Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of York / A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Archi-Episcopal See

by A. Clutton-Brock

The Interior of the West End of the Nave contains the famous window with tracery of the curvilinear or flowing Decorated style, and of a design only surpassed by the east window of Carlisle Cathedral. The glass in this window was given by Archbishop Melton, and is almost the finest in the cathedral. The tracery has been entirely and very carefully restored. The window contains eight lights. These lights are coupled in pairs by four arches with a quatrefoil in the head of each, and again formed in groups of four by an ogee arch above the other arches. The flowing curves of these ogee arches are most ingeniously and beautifully worked into the pattern of the upper part of the window, which contains five main divisions of stonework, each like the skeleton of a leaf in shape and in the delicacy of its pattern. Of these five divisions the top one is made by splitting up the central mullion; two diverge from it at the top of the lower lights; and two others curve inwards from the outside arch. The central mullion runs up almost to the top of the arch. The mullions are alike in moulding and size. Below the window is the west door, the head of which is filled with ancient stained glass. There is a gable above it, running up to the bottom of the window and containing three niches. There are kneeling figures on each side of the gable, so that the top of it may have held a figure of Christ. All that portion of the west end not occupied by the window and the porch is filled with storeys of niches and arcading. The lowest storey consists of a rich arcading, each division of which is ornamented with geometrical tracery closely resembling that of the arcading of the aisles. These divisions are marked by pinnacles. Above this is another row of arcading of much the same character, except that it is about half as high again as the lower storey. Each division of this arcading contains two niches for statues, and above the niches are gables. Above the gables the divisions are filled with tracery closely resembling that of the lower arcade. This second arcade reaches to the bottom of the great window, which is marked by a string course running across the whole part. On each side of the gable of the porch is an extra niche rather clumsily fitted in. Above the string course the arcading is not so rich as below. The third storey consists of long niches ornamented merely with arches, gables, and pinnacles between each niche. The fourth is of much the same character, but that the divisions are shorter and have no gable above them. The last storey consists of plain panelling ornamented at intervals by gables. The west windows of the aisle are shorter than the other aisle windows, but have tracery of the same character. The aisle doorways are plain, but over both are some sculptured figures. Those over the north door appear to represent a hunt. In the middle a woman is setting a dog on to two beasts, and behind them there is a man blowing a horn. At the sides are two quatrefoils, set in which are figures (1) of a man attacking another man drinking, and (2) one man driving another away. The sculpture over the south door was destroyed in the fire of 1840, but a careful restoration of it has been made. It consists of a man in the middle fighting with a dragon, with sword and shield, and at the sides in the quatrefoils (1) Delilah cutting the hair of Samson, and Samson and the lion; (2) a man and woman fighting. The ends of the aisles are also ornamented with arcading in three storeys, the lowest of which is like the lowest storey of the arcading at the west end of the nave; the second a smaller series of niches ornamented with gables and pinnacles; and the third a single arcade on each side of the window, filled with geometrical tracery and resembling those on the sides of the other aisle windows.

It cannot be said that this mass of niches and arcading at the west end is either ingenious or successful. Arcading is a very beautiful decoration where it is employed, as in a triforium, in single storeys, to cover a definite even space. But where it is used to fill up an irregularly-shaped mass of wall which there is no need to decorate, it looks incoherent and confused. Had the wall been left bare it would have afforded an excellent contrast to the elaborate pattern of the central window. As it is, this decoration seems to be conceived in a spirit, of which there are further evidences in the decoration of the west front of the east end—the spirit of a builder determined to display the magnificence of his resources even at the expense of symmetry and refinement. This is a weakness that might be expected in the designer of a London hotel, but not in a great mediæval architect.

The nave was fitted with benches, seats, and a very mean-looking organ, in 1863. It is lit by gas jets round the capitals of the piers.

The tombs of the nave are described in a general account of the monuments of the church.

The present pavement dates from 1731. It was laid down according to the design of William Kent, under the direction of Lord Burlington, the amateur architect of Burlington House. The stone was given by Sir Edward Gascoigne from Huddlestone. Some of the gravestones were also used for the work. The work cost £2500, which was collected by subscription. The pavement, though inoffensive, is not in keeping with the rest of the church.

The Transepts.—The minster is generally entered by the door at the south end of the south transept, and this is perhaps an advantage, as it introduces the visitor at once to the finest view of the interior and one of the finest architectural views in the world.

Mr Fergusson has called the "lantern" the weak point in the system of Gothic, or rather of English Gothic, architecture (for in French churches there is usually no lantern), and there is something to be said for his view.

The climax of a domical church is obviously the dome. That is the centre and dominating feature of the whole design, and all the lines of the building should lead up to it. But in a Gothic interior the climax is at the east end. In the Middle Ages the high altar, blazing with jewels, plate, and costly embroidery, naturally drew all eyes to it. From the west end, therefore, the altar as a point of attraction was without a rival. But, as the visitor drew near to the transepts, the lantern, if it existed, suddenly discovered itself and distracted his attention from the altar. And when seen directly from below it had not the overpowering impressiveness of the dome. It was apt to be too narrow and dimly lit, too much disconnected from the system of the whole building to produce an overpowering and harmonious effect. But at York, when the minster is entered by the south transept, the east end is not seen at all, and the lantern, with all its height and vastness, is seen at once. Even as viewed from the west end, the choir is shut off from the rest of the church by a heavy screen, and the view eastward is broken and ineffective. But those very qualities of the interior which lessen the beauties of the nave increase the grandeur of the transept view. The great width of the church has enabled the lantern to be so large as almost to give it the effect of a dome. And the opening of the lantern is so lofty, 180 feet indeed from the floor to the vault, as to lessen the appearance of emptiness that might otherwise result from the great width of the transepts. The dimensions of this part of the church are all enormous, and only comparable to those of the dome and transepts of St. Paul's. The length of the transepts, each of them four bays long, is 223 feet from north to south, in itself the length of a large church; their width is 93 feet, the height to the summit of the roof, 99 feet, and to the top of the lantern, 180 feet.

The transepts, therefore, are unusually prominent, even for an English cathedral, and they have many other unusual features. Taken in conjunction with the lantern, they produce an effect to be found in no other Gothic church in the world. In England there are none so wide and so lofty. In France there are interiors even loftier, but in France the transepts are seldom a prominent feature of the design. Often they do not project beyond the outer wall of the aisles of the nave, and oftener still there is no central tower large enough to allow of a lantern at all. It is a great piece of good fortune, also, that the five vast lancets of the north transept end, known as the five sisters, still keep their beautiful original glass. If we look at these windows and consider how utterly ineffective they would be if they were glazed with plain glass, we can understand how little remains of the original beauty of the interior of Salisbury.

When these transepts were planned, the minster had a Norman nave and choir, far narrower and smaller in every way than the present nave and choir. There is no doubt that the transepts were begun with the intention of rebuilding the whole church. At that time it was not among the largest of English cathedrals, and the aspiring and ambitious archbishops naturally desired to have a cathedral worthy of their position in the church. They therefore planned their transepts without any regard for the then existing proportions of the rest of the building, but as it was impossible to rebuild the whole minster at once, they found it necessary to fit their new transepts on to the older and smaller nave and choir, and afterwards to fit their new and larger nave and choir to these transepts. This necessity accounts for and explains many of the peculiarities of the transepts.