During those limited days of the week before Doncaster, I was constantly
coming back to the Minster, which is not the germ of political York, or
hardly religious York; the brave city was a Romano-British capital and
a Romano-British episcopal see centuries before the first wooden temple
was built on the site of the present edifice in 627. I should like to
make believe that we found traces of that simple church in the crypt of
the Minster when we went the next morning and were herded through it by
the tenderest of vergers. Most of our flock were Americans, and we put
our guide to such question in matters of imagination and information
as the patience of a less amiable shepherd would not have borne. Many a
tale, true or o’ertrue, our verger had, which he told with unction; when
he ascended with us to the body of the church, and said that the stained
glass of the gigantic windows suffered from the depredations of the
mistaken birds which pecked holes in the joints of their panes, I felt
that I had full measure from him, pressed down and running over. I do
not remember why he said the birds should have done this, but it seems
probable that they took the mellow colors of the glass for those of ripe
fruits.
For myself, I could not get enough of those windows, in another sort
of famine which ought at this time to have been sated. I was forever
wondering at their grandeur outside and their glory inside. I was glad
to lose my way about the town, for if I kept walking I was sure, sooner
or later, to bring up at the Minster; but the last evening of our stay
I made a purposed pilgrimage to it for a final emotion. It was the
clearest evening we had in York, and at half-past six the sun was
setting in a transparent sky, which somehow it did not flush with any of
those glaring reds which the vulgarer sorts of sunsets are fond of, but
bathed the air in a delicate suffusion of daffodil light, just tinged
with violet. This was the best medium to see the past of the Minster in,
and I can see it there now, if I did not then. I followed, or I follow,
its veracious history back to the beginning of the seventh century,
whence you can look back further still to the earliest Christian temples
where the Romans worshipped with the Britons, whom they had enslaved
and converted. But it was not till 627 that the little wooden chapel was
built on the site of the Minster, to house the rite of the Northumbrian
King Eadwine’s baptism. He felt so happy in his new faith that he
replaced the wooden structure with stone. In the next century it was
burned, but rebuilt by another pious prince, and probably repaired by
yet another after the Danes took the city a hundred years later. It
was then in a good state to be destroyed by that devout William the
Conqueror, who came to take the Saxon world in its sins of guttling
and guzzling. The first Norman archbishop reconstructed or restored
the church, and then it began to rise and to spread in glory--nave,
transepts, and choir, and pillars and towers, Norman and Early English,
and Perpendicular and Decorated--till it found itself at last what the
American tourist sees it to-day. It suffered from two great fires in
the nineteenth century, the first set by a lunatic who had the fancy of
seeing it burn, but who had only the satisfaction of destroying part of
the roof.
It was never richly painted, but the color wanting in the walls and
fretted vault was more than compensated by the mellowed splendors of
the matchless windows. It was, indeed, fit to be the home of much more
secular history than can be associated with it; but not till the end
of the thirteenth century had the Minster a patron of its own, when St.
William was canonized, and exercised his office, whatever it was, for
two brief centuries. Then the Cromwell of Henry VIII. took possession
of it in behalf of the crown, and the saint’s charge was practically
abolished. He was even deprived of his head, for the relic was encased
in gold and jewels, and was therefore worth the king’s having, who was
most a friend of the reformed religion when it paid best. The later
Cromwell, who beat a later king hard by at Marston Moor, must have
somehow desecrated the Minster, though there is no record of any such
fact. A more authentic monument of the religious difficulties of the
times is the pastoral staff, bearing the arms of Catharine of Braganza,
the poor little wife of Charles II., which was snatched from a Roman
Catholic bishop when, to the high offence of Protestant piety, he was
heading a procession in York in 1688. The verger showing us through the
Minster was a good Protestant, but he held it bad taste in a predecessor
of his, who when leading about a Catholic party of sight-seers took the
captive staff from its place and shook it in their faces, saying, “Don’t
you wish you had it?”