Sens: One of the First Gothic Cathedrals and Thomas Becket's Refuge

Required Activities

• Walk the nave looking for what the anonymous master of Sens did first in any cathedral: rib vaults overhead, flying buttresses outside, and the alternation of strong and weak piers down the arcade — all of it under a vault only 24.4 m up, nine metres lower than Notre-Dame de Paris

• Find Martin Chambiges's Moses portal on the south transept front and work out where his flamboyant work of the 1490s meets the abandoned 14th-century base beneath it, then stand under the two rose windows, each 11 m across, above glazing 18 m tall

• Track Becket through Sens: the famous 13th-century window in the north ambulatory of the choir that commemorates his arrival, his statue under one of the Romanesque blind arcades on the same north side, and the plaque at the corner of the rue de Brennus and the place Drapés marking where the house he lived in stood

• At the synodal palace, find the great synod hall under its six rib vaults, count the six twin windows on the parvis front, look up at the patterned painted tile roof with its crenellations and four low corner towers, and pick out the gargoyles carved as avarice and lust

• In the archbishop's chapel, where the cathedral treasury is shown, find the two altar frontals — the Coronation of the Virgin and the Adoration of the Magi — and the royal mantle embroidered with fleurs-de-lys and trimmed with ermine, made for the funeral offices of the Dauphin Louis and Marie-Josèphe de Saxe