The Lincoln Imp: Stone Devil of the Angel Choir
High in the Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral, in the holiest and most elaborately decorated part of one of England's greatest medieval buildings, there sits a devil. He is about twelve inches tall, carved from the same oolitic limestone as the cathedral walls around him, and he has been there since approximately 1280. He perches cross-legged between two arches on the north side of the choir, one leg resting casually across the other, his expression caught somewhere between defiance and amusement, as if he has just said something he cannot take back and has decided he does not want to. For seven hundred years, pilgrims, tourists, schoolchildren, and scholars have looked up at him from below, and for most of that time the story of how he came to be there was considerably more ambiguous than the version the gift shop would have you believe.
The Cathedral That Needed a Devil
Lincoln Cathedral is not a modest building. Construction began in 1072 under the Norman bishop Remigius de Fécamp, and the structure was rebuilt and expanded repeatedly over the following centuries following earthquake damage in 1185 and the ambitions of successive bishops who each wanted to leave the building more imposing than they found it. The Angel Choir, the section where the Imp now sits, was built between 1250 and 1280 under the supervision of Simon of Thirsk, constructed in part to house a shrine to Hugh of Avalon, a twelfth-century bishop who had been canonised as Great St Hugh. Hugh's tomb still sits in the Angel Choir today, directly beneath the gaze of the carved figure that would eventually become the most famous piece of stonework in Lincolnshire.
The choir takes its name from the carved angels that line its triforium, thirty sculpted figures that represent one of the finest surviving examples of thirteenth-century English stone carving. The choice to place a grotesque devil figure in this same space, the most sacred and ceremonially significant part of the building, is an arrangement that has puzzled scholars for as long as anyone has thought to ask about it. One theory holds that the architects placed the demonic figure deliberately, positioned so that it would look down over the left shoulder of pilgrims as they knelt at St Hugh's shrine, a carved embodiment of the evil presence that the saint's intercession was supposed to hold at bay. Another, simpler reading is that grotesque figures were simply what thirteenth-century stonemasons carved when given a corner to fill and some latitude in the subject matter, and that the theological interpretation came later.
What is not in dispute is the carving itself, its date, its location, and its appearance. The figure is cross-legged, with a right leg folded over the left. One hand rests on an ankle. The face bears the hybrid characteristics typical of medieval grotesque work, part human, part animal, with features that suggest the demonic type common across ecclesiastical architecture of the period. The imp is carved from Lincolnshire limestone and shows the incised detailing and surface modelling consistent with the skills of thirteenth-century cathedral workshops. He has been sitting in that cleft between the arches since before the Black Death, before the Wars of the Roses, before the Reformation stripped the cathedral of most of its other decorative figures. He survived all of it, which is itself something worth noting.
What a Devil Is Doing in a Cathedral
The Lincoln Imp is frequently described as unique, but this is not quite accurate. Grotesque figures, gargoyles, demons, and hybrid creatures were standard decorative vocabulary in medieval church architecture, appearing across England and continental Europe with a frequency that can seem surprising to modern sensibilities trained to associate churches with angels and saints rather than leering monsters. Westminster Abbey contains a devil carrying away a monk. Southwell Minster has its own cast of fantastic carved creatures. Norwich Cathedral is populated with medieval carvings of considerable strangeness. The Green Man, that half-human, half-foliate figure whose pagan connotations are obvious, appears in hundreds of English churches without anyone having attached a specific legend to him.
The word imp itself is worth examining. As Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud note in A Dictionary of English Folklore (2000), the term originally combined the meanings of child and small devil, a dual connotation that accurately describes the Lincoln carving's physical character. The Old English root impa meant offshoot or young shoot, and the word did not settle into its specifically demonic meaning until the Early Modern period. In medieval ecclesiastical art, figures of this type were understood more broadly as representations of evil forces, the demonic counterpart to the angels that populated the upper registers of the same buildings. Positioning them in sacred spaces was not a contradiction but a statement: the forces of darkness exist, they press against the walls of the holy, and they are held there by the power of God and the saints.
There is also an older tradition, recorded in English proverbs as early as the mid-sixteenth century, of a specific devilish figure associated with Lincoln. The proverb he looks as the devil over Lincoln described a malignant or envious expression, and was linked to stone carvings of devils or demonic figures visible on or around the cathedral. This tradition is distinct from the Imp legend as it is now told, but it establishes that the association between Lincoln Cathedral and a resident devil was well established in folk speech several centuries before the modern legend took its current form.
