In the
next century it was burned, but rebuilt by another pious prince,
and probably repaired by yet another after the Danes took the
city a hundred years later. It was then in a good state to be
destroyed by that devout William the Conqueror, who came to take
the Saxon world in its sins of guttling and guzzling. The first
Norman archbishop reconstructed or restored the church, and then
it began to rise and to spread in glory--nave, transepts, and
choir, and pillars and towers, Norman and Early English, and
Perpendicular and Decorated--till it found itself at last what
the American tourist sees it to-day. It suffered from two great
fires in the nineteenth century, the first set by a lunatic who
had the fancy of seeing it burn, but who had only the
satisfaction of destroying part of the roof.
It was never richly painted, but the color wanting in the walls
and fretted vault was more than compensated by the mellowed
splendors of the matchless windows. It was, indeed, fit to be the
home of much more secular history than can be associated with it;
but not till the end of the thirteenth century had the Minster a
patron of its own, when St.
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