York Minster - III

The arches of the York Minster don’t all line up owing to them having measured wrong and being about six feet out; also they changed their minds a bit here and there. We were asked to notice that there were seven statues on one side of the (I would call it entrance to, but they refer to it as the screen) the Choir (pardon me, that's Quire at York Minster), but eight on the other. You only think you speak English, see.

This unbalance was one of the results of the mismeasurement. Fortunately there were 15 kings to date, from William to Henry VI, so they could cover themselves after all.



Jan noticed one was wearing a skirt. Barry said it was Stephen and he reckoned it was commentary of the fact that Stephen fought for the throne for years and years – against a woman, Empress Matilda. (Reference Ellis Peter’s mysteries involving Brother Cadfael, if you like that period).

York Minster is referred to as the "heart" of York; see the heart shape at the top of this window?

The choir quire is all 19^th century replicate following on from an arsonist’s work in the mid 1800s.

We were told about the saint  William FitzHerbert and the bridge:  it collapsed under the weight of all the people who gathered to see him when he came to York, but no one was killed; that's how they knew he was destined for sainthood). This window tells his life story.

We were asked to notice the shape of the arches in this part of the church; very Moorish they are.



Much of the work on this part of the church was just following the time of the Crusades and architects brought back ideas based on what they saw in the holy lands. 

Each of those five lancets is over 16 metres (~48 feet) tall.

This window, made from grey Grisaille glass, has been nicknamed the Five Sisters, by the author Charles Dickens when he wrote about it in his book Nicholas Nickleby. It's not one I've read but I may look out for it now.

I well remember the story about this cardboard replica of the East facing window. It tells the story of the whole Bible, which is pretty daunting. The cost was £46, plus another £10 that the master artist negotiated to receive as a bonus for finishing it in three years. I think Barry said it had over 10,000 pieces of glass in it.



The cardboard is there because the actual window is undergoing renovation. The cost of that renovation is £23 million. I think they should just buy another one for £56, don't you?

This is a box for a processional gown, from about 1290.

The iron band work is similar to that found on the door to the Chapter House. If the box that holds it is this ornamental, one can only begin to imagine what the gown itself, folded up inside, would have looked like.

I don’t remember who this indolent looking man was.



He was a member of the clergy and he wanted this memorial sculpture done. The sculptors again had quite a bit of voice about things. See that decoration on the wall just above his feet? It’s a pea pod. If you didn’t pay your sculptor his fee, that peapod would be depicted as shut (like your pocketbook, I suppose) and all the viewers of your memorial throughout time would know you hadn’t paid your bill.



This guy paid up; the peapod is open.

The Minster has had several architectural crises, one of which was a lightening strike in 1984 – act of God. One of the windows that was damaged was the Rose window: it symbolizes the end of the War of the Roses.

In rebuilding this part of the roof, they decided to survey school children to find out what was on their mind and get a bit of contemporary art involved. The three things I remember of all that Barry showed us was a starved African child (this was about the time of the Bob Geldorf Band Aid concert, remember that?).

Also children were thinking about space exploration and worried about the extinction of whales.

Lest you be worried about the spiritual aspect being lost, there were two loudspeaker announcements whilst we were there – one every hour. We were led in prayers. Barry said it was to remind people that the Minster is after all a church – it gets a bit rowdy there sometimes – and to keep everyone a bit more respectful and quiet. Fine by me. 

The sound of the prayers and the accompanying bell tolling the hour both echoing through the vast and beautiful space is one of the best memories I will take away from this visit to the York Minster.

York Minster - II

The knights who gathered at York under Edward I (1239-1307) and Edward II (1284-1327) were descendants of the men who came across in 1066 with William the Conqueror, a Norman (from France). The shields of these knights are found high on the inner walls of the cathedral.

The purpose of York in the Edwards’ time was to deal with the Scots (reference Braveheart). At this point Barry asked if there were any Scots in the audience. He had previously asked if there was anyone from abroad and Jan and Jerry identified themselves as from Oklahoma, whereby Barry said he understood they wouldn’t know any history prior to 1600, which I thought rather cheeky, but never mind.

The wealthy knights contributed towards the building of the York Minster, a process that took 250 years and I gather they changed their minds a lot during that time. I was going to ask what happened at the York Minster during the time of Henry VIII, but he got around to that part.

The Quire

Minster, by the way, comes from the Latin word for monastery –monasterium. You only have a minster if you have a bishop (or perhaps it's the other way around; the administrative structure of the Anglican church is beyond me). However, I can tell you that the Archbishop of York is an interesting character (you saw the Archbishop of Canterbury on TV last month and he was pretty interesting as well).

