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
In the windows of the second stage the abacus of the capitals is
continued as a string from window to window. The two flanking buttresses
have been crowned at some later period with gables ending in finials,
and the great gable is pierced with a Perpendicular window of three
lights, which has three transoms in the head, the mullions carried up to
the archivolt, and a dripstone ending in foliage. The sides of the gable
here do not take an upward turn to meet the corners, and there are no
flanking turrets. In the end of the aisle the blocked upper window is
pointed, and has a little trefoiled niche above and to the left of it,
and there is no thickening of the masonry above to necessitate
carrying-arches. The buttresses at the corner reach to the top of the
parapet and have no surmounting pinnacle. The small portion of the east
side of the aisle which is not concealed by the Chapter-house and
Lady-loft displays in the lower stage a somewhat inexplicable blind
arch, carrying an inclined thickening of the masonry that has been
afterwards built up to a level, and below the parapet a moulded cornice
like that on the north side of the church. This cornice is continued
within the Lady-loft, and reappears over the last bay of the
choir-aisle.
=The Chapter-House.=--The south aisle of the choir is concealed by a wing
of three storeys, of which the lowest, though exposed to view by the
conditions of the site, is of the nature of a crypt, while the second
comprises the Chapter-house and vestry, and the third, known as the
Lady-loft, is an addition, probably of the fourteenth century. The first
two storeys seem to have formed part of a church earlier than Archbishop
Roger's,[43] and have been variously ascribed to Archbishops Thurstan
(1114-1141)[44] and Thomas of Bayeux (1069-1100).[45] From the east wall
of these two storeys an apse is thrown out, upon which rests a square
projection from the Lady-loft, too short to be called a chancel. The two
westernmost buttresses, up to the string above the crypt, are evidently
additions by Archbishop Roger, while the third, which completely encases
a three-sided apsidal projection at the corner of the vestry, is of much
later date and will be examined presently. Adjoining it is a flat
pilaster buttress, apparently original. The crypt has five unglazed
windows along the south side, all round-headed and plainly splayed, and,
where it joins the transept, there is a large rectangular squint which
gives light to a staircase that leads up to the Chapter-house. A pointed
doorway, made in later times, cuts into the fourth window from the west.
In the second storey there are on this side only four windows, which are
spaced without any regard to the position of those below. The two
westernmost, which are circular and without tracery--a type of window
that is somewhat rare--can hardly be later than the time of Archbishop
Roger, and may be earlier: the next two are square and of much later
date.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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