Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon: A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its FabricHallett, Cecil Walter Charles
History
Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon: A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric
Hallett, Cecil Walter Charles
Ripon Cathedral
It was perhaps at this period that the west gate of the precincts was
pulled down--a mediaeval structure which contained at least seven rooms,
and which stood at the bottom of Kirkgate. The graveyard in the middle
ages contained a cross, at which a service was held on Palm Sunday;
also, possibly, a mortuary chapel and a well associated with St.
Wilfrid--(not, of course, the St. Wilfrid's well which now fills the
public baths). Of these things there is now not a trace, save, perhaps,
the stump of the cross, near the south wall of the nave. Nor are there
any undoubted remains of the mediaeval wall which enclosed the precincts,
except the fragment with an archway in it, which still forms the
southern entrance. The mediaeval prisons, which belonged respectively to
the Archbishop and the Chapter, have long vanished, as has also that
which appertained to the Court of Canon Fee, but there is a Liberty
prison of some age in 'Stammergate.' Most of the archiepiscopal palace
had disappeared by 1830, but there was still a portion which was used as
the court-house of the Liberty. In that year this was pulled down, and
the present court-house was built upon the site. A memory of the Palace
survives in 'Hall Yard,' and there still remains what is, perhaps, a
remnant of the actual fabric, in the shape of an old cottage with an
external staircase, which stands behind the wall to the west of the
public garden that fronts the north side of the church. In the
above-mentioned wall is an Early English doorway, with a dripstone
adorned with the nailhead moulding. The door has a flat-arched wooden
frame, the spandrels of which are carved with _fleurs-de-lys_, while the
wooden tympanum above has Perpendicular panelling. This doorway is not,
perhaps, a relic of the Palace. It is not in its original position, and
indeed is said to have come originally from St. Mary Magdalene's
Hospital. Several of the old houses adjoining the Cathedral on the south
side, and along St. Agnes-gate, may possibly have been inhabited by the
Prebendaries of the Second Collegiate foundation, but the stone-roofed
house adjoining Bondgate Green Bridge is the only one in Ripon which can
be identified with a mediaeval prebend--that of Thorp, and even here the
existing fabric can scarcely be pre-Reformation. St. John's
Hospital,[31] whose inmates for several centuries have been women, was
unfortunately rebuilt in 1869, but the modern chapel (served by one of
the cathedral clergy) retains a bell of 1663. The old Grammar
School,[32] which stood at the foot of the steps from St. Agnes-gate to
the Minster, has been pulled down since 1872.
Meanwhile the Minster itself had been undergoing restoration--in 1829
and the following years at the hands of Blore, when upwards of L3000
were spent, and from 1862 to 1870 at the hands of Sir G. Gilbert Scott,
and at a cost of about L30,000.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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