To come to post-Roman times, Bede, who died in 785, tells us that _Paulinus_, who had been consecrated Bishop of York in 625, and had baptised King Ædwin and a large number of people at York in the church which stood on the site afterwards occupied by the Minster, came to Lincoln, and, after baptising numbers of people in the Trent, as he had previously done in the Swale near Richmond in Yorkshire, built a stone church in Lincoln, or caused his convert Blaeca, the Reeve of the city, to build it, in which he consecrated Honorius Archbishop of Canterbury. Bede saw the walls of this church which may well have stood where the present church of St. Paul does. William the Conqueror in 1066 built the Norman castle on the hill to keep the town, which had spread along the banks of the Witham, in order. It was about this time that Remigius, a monk of Fécamp, in Normandy, who had been made by William, Bishop of Dorchester-on-Thames in 1067, as a reward for his active help with a ship and a body of armed fighting men, got leave, after much opposition from the Archbishop of York, to build a cathedral at Lincoln on the hill near the castle. So, next after the Romans (and perhaps the Britons were there before them), it is to him that we owe the choice of this magnificent site for the cathedral. Remigius began his great work in 1075, of which the central portion of the west front, with its plain rude masonry and its round-headed tall recesses on either side of the middle door, and its interrupted band of bas-reliefs over the low Norman arches to right and left of the tall recesses, is still _in situ_. The sixteen stone bas-reliefs are subjects partly monkish, but mostly Scriptural, concerning Adam, Noah, Samuel, and Jesus Christ. They are genuine Norman sculptures, and they are at the same level as Welbourn’s twelve English kings under the big central window, but these are of the fourteenth century. The church of Remigius ended in an apse, of which the foundations are now under the stalls about the middle of the choir. It probably had two towers at the west end, and possibly a central tower as well. The church of St. Mary Magdalene was swept away to clear the site, and a chapel at the north west end of the new building allotted to the parishioners in compensation. Like the Taj at Agra it was seventeen years in building, and its great founder died, May 4, 1092, a few months before its completion. This was in the reign of Rufus, a reign notable for the building of the great Westminster Hall. [Illustration: _Gateway of Lincoln Castle._] [Sidenote: LINCOLN CASTLE] [Sidenote: BISHOP ALEXANDER]