Lincoln Cathedral

An earthquake brought this building down in 1185. What went up in its place was the strangest great church in England: a choir with a deliberately lopsided vault, a retrochoir carved with thirty angels, a rose window nobody has been able to date confidently, and a foot-high demon that a whole city adopted as its badge. For two centuries, if the chroniclers are right, its spire made it the tallest thing ever built by anybody. This guide walks all of it.

Earthquake, rebuilding, and a record nobody can prove

Remigius, 1072

Remigius de Fécamp moved his see from Dorchester-on-Thames to the hilltop above Roman Lincoln in 1072 — the Normans liked the site for the same reason the Romans had, because it commands the flat country for miles. He never saw it finished. He died on 7 May 1092, two days before the consecration.

The earthquake of 1185

Fire damaged the building in 1141. Then on 15 April 1185 an earthquake shook eastern England — the first English earthquake with reliable reports of structural damage, estimated at around magnitude 5 — and the chroniclers say the cathedral was split from top to bottom.

How much of that was the earthquake and how much was bad Norman building is argued about by people who know more than the chroniclers did; the phrase “from top to bottom” is rhetoric, not a survey. What is certain is that only the lower stage of the west front survived, and you can still read it in the facade today: three deep Norman recesses, absorbed into a later Gothic screen like a fossil in newer rock.

St Hugh, and the strangest vault in England

The man who rebuilt it was Hugh of Avalon, a Carthusian from Burgundy made Bishop of Lincoln in 1186 and later canonised. Work began at the east end with what is still called St Hugh's Choir, raised between 1192 and 1210 under a master mason named Geoffrey de Noiers.

Its vault is the reason architectural historians come to Lincoln. The ribs do not line up. The bays are not symmetrical; the ridge rib wanders; each pair of vault cells is different from its neighbour, and the whole thing reads as though it were improvised. It is called the crazy vault, and the current view is that it was entirely deliberate — an experiment in what a rib vault could be, made at the exact moment English masons realised the rib was a decorative system and not just a structural one. Nothing like it survives anywhere else in Europe.

The spire, and the claim

The central tower was raised between 1307 and 1311 and given a timber spire sheathed in lead, reputed to reach 525 feet. If that figure is right, Lincoln became the tallest structure in the world — ending the Great Pyramid's four-thousand-year run — and held the record until the spire blew down in a storm in 1548.

The honest position is that the figure is doubtful. No contemporary measurement survives, the height comes from later writers, and modern estimates run a good deal lower. If the spire was shorter than claimed, the record may never have been Lincoln's at all. It is a wonderful story and it is repeated everywhere as fact; treat it as a strong tradition rather than a measurement. The two west spires, added in 1420, were taken down by 1807 after the townspeople rioted over an earlier attempt to remove them.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

Steep Hill and Exchequer Gate

Walk up rather than driving up, if your legs will take it. Steep Hill is exactly what it says, cobbled and one in seven, lined with bookshops and timber-framed fronts, and it delivers you into Castle Square with the cathedral on one side and the castle on the other. Then you go through Exchequer Gate, a fourteenth-century gatehouse, and the west front arrives all at once. It is one of the best approaches to any building in England and it is completely wasted from a car park.

The West Front

A vast, flat Gothic screen, far wider than the building behind it, with the surviving Norman core embedded in its middle. It is not a facade in the French sense — it does not express the nave and aisles behind it at all — it is a wall built to be seen from the town, and that is exactly what it does.

Look low down, either side of the central doorway, for the Romanesque frieze: carved panels of about 1145 showing Noah's ark, the Last Judgment, Daniel in the lion's den, souls in torment. It is one of the earliest large-scale sculptural schemes in England, badly weathered, and most visitors walk straight past it looking upward.

The nave

Built from about 1225, and unlike the choir it is regular, calm and enormous. The vault is a simple ridge-and-tierceron pattern; the piers alternate between clustered Purbeck marble shafts and plainer stone. Lincoln's masons invented or perfected the tierceron vault, and this nave is where the idea went mainstream.

Look at the floor near the west end for the Lincoln Pavement and, above, at the two rose windows in the transepts, which are the reason to walk on.

The Dean's Eye and the Bishop's Eye

The two rose windows face each other across the transepts and they are a hundred years and an entire aesthetic apart.

