All Hallows

Dean of the Cathedral Church of St Ælfwine

Careful, dry, and unwilling to be hurried; he will grant that a thing is unexplained and decline to call it more than that.

Wants: Keep the fabric sound, the services said, and the chapter's business out of the county papers.

Fellow of St Chad's, visiting the muniments

Curious past the point of prudence, pleased by a hard hand in a cartulary, and privately certain that nothing he reads can reach him.

Wants: Trace the abbey's lost cartulary through the chapter deeds before the Long Vacation ends.

Head Verger

Walks the building rather than trusts the doors, and keeps his opinions in a notebook he shows to nobody.

Wants: Have every door in his charge shut at ten and shut at six, as they were left.

Sacrist and Keeper of the Bells

Slow, exact, and easier with the fabric than with people; he counts things twice as a matter of course.

Wants: Get the tenor rehung before the frost and stop the ringers going up alone.

Canon Librarian

Proprietorial about his books and evasive about the fourteen entries struck out of the catalogue.

Wants: Recover what was taken from the library in 1804 without admitting anything was taken.

Precentor

Rules the quire by the second and is unnerved by any sound in the building he cannot assign to a cause.

Wants: Keep the choir foundation from being cut at the next chapter meeting.

Diocesan Architect

Restless, fond of ladders, and inclined to open up a blocked arch first and consult the chapter afterwards.

Wants: Survey the undercroft to the far end and prove the fall of masonry is nothing structural.

Secretary to the County Antiquarian Society

Amiable, indefatigable, and in the habit of reading other men's papers aloud to a room before the author has finished with them.

Wants: Get the crypt written up for the Society's Transactions before Michaelmas.

Abbot of the Old Foundation, disturbed in 1874

Patient in the way a man is who has waited four centuries, and exact about what was owed him and by whom.

Wants: Have the lid set back straight and the plate read into the record, in that order.

Anchoress, enclosed in 1503

Attentive to everything that passes the altar and indifferent to everything that does not; she was read the burial office while living and has taken it literally.

Wants: Be given back her sight of the altar, which the new reredos has cut off at the corner.

That which sounds at sixty-one feet and at ninety

Keeps to the shaft and to the wet courses of the walls, and comes up only as far as the ring.

Wants: Be let the length of the rope, which has twice been shortened.

That which was shut in during the week after the faculty

Works at one line of mortar at a time and has all the patience the work requires.

Wants: Have the three loose bricks out, which is a matter of time and not of strength.

Prebendary of Bishopsthorpe, obit. 1698

Keeps his office to the minute, empty church or full, and waits out an interruption rather than answer it.

Wants: Have the chantry money restored, which was diverted in his own lifetime.

Chantry Priest of the Niche, suppressed 1547

Aggrieved, precise about the terms of his endowment, and disinclined to blame the man who ended it.

Wants: Say the one mass he was paid in perpetuity to say, and be done.

The Drowned Ringer

Goes at things in a rush, as he did when the rope parted, and cannot now stop himself at the same point each time.

Wants: Get his name back onto the peal board it was painted out of.

He who meets the bearers at the third resting stone

Travels the old way at the bearers' pace and will not be overtaken or spoken past.

Wants: Bring a burden to the lych-gate that was set down short of it in 1802.