The west front with its two towers was built about this time; and the eastern part of the choir was rebuilt in the Decorated style by Archbishop John Romanus (1286-1296).
The church was used as a refuge and fortress by the people of Ripon when the Scots invaded it in 1317. Many necessary repairs were made under Archbishop de Melton (1317-1340). The central tower fell in 1450 and had to be rebuilt; also the east side of the south transept and the south side of the choir. The present rood-screen and canopied stalls were erected at the end of the Fifteenth Century. Then the nave was rebuilt; but progress was delayed by the outbreak of a plague in 1506. St. Wilfrid’s Shrine was demolished by Henry VIII. In 1593 the central spire was injured by lightning. During the Civil Wars the Parliamentary soldiers shattered the splendid glass of the east window and did other damage. In 1660 the central spire fell and injured some of the canopies of the choir-stalls; and, therefore, in 1664, the western spires were removed for fear that they might fall also. Many repairs were made in 1829. Restorations on a large scale were undertaken by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1862-1870.
The West Front is Early English. It has two square towers and a central gable. String-courses divide the façade into four stages. In the first are three doorways adorned with gables and crosses. The central door, which is larger than the others, consists of five orders and five triple shafts. The two others have three orders and three shafts. Some of the mouldings are filled with the dog-tooth ornament. All three doors open into the nave. Between the gables spouts issue from the heads of animals. Above the doors comes a row of five lancet windows and above them a group of three small lancets placed very high. The towers are ornamented with arcades and lancets, buttresses, parapets and pinnacles. The ten bells hang in the south tower.
The Central Tower is interesting because it is composed of two styles of architecture. On the north and west sides it is Twelfth Century and on the two others Perpendicular. The windows on all sides are round-headed. The dog-tooth ornament appears in the moulding. Ripon, though finely proportioned, is somewhat cold and severe in general appearance. The north transept with its round-headed windows and its interesting doorway, with a rather curious inner arch and capitals of carved foliage, is a good example of the Twelfth Century. The south side of the nave is preferred to the north side by critics. In the south transept we have Archbishop Roger’s work again. The doorway is elaborate. The foliage on the capitals of the columns approaches the Early English style. The lintel is square. The south side of the choir is partly hidden by the Chapter-House with the Lady-Loft above. The buttresses that follow are of the Twelfth Century. The three western bays are Perpendicular; the others, Decorated. The two flying-buttresses are like those on the north side. Gargoyles appear at intervals along the string of the roof. The east end is Decorated. Its chief feature is the splendid window, of which the tracery alone remains.
Entering the west doorway we look upon one of the great naves of the Perpendicular period, ranking next in size after York, Winchester, Chichester and after St. Paul’s in width.
“Among very late Gothic buildings there are few indeed which are of so good a quality as this nave of Ripon, which, like the late church towers of Somerset, shows that Mediæval art took long to die out in regions remote from London. It is, indeed, the architecture of the days of Agincourt rather than of the eve of the English Renaissance. The pillars are characteristic of the Perpendicular style, their section being a square with a semicircle projecting from each side, and the corners hollowed. Their bases have complex plinths of considerable height and are polygonal, but follow roughly the form of the pillar, and the mouldings, as usual in this style, overhang the plinth. The capitals, with small mouldings and many angles, are of somewhat the same form as the bases. On the westernmost complete pillar of the north arcade are two shields, charged respectively with the arms of Ripon (a horn) and of Pigott of Clotherholme. The arches, instead of being of that depressed form which is so common in late work, are very beautifully proportioned, and their mouldings are bold, numerous and well-cut. There is no triforium; but a passage, at a slightly lower level than in Archbishop Roger’s bays, runs below the great clerestory windows, which were once, no doubt, gorgeous with stained glass. Their arches are moulded, but the splay is left plain. The roof-shafts, which are in clusters of three and have fillets upon them, spring from semi-octagonal corbels, and where each cluster passes the string-course there is an angel holding a shield. A sign of decadence may be found, perhaps, in the way in which the hood-moulds of the windows intersect with these shafts. Though the two sides of the nave are not quite of the same date, they are almost alike, but for some slight differences in the capitals, the arch-mouldings, and the hollows on the pillars; the builders feeling, doubtless, that any marked variation would mar the general perspective—a consideration which, of course, could not bind them in designing the north aisle. The original Perpendicular roof may have resembled that which now covers the transepts. About 1829 Blore put up an almost flat ceiling of deal. The present oaken vault, by Sir Gilbert Scott, was copied from that of the transepts of York Minster, and is adapted to the old roof-shafts, between which have been added angel corbels of wood. As the ribs intersect near their springing, they weave a network over the whole vault, and the carved bosses at the intersections amount to 107. A passing notice is merited by the pulpit, which is Jacobean.”—(C. H.)
The two great tower arches under the west towers are Early English; those of the central tower are round. Their great piers are composed of clusters of engaged shafts. Massive arches also mark the opening of each aisle of the nave into the transept. In the south aisle stands a blue marble Font, and near it an older one, probably of the Twelfth Century. Tradition says that the altar-tomb here is that of an Irish prince who brought home from Palestine a tame lion. On the bas-relief a lion, a kneeling man and two birds are represented, which gives cause for the story. The work is presumably of the Fourteenth Century. Above the font we can see the only Mediæval glass in the Cathedral—fragments of Fourteenth Century work left from the wreckage of the Puritan soldiers. St. Peter, St. Paul and St. Andrew will easily be recognized. There is also a shield bearing the English arms in this window. In the south wall of the nave there is a fine Piscina dating from the Twelfth Century. At this point we shall have to interrupt our walk through the Cathedral to examine St. Wilfrid’s Needle, the popular name for the Saxon Crypt.
“From a trap-door in the pavement below the piscina a flight of twelve steps winds down into a flat-roofed and descending passage 2⅛ feet wide and slightly over 6 feet high, which, running a few feet northwards and bending at right angles round the south-west tower pier, extends eastward for about 10 yards, with a descent of one step near the end, and terminates in a blank wall. There is a square-headed niche at the turn and a round-headed niche at the end, both meant, doubtless, to hold lights. Three feet from the end a round-headed doorway, 2 feet wide and over 6 feet high, opens northwards with a descent of two more steps, into a barrel-vaulted chamber, 11 feet 5 inches long from east to west, 7 feet 7 inches wide and 9 feet 10 inches high. In the north wall of this chamber, and approached by three wide steps, is the celebrated St. Wilfrid’s Needle, a round-headed aperture pierced through into a passage that runs behind. This aperture was connected with one of those superstitions that so often flourished before the Reformation in notable centres of religion, and ability to pass through it, or ‘thread the needle,’ was regarded as a test of female chastity; but it was, of course, in the later middle ages that this superstition arose, and the ‘needle’ (or rather needle’s eye) is evidently only one of the original niches with the back knocked out. Of these niches (which again were doubtless for lights) there are four in the chamber besides the ‘needle,’—one in each wall,—and, like the niche at the end of the passage of entrance, they all have semicircular heads, each cut in a single stone. That in the west wall has a hole or cup at the bottom, probably to hold oil in which a wick might float, while the others (except the ‘needle’) have a sort of funnel at the top, doubtless to catch the soot from lamps.”—(C. H.)
The North Transept is a fine specimen of the transitional from Norman to Early English, and is almost in its original condition. It is 34 feet wide, or 52 feet including the aisle. Here we find a stone pulpit of the Perpendicular period, its five