Lincoln Cathedral

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Lincoln Cathedral — the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Lincoln — is one of the great Gothic churches of medieval England, raised on a limestone scarp above the city and visible across the surrounding plain. A first Norman cathedral on the site was largely wrecked by an earthquake in 1185; the rebuilding that followed, begun under Bishop Hugh of Avalon, produced the soaring early-English structure that survives. For roughly two and a half centuries, until its central spire fell in 1548, the cathedral is generally reckoned to have been the tallest building in the world, overtopping the Great Pyramid.

As a building, it was conceived for worship and for the dead. Hugh, who died in 1200 and was canonized in 1220, became the focus of one of the busiest pilgrim cults in England: his shrine in the Angel Choir drew offerings and travelers, and the choir itself was extended to receive them. Medieval pilgrimage was a devotional act with a practical edge — penance worked off, healing sought at a holy tomb, the saint petitioned as an intercessor — and Lincoln’s prosperity through the thirteenth century rested in part on that traffic. The cathedral also held, until the Reformation stripped such things away, the apparatus of late-medieval piety: relics, chantries, and the daily round of the secular canons who served it.

The building carries a piece of folklore that has outlasted its theology. High in the Angel Choir sits a small carved grotesque, a squatting imp-like figure, around which a popular legend grew: that a demon, sent to make mischief in the church, was turned to stone by an angel and fixed there as a warning. The tale is not medieval doctrine but later folk narrative, the kind that gathered around odd carvings in many churches; the Lincoln Imp became a civic emblem and a tourist fixture, its devilry domesticated into a mascot. The carving itself belongs to the ordinary medieval vocabulary of beasts and monsters worked into sacred stone, whose intended meaning — apotropaic, moral, or simply decorative — remains debated.

Lincoln’s later history is largely architectural and antiquarian rather than esoteric. It preserves two of the finest medieval rose windows in England, the Dean’s Eye and the Bishop’s Eye, and one of the surviving original copies of Magna Carta was long kept here. What gives the place its standing in any account of religion is concrete and old: a working shrine, a destination for the medieval devout, and a building whose scale was itself read, by those who raised it, as an offering.

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