I. Both the minsters built by St. Wilfrid—Ripon and Hexham—retain their crypts. He was a Romaniser in architecture as in ritual, and well acquainted with Italy. So his seventh-century church at Ripon was modelled after the early Christian basilicas which he had seen at Rome. Like them, it had a confessionary or crypt, which still exists, beneath the central tower; like them, it was orientated to the west. He seems even to have brought over Italian masons to direct or to execute the work, for the crypt is vaulted, and the vaulting is of excellent construction; the masonry is smooth, and is covered “with a fine and very hard plaster which takes a polish.” At its west end was the altar, at its east end an aperture through which a glimpse of the interior might be obtained from the Saxon nave. Round the walls are little niches in which lights were placed. “St. Wilfrid’s Needle” is merely a niche with the back knocked through. Similar Saxon crypts remain at Hexham and Wing, and a Norman crypt at St. Peter-in-the-East, Oxford. They usually consisted of a small central chamber, with a passage all round it. There were two staircases descending from either side of the nave; pilgrims went down one flight of steps, proceeded along the passage, getting a glimpse of the relics through openings in the wall of the central chamber, and then returned up the other flight of steps into the nave. IV. NORMAN.—Early in the twelfth century a Norman cathedral seems to have been built, wholly or in part, by Archbishop Thurstan. Of this there remains only an apsidal building, with crypt beneath, on the south side of the south aisle of the present choir. An eleventh-century chapel formerly existed, with crypt beneath it, in precisely the same situation at Worcester; there is a twelfth-century chapel in the same position in Oxford cathedral. In Oxford this chapel was the Lady chapel. It may be that the Ripon chapel also may have been a Lady chapel. For if the Norman choir was of the same length eastward as at present, it would have been impossible to build a Lady chapel of the type of that, the crypt of which still exists at Winchester, to the east of the choir; the ground falls far too steeply eastward. Moreover, the so-called Lady loft now existing would seem, from its name, to be merely an upper story added to a Lady chapel. This Norman chapel formerly opened into the Norman church; traces of the arches may be seen in the walls. In the buttress is a curious room which may have been a sacristy, a lavatory, a prison, or an anchorite’s cell, like the one in the east end of Ludlow church. [Illustration: NAVE.]