Histories of the Minster usually begin with the date of Easter Sunday, 627AD, which is when the Anglo-Saxon King Edwin of Northumbria was christened in a small wooden church in York. This reading of events masks York’s importance in the development of Christianity in the British Isles: the choice of York as the centre of the Christian Church in the North dates back to 601 at the latest; St Paulinus, York’s first Archbishop, was crowned in 625, and a York bishop attended the Council of Arles in 314.
York Minster viewed from Duncombe Place, 2009
After his coronation King Edwin ordered a stone church be built. It was completed in 637 and dedicated to St Peter. This church survived through York’s Viking era until it was destroyed by fire in 1069. Archbishop Thomas of Bayeux ordered a new church be built, which evolved into today’s Minster.
The building we see today dates from 1220, when Archbishop Walter Gray began extending the Norman Minster. Work on transforming the Minster into today’s Gothic church was completed around 250 years later.
Civil war and reformation
The Rose Window, seen by many as the Minster’s crowning glory, commemorates the union of the houses of York and Lancaster, who disputed the English throne for most of the fifteenth century in what was effectively a civil war.
The War of the Roses, as it became known, was effectively settled when Henry Tudor (the candidate of the House of Lancaster, whose emblem was a red rose) gained a military victory over the Yorkists (represented by King Richard III and whose emblem was a white rose) in 1485.
A year later as King Henry VII he scored a huge PR triumph by marrying Elizabeth of York, after which he could claim to have united the houses of York and Lancaster. Henry and Elizabeth were the first king and queens of England’s Tudor dynasty: their emblem, a red and white rose, combines the emblems of their own families.
Had the Minster been completed fifty years later it is unlikely that Henry and Elizabeth’s son, King Henry VIII, would have been honoured in its architecture in the same way. York Minster escaped most of Henry’s opportunistic plundering of the church’s property following his first divorce – even though Cardinal Wolsey, perhaps the Minster’s most famous archbishop, had long fallen from Henry’s favour.
The Minster was robbed of many of its treasures, but its external structure remained largely unscathed, as it did during the English Civil War of the 1640s – even when York was besieged by Oliver Cromwell’s Roundhead army.
From fires to the future
Around this time the area around the Minster would have been filled with many small buildings, many occupied by people whose business was in and around the Minster itself. Some remain intact – and a good picture of what the Minster Precinct was like under Henry VIII can be seen in C J Sansom’s novel Sovereign.
Much of the area was demolished and rebuilt to give the Minster its current grand approach from the West – ie, from the newly built railway station – under the auspices of Augustus Duncombe (1814-80), a nineteenth-century Dean of York. This western approachway was given the unsurprising name of Duncombe Place.
Three major fires have affected York Minster since Norman times: one caused by Jonathan Martin, an insane ex-preacher, in 1829, and one accidental one in 1840. Most recently, lightning caused a fire in 1984 that nearly destroyed the south transept (bosses designed by viewers of the BBC Children’s programme Blue Peter now adorn its restored ceiling).
Fortunately, the cathedral escaped being bombed by the German Luftwaffe during the Second World War, despite York being targeted in the Baedeker raid of April 1942.
The money raised from visiting sightseers ensures many future generations can enjoy the beauties of York Minster.