On reaching High Street, which is part of the great north-west road, and the old coaching way between London and Holyhead, it is best to go right on down Pepper Lane, which immediately faces you, until you come to S. Michael's churchyard. This broad open space was, and is still, the centre of the life of the town. Here stood the cathedral and the two great parish churches, the house containing the cloth market, and the guild-hall, where the rulers of the city assembled to take council together. Possibly while the churches, as we know them now, and S. Mary's Hall were yet unbuilt, the common assembly of city folk met together here to hold courts, and decide on questions touching the common weal. Now the cathedral and drapery are gone, but the church spire still stands fronting the spectator, and a few paces will bring him where, behind the projection of a small black and white cottage, stands the red and crumbling entrance porch of S. Mary's Hall.
Tradition, which we can never afford to disregard, says that S. Michael's Church—spire, tower, chancel, and nave—was built by the Botoners, a great merchant family, further affirming that a brass plate was found in the church, with the following lines engraved upon it:—
"William and Adam built the tower,
Ann and Mary built the spire,
William and Adam built the church,
Ann and Mary built the quire."
Undoubtedly the Botoners were wealthy and generous folk, but whether this little quatrain is founded on fact or no, we have no means of proving.
The famous nine-storied steeple, consisting of tower, octagon and spire, whereof the tower, begun in 1371, occupied twenty-one years in building, is 300 feet high or thereabouts, but gains a fictitious appearance of greater height in that it springs immediately from the ground. The architect had a marvellously happy thought when he added the flying buttresses, which connect the pinnacles of the main tower with the octagon above it, converting a mere tall spire into a "star-ypointing" thing of lightness and beauty.[734] The stone figures in the niches are modern; the ancient ones, worth inspection though worn past identification, have been placed in the crypt, to which entrance is gained on the north side of the church. It is perhaps the finest specimen of the florid Perpendicular spire in England. The decoration is concentrated in the storeys easily seen, i.e. the upper ones of the tower, gradually dying away as the eye travels upwards. The steeple recently underwent restoration under Mr Oldrid Scott, and whatever was gained in stability by the process, much was lost with the look of old age which vanished with the crumbling surface of the ancient stone.
Before entering the church by the south door notice the rare round trefoil-headed arch of the south porch, earliest portion of the church, a few steps beyond, opposite the door of S. Mary's Hall. What first strikes the spectator on entering is the great size of the building, a fact mainly owing to the simplicity of the ground plan, no space being lost in transepts, and to the absence of any partition or arch between nave and chancel, so that from the west end there is an uninterrupted view of the entire church. From this spaciousness and simplicity comes a grandeur which mere size could never wholly give. The style of architecture—of the kind called "Perpendicular"—shows that the fabric belongs to the end of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth century, the choir being older than the nave, which dates from 1434 to 1450. It has been suggested that the building was just complete when Henry VI. paid his visit to the church in 1451.
The width of the arches and slightness of the pillars display the technical skill of the architects of this period, who, by a just distribution of weight, etc., contrived to raise churches of maximum size at a minimum expense of material and labour. It is a church where a large congregation may be comfortably housed, but it has the great defect of the later style of Gothic building,—all sense of mystery and aspiration, with which the lofty roof and high-pointed arch of the earlier periods impress the beholder, are wholly absent.
On looking up from the west end, a curious break in the line of the roof at the junction of nave and chancel is very apparent. The choir inclines to the north, and in so doing furnishes an architectural problem difficult of solution.[735] It is curious that the tower, which is not central with the nave, is in line with the choir.
The lantern at the west end has been opened out since the recent restoration, and the sight of the beautiful groining of the roof is not one that should be missed. The nave has six bays; and in the clear-story windows of both nave and chancel the mullions are carried down until they meet the line of the arch; in the chancel the scheme is more decorative, and over the central arch of the three bays the window is a four-light one.
The step between nave and chancel is of oak and may have been the ancient sill of the rood-screen.[736]