In the first bay of the north side of the Angel Choir is a remarkable monument, part of which once served for an Easter sepulchre. This, like those of Navenby and Heckington of the same date, is richly carved with oak and vine and fig-tree foliage, and shows the Roman soldiers sleeping. Opposite, on the south side, are the tombs of Katharine Swynford of Ketilthorpe, Duchess of Lancaster, Chaucer’s sister-in-law, whose marriage to John of Gaunt took place in the minster in 1396. Like so many of the monuments, these are sadly mutilated, and are not now quite in their original position.
It is on one of the pillars of the east bay, the second from the east end, that the curious grotesque, familiar to all as the “Lincoln Imp,” is perched.
THE NAVE
If we now turn westwards we shall come to the fine stone organ screen, and pass through to the tower, whose predecessor fell through faultiness of construction, and was rebuilt by Grosteste as far as the nave roof, and we shall look down the nave, which is forty-two feet wide, each aisle being another twenty feet in width. The planning and execution of the nave we owe to the two Bishops Hugh. Its great length (524 feet with the choir and presbytery) makes the whole building, when viewed from the west, look lower than it is, for it is really eighty-two feet high. Looking west this is not felt so much, and there is a feeling of great dignity which the best Early English work always gives. The piers may seem lacking in massive strength, but they vary in pattern, those to the east being the most elaborate, and so gain in interest. One curious thing about the nave, though not discernible to the uninitiated, is that the axis, which is continuous from the east end for the first five of the seven bays, here diverges somewhat to the north, and so runs into the centre of the Norman west front. The two western bays are five and a quarter feet less in span than the others. Probably the architect, as he brought the nave down westwards with that light-hearted disregard of a previous style of architecture which characterised the medieval builder and his predecessors of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, intended to sweep away all the old Norman work at the west end and carry the line straight on with equal-sized arches, but funds failed and he had to join up the new with the old as best he could; and we have cause to be thankful for this, since it has preserved for us the original and most interesting work of Remigius.
THE TRANSEPTS
Before we leave our place beneath the tower, we must look at the two great transepts. These have piers, triforium and clerestory similar to those in the choir, and each has three chapels along the eastern wall; these, from north to south, are dedicated to St. Nicholas, St. Denis, St. Thomas; and in the south transept to St. Edward, St. John and St. Giles. Of these, St. Edward’s is called the chanters’ chapel, and it has four little figures of singers carved in stone, two on each side of the door. This was fitted up for use and opened in August, 1913, for a choristers’ chapel, the tombstone of Precentor Smith, 1717, being introduced for an altar. Everybody is attracted by the rose windows. That to the north has beneath it five lancet windows, something like those at York, filled with white silvery glass, but the rose above has still its original Early English stained glass, and is a notable example of the work of the period. A central quatrefoil has four trefoils outside it and sixteen circles round, all filled with tall bold figures and strongly coloured. It is best seen from the triforium. Below is the dean’s door, with a lancet window on either side, and over it a clock with a canopy, given in 1324 by Thomas of Louth. This canopy was carried off by the robber archdeacon, Dr. Bailey, and used as a pulpit-top in his church at Messingham, but was restored by the aid of Bishop Trollope.
The south transept, where Bishop John of Dalderby was buried, contains what no one sees without a feeling of delight, and wonder that such lovely work could ever have been executed in stone,—the great rose window with its twin ovals and its leaf-like reticulations, which attract the eye more than the medley of good old glass with which it is filled, but which gives it a beautiful richness of effect. Below this are four lancets with similar glass.
THE FONT
The aisles of the nave are vaulted, the groins springing from the nave pillars on the inner, and from groups of five shafts on the outer side. Behind these runs a beautiful wall arcade on detached shafts, continuous in the north aisle, but only repeated in portions of the south aisle, with bosses of foliage at the spring of the arches. In the aisle at the second bay from the west is the grand old Norman font, resembling that at Winchester. There is another at Thornton Curtis in the north-east of the county. Neither of the Lincolnshire specimens are so elaborately carved as that at Winchester, which is filled with scenes from the life of St. Nicholas, but all are of the same massive type, with dragons, etc., carved on the sides of a great block of black basalt resting on a round base of the same, with four detached corner pillars leading down to a square black base. These early basalt fonts, of which Hampshire has four, Lincolnshire two, the other being at Ipswich, Dean Kitchin conclusively proved to have all come from Tournai, in Belgium, and to date from the middle of the twelfth century, a time coinciding with the episcopacy of Bishops Alexander and De Chesney at Lincoln, and Henry de Blois at Winchester. The one at St. Mary Bourne is the biggest, and has only clusters of grapes on it and doves. The other two are at East Meon and at St. Michael’s, Southampton, and have monsters carved on them like the Lincolnshire specimens.
Of brasses, in which the cathedral before the Reformation was specially rich, having two hundred, only one now remains, that of Bishop Russell, 1494, which is now in the cathedral library; but in a record made in 1641 by Sir W. Dugdale and Robert Sanderson, afterwards Bishop, is the following most charming little inscription to John Marshall, Canon of the cathedral, 1446, beneath the figure of a rose:—