The Dean's Eye, to the north, is about 1220, and holds a great deal of its original glass — genuinely rare in England after the Reformation and the Civil War. It shows the Last Judgment, and it was fully dismantled and rebuilt between 2004 and 2006 because the stonework was failing.

The Bishop's Eye, to the south, is about 1330, and is a different kind of object entirely: a leaf-shaped opening filled with flowing curvilinear tracery, one of the largest and finest of its type anywhere. Its glass is a mosaic of fragments — medieval panels smashed at the Reformation and in the Civil War, collected up and reassembled in the eighteenth century as an abstract patchwork. You cannot read a single scene in it. That is the point, and it is beautiful.

The pulpitum and St Hugh's Choir

The stone screen across the entrance to the choir is about 1330, and it is a thicket of undercut foliage, tiny heads and canopies — Decorated Gothic showing off. The organ sits on top of it.

Through it is St Hugh's Choir with its crazy vault overhead, and beneath the vault, the choir stalls: sixty-two of them, from the 1370s, with misericords under the seats. Lincoln has one of the best sets in England — a knight fighting a dragon, Alexander borne aloft by griffins, domestic scenes, a woman beating a man with a distaff. They are hidden under folding seats and almost nobody thinks to lift one, but the vergers will if you ask.

The Angel Choir

Beyond the choir, the building changes gear again. The Angel Choir was built between 1256 and 1280 to extend the east end, for one reason: St Hugh had been canonised in 1220 and the pilgrims would not fit. It is the finest thing in the cathedral — taller, lighter, more richly carved than anything west of it, and finished with the eight-light east window, one of the largest of its date in England.

Up in the spandrels of the triforium are the thirty carved angels that give the choir its name. They play instruments, hold scrolls, swing censers, carry souls; none repeats another; and they are about twelve metres up, which is why almost nobody looks at them properly. Take a lens or ask for the free floor tour, which is included Monday to Saturday and whose guides will point at every one of them.

The Lincoln Imp

And then, on the north side, between two arches of the arcade, below the second corbel counting from the east, sits a grinning cross-legged demon about a foot high with horns, hairy legs and one leg over the other. There is a spotlight on him.

The legend is Victorian rather than medieval: two imps sent by Satan to make trouble were smashing the furniture when an angel appeared from a hymn book and told them to stop; one fled, and the other threw rocks at the angel and was turned to stone where he sat. Nobody knows why the mason carved him, and the story was assembled centuries later. It made no difference. He is on the city's coat of arms, on the football club's badge, on every teatowel in Steep Hill, and he is the most successful piece of medieval marketing in England.

The shrine of St Hugh, and the sanctuary

The whole east end exists because of Hugh, and his shrine stood behind the high altar until 1540, when it was destroyed and the metals melted down like every other English shrine. A modern marker shows where it was. Hugh, incidentally, kept a swan at his palace at Stow that followed him about, which is why he is shown with one and why there are swans all over the building.

The cathedral also carries a much harder story, and it does not hide it. A second shrine here, to “Little St Hugh”, grew up after the death of a boy in 1255 and the blood-libel accusation, torture and execution of Lincoln's Jews that followed. The cult was never authorised by Rome. The cathedral now displays a plaque repudiating the story as a fabrication and expressing regret, which is the right thing to have done and more than most English cathedrals have managed with their own histories.

Katherine Swynford

Near the high altar, on the south side, are two battered stone chests. One is Katherine Swynford — governess, then mistress, then third wife of John of Gaunt, and through their legitimated Beaufort children the ancestress of every English monarch since Henry VII. The other is her daughter Joan, Countess of Westmorland.

What is there now is only the base. The monuments had brass effigies under painted stone canopies, attributed to Henry Yevele; Parliamentary soldiers occupying the cathedral in 1644 stripped the brasses, and John Evelyn recorded barge-loads of metal being carried off. What survives is mutilated almost past recognition, which makes it a fair monument to what happened to English church art in general.

The Chapter House

Out through the cloister is a ten-sided room of about 1220, roofed from a single central pillar with flying buttresses outside to hold the thrust — among the first uses of them in England. It is the earliest polygonal chapter house in the country, and it started a fashion: Westminster, Salisbury, York and Wells all followed.

Edward I held a Parliament in it in 1301, and another in 1316. It has also been a film set more than once. Its real quality is acoustic: stand in the middle and speak, and the room answers.

