England Guide
Yorkshire
York Minster
Opening time: Mon– Sat 9/9.30am to last entry at 5pm, Sun noon–3.45pm
Price: £5.50, Minster and all its attractions £9
Telephone: 01904/557216
Website: www.yorkminster.org
York Minster ranks as one of the country's most important sights. Seat of the Archbishop of York, it is Britain's largest Gothic building and home to countless treasures, not least of which is an estimated half of all the medieval stained glass in England.
On Easter Day in 627, Bishop Paulinus, on a mission to establish the Roman Church, baptized King Edwin of Northumbria in a small timber chapel in York. Six years later the church became the first minster and Paulinus the first archbishop of York. The minster's first significant foundations were laid around 1080 by the first Norman archbishop, Thomas of Bayeux, and it was from the germ of this Norman church that the present structure emerged.
Nothing else in the Minster can match the magnificence of the stained glass in the nave and transepts. The West Window (1338) contains distinctive heart-shaped upper tracery (the "Heart of Yorkshire"), whilst in the nave's north aisle, the second bay window (1155) contains slivers of the oldest stained glass in the country. The greatest of the church's 128 windows, however, is the majestic East Window (1405), at 78ft by 31ft the world's largest area of medieval stained glass in a single window.
The foundations, or undercroft, have been turned into a museum, while amongst precious relics in the adjoining treasury is the eleventh-century Horn of Ulf, presented to the Minster by a relative of the tide-turning King Canute. There's also access from the undercroft to the crypt, the spot that transmits the most powerful sense of antiquity, as it contains sections of the original eleventh-century church, including pillars with fine Romanesque capitals.