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York Minster (daily: June-Sept 7am-8.30pm; Oct-May 7am-6pm; GBP3 donation requested; ) ranks as one of the country's most important sights. Seat of the Archbishop of York, it is Britain's largest Gothic building and home to countless treasures, not least of which is the world's largest medieval stained-glass window and an estimated half of all the medieval stained glass in England. In its earliest incarnation the Minster was probably the wooden chapel used to baptize King Edwin of Northumbria in 627. After its stone successors were destroyed by the Danes, the first significant foundations were laid around 1080 and it was from the germ of this Norman church that the present structure emerged. The oldest surviving fabric, in the south transept, dates from 1220 and the reign of Archbishop Walter de Grey. A new chapter house, in the Decorated style, appeared in 1300, and a new nave in the same style was completed in 1338. The Perpendicular choir was realized in 1450 and the western towers in 1472. In 1480, the thirteenth-century central tower, which had collapsed in 1407, was rebuilt, thereby bringing the Minster to more or less its present state. Nothing else in the Minster can match the magnificence of the stained glass in the nave and transepts. The West Window (1338) contains distinctive heart-shaped upper tracery (the "Heart of Yorkshire"), whilst in the nave's north aisle, the second bay window (1155) contains slivers of the oldest stained glass in the country. The north transept's Five Sisters Window is named after the five fifty-foot lancets, each glazed with thirteenth-century grisaille , a distinctive frosted, silvery-grey glass. Opposite, the south transept contains a sixteenth-century, 17,000-piece Rose Window , commemorating the 1486 marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, an alliance which marked the end of the Wars of the Roses. The greatest of the church's 128 windows, however, is the majestic East Window (1405), at 78ft by 31ft the world's largest area of medieval stained glass in a single window. Its themes are the beginning and the end of the world, the upper panels showing scenes from the Old Testament, the lower sections mainly episodes from the book of Revelation. Before leaving the main body of the interior, give some time to the north transept's 400-year-old wooden clock with its oak knights, and the stone choir screen , decorated with life-size figures of English monarchs from William I to Henry VI - all except the latter carved in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The painted stone shields round much of the nave and choir are those of Edward II and the barons who in 1309-10 held a "parliament" in York. Amongst the many tombs , those of most interest are the monument in the south transept to Walter de Grey, a beautiful grey-green canopy protecting a recumbent stone figure, and the tomb of the 10-year-old William, second son of Edward III, in the choir aisle. The foundations, or undercroft (GBP3), have been turned into a museum, fitted into a space excavated during restorations in the 1960s. Amongst precious church relics in the adjoining treasury are silver plate found in Walter de Grey's tomb and the eleventh-century Horn of Ulf, presented to the Minster by a relative of the tide-turning King Canute. There's also access from the undercroft to the crypt , the spot that transmits the most powerful sense of antiquity, as it contains portions of Archbishop Roger's choir and sections of the 1080 church, including pillars with fine Romanesque capitals. Access to the undercroft, treasury and crypt is from the south transept, also the entrance to the central tower (GBP3), which you can climb for rooftop views over the city. Finally pop into the Chapter House (GBP1), an architectural novelty whose buttressed octagonal walls remove the need for a central pillar, otherwise a common feature of this type of building.
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