The Cathedral of York
"The Cathedral of York" is Esther Singleton's chapter on York Minster from her 1912 guide *How to Visit the English Cathedrals*, and it presents the great Minster as the supreme example of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture in England, distinguished above all other cathedrals by the sheer scale of its medieval stained glass. Singleton opens by situating the building within its city, establishing York as a settlement of exceptional antiquity — a Roman military capital known as Eboracum from roughly 70 A.D., a seat of Constantine the Great, and from the seventh century onward the principal ecclesiastical see of northern England. The precedence dispute between the Archbishops of York and Canterbury is given detailed attention, tracing the long conflict from St. Augustine's era through to 1352, when Innocent VI finally ruled that Canterbury would be styled Primate of All England and York Primate of England. This political and ecclesiastical history shapes Singleton's interpretation of the entire building: the Minster is not, she argues, an expression of spiritual aspiration so much as a declaration of "secular magnificence" and archiepiscopal ambition. The narrative of construction begins with King Edwin's baptism in 627 in a temporary wooden church on the Minster's present site, followed by successive waves of building and destruction. Thomas of Bayeux, the first Norman archbishop, rebuilt from ruins after the Danish and Conqueror's devastation of 1070. Roger de Pont l'Évêque rebuilt the choir in the twelfth century. Walter de Grey began the great Early English transepts around 1230. John Romeyn the younger initiated the Decorated nave in 1291. John of Thorsby commenced the Perpendicular choir in 1361, funding it sacrificially and drawing on clergy and laity alike. The central tower was erected 1410–1423, and the church was re-consecrated in 1472. Singleton also records the later disasters: Jonathan Martin's deliberate arson of the choir in 1829, a second fire in 1840 in the southwest tower, and restorations in 1871. The tour of the building proceeds methodically. The West Front is called "the best cathedral façade in this country" — its lower portions Early Decorated, its towers Perpendicular, its surfaces alive with niched ornament and the great eight-light window above the entrance. The Central Tower, at 200 feet the largest in England, is treated as one of the finest towers in the world, its Perpendicular restraint and absence of pinnacles lending "unrivalled dignity." Entry through the south door of the South Transept reveals what Singleton identifies as "one of the most superb architectural views in the world," looking directly across to the north transept end where the Five Sisters — five lancets of 53 feet 6 inches each, filled throughout with original Early English grisaille glass in grey-green tones — dominate the composition. The choir, the largest in England, nine bays long and entirely Perpendicular, is praised for a "triumphant light and space and colour" surpassing even Moorish and Italian architecture at its best. Its great east window, contracted to John Thornton of Coventry in 1405 and completed within three years, measures 78 feet by 32 feet with nine lights, and is described as "probably the finest example of Perpendicular glass in England," its 200 panels moving from Old Testament scenes at the top to the Book of Revelations below, crowned at the apex with Christ in Judgment. The Decorated nave receives extended analysis: its architects sacrificed the triforium to accommodate large clerestory windows, feared that stone vaulting would be too heavy and substituted wood, and produced piers of extraordinary delicacy with capitals carved in oak and thorn foliage. The west window, given by Archbishop Melton in 1338, is almost entirely original glass and remarkable for the way its painted design locks precisely into the elaborate curvilinear tracery of the stonework. The Chapter-House is identified as the most beautiful in England. Octagonal, without a central pillar, its seven bays each filled with a five-light window of geometrical Decorated tracery, its stone surfaces carved with maple, oak, vine, pigs, squirrels, birds, and grotesque dragons, it carries its medieval motto — *Ut Rosa flos florum, sic est Domus ista Domorum* ("As the Rose is the flower of flowers, so is this House the chief of Houses") — with a pride that Singleton does not dispute. The crypt, discovered after the 1829 fire, preserves Norman work and possibly Saxon masonry from Edwin's seventh-century church. Throughout, Singleton draws extensively on the expertise of Arthur Clutton-Brock and other specialists, weaving their close architectural analysis with her own connective commentary. The result is a portrait of York Minster as a building whose apparent stylistic unity — achieved across Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular phases spanning three centuries — produces an effect of stately masculine repose unmatched elsewhere in England, and whose unrivalled accumulation of medieval glass, totaling over 25,500 superficial feet, constitutes a possession without equal in Christendom.
By Esther Singleton · First published 1899 · Genre: Architectural History, Travel Writing, Art History