The Ballad, the Legend, and the Victorian Invention
Here is where the story becomes genuinely interesting from a folklorist's perspective. The Lincoln Imp as a carved figure has existed since around 1280. The Lincoln Imp as a narrative legend, the one involving the Devil sending imps to Earth, the mischief at Chesterfield, the chaos in the cathedral, the angel's intervention, and the petrification, is a considerably more recent creation. The earliest documented written version of anything resembling the modern legend appears in a pamphlet published in 1897 by a writer using the name Arnold Frost, whose real name was G. T. Hemsley. His work, The Ballad of the Wind, the Devil and Lincoln Minster, contains the first printed version to clearly identify the stone figure as a real imp turned to stone by divine intervention.
An earlier piece by a writer also using the name Arnold Frost, dating to the 1880s, had already established a related tradition involving the wind and the Devil visiting Lincoln, drawing on a long-standing local joke about the perpetual wind around the cathedral. The wind element of Lincoln folklore predates the Imp legend by several decades, and appears to have been gradually absorbed into it. By 1897, Frost had fused the wind tradition, the stone figure, and the petrification motif into the coherent narrative that, with variations, is still told today. The first mention of the Imp carving in print without any accompanying legend was in 1869, by Richard John King, who described it as an elf with large ears that might illustrate medieval folklore, a description that is rather more cautious and accurate than anything the souvenir industry would later produce.
The transformation of a peculiar stone carving into a city-wide cultural phenomenon required one more ingredient beyond Frost's ballad, and that ingredient was commerce. In 1890, a Lincoln jeweller and watchmaker named James Ward Usher obtained a Registered Patent design for the Lincoln Imp, giving James Usher and Son the legal monopoly on producing jewellery and decorative items bearing the figure's likeness. Usher's range included brooches set with precious stones, cufflinks, tie pins, spoons, and thimbles. The jewellery was fashionable enough that the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, was seen wearing an Imp pin. Letters addressed simply to the jeweller who makes the Lincoln Imp reached Usher's shop on the High Street without difficulty, which gives some measure of how thoroughly the figure had embedded itself in the public imagination within a decade of its commercial promotion.
The Legend in Its Modern Form
The version of the Lincoln Imp story that most people now know runs approximately as follows. On a day when the Devil was feeling playful, he dispatched two young imps to Earth with instructions to cause as much mischief as they could manage. The pair made their way south and west through England, pausing at Chesterfield in Derbyshire long enough to twist the spire of St Mary and All Saints Church into its famous crooked shape, a piece of shared folklore between the two towns that each party tells with some satisfaction at the other's expense. The imps then continued to Lincoln, where the cathedral caught their attention.
On entering the building, the bolder of the two set about his work with considerable enthusiasm. He tripped the Lord Bishop, knocked over the Dean, tormented the vergers and choir, and began smashing the stained glass windows. When an angel appeared and commanded him to stop, the imp's response was characteristically defiant: Stop me if you can. The angel did exactly that, turning the imp to stone in the moment of his defiance, where he has sat ever since in the Angel Choir, frozen mid-taunt in a cleft between the arches. The second imp's fate varies by telling. In some versions he escaped and can still be heard in the wind that perpetually scours the cathedral exterior. In another tradition, the second imp rested on the back of a witch outside the building and both were turned to stone, the heavily weathered exterior imp carving on the south side of the cathedral sometimes cited as evidence of this variant. A more recent version sends the second imp to Grimsby, where the Grimsby Minster has its own differently styled imp carving.
The Chesterfield connection deserves its own attention. St Mary and All Saints Church in Chesterfield does indeed have a famously twisted and warped spire, a genuine architectural anomaly caused by the use of unseasoned timber in its construction during the fourteenth century, combined with the differential drying effects of the sun on its lead covering. The local legend attributing the twist to a visiting imp has no independent documentation, and appears to be a piece of shared storytelling between two towns that found the mutual joke convenient. Chesterfield and Lincoln both claim the imp story with a degree of ownership, and the spire's real history is considerably less diabolical than either would prefer.
