he Perpendicular work of the western towers everything is in
graceful proportion, and nothing from the ground to the top of the
turrets, jars with the wonderful dignity of their perfect lines.

A few years before the Norman Conquest a central tower and a presbytery
were added to the existing building by Archbishop Cynesige. The
'Frenchman's' influence was probably sufficiently felt at that time to
give this work the stamp of Norman ideas, and would have shown a marked
advance on the Romanesque style of the Saxon age, in which the other
portions of the buildings were put up. After that time we are in the
dark as to what happened until the year 1188, when a disaster took
place of which there is a record:

'In the year from the incarnation of Our Lord 1188, this church was
burnt, in the month of September, the night after the Feast of St.
Matthew the Apostle, and in the year 1197, the sixth of the ides of
March, there was an inquisition made for the relics of the blessed John
in this place, and these bones were found in the east part of his
sepulchre, and reposited; and dust mixed with mortar was found
likewise, and re-interred.'

This is a translation of the Latin inscription on a leaden plate
discovered in 1664, when a square stone vault in the church was opened
and found to be the grave of the canonized John of Beverley. The
picture history gives us of this remarkable man, although to a great
extent hazy with superstitious legend, yet shows him to have been one
of the greatest and noblest of the ecclesiastics who controlled the
Early Church in England. He founded the monastery at Beverley about the
year 700, on what appears to have been an isolated spot surrounded by
forest and swamp, and after holding the See of York for some twelve
years, he retired here for the rest of his life. When he died, in 721,
his memory became more and more sacred, and his powers of intercession
were constantly invoked. The splendid shrine provided for his relics in
1037 was encrusted with jewels and shone with the precious metals
employed. Like the tomb of William the Conqueror at Caen, it
disappeared long ago. After the collapse of the central tower to its very
foundations came the vast Early English reconstruction of everything
except the nave, which was possibly of pre-Conquest date, and survived
until the present Decorated successor took its place. Much discussion
has centred round certain semicircular arches at the back of the
trifor