My first stop on my long weekend in York was York Minster. Well, my actual first stop, on the evening I arrived, was next door to my apartment, at the Barbican Theatre to see Rob Beckett. What kind of comedy fan, living next door to a theatre, isn’t going to pop round the corner for the evening?
So my first stop on my first morning was at the Minster. You must have heard me harp on about “before it burns down” by now. Back in April, the night of the Notre Dame fire, I realised the big old medieval cathedrals might not wait for me to get to them. York is my fifth out of 42.
Actually, I missed the boat on “before it burns down” in this case. York Minster has had three big fires in the last two hundred years. In 1829, arsonist and religious fanatic Jonathan Martin took exception to something in the Sunday afternoon service, his in the vestry and in the middle of the night, piled up all the hymn books and kneelers and anything he could get his hands on that would burn and set fire to the lot in the middle of the quire. Bye-bye eastern roof.
The second fire was an accident. A stonemason, working in the south-west tower left a candle up there overnight. Bye-bye nave roof. After the 1829 fire, they’d made detailed plans of the cathedral roof so rebuilding was pretty simple.
And then of course, there was the 1984 fire, which was caused by a lightning strike. That took out the roof of the south transept. Tour guide Brian said the crossing tower acted as a firebreak but we all also know from reports back in April that firefighters deliberately collapsed the roof to stop it spreading.
Major fires are not that unusual a feature in a building that’s stood in a heavily populated area for so long.
It’s not all that obvious. The first thing that struck me about the cathedral as I walked in was how clean and… soulless it was. Turns out you spot the character from the corner of your eye with this one. York Minster has always been in competition with and one step behind Canterbury Cathedral. When they rebuilt it Gothic style over – literally over and around the existing Norman cathedral – they carried on the new nave until it was bigger than Canterbury. They acquired St William because Canterbury had St Thomas Becket. William was, like Thomas, an archbishop murdered in his cathedral. In Thomas’s case, that’s pretty definite. Ten or twelve swords are pretty hard to deny. William’s murder is usually preceded with “probably” because they say he was poisoned during mass. His remains also went missing but unlike Thomas’s, they were recovered in the 1960s when the tower threatened to collapse and engineers excavated the crypt during urgent repair work.
I did the crypt tour. You can go into the crypt yourself but the special tour takes you into the dark corners behind the gates and with a specialist guide. He talked a lot about “Thomas’s cathedral” and “Williams’s cathedral” and someone else’s cathedral. I feel like it would be easier to follow if he talked about “the Norman cathedral” or “the 1220 cathedral”. There are too many people in this story!
In short, various people have fiddled with the crypt over the centuries. As the level of the quire was raised, the height of the crypt has changed, and then at some point someone filled in the western end of the crypt. The Victorians found and dug that out. They literally threw anything in. Here’s a Norman column finial. Here’s a pile of fourteenth century bricks. Here’s a bit of something Roman. Those are the remains of the Norman crypt and if you ignore the Victorian arches, you can imagine the Norman vaulting back into place.
I am a dwarf. I am a person of the dark places beneath the Earth. I like putting on a hard hat and going down into the maintenance tunnels to find places where you can see four different eras of York Minster at once.
The other thing worth mentioning is the Chapter House. It was built separately but the weather in Yorkshire being what it is, they quickly built a passage to join it to the north transept. It’s a fairly typical chapter house – octagonal, stained glass, alcoves for bishops to sit in. I don’t know if it was typical for the walls to be highly decorated and painted like the lower chapel of Sainte-Chapelle. It’s not there now – centuries old paint cracked and peeled and the Victorians tidied up by removing it all. Is that the same story in every chapter house I’ve seen so far? Sainte-Chapelle is spectacular – to think that we could have that in our medieval cathedrals over here if not for the Victorians!
I said the chapter house was the “other thing” but actually, I haven’t mentioned York Minster’s USP. It is unique in retaining all its medieval stained glass. In other cathedrals the glass suffered the fate of thousand-year-old fragile material and also the English Civil War, when anti-church Cavaliers smashed statues and windows. Winchester’s great west window is a mosaic of broken pieces and the other windows are plain glass, which is why it’s so light and airy. York was saved by big-cheese Cavalier and local boy William/Edward?? Fairfax who refused to let his men destroy his cathedral. It’s not all good news. Medieval glass isn’t pretty. For one, it’s been discoloured on the outside by acidic rain for several centuries and on the inside by acidic condensation, which settles on the coldest surface – the glass. Then every time it cracked, they repaired it by putting a piece of lead across. That was the accepted method of repairing stained glass until quite recently. Lead is heavy and the extra weight bows the window out, causing more cracks, more repair lead, more bowing etc. What you see is yellowish stained glass so criss-crossed with lead that you can hardly make out the pictures.
York spent ten or eleven years and £20m restoring the east window, including double glazing it with matching clear shapes on the outside but it’ll take lifetimes and a large fortune to do that to every window. The top panes show the Book of Genesis, the middle panes show the Book of Revelations and the bottom panels show kings and bishops. Tour guide Brian explained that you multiply the number of panels and you get the number of years people believed the Earth had existed for and divide that by something else and you get this magic number and then add all the digits together and you get…. Taylor Swift levels of numerology that I couldn’t follow but seemed to indicate the cathedral was about to release a new album.
And I think that really is everything I have to say about York Minster. I hope I’m not getting cathedral burn-out already because after five, I’m already going “Yeah, that Decorated Gothic nave is boring.” You wait until I get to Wells – it has an interesting medieval engineering solution that looks like it was built last year. Yes, I find that interesting.