either side, and over it a clock with a canopy, given in 1324 by Thomas of Louth. This canopy was carried off by the robber archdeacon, Dr. Bailey, and used as a pulpit-top in his church at Messingham, but was restored by the aid of Bishop Trollope.

The south transept, where Bishop John of Dalderby was buried, contains what no one sees without a feeling of delight, and wonder that such lovely work could ever have been executed in stone,—the great rose window with its twin ovals and its leaf-like reticulations, which attract the eye more than the medley of good old glass with which it is filled, but which gives it a beautiful richness of effect. Below this are four lancets with similar glass.

THE FONT

The aisles of the nave are vaulted, the groins springing from the nave pillars on the inner, and from groups of five shafts on the outer side. Behind these runs a beautiful wall arcade on detached shafts, continuous in the north aisle, but only repeated in portions of the south aisle, with bosses of foliage at the spring of the arches. In the aisle at the second bay from the west is the grand old Norman font, resembling that at Winchester. There is another at Thornton Curtis in the north-east of the county. Neither of the Lincolnshire specimens are so elaborately carved as that at Winchester, which is filled with scenes from the life of St. Nicholas, but all are of the same massive type, with dragons, etc., carved on the sides of a great block of black basalt resting on a round base of the same, with four detached corner pillars leading down to a square black base. These early basalt fonts, of which Hampshire has four, Lincolnshire two, the other being at Ipswich, Dean Kitchin conclusively proved to have all come from Tournai, in Belgium, and to date from the middle of the twelfth century, a time coinciding with the episcopacy of Bishops Alexander and De Chesney at Lincoln, and Henry de Blois at Winchester. The one at St. Mary Bourne is the biggest, and has only clusters of grapes on it and doves. The other two are at East Meon and at St. Michael’s, Southampton, and have monsters carved on them like the Lincolnshire specimens.

Of brasses, in which the cathedral before the Reformation was specially rich, having two hundred, only one now remains, that of Bishop Russell, 1494, which is now in the cathedral library; but in a record made in 1641 by Sir W. Dugdale and Robert Sanderson, afterwards Bishop, is the following most charming little inscription to John Marshall, Canon of the cathedral, 1446, beneath the figure of a rose:—

“Ut rosa pallescit ubi solem sentit abesse

Sic homo vanescit; nunc est, nunc desinit esse.”

which may be Englished

“As the rose loses colour not kissed by the sun,

So man fades and passes; now here, and now gone.”

The ascent of the towers gives magnificent views; from the central tower one may see “Boston Stump” on one hand, and on the other Newark spire. The big bell, too, has its attractions, but the greatest curiosity is the elastic stone beam, a very flat arch connecting the two western towers, made of twenty-three stones with coarse mortar joints, which only rises sixteen inches, and vibrates when jumped on. Its purpose is not clear, possibly to gauge the settlement of the towers. The north end now is thirteen inches lower than the south. A gallery in the thickness of the wall between the great west window and the Cinquefoil above it, allows a wonderful view of the whole length of the cathedral. It is called Sir Joseph Banks’ view.

THE BISHOP’S PALACE

THE CHANCERY

Within the Close, as we passed along looking at the cathedral, we had our backs to the canons’ houses. First comes the precentory and the sub-deanery near the Exchequer Gate, next the Cantilupe Chantry, with a figure of the Saviour in a niche in the gable end, and a curious square oriel window, and then the entrance to the Bishop’s palace opposite the Galilee porch. The old palace, begun about 1150 or possibly earlier, was a splendid building; the ruins of it are in the palace grounds. Through a gateway or vaulted porch, where is now the secretary’s office, you descend to the site of the magnificent hall, eighty-eight feet by fifty-eight, built by St. Hugh, for, like Vicars Court, with its steep flight of steps and its charming old houses, it is built on the slope of the hill. Succeeding bishops added to the pile in which Henry VI. and Henry VIII. were royally lodged and entertained, and the charges which cost Queen Katharine Howard her life took their origin from her meetings here and afterwards at Gainsborough with her relative Thomas Culpepper. The palace was despoiled in the days of the Commonwealth, and little but ruins now remain, but a part of it has been restored and utilised as a chapel by the late Bishop King, perhaps the most universally beloved of Lincoln’s many bishops. Buckden and Nettleham and Riseholme have supplied a residence for successive bishops, and now the bishop is again lodged close to his cathedral. But, in the grandiloquent language of a work entitled ‘The Antiquarian and Topographical Cabinet, containing a series of elegant views of the most interesting objects of curiosity in Great Britain, 1809,’ “The place where once the costly banquet stood arrayed in all the ostentatious luxury of Ecclesiastic greatness has now its mouldering walls covered with trees.” The same authority, speaking of Thornton Abbey, has this precious reflection, which is too good to lose: “Here in sweet retirement the mind may indulge in meditating upon the instability of sublunary greatness, and contemplate, with secret emotion, the wrecks of ostentatious grandeur.” The Chancery, built by Antony Bek, 1316, faces the east end of the minster yard; it is distinguished outside by an entrance arch and an oriel window. Inside, there are some very interesting old doorways, and a charming little chapel, with a wooden screen of c. 1490, the time of Bishop Russell, and two embattled towers on the old minster yard wall in the garden, of the early fourteenth century. The deanery is a modern building on the north side of the minster.

Pottergate, Lincoln.

It was in the chapter house, probably, that Edward I. held his great Parliament in 1301, which secured the Confirmation of Magna Charta. Edward II. and Edward III. also each held a parliament here, and since their time certainly seven kings of England have visited Lincoln.

MINSTER OR CATHEDRAL?

The cathedral precincts of Lincoln are called the “Minster Yard,” and the church is called the Minster, though Lincoln was a cathedral from the first; the term Minster being only properly applied to the church of a monastery, such as York, Canterbury, Peterborough, Ripon, and Southwell; of these, Canterbury is not often called a Minster, but York is always. Lincoln was never attached to a monastery.