Qualla: Southwell Minster

Southwell Minster: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pepperpotman, CC BY-SA 4.0. The first thing you notice from any distance is the pyramid. Southwell Minster's twin western towers wear conical pyramid spires of the kind English masons gave up almost everywhere else, and from the rolling country east of Nottingham you can see them from miles away. The second thing you notice, only once you are inside the octagonal chapter house behind the choir, is the leaves. They are everywhere: maple, hawthorn, oak, vine, buttercup, ivy, hop. They climb the capitals and the bosses, they spiral around the doorways, they reach across the ribs of the vault. They were carved between about 1290 and 1300 by sculptors whose names no one recorded, and the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner wrote an entire short book about them in 1945. He called it simply The Leaves of Southwell.

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Image: Pepperpotman | CC BY-SA 4.0

Southwell Minster: From Wooden Church to Norman Cathedral

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Soloist at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Tradition holds that Paulinus, first Archbishop of York, founded a church here in 627 while baptising converts in the River Trent. Whether or not that legend captures something true, by 956 the site was important enough that King Eadwig granted land at Southwell to Oskytel, Archb...

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Image: Soloist at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Southwell Minster: The Chapter House and Its Leaves

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Southwell Minster Marketing, CC BY-SA 4.0. The original Norman chancel was square-ended and too small. The thirteenth century rebuilt it in the new Early English Gothic style between 1234 and 1251, and then in 1288 the Minster's masons added an octagonal chapter house off the north-east corner. The Leaves of Southwell, as...

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Image: Southwell Minster Marketing | CC BY-SA 4.0

Southwell Minster: Fire and the Surrendered King

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Redzac, CC BY 4.0. Southwell Minster has been damaged repeatedly and somehow always patched up. During the English Civil War, after the third siege of Newark, Charles I surrendered to a Scottish Presbyterian army camped at Southwell in May 1646. The Minster's nave was reportedly used to stable cava...

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Image: Redzac | CC BY 4.0

Southwell Minster: Cathedral by Statute

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pepperpotman, CC BY-SA 4.0. For most of its life Southwell was a collegiate church rather than a cathedral, governed by sixteen prebendaries who held estates around the diocese of York. In August 1540, Henry VIII proposed making it the seat of a new diocese for Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, but the scheme...

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Image: Pepperpotman | CC BY-SA 4.0