Another big day, despite the fact that today was supposed to be our first “free” day. I got up early to go to morning prayer at the Minster, since I was feeling a bit at loose ends on Monday night. The Minster is, unsurprisingly, very high Anglican worship, though they do use Common Worship, the Church of England’s update to the Book of Common Prayer. At any rate, the priest introduced himself at the end (I can only assume I was one of the seven people in the room who isn’t a regular). We chatted for a minute, and when I asked him for a coffee shop recommendation on my way out, he invited me to his house for breakfast! He and his wife live on the Minster grounds, and they were both beyond lovely and welcoming. They made me toast and coffee (real coffee! not instant!), and invited me back for dinner on Friday. (I feel that I am making Heidi, Cindy R, and Josh proud with the way I am chatting up people I don’t know at all. This is so not like me.)
We spent the first part of the morning in the Minster with Sarah Blick, one of our seminar organizers, getting a thorough overview of gothic architecture. More on this later—I will just say that it was lovely.
This afternoon, we had an opportunity to see St Martin-cum-Gregory (yes, that’s its name), a parish church that is in a rather severe state of disrepair. But it has an interesting history—you can see the footprint of what was probably the original Anglo-Saxon church, and which seems to have reused stone that from the Roman city. In the link, you can notice how the stone above the arches smooths out—it’s a different building phase, and a different kind of stone. The church was possibly built on top of Roman temples. (The Minster is built on top of the Roman praetoria, the fort.) The initial church, probably just a rectangle, was heightened by the addition of a clerestory, and lengthened by the addition of a chancel, and then eventually to chapel/aisles were added on to the sides. What’s so interesting is that you can see the way in which the church is “cobbled” together, with very different types of stone being used at different points in the building process. The two aisles are noticeably asymmetrical, which is part of how you can tell they were added at different times.
For the medievalists, one of the side aisles was probably a Lady Chapel, sponsored by local guilds, and the other was sponsored by the Scrope family. For the non-medievalists: Richard Scrope was the archbishop of York right up until he participated in a plot to overthrow Henry the IV (who had just deposed Richard II…). Henry had Scrope’s head chopped off and put on a pike at the city gates, as a reminder to all who entered that even archepiscopal privilege can’t protect you if you try to overthrow the king. The archeologist we were talking with was positing that the chantry chapel in the aisle was part of the Scrope family’s effort to restore themselves to respectability. Scrope’s body appears to have been taken back to the Minster and buried (it was, after all, his ecclesiastical seat). He was soon being venerated as a martyr by lay folks in York, which really bothered Henry IV’s supporters, for obvious reasons. Back to the Lady Chapel—in the image, the baptismal font is sitting where the altar would have been in the Middle Ages—you can make out the niche and on the right and the pedestal on the left where statues of the Virgin would have sat.
The church has several other interesting features that I will mention briefly. The stained glass windows are a total hodgepodge, as you can see (in the image: the outside panels are medieval, the middle is the product of a revitalized interest in the nineteenth century in making stained glass). You find medieval original next to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century additions (in the image, the top left panel is medieval, and the rest is eighteenth century). They even have some stacked in a corner, which they don’t appear to know what to do with! Some of the pieces appear to have been taken apart and put back together completely randomly.
The parishioners of this church appear to have been very proud of their parish. They bricked over the tower in the nineteenth-century to make it look more impressive, and they built extra buttresses on the south side of the church, which both makes the church look larger and more impressive, and serve no architectural function. The ceiling in the nave/chancel (central part of the church), and the north chapel (the one funded by the Scropes) are nineteenth-century timber. The ceiling in the Lady Chapel is Elizabethan. And the plaster over all the stone inside is also a nineteenth-century addition. The congregation probably thought it looked lovely. The medievalists hate it.
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