Qualla: Ripon Cathedral

Ripon Cathedral: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Soloist at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Descend the narrow steps beneath the choir of Ripon Cathedral and you enter a small barrel-vaulted chamber so plain it feels improvised. The walls are rough. The ceiling is low. The space is barely larger than a generous wardrobe. This is the crypt that Saint Wilfrid built in AD 672. It is the oldest intact built space in any English cathedral - older than the Tower of London, older than every visible stone in Westminster Abbey, older than the Magna Carta by 543 years. Wilfrid brought stonemasons, plasterers, and glaziers from France and Italy to construct his great basilica above this crypt, and a contemporary account by his hagiographer Stephen of Ripon describes the wonder of it. The basilica is gone. Almost everything Wilfrid built has been destroyed, rebuilt, dissolved, restored, or burned at least once. The little crypt still stands. It always stands.

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Image: Soloist at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ripon Cathedral: The Crypt Beneath Three Cathedrals

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hogweard, Public domain. Wilfrid founded a monastery at Ripon in the 660s, then refounded it as a Benedictine house in 672. His basilica above the crypt was the work of imported European craftsmen at the very edge of post-Roman knowledge. In AD 948, the English king Eadred devastated Ripon as a warning t...

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Image: Hogweard | Public domain

Ripon Cathedral: The Best West Front of Its Type

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alethe, CC BY-SA 3.0. The present cathedral's Early English Gothic west front was added in 1220. Twin towers, originally crowned with wooden spires sheathed in lead, frame three tall pointed arches with deep recessed mouldings. Architectural historians consider it one of the finest examples of Early E...

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Image: Alethe | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ripon Cathedral: Dissolution, Civil War, and Recovery

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Helge Klaus Rieder, CC0. In 1547, before the medieval rebuilding was finished, Edward VI dissolved Ripon's college of canons. All revenues were appropriated by the Crown. The crossing tower never received its planned Perpendicular arches. For decades the church sat half-finished, its income gone, its pur...

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Image: Helge Klaus Rieder | CC0

Ripon Cathedral: Alice in the Choir Stalls

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Green from Bradford, CC BY 2.0. Ripon Cathedral's most surprising claim is literary. Lewis Carroll's father Charles Dodgson was a canon at Ripon from 1852 to 1868, and the young Lewis spent considerable time in the cathedral. The misericords - those Ripon-school carvings from the 1490s - are said to have inspir...

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Image: Tim Green from Bradford | CC BY 2.0