RETRO-CHOIR
X. What the monks cared most about was the lighting of the church. This they were always trying to improve. In the thirteenth century they inserted large geometrical windows in the western transept, and c. 1290 others in the aisles of the central transepts to light the altars placed there. Moreover, the Norman windows in the aisles of the nave were replaced by wide windows of five lights. In the Curvilinear period the triforium windows were transformed, and charming flowing tracery, with rear-arches, was inserted in the windows of the apse, which then looked into the open air, but now look into the New Building. In the Perpendicular period some seventy-five windows were either enlarged or filled with rectilinear tracery. The builders certainly achieved their object. The cathedral is well lighted. We may be thankful that they did not stick a great Perpendicular window in each end of the central transept.
XI. In 1541 the church was made a cathedral on the new foundation. Henry VIII. is said to have preserved it as a mausoleum to his first wife, Catharine of Arragon, who is buried in the choir. It is wretchedly built—the west front and the New Building as badly as the Norman work—and practically without foundations. Much underpinning has been done, and more is required. The west front has been saved for the present by judicious treatment.
The Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Wilfrid, Ripon.
Ripon minster has passed through strange vicissitudes. It was founded c. 660 as a monasterium or minster for Scottish monks attached to the Celtic church. Soon afterwards it was taken away from them and granted to the famous St. Wilfrid. In 678 the church became a cathedral, but only during the lifetime of Bishop Eadhed. Ultimately it passed into the hands of regular canons of the Augustinian Order. It was dissolved with the other collegiate churches by Edward VI. It was made collegiate once more by James I., but with dean and prebendaries instead of Augustinian canons. In 1836, for the second time, it became a cathedral.
I. Both the minsters built by St. Wilfrid—Ripon and Hexham—retain their crypts. He was a Romaniser in architecture as in ritual, and well acquainted with Italy. So his seventh-century church at Ripon was modelled after the early Christian basilicas which he had seen at Rome. Like them, it had a confessionary or crypt, which still exists, beneath the central tower; like them, it was orientated to the west. He seems even to have brought over Italian masons to direct or to execute the work, for the crypt is vaulted, and the vaulting is of excellent construction; the masonry is smooth, and is covered “with a fine and very hard plaster which takes a polish.” At its west end was the altar, at its east end an aperture through which a glimpse of the interior might be obtained from the Saxon nave. Round the walls are little niches in which lights were placed. “St. Wilfrid’s Needle” is merely a niche with the back knocked through. Similar Saxon crypts remain at Hexham and Wing, and a Norman crypt at St. Peter-in-the-East, Oxford. They usually consisted of a small central chamber, with a passage all round it. There were two staircases descending from either side of the nave; pilgrims went down one flight of steps, proceeded along the passage, getting a glimpse of the relics through openings in the wall of the central chamber, and then returned up the other flight of steps into the nave.
IV. Norman.—Early in the twelfth century a Norman cathedral seems to have been built, wholly or in part, by Archbishop Thurstan. Of this there remains only an apsidal building, with crypt beneath, on the south side of the south aisle of the present choir. An eleventh-century chapel formerly existed, with crypt beneath it, in precisely the same situation at Worcester; there is a twelfth-century chapel in the same position in Oxford cathedral. In Oxford this chapel was the Lady chapel. It may be that the Ripon chapel also may have been a Lady chapel. For if the Norman choir was of the same length eastward as at present, it would have been impossible to build a Lady chapel of the type of that, the crypt of which still exists at Winchester, to the east of the choir; the ground falls far too steeply eastward. Moreover, the so-called Lady loft now existing would seem, from its name, to be merely an upper story added to a Lady chapel. This Norman chapel formerly opened into the Norman church; traces of the arches may be seen in the walls. In the buttress is a curious room which may have been a sacristy, a lavatory, a prison, or an anchorite’s cell, like the one in the east end of Ludlow church.