The Minster—the Cathedral Church of St. Peter, to call it by its proper title—is the fifth building on this site. First of all in the series was the wooden chapel erected for the baptism of Edwin, the Saxon king, in A.D. 627, followed by a stone church, begun by him in 628 and completed eight years later by King Oswald, who placed the head of Edwin, slain in battle by the heathen at Hatfield near Doncaster, here in the chapel of St. Gregory. Thirty-five years later this second church was found by Wilfrid the Archbishop to be in a state of decay, and he accordingly repaired the roofs and the walls, which he rendered “whiter than snow by means of white lime,” as we are told by contemporary chroniclers. In point of fact, he whitewashed the cathedral, just as the churchwardens of a hundred years ago used to treat our village churches, for which conduct we have been reviling them for many years past, not knowing that as whitewashers they could claim such distinguished kinship. About the year 741 this second building was destroyed by fire and was replaced by another, completed in 780, itself burnt in 1069. The fourth was then begun by Thomas of Bayeux, the first Norman archbishop, and completed about 1080; to be in its turn partly demolished by Roger Pont l’Évêque, who about 1170 rebuilt the choir on a larger scale. Following him came Archbishop Gray, who rebuilt the south transept in its present form between 1230 and 1241; the north transept and the central tower in its original form being the work of John Romanus, sub-dean and treasurer from 1228 to 1256. To the son of the sub-dean, Archbishop Romanus, fell the beginning of a new nave, which was commenced by him in 1291, but was not completed until 1345, and is the existing one. All these rebuildings were on a progressive scale of size and magnificence, and so by the time they had been completed it happened that Archbishop Roger’s Late Norman choir, which had replaced the smaller Early Norman one by Thomas of Bayeux, was itself regarded as too small and mean, and so was pulled down to make room for the existing choir, completed about 1400. Thus the earliest architectural features of the existing Minster above ground are the Early English transepts, and nothing remains of those vanished early buildings save some dubious Saxon masonry and Norman walling in the crypt.