Candles in Ripon Minster

The candle-lighting of Candlemas lingered in some northern churches long after the Reformation. A correspondent of the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1790 remembered staying at Ripon and seeing the collegiate church lit up with an immense number of candles all afternoon on the Sunday before Candlemas. At Durham in 1628 the Puritan prebendary Peter Smart complained that John Cosin had spent two hours on ladders on Candlemas Day setting up two hundred and twenty candles and sixteen torches in the cathedral.