FORTUNES IN WINDOWS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 654, 4 May 1929, Page 2

FORTUNES IN WINDOWS

YORK MINSTER GLASS MARVELLOUS RESTORATIONS In the workshops of York Minster one of the most remarkable tasks of restoration ever accomplished is drawing slowly to an end. Twenty-two years ago (writes a correspondent of the London “Daily Mail”) craftsmen began to remote from the minster Its priceless treasures of stained glass, which had become dimmed and the lead settings of which had become dangerously disintegrated. Not only was the lead in many of the windows so worn and broken as to give scarcely any support to the glass, but much of the glass was found to be, as it were, etherealised by ege to the thinness of butter-paper. In 109 windows York Minster possesses more than half of the total quantity of mediaeval glass in this

country. It is of the 12th, 13th 14th and l»t® centuries, and basing its worth on prices for mediaeval glass obtained in the United States recently, its value has been estimated to be no less tba 1 £70,000,000. 4 Up to the present 92 out of the I** windows have been restored and replaced at a cost of £35,000. The five lancet windows, the fines of their kind in the world, in the north transept, known as the Five were restored at a cost of more than £3,000 as a memorial to the women who gave their lives in the Great «arThey were filled with 13th-century glass and were releaded with , tury lead, which once covered the too of Rievaulx Abbey, near Helmsley. Yorkshire.