There are not very many notable tombs here, though there is much illustrious dust. Here was buried the head of King Edwin of Northumbria, who so "often sat alone by himself for a long time, silent as to his tongue, but deliberating in his heart" whether he should become a Christian. This Minster is in a sense the fruit of his deliberations. There is no monument to him, nor to Earl Tostig of the violent temper, whose body was carried here from Stamford Bridge; but the founder of the present building lies in his robes under a canopy in the south transept. We may see, too, in the Lady Chapel, the marble tomb of Archbishop Scrope, the builder of Bolton Castle, who preached a sermon in this Minster inciting the people to take up arms, and lost his head in consequence. And near the altar of the same chapel is a little black kneeling figure that deserves attention. It is a monument to Frances Matthew, the wife of Tobie Matthew, Archbishop of York, and the daughter of William Barlow, Bishop of Chichester. "She had four sisters married to four bishops.... So that a bishop was her father, an archbishop her father-in-law, she had four bishops her brethren, and an archbishop her husband." Unless I am much mistaken she had also an abbess for her mother, which was the strangest thing of all. There was a William Barlow, at one time Bishop of St. David's, who is said to have married an abbess as soon as the Reformation made it possible, and had five daughters married to five bishops. Frances Matthew must surely have been one of these. Tradition says that Bishop Barlow, who had many unpleasant traits, stripped the lead from the Palace of St. David's and dowered his daughters with it; but Frances must have been a baby, if indeed she was born, when her father was guilty of this thievish vandalism. She herself is described as being above her sex, and even above the times—but indeed all the women who were buried in ages gone by seem to have been superior to all the rest. She gave her husband's library to the Minster.
Close to her mural monument is the largest window in England. There is no building, I believe, that has so much ancient and beautiful glass as this, and it is a miracle to be thankful for that it was not destroyed in the last century, when the poor maniac set fire to the Minster because he disliked the buzzing of the organ. The soft-toned window of the Five Sisters is the loveliest of all.
But all these are modern things. Down in the crypt we shall find ourselves in touch with the century of Paulinus and St. Chad and St. Wilfrid, the three earliest Archbishops of York; for here is the herringbone work of the first stone church, and here, they say, are the pillars of the building that succeeded it and was destroyed by the Danes. This is the spot on which the Roman temple stood, and the wooden church where King Edwin was baptized, and the altar on which Ulphus the Saxon laid his horn. This Ulphus was a prince in Deira, whose sons were of a quarrelsome temper, and were likely, he thought, to fall out over the division of his property after his death. So "he presently took this course to make them equal." He carried his favourite drinking-horn, his horn of ivory and gold, to York, and filling it there he knelt before the altar of the Minster and drank the wine in token that he endowed the church with all his lands for ever. That this brought peace to his family I rather doubt; but the lands of Ulphus are to this day in the possession of York Minster, and the horn of Ulphus is to this day within its walls. If we go through this door in the south aisle of the choir we may see it—an elephant's tusk, rich tawny in colour, finely carved. It disappeared mysteriously at the time of the Civil War, but somehow fell into the hands of Fairfax, whose son returned it to the Minster. How it came to Fairfax is not recorded; but is it not possible that he may have quietly taken possession of it, knowing how unsafe it was in the hands of the Puritans, and have told his son to give it back in less troubled times? Or was it perhaps one of those relics which would have "irrecoverably perished in the late wars" if Fairfax had not paid "that industrious antiquary, Mr. Dodsworth," to collect them? We know that Fairfax had "a peculiar respect" for antiquities, and that it was owing to his unceasing care that the Minster suffered so little in the war.
It is not in a few days that York can be seen. Only those really know the place who live within the enchanted walls; we should linger here as long as possible, and return again and again. Yet those whose time is limited will find that even a couple of nights spent at the justly famous Station Hotel will enable them to see more than the Minster without suffering from that sense of hurry that spoils pleasure.
York has not hurried. In the Museum Gardens, themselves a wonderful museum, we may realise how many centuries she has taken to become what she is. Here is a tower that was raised by the Romans. The date of it is uncertain, but Mr. Wellbeloved tells us it was probably built when the Conquering Legion came to Eboracum. This, says Gibbon, was at the beginning of the second century; so this tower of many angles takes us back to the time of Hadrian, to days before the Emperor Severus died here in the palace that has altogether vanished, bidding his sons let all their conduct tend to each other's good; days long before the death of Constantius and the accession of Constantine the Great. It is not true that Constantine was born in York, but it was here that he went through his little performance of reluctant modesty when the soldiers made him Emperor—weeping and spurring his horse while they pursued him with the imperial robes.
In the same garden are the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey. The Benedictine monks who founded this community came from Whitby, and were perhaps the builders of the Norman apse we saw at Lastingham, where they paused for a time on their way to York. It is easy to see that this remnant of a most beautiful church was not of their raising: there is nothing Norman here, nothing but the purest Gothic work. It was while the earlier eleventh-century church was still standing that a strange scene took place here; when the Archbishop of York with his retinue clamoured long upon the abbey gates in vain, while the abbot refused to open to him; then forced his way at last into the abbey and pronounced an interdict—here where the grass grows under our feet—against the abbot and his monks. The cause of all this commotion was that little band of brethren who built the Abbey of Fountains with so much toil and endurance. They were at that time monks of St. Mary's, and had appealed to Archbishop Thurstan to reform their house. Abbot Geoffrey, however, preferred to remain unreformed; and so the fiery prelate swept off with the zealous thirteen and set them down in the wilderness beside the Skell to live as austerely as they would. The Abbey of St. Mary, in spite of the interdict, grew very great as well as beautiful.
ST. MARY'S ABBEY, YORK.