The Cathedral Church of St. Peter, York.

FROM NORTH.

York Minster has had many predecessors—Romano-British, Saxon, Norman and Transitional cathedrals. From the two first periods nothing survives, unless it be two walls in herring-bone masonry in the crypt. Little remains of Norman work except in the western portion of the crypt. In the centre of the crypt are fine fragments of the Transitional choir of Archbishop Roger, whose work is seen at Ripon. The present cathedral is mainly of three periods. The great transept was designed in the Lancet period; the nave, chapter-house and vestibule were built in the latter part of the Geometrical period; the retro-choir, choir and towers are Perpendicular. But though the work is of three periods, it is practically of only two designs, the choir and retro-choir being only a Perpendicular version of the design of the nave.

II. As at Lichfield and Wells, the canons of York in the endleft not a fragment of the earlier work visible above ground. They must have had vast resources at their disposal, in addition to what they received in offerings at the shrine of the local saint, St. William of York. He died in 1154; he was canonised in 1227. It was about this latter date that the rebuilding of the cathedral commenced; and it is not unreasonable to believe that the offerings from his shrine had something to do with the vastness of scale on which the new work was planned; the new transept being not only exceptional both in height and breadth, but also in having aisles on the western as well as on the eastern side—an extravagance unknown in our Gothic cathedrals, except at Wells. It is amusing to find the double-aisled transept in the sub-cathedral of Beverley Minster. There seems to have been an internecine rivalry between the canons of Beverley and York. Both churches have double aisles to the central transepts; both continue in full height to the east end; both have western towers; and though Beverley has no central tower, it has by compensation an aisled eastern transept, where York has but transeptal bays. Moreover, the high vaults of Beverley are of stone. In beauty of proportions and of detail—in everything but scale—Beverley has much the best of it.

SOUTH TRANSEPT.

The south transept was built 1230-1241, the north transept 1241-1260. The façade of the south transept is confused and commonplace, overloaded with ornament, and cut up toomuch with windows; that of the north transept—with the Five Sisters—is of noble simplicity. In the south transept is the beautiful monument of Archbishop Gray (1215-1255), the builder also of Ripon west front and Southwell choir. “The view which is presented to the visitor on entering this transept is without doubt the finest in the cathedral. The magnificent spaciousness of the transept, the majesty of the lofty lancets which nearly fill the north gable, the solemn light struggling through their ancient diapered glass, the great central tower with its unrivalled lantern, combine to produce an impression fully sustaining the great reputation of the minster.” In proportions the design of the transept is not a success; the elevation dwindles away upward, the triforium being made far too large at the expense of the clerestory. In itself the triforium is a very fine composition, only there is not room for it, nor is it in harmony either with the pier-arcade below or the clerestory above. It is the largest and most complex triforium in the country; consisting of two pairs of acute lancets below, set under two acute lancet arches, which again are set under an outer arch almost semicircular. This was the last big triforium built in England (save the exceptional one in Ely choir). There had always been a feeling in favour of the diminution of the triforium. Even in the twelfth-century naves of Tewkesbury and Gloucester the triforium had been cut down to very small proportions; in Beverley choir the triforium is greatly attenuated; and very soon afterwards the triforium wasto be seen nearing extinction in Exeter choir and in the nave of York itself.

SOUTH TRANSEPT.

III. At this period (c.1260) we must think of York Minster as possessing the present spacious transept, a Transitional choir of the character of that of Ripon, and a Norman nave. When the work of rebuilding was resumed, the Transitional choir—which must have been spacious and convenient—was spared once more, and the canons proceeded to take down and rebuild the Norman nave, laying the foundation stone in 1291, and beginning at the south-east. The new nave is so exceedingly broad and lofty that it is probable that it was built round and over the top of the old Norman nave. The money came from “indulgences, penances, briefs, bequests, and offerings at the shrine of St. William.” The nave, like the whole minster, is exceedingly impressive in the vastness of its spaces: no building of such dimensions could fail to be impressive. Its proportions, however, are not good. The broadest cathedral nave in England (its span is 45 feet), and the loftiest (it is nearly 100 feet high), it ought to be one of the longest, which it is not: it is even shorter than the transept. Matters are made worse, as in Lincoln nave, by the wide spacing of the piers, the result of which is greatly to reduce the apparent length of the nave. It contains only eight bays. Had it been divided into ten or more bays, it would have looked far longer. It was designed not so much on architectural lines as a glass-house. The canons wanted the greatest possible breadths of stained glass in aisles and clerestory. The error was seen and corrected in the choir, which, though no longer than the nave, has nine bays instead of eight. It is possible that nothing but want of funds prevented the canons from continuing the nave farther westward. The exceptional height and breadth of the nave made it very costly; and the funds plainly ran short, for, though begun in 1291, it was not roofed till 1360. To make matters worse, the canons were building a new chapter-house and vestibule at the same time as the nave: so that funds may well havefailed. Nevertheless, at Ely, equally large works were completed before 1360, though they were not commenced till 1321, and were executed with much greater richness of detail than in York.

