Ripon Cathedral: A Medieval Minster and Anglican Cathedral in England
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.8
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval
- Civilizations
- Anglo-Saxon, English, Norman
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page21 sections
History
Ripon Cathedral, in Ripon, United Kingdom, is a church whose origins lie in an Anglo-Saxon monastery founded by monks associated with Melrose in the 660s. Wilfrid of York refounded it as a Benedictine monastery in 672, replacing an earlier timber church. The present building developed through medieval rebuilding between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries and combines Anglo-Saxon survivals with successive phases of English Gothic architecture.
Anglo-Saxon foundation
Wilfrid’s foundation was among the earliest stone buildings in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. To construct its basilica in the Roman manner, Wilfrid brought stonemasons, plasterers, and glaziers from France and Italy. After his death in 710, he was buried beside the altar of his church, reinforcing the site’s importance as a religious centre.
Wilfrid’s church was destroyed in 948 during King Eadred’s campaign to recover Northumbria. A second minster was then established, but it was destroyed in 1069 during William the Conqueror’s Harrying of the North, the violent campaign by which the Norman king sought to suppress resistance in northern England.
Norman and medieval rebuilding
Thomas of Bayeux, the first Norman Archbishop of York, began a third church at Ripon around 1080. Traces of this building were later incorporated into the chapter house. In the tenth century the institution had become collegiate, meaning that it was served by a community of clergy rather than a monastic order. It remained one of the mother churches of the extensive Diocese of York for the rest of the Middle Ages.
The present church is the fourth on the site. Its principal medieval construction took place under Roger de Pont l’Évêque, Archbishop of York, between 1160 and 1175, when the choir walls were built. Further work continued over subsequent centuries. The Wars of the Roses delayed rebuilding, which resumed after Henry VII’s accession and the restoration of peace in 1485.
The crossing tower collapsed in an earthquake in 1450. Although it was rebuilt, it did not regain its former height. In 1547, Edward VI dissolved Ripon’s college of canons before the rebuilding had been completed and transferred its revenues to the Crown. The planned final stages of the crossing tower, intended in the Perpendicular style, were therefore never added.
Reformation, restoration, and cathedral status
James I issued a Charter of Restoration in 1604, supporting the institution after the disruption of the sixteenth century. During the English Civil War of 1642 to 1649, much of the cathedral’s stained glass was smashed and some statues were destroyed.
Ripon Minster became Ripon Cathedral in 1836, when it was made the cathedral of the newly created Anglican Diocese of Ripon. This was the first new English diocese established since the Reformation. In 2014 the Diocese of Ripon was incorporated into the Diocese of Leeds, and the cathedral became one of that diocese’s three co-equal cathedrals, alongside Bradford and Wakefield. It is a Grade I listed building, situated about 300 metres southeast of Ripon’s city centre, with the River Skell approximately 150 metres to the south.
Music and institutional memory
Ripon’s musical history reaches back to an organ recorded in 1399 and an organist, the priest Thomas Litster, recorded in 1447. Later organists included the composers Charles Harry Moody and Ronald Edward Perrin. The cathedral also preserves a long tradition of commemorating its past through furnishings, portraits, sculpture, and the continued development of its musical instruments.
Remains
Layout and construction
The surviving cathedral brings together an Anglo-Saxon crypt and a large medieval church arranged around a nave, transepts, choir, crossing, and western towers. Its fabric was constructed and enlarged from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries. The choir and transepts rise through three levels, while the nave has a two-storey elevation and extends for nearly 90 metres.
Principal medieval fabric
West front
Built around 1220, the west front is an exceptionally fine example of Early English Gothic, a style associated with pointed lancets and restrained decoration. Its relatively low twin towers frame ten lancets arranged in two rows. The entrance lacks the extensive figure sculpture and decorated tympana found in contemporary French examples. The towers originally carried wooden spires covered with lead.
Choir and east window
The choir walls belong to the rebuilding directed by Roger de Pont l’Évêque in the twelfth century. The flat-ended design follows French Early Gothic models in its slender clustered piers, pointed arcade, thin upper walls, low gallery, paired openings with narrow central shafts, and pointed blind arcades. Its three-arched clerestory, the upper windowed level of the wall, includes a passageway and retains a more traditional Anglo-Norman character.
The large east window was installed during the reconstruction of the choir between 1286 and 1288 and 1330. It belongs to the Geometric phase of Decorated Gothic, the period known for elaborate geometric window patterns, and is regarded as an outstanding example of the large Decorated Gothic windows built in northern England.
