Qualla: Lincoln Cathedral Library

Lincoln Cathedral Library: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Lincoln Cathedral Library: What the Dean brought home

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 cloiste...

Lincoln Cathedral Library: Wren's quieter library

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 arch...

Lincoln Cathedral Library: The manuscripts on the shelves

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Lincoln Cathedral Library: Before Wren, a chained library

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 tha...

Lincoln Cathedral Library: Closed for the ceiling

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ser...