The Lincoln Imp is a small carved stone figure, standing about a foot high and sitting cross-legged between two arches on the north side of the Angel Choir in Lincoln Cathedral, one of the most beloved pieces of medieval carving found anywhere in the building. The traditional story holds that the Devil once sent two imps out into the world specifically to cause trouble, and that one of them blew directly into Lincoln Cathedral, where it tripped up the bishop, tormented the choir during their own services, and started smashing windows before an angel finally intervened and told it to stop its mischief. When the imp refused to listen even then, it was turned to stone on the very spot where it stood, and there it has remained ever since, fixed permanently in the exact pose it held at the moment of its punishment.
The imp has become the city's own genuine unofficial mascot in the centuries since, lending its name to a popular statue trail scattered through the city, several public murals, and Lincoln City football club's own well-known nickname, the Imps, a small piece of medieval mischief transformed into a genuinely modern civic identity.
The tale of a sister imp who supposedly escaped Lincoln's own angel and went on to cause similar chaos in Grimsby, where it was likewise eventually petrified, is a genuinely separate and considerably more recent piece of local lore, attached specifically to a different carving found on Grimsby Minster rather than growing organically from the same original medieval tradition.
Comments