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Archenfield Archaeology Ltd for the |
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Hereford Cathedral |
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The word ‘cathedral’ is in fact an adjective rather than a noun. A ‘cathedra’ is a bishop’s throne and a cathedral church is a church which houses a bishop’s throne and is thus the chief church of a diocese. This church is the cathedral church of St Mary the Virgin and St Ethelbert the King. Although there is much popular confusion a cathedral as an institution is entirely separate from any civil authority and the possession of a cathedral does not turn a town into a ‘city’. Hereford is a city because a royal charter makes it so. |
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As an institution, the Bishopric of Hereford is older than the kingdom of England although its origins are extremely obscure. The earliest English reference to either Hereford or its bishop is in 801 when Wulfheard, Bishop of Hereford, made a written profession of obedience to the Archbishop Æthelheard of Canterbury. Traditionally the see of Hereford dates from about 676 when Putta was appointed its first bishop but many modern scholars doubt if Putta was really was a bishop in this area. |
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Hereford Cathedral from Aylestone Hill in the early 19th century. By this time it had lost its spire but still dominates the town, as it does to the present day. |
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In the late 7th century the present county of Hereford was divided between the Western Hecana, an ‘English’ (really just Germanic) people in the north and the ‘Welsh’ (really British) kingdom of Ergyng in the south. Ergyng had possessed its own bishopric for many years as the native British had been Christian since the late Roman period. Merewalh, The king of the Western Hecana, was converted to Christianity in the mid 7th century and some time afterwards a bishop was appointed to minister to these people. Although there are still some who dispute this it is virtually certain that the original seat of the bishopric was not at Hereford, which may still have been in the territory of Ergyng. In about 1173 the then Bishop of London and former Bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot, wrote a letter to one of his successors at Hereford. In this, he asked for the rights of the church of Lideberi should be confirmed because of the seat of the bishopric which it once held and the bodies of the holy bishops which lay there. This letter has often been dismissed, but it is difficult to understand why Foliot would have been mistaken about the original location of the seat. Lideberi itself has two obvious possible locations, Lydbury North in Shropshire and Ledbury in Herefordshire, although some believe that a more likely site of the bishop’s seat would have been Leominster. However the site of the Cathedral was certainly at Hereford by the end of the 8th century where it may well have been placed by the great Offa, king of Mercia |
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Hereford Cathedral and Bishop's Palace in July 2006 |
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Ordinarily in this period a cathedral would have been the only church in a town and its graveyard would have served for the burials of its community. In Hereford however a burial ground had already been established on what would later be the site of the monastery St Guthlac, then Hereford Castle and is now the Castle Green. It is likely that this was the site of a British (the English now say ‘Welsh’) church pre dating the loss of this area to Mercia sometime in the 8th century. |
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The cathedral and palace from the river in 1795, by James Wathen |
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By the early 11th century the cathedral was the pre-eminent church in the area. The original cathedral was presumably built of wood. In 1012 Æthelstan became bishop is and rebuilt it in stone - but disaster was about to strike. In 1055 Gruffydd ap Llewellyn, King of Gwynedd and Powys, led a Welsh army towards Hereford. With him was Aelfgar, the outlawed Earl of East Anglia and son of Leofric, Earl of Mercia and Godifu ‘Lady Godiva’. Aelfgar led a force of eighteen ships companies of Vikings that he had recruited in Ireland. Ralph, Earl of Hereford, led his force of Normans and English to meet them. In the battle that followed Ralph was decisively beaten and the Welsh, with their Viking allies entered and burnt the town of Hereford. The cathedral was attacked and several canons were killed defending it. It was looted, its records burnt and its treasures taken away by Gruffydd who, the Welsh annals record ‘returned home in triumph and laden with booty’. The English were less happy ‘They burned the town and the great mynstre, which the venerable Bishop Æthelstan had before caused to be built, that they plundered and bereaved of relics and of vestments and of all things and slew the folk and led some away.’ The elderly Bishop Æthelstan died the following year, a broken man. He was succeeded by Bishop Leofgar who decided to get revenge on Gruffydd. Leading an army of mainly Hereford men Leofgar moved up the Wye Valley into Wales. On 16th June 1056 he found Gruffydd near Glasbury-on-Wye. In the action which followed Leofgar, the Sheriff of Hereford, priests, and the leading citizens of Hereford were killed. |
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Hereford in 1055 in this image by local artist Enok Sweetland. The cathedral is just left of centre. Earl Ralph and his English have been defeated in battle and King Gryffydd has stormed Hereford. Smoke is starting to rise from the town. |
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After the Norman Conquest the cathedral was re-built again. This new cathedral had not been completed when the civil war between Stephen and Matilda broke out but Matilda’s supporters turned it into a fortress. They stabled their horses in the nave and mounted catapults on the tower to attack Stephens’s men who were holding the nearby castle. Siegework trenches were dug through the town’s graveyard and the site of their long- and recently buried kinsfolk’s bodies being tossed up onto earthen ramparts outraged Herefordians. The south transept dates from this period. By the late 12th century the Cathedral had become one of England’s great centres of learning where grammar, logic, rhetoric, (the trivium) and arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy (the quadrivium) could be studied. Apart from these ‘liberal arts’, other subjects were canon and civil law, theology, astrology and geomancy. (Geomancy was originally divination by casting a handful of soil upon a surface, later the study of patterns made by random dots made on a page.) The Bishop of Hereford from 1186 to 1199, William de Vere, was a scholar who encouraged the new scientific knowledge coming from the Arabic world. Roger Infans – Roger of Hereford - adapted Arabic astronomical tables for the meridian of Hereford in 1178 and among his other books was Iudicia Astronomie, a book on astrology. The cathedral was gradually enlarged and enhanced and, not being a monastic foundation, its institutions survived the reformation unscathed. Some damage was done to its statuary in the 17th century civil war but the most dramatic event was the collapse of the west front in the 18th century. Following this the spire was judged to be unsafe and was demolished and the nave shortened by one bay. The newest building in the cathedral is the award-winning New Library Building completed in 1996. This houses two of the most important medieval treasures in Britain, the Mappa Mundi and the cathedral’s chained library. |
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The Mappa Mundi building and the Bishop's Palace gatehouse |
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maintained by Archenfield Archaeology Ltd |
