There are only two surviving libraries designed by Sir Christopher Wren. One is at Trinity College, Cambridge, and is famous. The other sits above the north cloister of Lincoln Cathedral, holds 260 medieval manuscripts, a Roman mosaic, and one of just 250 known fifteenth-century copies of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales — and most visitors to Lincoln never realise it is there. The librarian who built it, Dean Michael Honywood, paid £780 of his own money in 1674 to put up a building for the books he had collected during fourteen years of religious exile. The Parliamentarians had ruined the cathedral during the Civil War. Honywood wanted somewhere safe to put what he loved.
Michael Honywood was made Dean of Lincoln in 1660, the year Charles II returned to the throne. He arrived to find a cathedral whose fabric had been mauled by Parliamentary soldiers during the siege and storming of 1644: stained glass smashed, fittings looted, the medieval cloisters partly ruined. Repairs took him fourteen years. Only in 1674 could he turn to his cherished private project — a new library building, paid from his own pocket, to house the five thousand books he had accumulated during his years in exile in the Netherlands. Among them was a manuscript copy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, one of only about 250 in the world. He bequeathed the whole collection to the Dean and Chapter, and they are still in the building he built for them, on the shelves he ordered.
Honywood commissioned the design from Christopher Wren himself, who was busy at the time rebuilding much of London after the Great Fire. A surviving page in the cathedral's collections, signed by Wren, sets out prices for painting and gilding — proof that he was not only the architect but the active site supervisor. The exterior is a serene Tuscan Doric colonnade, classical and restrained. The interior, by contrast, is full of Baroque tricks: advancing and receding planes, a cornice that plays with depth, and trompe-l'œil marbling painted directly onto the woodwork. When conservators stripped back the later overpaint, they found patches of the original marbling intact; where they could not safely uncover it, they painted reproduction marbling over the top. The room is long and narrow, and the architectural games are there to make it feel grander than its proportions allow. They work.
Beyond the Honywood collection sit older treasures. The Lincoln Chapter Bible was commissioned in the late eleventh century by Nicholas, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, for the newly built Norman cathedral. The fifteenth-century Lincoln Thornton Manuscript contains the earliest written account of the death of King Arthur — the source Sir Thomas Malory drew on for Le Morte d'Arthur. There are 120 incunabula, books printed before 1500, and a pocket-sized illuminated Book of Hours that a medieval merchant could carry in a sleeve. Most surprising, perhaps, is the Algonquian Bible — Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God — the first Bible printed anywhere in the Americas, in 1663, translated by the Puritan missionary John Eliot into the Massachusett language of the indigenous people of what is now eastern Massachusetts. How a copy ended up in Lincoln is a story in itself, a thread running from Wampanoag country to a Wren library above a medieval English cloister.
Wren's was not Lincoln Cathedral's first library. By 1422 the canons had built a chained library above the east walk of the cloister, adjoining the Chapter House, sized for about a hundred manuscripts — enough for the cathedral's working collection. Books were valuable enough that they were physically attached to the reading desks. Three of those medieval desks and one of the original benches survive in the Mediaeval Library, which is still part of the cathedral's holdings. To stand there is to feel the change of scale that Honywood's bequest forced: a medieval cathedral library was a few dozen volumes for the clergy; an early modern one was a private collection of thousands, donated whole, and required a new building. Under the staircase up to the Wren room is a Roman mosaic uncovered in the cloister in 1793, a reminder that Lincoln was a Roman city before it was a Christian one.
The Wren Library is currently closed to the public for extensive repairs to its ceiling. The cathedral has been running a fundraising campaign to finance the work; the building is over three hundred and fifty years old, and the long narrow room with its trompe-l'œil sky needs serious attention. When it reopens, the manuscripts will still be there, still in Wren's shelves, still beneath the cornice he priced out himself. The Roman mosaic will still be under the stairs. The Algonquian Bible will still be on its shelf, an indigenous American language printed in seventeenth-century Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a shelf built by an English exile in seventeenth-century Lincoln.
Located at 53.235°N, 0.536°W, in the cathedral close on the north side of Lincoln Cathedral. The cathedral itself is the dominant landmark of central Lincoln — visible for tens of miles across the Trent valley from any direction. The library building is the long classical colonnade running east-west above the north cloister. Nearest airfield is RAF Waddington (EGXW), 5 miles south; Humberside (EGNJ) 30 miles north handles light civilian traffic. The library is closed for ceiling restoration; check the cathedral website before planning a visit.