CHAPTER-HOUSE

Another feature which shows that the York canons had started their work without considering whether they would be able to finish it is the omission of a stone vault, which was plainly contemplated at the outset; the pinnacles built for the purpose of weighting the buttresses against the thrusts of a stone vault still existing on the south side. When the north side was built, the canons had abandoned hope of vaulting the nave in stone, and so did not put up big pinnacles. It is well to remember, however, that the exterior of the nave was designed originally to have flying-buttresses and big pinnacles on both sides. In the end, as in Selby choir, a sham vault of wood was put up. One cannot help regretting these shams. It would have been Gothic to recognise honestly that the ceiling was wood, and to design it in wood and not in lithic fashion. Then we might have seen an English Gothic cathedral with such a hammer-beam roof as that of Westminster Hall: very magnificent it would have been.

Side by side with the nave went up the chapter-house. It belongs to the middle of the Geometrical period,c.1300; later in character than its sister at Southwell, and but little earlier than the chapter-house of Wells. Externally, it isprovided with buttresses and pinnacles and flying-buttresses and flying bridges to resist the thrusts of a stone vault. Yet no stone vault is there, but another sham vault of wood. The detail of the chapter-house, inside and outside, is of exquisite beauty.

At first the chapter-house was a detached building, but a vestibule was soon added. Parapet-mouldings of the chapter-house may now be seen inside the vestibule.

A very curious and bold specimen of mediæval engineering may now be mentioned. If the western bays of the great transept next to the central tower be examined, it will be seen that in the clerestory and in the triforium these bays are exceedingly narrow, but that in the ground-story the narrow arch corresponding to the narrow bays of the triforium and clerestory has been moved, and a wider arch substituted. The fact is, when the transept was completed, the Norman nave, which was still standing, had a very narrow aisle. Consequently the builders of the transept built a pair of narrow arches, on either side of the central tower, leading from the transept into the Norman aisle. Later on, as we have seen, the Norman nave and aisles were pulled down, and the present nave was built. Its aisles are exceptionally broad. The result was that the piers of the two narrow arches found themselves in the very middle of the new broad aisles of the nave—a most awkward obstruction to processions passing from aisle to transept, orvice-versa. So the triforium and clerestory was underpinned, the Lancet piers next to the tower were taken down and then put up again clear of the aisles, and the two arches also on either side of the tower were taken down and rebuilt with the same stones, each in the place of the other. The result is that, counting from the end-walls of the transepts, in the triforium and clerestory there are three of the bays wide and one narrow, while in the ground-story there are two wide, one narrow, and one wide bay. Similar changes took place on the eastern side of the transept when the choir was built.

Later on, when the central tower was built, its great weightsank the piers on which it rests eight inches into the ground, and the adjoining masonry was dislocated. The result was that it was found necessary to rebuild the third piers on both sides of both transepts (counting from the end-walls) as well as the first pier on the western side of the north transept, and at the same time to block up all the four narrow arches with solid masonry (cf.Carlisle, andExeter).

IV. The west front of the nave was not finished till the very end of the Curvilinear period, to which period belong also the treasury and sacristy, and also Archbishop Zouch’s chapel, unless the latter was rebuiltc.1396.

CHAPTER-HOUSE ARCADE.

V. Immediately that the nave was roofed in, the canons commenced to rebuild the eastern limb. Meanwhile architectural fashions had changed. While the York people were lingering over their Geometrical nave, a whole architectural period had passed away, leaving behind few traces at York except in the west front. When the new choir was commenced in 1361, the Curvilinear style had disappeared before the new Perpendicular style, invented at Gloucester and taken up by Bishop Edingdon at Winchester. The style, however, was still new, and though the Winchester work is purely Perpendicular, the York design still retains in the window tracery reminiscences of the flow of curve that Edingdon and Wykeham had replaced by grilles of horizontal and vertical bars.

Only the eastern part of Archbishop Roger’s Transitional work was at first pulled down, the services going on without interruption in the western bays. The four new eastern bays—designed as a retro-choir, the altar standing originally one bay more to the west than at present—may be distinguishedat once externally by the unusual feature of having an external instead of an internal arcade to the clerestory; this gives a fine play of light and shadow.

Then the five western bays were built, two bays as sanctuary, three as choir. Owing to the continuation of the high roofs to the extreme east end of the cathedral, there is little of the picturesqueness of the eastern terminations of Wells and Salisbury, but there is spaciousness, dignity and majesty. Here also the canons had not the money—perhaps not the courage—to put up a high vault of stone. Nave, eastern limb, and transept (the vault of which is of the fifteenth century) were all vaulted in wood. The punishment was long in coming, but it came at last. The wooden vault of the choir, the stalls and the organ, were burnt down by a lunatic in 1829; and that of the nave by a plumber in 1840. The finest feature in the choir is the tall transeptal bays, suggested by and built on the foundations of Archbishop Roger’s flanking towers. The whole eastern limb was finishedc.1420. Then came the central tower, 1410-1433; the south-west tower, 1433-1447; the north-west tower, 1465-1474; the organ screen, 1475-1505.

FROM SOUTH-WEST.

In 1472 the completion of the great works commencedc.1230 was near at hand, and a solemn consecration of the rebuilt cathedral was held. The Norman and Transitional cathedral had disappeared; its successor occupied a century and a half in building.

