The town and surrounding area benefited from this connection: the bishops secured a weekly market and four annual fairs for Howden before the 13th century.

This was the status quo until the English Reformation, when England's chantries and collegiate foundations were abolished and Howden lost its canons and their patronage.

Rebuilding of the church began almost immediately after collegiate status was achieved, and not under a bishop's patronage but that of one of the original canons, John of Howden, chaplain to Eleanor of Provence.

Probably after a break of several years, the nave was continued westward, the south porch built, and the structure completed with the construction of the west front from c. 1308.

The new choir was designed with aisles and a clerestory from the start, vaulted in stone and brick (unlike the earlier parts of the church), and given a bold and magnificent east front.

A chapter house was then begun off the south choir aisle, but only recommenced in 1380 after £10 was endowed by Henry de Snaith, canon of Howden, Lincoln, and Beverley.

The late 15th century saw the tower's upper stage added, and a grammar school was built off the south nave aisle c. 1500.

Both these patterns are taken directly from the recently built Angel Choir at Lincoln Cathedral; Nicola Coldstream writes that ‘the mason of Howden may well have introduced them to Yorkshire’.

[3] The break between Canon John's work and the next phase is easily discerned, as the tracery patterns change completely and the elements are no longer encircled.

The arms of Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham from 1308 to 1311, which appeared in stained glass of the northwest window suggest that the west front was constructed during those years under his patronage.

This is not disputed by the overall form of the west front, with four emphatic turrets and the tops of the aisle walls finished horizontally, a common northern type based on the east facades of Ely and Lincoln.

The tracery motifs used in the main façade are employed again on the octagonal openwork turrets, surmounted by crocketed spirelets, that crown the buttresses.

Blind arcades on the interior of the west front feature foliage carving similar to contemporary work at York Minster and Selby Abbey.

The new choir was planned from the outset with a two-storey elevation of arcade and high clerestory, with aisles and quadripartite vaulting, and with a square east end as was usual in England.

At six bays, it was to be as long as the nave, bringing the total length of the minster to 78 metres (255 feet) and making it one of the Riding's largest churches.

From the interior, the only commonality with the nave was the pattern for the piers, four filleted shafts separated by four concave hollows, though the capitals here were foliate.

The east fronts of the two churches are also similar, again following Lincoln's example, with built-up aisle walls and massive buttresses ending in emphatic turrets, as well as a large traceried window filling the gable to light the roof space.

But whereas Selby's east front is plain, with almost no surface decoration, Howden's is a spectacularly ornamented composition and powerfully effective even in a weathered state with the tracery, turrets, and gable cross destroyed and much detail missing.

The aisle windows have crocketed gables in thin relief, and their tracery is ‘convincingly reconstructed’ (Coldstream) by Sharpe as partially reticulated.

The entire façade is dominated by the great east window of seven lights, flanked by statue niches at its base on the exterior jambs and the interior embrasures.

These fantastical tracery patterns would go on to be employed and developed in a group of well-known Decorated churches in Lincolnshire: Heckington, Sleaford, and Algarkirk, as well as Hawton just over the border into Nottinghamshire.

It is surely no coincidence that the first use of brick for a major building project was in the transepts of Hull Minster, built from 1300 to 1320 only twenty-six miles east of Howden.

Only the substructure, however, was built during the Decorated period: there can be no doubt that the parts below window level, including the entry passage, the portal itself, and the interior seats predate 1350.

Everything above that level is Perpendicular, however, the work being recommenced in 1380 after a long intermission: in that year Henry de Snaith, canon of Howden, Lincoln, and Beverley, bequeathed £10 for the completion of the chapter house.

It is a ‘veritable stone cage’ (Pevsner), with immensely tall three-light double-transomed windows and the wall space reduced to the width of the buttresses.

The windows this time featured basket arches and single transoms, and the tower was topped off with an embattled parapet: a common motif in late medieval ecclesiastical architecture symbolising the secular authority of the church as well as its strength as a bastion against evil.

He had a reputation as a poet in Norman French and Latin, writing on religious and lyrical subjects, and had been clerk or confessor to Queen Eleanor of Provence, the wife of King Henry III.