Chapter VI: PERPENDICULAR.—The monks wanted to have a Galilee porch, and

they inserted one between the piers of the west front, where it was constructionally useful by keeping the piers from bulging in. The wooden screens were now inserted in the central transept.

Peterborough, after 1116, seems to have had a singular immunity from fire; so, very unlike Norwich, the monks did not take the slightest trouble to make their church fireproof. The whole of the high roofs are of wood. That of the nave may possibly be the original twelfth-century ceiling. A twelfth-century wooden roof still covers the Bishop’s Palace at Hereford. The choir has a wooden vault of the fifteenth century.

VIII. In another respect the history of the church is uneventful. The eastern limb must have been exceedingly inconvenient, for there was no processional aisle or ambulatory round the apse. Every other large church pulled down or altered its eastern limb to suit the ritual: the Peterborough monks, always conservative and always behind the times, did not provide a processional aisle till the latter days of Gothic. And even then they took a very long time about it. The works seems to have been suspended in 1471, and not resumed till 1496. Even then, good conservatives that they were, they did not pull down the apse, but erected the New Building round it. It is a rich specimen of TUDOR work, with a fan vault.

IX. In the matter, too, of the roof-drainage the Peterborough monks were slow to move. Instead of dripping eaves they constructed gutters and parapets to the aisles in the early years of the thirteenth century, and to the apse a little later. It was not till _c._ 1330 that they provided the high roofs of nave and choir with gutters and parapets; and, with their wonted conservatism, they retained the Norman corbel-table.

X. What the monks cared most about was the lighting of the church. This they were always trying to improve. In the thirteenth century they inserted large geometrical windows in the western transept, and _c._ 1290 others in the aisles of the central transepts to light the altars placed there. Moreover, the Norman windows in the aisles of the nave were replaced by wide windows of five lights. In the Curvilinear period the triforium windows were transformed, and charming flowing tracery, with rear-arches, was inserted in the windows of the apse, which then looked into the open air, but now look into the New Building. In the Perpendicular period some seventy-five windows were either enlarged or filled with rectilinear tracery. The builders certainly achieved their object. The cathedral is well lighted. We may be thankful that they did not stick a great Perpendicular window in each end of the central transept.

XI. In 1541 the church was made a cathedral on the new foundation. Henry VIII. is said to have preserved it as a mausoleum to his first wife, Catharine of Arragon, who is buried in the choir. It is wretchedly built—the west front and the New Building as badly as the Norman work—and practically without foundations. Much underpinning has been done, and more is required. The west front has been saved for the present by judicious treatment.

The Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Wilfrid, Ripon.

Ripon minster has passed through strange vicissitudes. It was founded _c._ 660 as a monasterium or minster for Scottish monks attached to the Celtic church. Soon afterwards it was taken away from them and granted to the famous St. Wilfrid. In 678 the church became a cathedral, but only during the lifetime of Bishop Eadhed. Ultimately it passed into the hands of regular canons of the Augustinian Order. It was dissolved with the other collegiate churches by Edward VI. It was made collegiate once more by James I., but with dean and prebendaries instead of Augustinian canons. In 1836, for the second time, it became a cathedral.

I. Both the minsters built by St. Wilfrid—Ripon and Hexham—retain their crypts. He was a Romaniser in architecture as in ritual, and well acquainted with Italy. So his seventh-century church at Ripon was modelled after the early Christian basilicas which he had seen at Rome. Like them, it had a confessionary or crypt, which still exists, beneath the central tower; like them, it was orientated to the west. He seems even to have brought over Italian masons to direct or to execute the work, for the crypt is vaulted, and the vaulting is of excellent construction; the masonry is smooth, and is covered “with a fine and very hard plaster which takes a polish.” At its west end was the altar, at its east end an aperture through which a glimpse of the interior might be obtained from the Saxon nave. Round the walls are little niches in which lights were placed. “St. Wilfrid’s Needle” is merely a niche with the back knocked through. Similar Saxon crypts remain at Hexham and Wing, and a Norman crypt at St. Peter-in-the-East, Oxford. They usually consisted of a small central chamber, with a passage all round it. There were two staircases descending from either side of the nave; pilgrims went down one flight of steps, proceeded along the passage, getting a glimpse of the relics through openings in the wall of the central chamber, and then returned up the other flight of steps into the nave.