Fergusson called the Angel Choir “the most beautiful presbytery in England.” It dates from 1256 to 1280, when the Early English was merging into the Decorated. The sculptural angels that ornament the spandrels of the triforium account for the name.
“It is in five bays carried eastward at a uniform height and breadth with the choir of St. Hugh. Lincoln stone is used throughout, relieved with shafts and capitals of Purbeck marble. The spandrels of the great arches, which are plain in other parts of the building are here decorated with sunk geometrical forms. Each bay of the triforium is divided, as elsewhere, into two arches, both of which enclose two sub-arches; but the details are richer than in the earlier parts of the minster. The clerestory has one window of four lights in each bay, with an eight-foil and two trefoils in the head. The compartments of the vault were originally coated with plaster, which has been scraped away so as to shew the stone surface underneath. It is a question whether it does not now look better than with the old plaster, and the gaudy colouring which once, most probably, decorated it. The springers of the vaulting are supported by slender shafts, which rest on elaborately foliaged corbels in the spandrels of the great arches. The beautiful foliaged bosses along the ridge rib are best seen from the triforium or the clerestory.”—(A. F. K.)
In olden times the Angel Choir contained the Shrine of St. Hugh and a monument to Queen Eleanor, of which the one now standing in Westminster Abbey is probably a copy. It was an altar-monument of marble with the Queen’s effigy in gilded brass, and was destroyed during the Civil Wars in the Seventeenth Century. Eleanor died not far from Lincoln, from which city the funeral procession started to London. A modern stone monument, with a brass effigy of Queen Eleanor, was placed under the East Window in 1891.
Just behind the reredos there is a row of four table-tombs. The north one was placed there by Bishop Fuller, to mark the resting place of St. Hugh; next comes Bishop Fuller himself (died 1675); next, Bishop Gardiner (died 1705); and next, Subdean Gardiner and his daughter, Susanna (died 1731 and 1732). Near the latter stands the alabaster and red marble monument to Dean Butler (died 1894). In corresponding position and next to St. Hugh’s tomb we see Bishop Wordsworth’s effigy under a tall ornate Gothic canopy. This Bishop of Lincoln (died 1885), was a nephew of William Wordsworth. Nearer the East Window we find a group of Fourteenth Century monuments to the Burghersh family, one of whom was Bishop of Lincoln (1320-1340), and another, a hero of Crécy, and Constable of Dover, and Warden of the Cinque Ports. Opposite is the monument to Nicholas de Cantelupe (died 1355), a mutilated effigy under a Gothic canopy. Near it lies Prior Wimbische. His effigy, also headless, lies under a canopy.
Leland, writing in the time of Henry VIII., mentions two mutilated tombs: Catherine Swynford, the third wife of John of Gaunt, made Earl of Lincoln in 1362, and that of her daughter, Joan Beaufort, who married the Earl of Westmoreland.
On the north side of the choir is the Easter Sepulchre, a fine piece of Thirteenth Century carving, in the Decorated style. It consists of four canopies with trefoiled arches. Three sleeping soldiers ornament three of the panels.
On a spandrel on the north side, under a corbel above the most easterly pier, sits the Lincoln Imp—one of those grotesques that the Mediæval carvers delighted in creating; and here he has been sitting with crossed leg and grinning grimly for centuries. He is of the same family as The Devil Looking over Lincoln ([see page 309]).
In the South Aisle of the choir we pause again before another spot, sacred in Mediæval days. Here stood until the Seventeenth Century the Shrine of Little St. Hugh, a child said to have been crucified by the Jews in 1255. According to the ballads the ball of the eight-year-old boy fell into a Jew’s garden; and when he ran in to get it, the Jews murdered him.
The canons of Lincoln obtained the body and buried it in the Cathedral. Hugh became a local saint; and the Jews of Lincoln were promptly persecuted. When the stone coffin was opened in 1791, the skeleton of a child three feet long, encased in lead, was found.
Henry of Huntingdon (died about 1155), the chronicler of Lincoln, was also buried in this aisle.