How to Visit the English CathedralsSingleton, Esther
History
How to Visit the English Cathedrals
Singleton, Esther
Cathedrals -- England
hanged at Lincoln. The head was found and restored to the
cathedral. The treasurer, John de Welburne (d. 1380), either
restored the old shrine or made a new one of the same
materials.”--(A. F. K.)
Fergusson called the Angel Choir “the most beautiful presbytery in
England.” It dates from 1256 to 1280, when the Early English was merging
into the Decorated. The sculptural angels that ornament the spandrels of
the triforium account for the name.
“It is in five bays carried eastward at a uniform height and
breadth with the choir of St. Hugh. Lincoln stone is used
throughout, relieved with shafts and capitals of Purbeck marble.
The spandrels of the great arches, which are plain in other parts
of the building are here decorated with sunk geometrical forms.
Each bay of the triforium is divided, as elsewhere, into two
arches, both of which enclose two sub-arches; but the details are
richer than in the earlier parts of the minster. The clerestory has
one window of four lights in each bay, with an eight-foil and two
trefoils in the head. The compartments of the vault were originally
coated with plaster, which has been scraped away so as to shew the
stone surface underneath. It is a question whether it does not now
look better than with the old plaster, and the gaudy colouring
which once, most probably, decorated it. The springers of the
vaulting are supported by slender shafts, which rest on elaborately
foliaged corbels in the spandrels of the great arches. The
beautiful foliaged bosses along the ridge rib are best seen from
the triforium or the clerestory.”--(A. F. K.)
In olden times the Angel Choir contained the Shrine of St. Hugh and a
monument to Queen Eleanor, of which the one now standing in Westminster
Abbey is probably a copy. It was an altar-monument of marble with the
Queen’s effigy in gilded brass, and was destroyed during the Civil Wars
in the Seventeenth Century. Eleanor died not far from Lincoln, from
which city the funeral procession started to London. A modern stone
monument, with a brass effigy of Queen Eleanor, was placed under the
East Window in 1891.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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