The Imp Becomes a Symbol
Once Usher's patent expired, the commercial use of the Lincoln Imp expanded rapidly. By the early twentieth century, the figure was appearing on Goss china, brass toasting forks, bells, door knockers, and a proliferating range of souvenir goods of steadily decreasing quality and increasing availability. The Lincoln Motor Company in the United States, whose cars shared no other connection with the English city, briefly attached Imp mascots to their bonnets. Wealthy Lincoln industrialist Alfred Shuttleworth was said to present female dinner guests with jewelled Imp brooches concealed under the lids of their soup dishes, which is an eccentric enough social practice to warrant recording.
The Imp became the formal emblem of Lincoln City Football Club, whose teams are known as the Red Imps, a nickname that has persisted through the club's various fortunes across the English football leagues. Lincolnshire County Council adopted a stylised dancing version of the Imp as its official logo, first in 1974 and updated in 2006. The figure appears in the insignia of No. 61 Squadron RAF. Lincoln College, Oxford, has its own Imp tradition, using the figure as the mascot of its boat club and as the name of its undergraduate newspaper, in reference to a separate proverb, to look on someone like the Imp looks over Lincoln, that circulated among Oxford students. In 2021, the city hosted the Lincoln Imp Trail, a public art installation featuring dozens of individually designed imp sculptures placed across the city.
What none of this commercial and civic adoption changes is the underlying archaeological fact: the carving itself, twelve inches of cross-legged limestone sitting high in the Angel Choir, predates all of it by six centuries. The legend grew up around the stone rather than the other way around. The devil was there first.
The Grotesque Tradition and What It Tells Us
To place the Lincoln Imp in its proper context is to understand something about how medieval people thought about the architecture of sacred space. The grotesque tradition in ecclesiastical building was not accidental or irreverent. It operated within a coherent theological framework in which evil was real, present, and required acknowledgement. Gargoyles served the practical function of water drainage, but their demonic forms were not incidental to their design. Hybrid creatures, devils, monsters, and impossible animals carved into the margins of sacred buildings occupied a symbolic boundary position, marking the threshold between the ordered divine interior and the chaotic natural world outside.
The Lincoln Imp occupies a more complex position than a typical gargoyle because he is inside the building, in the most sacred section, looking down over a saint's tomb. This inversion of the expected arrangement, the devil inside rather than outside, the monster in the sanctuary rather than on the threshold, is what has generated both the centuries of puzzlement and the legend that eventually filled the gap. People needed a story that explained why a devil was sitting in the holiest room of the cathedral, and the story they eventually settled on, that he was frozen there by an angel in the act of his own defiance, served that explanatory function neatly. It also happened to be good enough to sell jewellery.
Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud's observation that the word imp combines the meanings of child and small devil is worth returning to here, because it captures something essential about the figure's enduring appeal. The Lincoln Imp is not terrifying. He is not the Satan of Paradise Lost or the Devil of the crossroads bargain tradition. He is mischievous, petty, defiant, and ultimately powerless, a small creature that picked a fight with something vastly larger than itself and lost, and is now frozen in the permanent posture of the moment before he realised he had miscalculated. There is something almost sympathetic in that, which may be why Lincoln has adopted him with such consistent affection rather than the wary respect that more genuinely frightening folk figures tend to generate.
What Strange and Twisted Makes of the Lincoln Imp
What draws us to the Lincoln Imp is the gap between what it appears to be and what it actually is. It presents as a medieval legend, ancient and organically grown, rooted in the same soil as the cathedral that houses it. The reality is that the legend was substantially assembled in the 1880s and 1890s, written into existence by a poet using a pseudonym and then commercially amplified by a jeweller who recognised a business opportunity. The carving is genuinely medieval. The story wrapped around it is largely Victorian.
This gap is not a disappointment, or at least it should not be. It is instead a demonstration of something that the study of folklore reveals repeatedly: the boundary between ancient tradition and recent invention is almost never where people expect it to be. Legends grow around objects the way moss grows around stone, and the fact that this particular growth happened quickly and with commercial assistance does not make it less real as folklore. The Lincoln Imp story is now genuinely believed, genuinely told, and genuinely loved across Lincolnshire and beyond. Whatever its origins, it has done what legends are supposed to do, which is to give a place and its people a story about themselves that they want to keep telling.
The imp himself, meanwhile, continues to sit in the Angel Choir with his leg crossed and his expression unreadable, twelve inches of limestone that has outlasted every bishop, every jeweller, every football club relegation, and every version of the story told about him. He was there before the legend, and one suspects he will be there after it too.
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