Chapel Of The Hospital Of St Mary Magdalene

The Chapel of St Mary Magdalen in Ripon, North Yorkshire, is a rare and precious survival — a medieval leper-hospital chapel, one of very few of its kind left anywhere in England, and the only structure connected with Ripon's medieval hospitals still standing. An active Anglican church on Magdalens Road, a short distance north-east of Ripon Cathedral, to whose benefice it belongs, it was founded in the twelfth century to serve the sick and the outcast, and after centuries of changing fortunes it remains a place of worship to this day. It is listed at Grade I for its exceptional historical and architectural importance.

The chapel owes its origins to Archbishop Thurstan of York, who is said to have founded the Hospital of St Mary Magdalen here between about 1115 and 1139, with the chapel dating from the same period. According to evidence given at inquisitions in the early fourteenth century, Thurstan intended the hospital as a leprosarium, to care for all lepers born within the Liberty of Ripon. Leper hospitals were traditionally dedicated to St Mary Magdalen, who was seen as an outcast welcomed by Christ, and were usually set apart from the town; the chapel's relatively remote position, away from the cathedral and close to the River Ure, reflects this function. In an age when perhaps three hundred leper hospitals were built across the country, Ripon's is one of the few to survive, making it of great importance to historians and archaeologists. As leprosy declined, the hospital came to serve blind clergy, and later still a community of brethren under a master.

The little chapel is a simple oblong, without tower, aisles, porch or vestry, with a single buttress and a bellcote above the west door, where the leper-house once adjoined it. Although much of the present fabric dates from a fifteenth-century rebuilding in hammer-dressed limestone, the west end is original twelfth-century work, in a mixture of Norman and Early English styles, while the east end was rebuilt after a devastating Scottish raid in 1321. Beneath the altar is a tessellated floor thought to have come, in part, from a Roman building, for similar designs have been found in Roman excavations in the area. The east windows are Perpendicular, and in the north wall is a small window believed to have been a "lychnoscope", through which those outside could watch the Mass. The chapel's Norman font survives too, having been recovered after a spell of use as a water trough.

After the Reformation, which spared many of Ripon's religious houses, the chapel and hospital passed into the care of the cathedral, the Canon — and later the Dean — of Ripon serving as its master; one notable master was Marmaduke Bradley, the last abbot of nearby Fountains Abbey. By the nineteenth century, however, the chapel had fallen into disuse and decay, even being used at one time as a pig-sty, and a replacement chapel was built opposite in the 1860s. The old chapel was restored in 1917, and again, more thoroughly, between 1985 and 1990, after which it was rededicated in 1989. Archaeological investigations during that work uncovered several skeletons — none, interestingly, showing signs of leprosy — buried in the era when the hospital cared for lepers.

The chapel is the subject of one of Ripon's best-loved tales, recorded by the antiquarian Sabine Baring-Gould in his Yorkshire Oddities. It is said that, at a time when the chapel was little used, a dean with a fondness for port, being short of funds, secretly sold the chapel's bell; when the indignant parishioners demanded its return, he produced a bell — which turned out to be made of wood and painted to look like metal, the original having gone to the foundry to fund the dean's drinking. To this day the chapel keeps a wooden bell.

Today the Chapel of St Mary Magdalen continues as a place of regular worship, its priest also serving the chapel of St John the Baptist in Bondgate, another former medieval hospital chapel in the city, and it is also used as a venue for events such as the Ripon Poetry Festival. After some nine centuries it remains a living link to the charity and faith of medieval Ripon.

The chapel stands on Magdalens Road, on the north-eastern side of the cathedral city of Ripon, in North Yorkshire. Ripon Cathedral, one of the oldest Christian sites in England with its Anglo-Saxon crypt, the city's market square with its ancient Hornblower tradition, the River Ure, the spectacular ruins of Fountains Abbey and the water gardens of Studley Royal nearby, and the wider countryside of the Yorkshire Dales are all within easy reach.

From its founding by Archbishop Thurstan in the twelfth century as a chapel for the lepers of Ripon, through its rebuilding after the Scottish raids, its survival of the Reformation and its long decline and restoration, to its life today as a place of worship, the Chapel of St Mary Magdalen gathers more than eight centuries of the history of Ripon into one small building. A Grade I listed medieval hospital chapel — the last of its kind in the city — it remains one of the most remarkable and moving churches in Yorkshire.