Nave and aisles
Between 1501 and 1522, the nave walls were raised to their present height and the aisles were added. Their rib vaults belong to the Perpendicular style, which is characterized by strong vertical lines and large window openings. The nave’s two-storey elevation contrasts with the three-storey arrangements of the transepts and choir.
Interior furnishings and sculpture
Choir stalls and misericords
The choir stalls contain 34 oak misericords, carved between 1489 and 1494 by William Bromflet and his assistants. A misericord is a carved support beneath a folding choir-stall seat that allowed clergy to rest while appearing to stand. The carvings depict Joshua and Caleb carrying a grape from the Promised Land, Samson escaping from Gaza with part of a city gate, two episodes from Jonah, lions, a griffin pursuing a rabbit, hunting dogs seizing a fox, a pelican feeding its young, and two piglets watching a pig play the bagpipes.
The bagpipe scene may satirically allude to Scottish raiders who plundered Ripon in the early fifteenth century. These carvings belong to the Ripon school of carving, whose work also appears at Beverley Minster and Manchester Cathedral. A tradition links the rabbit and griffin imagery with Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit and Gryphon, although this remains a legend rather than an established episode in the cathedral’s history.
Choir screen
The choir screen, which separates the choir from the rest of the church, is about eight feet thick. George Gilbert Scott dated it to approximately 1494, while a document from 1408 already refers to a choir screen. In modern times, eight large statues were added on either side of the passage, with a further 24 statues placed in the niches above. Esmond Burton made the eight principal statues, which Mary, Princess Royal, unveiled in 1947.
The statues represent Eadhæd, Bishop of Lindsey and Ripon around 679 to 686; Willibrord, a Northumbrian-born missionary who became Archbishop of Utrecht; Thomas of Bayeux; Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York from 1595 to 1606; Æthelstan, king of Wessex from 924 to 927 and king of England from 927 to 939; Henry II of England; James I of England; and Charles Thomas Longley, Ripon’s first Anglican bishop in 1836 and a later Archbishop of Canterbury.
Anglo-Saxon crypt
The Anglo-Saxon crypt is reached from the choir screen by a staircase and an exceptionally narrow passage. It is a simple barrel-vaulted chamber with wall niches for candles and an altar table. Its present decoration includes a fourteenth-century alabaster relief of Christ’s Resurrection. The relief was found beneath the dean’s stall during a Victorian renovation of the choir and was probably concealed there to protect it from the iconoclasm, the destruction of religious images, associated with the Reformation.
Organ and bells
Cathedral organ
The cathedral’s present organ retains elements from several earlier instruments. William Preston built a five-stop organ in 1667, followed by an instrument made by Gerard Smith in 1690. Some pipes from Smith’s organ survive in two stops of the swell division. Renn of Manchester enlarged the organ in 1838 and placed it in a new case.
T. C. Lewis built a new three-manual organ in 1878, reusing some earlier stops, and its case was designed by George Gilbert Scott. Harrison and Harrison rebuilt it between 1912 and 1926, with the work interrupted by the First World War. The present instrument remains a reconstruction of Lewis’s organ in Scott’s case above the choir screen, with a second mobile console in the nave. Compton converted its pneumatic action to electro-pneumatic action in 1950, and later work included an overhaul, modifications, cleaning, and pipe repairs in 2013.
A carved wooden hand projects from the organ case. An articulated lever connected to the console raises and lowers it, and it is thought to have helped conduct the choir after the organist could no longer see the stalls.
Bells and clock
The south-west tower contains twelve diatonic bells and an additional flat-sixth bell. Ten bells were cast in 1932, while three more were installed in 2008. Two trebles completed the twelve-bell diatonic ring, and the flat sixth created a lighter eight-bell ring.
A 1379 fabric roll, a historical account of church building works and finances, mentions the minster clock. John Ripley of York worked on it in 1453, and George Mills of Ripon made a new clock and repaired the chimes in 1724. William Potts of Leeds installed another clock in 1906, retaining the west-front dial and adding one on the south side. Both dials measure seven feet, approximately 2.1 metres, across.
Font and portraits
Marble font
The late-fifteenth-century marble font was made from Teesdale marble quarried at Eggleston in County Durham.
Tudor portraits
The cathedral possesses 18 portraits depicting members of Tudor royalty, adding a royal and dynastic dimension to its interior collection.
