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THE BISHOP’S PALACE

THE CHANCERY

Within the Close, as we passed along looking at the cathedral, we had our backs to the canons’ houses. First comes the precentory and the sub-deanery near the Exchequer Gate, next the Cantilupe Chantry, with a figure of the Saviour in a niche in the gable end, and a curious square oriel window, and then the entrance to the Bishop’s palace opposite the Galilee porch. The old palace, begun about 1150 or possibly earlier, was a splendid building; the ruins of it are in the palace grounds. Through a gateway or vaulted porch, where is now the secretary’s office, you descend to the site of the magnificent hall, eighty-eight feet by fifty-eight, built by St. Hugh, for, like Vicars Court, with its steep flight of steps and its charming old houses, it is built on the slope of the hill. Succeeding bishops added to the pile in which Henry VI. and Henry VIII. were royally lodged and entertained, and the charges which cost Queen Katharine Howard her life took their origin from her meetings here and afterwards at Gainsborough with her relative Thomas Culpepper. The palace was despoiled in the days of the Commonwealth, and little but ruins now remain, but a part of it has been restored and utilised as a chapel by the late Bishop King, perhaps the most universally beloved of Lincoln’s many bishops. Buckden and Nettleham and Riseholme have supplied a residence for successive bishops, and now the bishop is again lodged close to his cathedral. But, in the grandiloquent language of a work entitled ‘The Antiquarian and Topographical Cabinet, containing a series of elegant views of the most interesting objects of curiosity in Great Britain, 1809,’ “The place where once the costly banquet stood arrayed in all the ostentatious luxury of Ecclesiastic greatness has now its mouldering walls covered with trees.” The same authority, speaking of Thornton Abbey, has this precious reflection, which is too good to lose: “Here in sweet retirement the mind may indulge in meditating upon the instability of sublunary greatness, and contemplate, with secret emotion, the wrecks of ostentatious grandeur.” The Chancery, built by Antony Bek, 1316, faces the east end of the minster yard; it is distinguished outside by an entrance arch and an oriel window. Inside, there are some very interesting old doorways, and a charming little chapel, with a wooden screen of c. 1490, the time of Bishop Russell, and two embattled towers on the old minster yard wall in the garden, of the early fourteenth century. The deanery is a modern building on the north side of the minster.