Wilfrid’s Church

Wilfrid’s church at Ripon was constructed in the 660s and 670s. Apart from a cathedral church in York, built in the 620s, it was, so far as we know, the first stone building erected in Northumbria since the Roman legions left Britain c.400. Eye-witness descriptions give no details of its size or plan, but stress its magnificence. For the Anglo-Saxons, used to single-storey timber and thatch houses, it must have seemed awesomely grand and permanent.

One part of Wilfrid’s church has survived nearly intact throughout the last 1300 years – the crypt. It is identified as Wilfrid’s work because it shares many unusual features with a crypt at Hexham which he is known to have built. The interior is almost as Wilfrid described it. By way of dark passages, pilgrims came to the main chamber where, presumably, one of the relics which Wilfrid had brought back from Rome was displayed in the eastern niche.

In 1997, York Archaeological Trust’s excavation of the area below the central tower revealed the remarkable construction of the main chamber’s roof. Stone ribs, originally erected in sections over a temporary wooden framework, supported the vaulted stone ceiling and the thick mortar infill above. No other similar construction is known in England, and its introduction at Ripon may result from Wilfrid’s observations of continental building practice.

The picture that emerges is of a church planned on a grand scale, built with unusual materials and foreign techniques, and designed to impress and enthral worshippers with the power and the glory of God.