Of course, the York Minster was a Catholic church when it was built and they seem to have just finished when Henry VIII decided he wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. According to Barry, some of the church officials went along with the idea, but of course the Pope didn’t and neither did the abbots, who lived in abbeys, and this is why there are none save ‘ruined abbeys’ in England; I've not checked on this fact, but it sounds about right.

The King had his way, of course, but apparently liked churches and didn’t mess them up too much. However, after his death, his 12 year old son Edward came to the throne and with probably loads of advisers telling him silly ideas, they went around and beheaded any image of Mary or other saints. There are a number of wooden statues that could join the ‘headless hunt’ (reference Harry Potter), as well as several stone ones, like this.

Then we went into the Chapter House. It was something of a meeting room of the ruling men of the church. There are 270 or so of these funny little heads carved into the canopy over the wooden seats around the seven-sided room.



The masons and glaziers were itinerant workers who moved from place to place to work. They had a lot of artistic freedom and so could make their opinions known. Now I’d have sworn I took a photo of Queen Eleanor (formerly) of Castile, but apparently not. I did manage to dig around and find this head for you. It reminds me of something out of Alice in Wonderland: the stonemason depicted her crown being pried off by a bat.

Barry told us she and Edward I, new English husband (Castile being in Spain), showed up to a meeting at the Chapter House and the great unwashed public had gathered to see the new Queen. Apparently she wasn’t accustomed to being ogled – her subjects had to lie face down in her presence back home – and some of their comments were ‘ribauld’ was Barry’s word. She put on a ‘haughty manner’ and made herself rather unpopular. Hence the head in her memory. I wondered about the 269 other stories in the room, but of course there wasn’t time -- or strength! -- to hear them all.

Bill noticed that other volunteer guides told different stories about different windows and such, so one could hear quite a few lectures before getting bored of the York Minster. Nice to know if we find ourselves in York again, which is not unlikely; it’s only an hour south of us on the train.

The Merchant's Wife

There was a very small plaque, maybe 5x10 inches – and I agree with Barry that it is a far too small memorial – to Thomas Fairfax, who saved York Minster during the Civil War. You may or may not remember that the Stuart King, Charles I (1600-1649) was involved in a civil war with parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell. Charles I was beheaded over that argument and royalty had to learn to think a bit different to their previous ‘Devine Right of Kings’ though it was a slow lesson for them.

Cromwell’s lot were Puritans who hated ornamentation and would certainly have smashed and destroyed the York Minster had they reached it. We owed our very nice morning to Fairfax who prevented this in some way, though he fought on the side of the Roundheads.   It sounds as though he was a man of principle who thought for himself; even Charles trusted him as honourable, though he fought for the opposing side.

York Minster - I

So, here we are at the famous York Minster.   You can go there yourself and have a virtual tour, if you like.  It's a pretty amazing place.  The virtual tour shows it as empty, which is even more amazing.  When we were there if was full of chairs and people everywhere.  It's meant to hold about 2,000 people, but it can cope with 3,500 at a squeeze.  Bill and I have each been here a number of times, but never taken the free guided tour, so this time we hung around to wait for the next available tour guide.  Ours was a volunteer named Barry.

We learned about stained glass windows:  the long narrow parts are lancets; each square bit that makes up the lancet is called a light.  The round-ish bits at the top are called roundels.  

This particular window was made in 1310; remade in 1789 – the leading that holds the glass only lasts about 150 years; and repositioned in 1950.  That is to say, the windows of the York Minster were removed and placed in mines and vaults for protection during WWII and were only replaced into the church in 1950.  Those dates are in the lower right corner.   

Looking at the ceiling of the Central Tower

Barry said he wouldn't tell us the story of every window - he didn't know the story of every one - but one thing that was interesting to me was that they generally tell a story:  you read it from the left to the right, starting with the bottom light and reading across each row until the story ends at the very top.  The story might be the life of a saint or the whole Bible or in one case the glazier chose a cartoon to amuse the people waiting in a queue for absolution or to buy an indulgence or something.  What amazed me was that if Barry said look there and you’ll see X, I could actually see X, something I wouldn’t have predicted.  The optometrist must have done a good job with my prescription; that, and I am fairly familiar with English history and some of the religious stories and artifacts. 

In the Quire

This is the 5^th York Minster; the first was a simple wooden structure built in 627.  They don’t know much about the first two  but they know quite a bit about the 3^rd and 4^th.  York was originally built by the Romans, but Barry said Christianity didn't fare so well under the Vikings.  Monasteries at places like Lindisfarne kept the spark of Christianity burning in the British Isles and under Norman rule the church thrived again.