In 766 Albert became archbishop. Like his immediate predecessors, he did much to beautify churches in the city. In this work Alcuin was one of his two right-hand men; and yet each detail which Alcuin gives is puzzling. He tells us that at the spot where the great warrior Edwin the king received the water of baptism, the prelate constructed a grand altar, which he covered with silver, precious stones, and gold, and dedicated under the name of St. Paul, the teacher of the world, whom the learned archbishop specially loved. There is a difficulty here. While it is certain that the church of stone of larger dimensions which Edwin and Paulinus began, to include the wooden oratory of St. Peter the place of Edwin’s baptism, was the church which Oswald completed and the first Wilfrith restored, as the Cathedral Church of York, there was no altar of St. Paul in the Cathedral Church in the middle ages. We should naturally have supposed that an altar so splendid as that which Albert constructed, at a spot so uniquely remarkable in the Christian history of Northumbria, would have been sedulously retained throughout all changes. The explanation may well be that not the size only but the level of the surface of the site has been greatly increased in the course of 1200 years. The herring-bone work of the walls of the early Anglian Church of York was found deep down below the surface when excavations were made after the fire of 1829, and at a later period in connexion with the hydraulic apparatus for the organ. Probably the altar of St. Paul, and the place of baptism, were down at that level, and were buried in the ruins of one fire after another, many feet below the present surface of the Minster Yard. My old friend Canon Raine, who edited the three volumes of the _Historians of the Church of York_, writing of the present crypt in his introduction to the first volume,[91] says, “In another peculiar place is the actual site, if I mistake not, of the font in which Edwin became a Christian.” Canon Raine was secretive in connexion with antiquarian discoveries, and from inquiries which I have made it is to be feared that the secret of this site died with him. All we can say is, that where that site was, there was this splendid altar[92] of St. Paul, _mundi doctoris_.