Great Tom, and the bells

The central tower holds Great Tom of Lincoln, a bell of about five and a quarter tons cast in 1834 from the metal of earlier bells, one of the heaviest in Britain. It is a clock bell: it strikes the hour and is not rung with the others, and there are four quarter bells alongside it. If you take the tower tour you go up through the bell chamber and stand beside it, which is a different experience from hearing it over the rooftops.

A ring of thirteen bells for change ringing hangs in the south-west tower. Lincoln lends its name to a standard method in the ringers' repertoire, which is the sort of fame only a cathedral can have.

The Russell Chantry, and two chapels most people miss

Off the south choir aisle is the Russell Chantry, a small fifteenth-century chapel with walls painted in 1958 by Duncan Grant — Bloomsbury Group, Vanessa Bell's partner, and about as far from medieval Lincolnshire as an artist can get. The murals show St Blaise, patron of wool combers, and the Lincoln wool trade that paid for much of the building around them. They were controversial when painted, are unmistakably twentieth-century, and are one of the few places in any English cathedral where you can see modern figurative painting on a chapel wall.

Nearby, the Longland Chantry and the Bishop's Eye chapels carry fan vaults and fine Perpendicular detail. And in the north choir aisle, watch for the Easter Sepulchre of about 1300 — a canopied stone recess with sleeping soldiers carved along its base, used once a year at Easter and among the best surviving in England.

The cloister and the Wren Library

The cloister is late thirteenth-century on three sides, with a wooden vault full of carved bosses. The fourth side is a classical colonnade of 1674 carrying the Wren Library above it — built to house a bequest of books, and generally attributed to Christopher Wren. It is the one piece of full-blooded classicism in the building, dropped into a Gothic cloister without apology, and the collision is worth two minutes of anyone's time.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The crazy vault Over St Hugh's Choir: a deliberately asymmetrical rib vault with no surviving parallel anywhere in Europe.
• The Lincoln Imp North side of the Angel Choir, below the second corbel from the east, about forty feet up, under a spotlight.
• The thirty angels In the triforium spandrels of the Angel Choir, no two alike, and worth a zoom lens.
• The Bishop's Eye South transept: curvilinear tracery of about 1330 filled with a mosaic of smashed medieval glass.
• The misericords Sixty-two choir stalls of the 1370s with carvings under the seats. Ask a verger to lift one.
• The Romanesque frieze Low on the west front, about 1145 — one of the earliest big sculptural schemes in England, and almost nobody looks down for it.
• The Chapter House Ten sides, one pillar, flying buttresses outside, and a Parliament held in it in 1301.
• The Wren Library A 1674 classical colonnade dropped into a medieval cloister, holding a bequest of books.

Insider tips

Sunday is a short day here: sightseeing runs only from about 11.45 to 2.30, there are no free tours, and the admission is two pounds cheaper for a reason. If you have any choice, come on a weekday.

Bring binoculars or a long lens. Almost everything worth seeing in this building — the angels, the Imp, the misericord carvings, the bosses — is either forty feet up or hidden under something. It is the single most rewarded piece of kit at Lincoln.

Time it for Evensong. It is free, it is sung by the cathedral choir most days in term, and hearing the Angel Choir used for what it was built for is worth reorganising an afternoon around. You do not need a ticket and you do not need to be religious; you do need to arrive a few minutes early and sit in the choir stalls when the vergers offer.

If the building looks familiar, that is because it has doubled for Westminster Abbey on screen more than once, most visibly in The Da Vinci Code, after Westminster refused. The chapter house and the cloister do most of the work in those sequences.

Book the tower tour early if you want it. It runs Saturdays and bank holidays only, April to October, 338 steps, minimum age fourteen, and it sells out. The roof tour runs all week and is the easier ticket.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Stay uphill. The Cathedral Quarter and Bailgate put you inside the medieval city, five minutes from the west door, with the good restaurants and the independent shops; downhill by the station is cheaper, flatter and a twenty-minute climb from everything you came for. Steep Hill itself is full of tearooms and secondhand bookshops and is a genuine pleasure to come down at the end of the afternoon.

More English cathedrals

• Canterbury Cathedral — the murder of Becket, the crypt, and the empty site of the greatest shrine in northern Europe.
• York Minster — the largest expanse of medieval stained glass in the country.
• Ely Cathedral — the Octagon, and the best solution to a collapsed tower anyone has ever found.

See all the English cathedrals in this guide →