oor of
the presbytery, and sometimes an incline stretching down to a window
that looked into the chamber below. Now the present entrance to this
crypt at Ripon is not original. To mention some of the evidences of
this, there are in the roof of the passage several tombstones (one at
the entrance and two beyond the bend) bearing incised crosses of the
thirteenth century, and 15 feet west of the doorway into the central
chamber there are signs that a cross-wall has been cut through. The only
part of the work, then, which is original is that which extends
eastwards of this point, and in Saxon times there was probably only one
entrance to the crypt, namely by the north passage; indeed, it seems
likely that the formation of an approach from the nave was
contemporaneous with the blocking of that passage, and that both
alterations were due to the incompatibility of the original disposition
of the crypt with the subsequent arrangements of the church above. Now
if that original disposition has been indicated correctly, the crypt
presented all the more important characteristics of a _confessio_. There
is the central chamber with a window looking into it (for this is the
probable explanation of the arched recess in the east wall),[65] and
there is the surrounding passage, which, however, is interrupted at the
south-west corner of the crypt in such a way that it is necessary to
pass through the chamber itself.[66] An excavation made in 1891[67]
failed to reveal any traces of a staircase at the east end of the south
passage, but as there are many instances in Italy of a _confessio_
without a second stair, this failure is of little importance. If, then,
this crypt may be assumed to be a _confessio_, there follows a very
interesting consequence. The fact that the surrounding passage was
entered from the east, that it runs round the west and not the east end
of the central chamber, and that the blocked window (if such it be) is
in the east wall of the latter, indicates that the nave lay to the
east,[68] in other words, that the presbytery was at the west end of the
church. Such a position for the high altar is ultra-Roman, was already
being discontinued in Wilfrid's day, and had probably never been seen in
the north, unless here and at Hexham; all of which considerations, in
the light of the known bias and character of Wilfrid, are in favour of
the theory above propounded.[69] It is impossible to say with certainty
whether Wilfrid's pres