Notas del episodio
In 1072 the Norman bishop Remigius de Fécamp moved his seat to Lincoln and raised a massive church to project Norman power over a diocese stretching from the Thames to the Humber. He finished it in 1092 but died on May 7, two days before its consecration. Fire destroyed the timber roof in 1124, and in 1185 an earthquake estimated at magnitude 5 or more split the building from top to bottom. Bishop Hugh of Burgundy, later Saint Hugh of Lincoln, began rebuilding in 1192 in the new Gothic style with pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses. Bishop Hugh of Wells signed Magna Carta in 1215, and in 1941 Britain's Foreign Office drafted a plan to give the cathedral's copy to the United States to help secure Lend-Lease.
The central tower collapsed in 1237, the chapter won permission from Henry III in 1255 to tear down part of the town wall, and between 1307 and 1311 a lead-covered timber spire rose to 525 feet, making the cathedral the tallest structure on Earth until a storm toppled it in 1548. In 1255 a boy's death became the Little Saint Hugh blood libel, leading to the hanging of 18 Jewish people, a lie the cathedral denounced on a plaque in 1955. In World War II, RAF pilot Billy Strachan nearly flew into the towers in fog, and treasures were hidden 60 feet underground. Today the cathedral uses more than 100 tons of limestone a year from its own quarry, and in 2022 scaffolding came off the West Front after 36 years.
- Why rigid Norman walls failed under the lateral shaking of the 1185 earthquake
- Geoffrey de Noiers' asymmetrical crazy vaults in Saint Hugh's Choir
- The Dean's Eye facing north against evil and the Bishop's Eye facing south toward the Holy Spirit
- The grinning Lincoln Imp in the Angel Choir, now the mascot of the whole city
- Soldiers of the Lincolnshire Regiment pumping the new Willis organ by hand in 1898 because the power station was not ready