York Minster

The Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Saint Peter in York, commonly known as York Minster, is an Anglican cathedral in York, North Yorkshire, England, and is one of the largest of its kind in Northern Europe. The minster is the seat of the Archbishop of York, the third-highest office of the Church of England (after the monarch as Supreme Governor and the Archbishop of Canterbury), and is the mother church for the Diocese of York and the Province of York. It is administered by its Dean and chapter. The title "minster" is attributed to churches established in the Anglo-Saxon period as missionary teaching churches, and serves now as an honorific title; the word Metropolitical in the formal name refers to the Archbishop of York's role as the Metropolitan bishop of the Province of York. Services in the minster are sometimes regarded as on the High Church or Anglo-Catholic end of the Anglican continuum. The minster was completed in 1472 after several centuries of building. It is devoted to Saint Peter, and has a very wide Decorated Gothic nave and chapter house, a Perpendicular Gothic quire and east end and Early English north and south transepts. The nave contains the West Window, constructed in 1338, and over the Lady Chapel in the east end is the Great East Window (finished in 1408), the largest expanse of medieval stained glass in the world. In the north transept is the Five Sisters window, each lancet being over high. The south transept contains a rose window, while the West Window contains a heart-shaped design colloquially known as The Heart of Yorkshire. A bishop of York was summoned to the Council of Arles in 314, indicating the presence of a Christian community in York at this time; however, archaeological evidence of Christianity in Roman York is limited. The first recorded church on the site was a wooden structure built hurriedly in 627 to provide a place to baptise Edwin, King of Northumbria. Moves towards a more substantial building began in the decade of the 630s.