SOUTH CHOIR.

Externally, York Minster, from its vast dimensions and the fine composition of the towers, is exceedingly impressive. One realises its immensity best from the city walls, where it is seen “reflecting every change in the sky, and rising like a mountain above the parochial churches and houses of the city.” The treatment of the north side of the nave and transept is particularly grave and impressive—largely because of the absence of pinnacles. The west front, in spite of overloaded and confused ornament, is of its type the finest in the country; and to my mind the great west window, in the free andfanciful flow of its intersecting ogee arches, surpasses its only rival, the east window of Carlisle. The central tower relies for effect on mass more than height, and thus contrasts strongly with the central towers of Canterbury and Lincoln. Gloucester tower alone seems to be impressive equally from height and bulk. Shorn of its pinnacles, however, York central tower has not fair play. Very beautiful, too, is the play of light and shade in the double plane of tracery in the eastern clerestory. And very characteristic is the east façade; it may be all wrong, with its strong emphasis of horizontal lines and concealment of the gable, but it has distinction; one never confuses the east end of York with that of any other cathedral—one never forgets it. The weakest point in York is what ought to be the source of the greatest beauty, the window-tracery.Much of it, especially in the choir, is ugly in itself; even that of the great east window and of the windows in the transeptal bays is meagre and thin. But what is worse, this poor tracery is repeated with most wearisome iteration all over the flanks of the cathedral. Window after window of the nave, window after window of the choir, are monotonously alike. The imagination of the York people was singularly limited. What a contrast to the glorious series of windows of Exeter, contemporary with those of York nave!

CHOIR, LOOKING EAST.

But it is not from its architecture that York holds its paramount place as an exponent of mediæval art, but because its ancient glass is almost all intact. For a detailed account of it the reader should refer to Mr. Benson’s handbook and to that of Dean Purey-Cust. I will conclude by describing it in Mrs. Van Rensselaer’s words, which are as true as they are eloquent. “Most English cathedrals have been entirely reduced to architectural bone and sinew; they lack decorative warmth and glow, life and colour, and the charm that lies in those myriad accessory things which the lingering faith of Rome has preserved in other lands. All the varied tools and trappings, altars, shrines, and symbolic trophies of the rich Catholic ritual have been banished; much of the furniture is gone, the walls are bare of paint, scores of monuments and chantries have been shattered to bits, thousands of sculptured ornaments and figures have been swept away in dust; apainful cleanliness has replaced the time-stains which give tone to many Continental churches even when no actual colouring exists, and a glare of white light or hideous discord of modern hues fills the enormous windows. Columns and walls and floors are as barren at York as elsewhere; and although many tombs remain, without its glass it would seem even colder and emptier than most of its sisters, for it was built at a time when walls of glass had nearly replaced walls of stone. But it has its glass, and this means much more than that it has a richness of decorative effect which no other English church displays. It means that here alone we can really apprehend the effect of a late Gothic church, even from the architectural point of view. At York we can follow the development of the art of glass-painting through a period of fully four centuries. More delicate, clear and exquisite fields of simple colour can never have been wrought than those which fill the Five Sisters with their sea-green purity. The west window, glazed a century later (1338), is a gorgeous mosaic of ruddy and purple hues, shining in the intricate stone pattern which shows black against the light, like a million amethysts and rubies set in ebony lace. The multicoloured eastern window, and its two mates in the minor transept, seem vast and fair enough for the walls of the New Jerusalem. And wherever we look in the lightly constructed eastern limb, it seems, not as though walls had been pierced for windows, but as though radiant translucent screens—fragile, yet vital and well equal to their task—had beenused to build a church, and merely bound together with a network of solid stone. For the moment we feel that nothing is so beautiful as glass. After we have seen the glass of York, we never think again that stained glass was merely an adornment of Gothic architecture. The early Gothic architect demanded for his enlarged windows some filling which, as decoration, would take the place of the wide frescoes of former times, and which, from the constructional point of view, would justify to the eye that partial suppression of walls which he knew to be scientifically right. This filling the early glass-painter gave him; and it was so satisfying from the architectural standpoint, and so beautiful from the decorative, that he was ready and eager to carry on his architectural evolution to the farthest possible extreme. He felt that he could attenuate his constructional framework as far as the laws of gravity would permit, since the glazier stood ready to replace really solid wall-spaces by those which looked solid enough, and were more beautiful than any expanses of stone had ever been. No architect could have built as late Gothic architects did, if only white glass had been at his command. None would have made walls which are literally windows, unless strengthof colour had come forward to simulate strength of substance. A Perpendicular church was actually meant to look as the choir of York does look—like a great translucent tabernacle merely ribbed and braced with stone.” The very best glass, however, is of later date than that of the cathedral, and the visitor should round off his education in mediæval glass by inspecting the late Perpendicular glass in which the parish churches of York abound. There is a fine collection of fifteenth-century glass in St. Martin’s church, in Coney Street, near the interesting old Guildhall. Indeed, nowhere in England can stained glass be studied to such advantage as at York.

EAST END.

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