York Minster is the cathedral of York, England, the seat of the Church of England's Archbishopric of York, and the second-largest Gothic cathedral of northern Europe. A Christian Bishop of York had been invited to the Council of Arles in 314 AD, and, in 627, the Christians hurriedly built a church in York to provide a place to baptise King Edwin of Northumbria. A stone structure was completed in 637 by King Oswald of Northumbria, but it was destroyed in a fire in 741 and rebuilt with 30 altars. The church was damaged during William the Conqueror's Harrying of the North in 1069, but it was repaired by Thomas of Bayeux in 1070. The Danes destroyed the church in 1075, but it was again rebuilt by the Normans in 1080. From 1405 to 1472, the church was converted into a cathedral, but much of the cathedral's treasures were looted during the English Reformation. Under Queen Elizabeth I of England, all traces of the cathedral's earlier Roman Catholicism were erased through the destruction of tombs, windows, and altars. The church suffered from several fires and was repaired several times throughout the 19th century, and a devastating fire in 1984 took four years to repair.
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