History of the Cathedral Church of Wells

Now we come at once to the question, why was Wells chosen to be the seat of the Bishoprick? I think you will easily see that there is not now, nor was there then, any diocese in England where the Bishop was more thoroughly driven to be the Bishop of the whole diocese and not merely the Bishop of one city. Somersetshire had not then, and it has not now, any one town at once larger than any of its neighbours and placed conveniently in the middle of the shire. Then, as now, the two greatest towns in the shire must have been the old Roman city of Bath at one end and the purely English town of Taunton at the other. Taunton was founded by King Ine between 710 and 722 as a border fortress against the Welsh, after he had carried the English frontier as far west as the boundary of Somersetshire goes now.7 Neither of these places was well suited to be the centre of the diocese. Bridgewater, which is more central, was not built till some ages later. Glastonbury, which is more central still, could not well be made the Bishoprick, because it was the seat of the greatest monastery of the West. Also Glastonbury was in those days a singularly inaccessible place. It stood on an island, and could be reached only by boats; so that unless the Bishop was to be altogether a hermit, he would have been a good deal out of place there. Some Bishops had fixed their sees in places of this kind, but it is clear that such an arrangement was in every way inconvenient, and so wise a King as Eadward the Elder was not likely to sanction it. And we may be sure that the monks of Glastonbury would be then, as they were long after, altogether set against having the Bishop for their chief instead of an Abbot of their own. I conceive that Wells was chosen, because at Wells there was already a body of secular priests attached to the church of Saint Andrew.

The whole history of Wells before the time of Eadward the Elder is excessively obscure, and much of it is undoubtedly fabulous. There is a story about King Ine planting a Bishoprick at Congresbury, which was presently moved to Wells, and a list of Bishops is given between Ine and Eadward. There is also a document which professes to be a charter of King Cynewulf in 766, which does not speak of any Bishop at Wells, but which implies the existence of an ecclesiastical establishment of some kind. But unluckily the Congresbury story rests on no good authority, and the charter of Cynewulf is undoubtedly spurious. But because a charter is spurious in form, it does not always follow that its matter is unhistorical. And I am the more inclined to attach some value to it, because, while implying the existence of some ecclesiastical establishment, it does not imply the existence of a Bishoprick. Putting all things together, and remembering the strong and consistent tradition which connects the name of Ine with the church of Wells, I am inclined to think that there must have been some body of priests, probably of Ine's foundation, existing at Wells before the foundation of the Bishoprick by Eadward.8 If then Ine did, somewhere about the year 705, found a church at Wells with a body of priests attached to it, we can well understand why Wells should be chosen as the seat of the new Bishoprick in 909. The secular canons of Ine's foundation could receive the Bishop as their chief, and become his Chapter, in a way in which the monks of Glastonbury could not so well do. If this be so, then the Chapter of Wells is really an older institution than the Bishoprick. The present form of the Chapter is, as I shall presently show, comparatively modern; but if this be so, the priests of Wells are, in one shape or another, two hundred years older than the Bishop. On this view, Eadward the Elder did with the church of Wells exactly what has been done with the churches of Ripon and Manchester in our own time. Both these churches were collegiate; Ripon had a Dean and Prebendaries; Manchester had a Warden and Fellows. In our present Queen's reign Bishopricks were founded in these two churches; from being only collegiate, they became cathedral, and the collegiate bodies became the Chapters of the new Bishops. In the like sort it seems probable that the church of Saint Andrew at Wells, founded by King Ine as a collegiate church, was made into a cathedral church by King Eadward the Elder. Saint Andrew's church therefore may be said to have two founders; King Ine founded the Chapter, King Eadward founded the Bishoprick. Now perhaps some of you read the notice which was placed on the choir-door last week summoning all the members of the Chapter to attend for the election of the new Bishop. You might there have seen the Queen's congé d'élire, the writ giving leave to the Chapter to elect a Bishop. In that congé d'élire, the Queen calls her rights over the church of Wells her "fundatorial rights." That is to say, they are the rights which she has inherited as the successor of King Ine, as not only the successor but the direct descendant of King Eadward the Elder.

Let us now try and picture to ourselves the state of things at Wells and in its neighbourhood at either of these early times. In some respects the aspect of the country has greatly changed; in others closely connected with them the influence of the then state of things abides to this day. The traveller who in Ine's day looked down from the height of Mendip looked down on a land which had been but lately wrested from its old British owners. By the hard fighting of about a hundred and twenty years the English border had been carried from the Axe to nearly the present limits of the shire.9 Taunton was a border fortress, newly raised against the gradually retreating but still often threatening Welsh. If the eye caught the hills of Devon or perhaps even those of Western Somerset, it looked, no less than when it looked across the Channel to the hills of Gwent and Morganwg, upon a foreign and hostile land.10 The great natural features of the country were of course the same as they are now. The rocks of Cheddar and of Ebber, the bold headland of Brean, the island rock of the Steep Holm, the little hills scattered here and there, and the knoll of Brent and the Tor of the Archangel rising above their fellows, are objects which do not change. But in the days of Ine we must remember that those hills were truly islands. The low ground was one wide extent of marsh; the dwelling-places of man were confined to those ridges and isolated heights where the ground was high enough to be safe against accidents of tide and flood. Mendip itself was a wild forest land, peopled only by beasts of chase, and we must remember that the hunters of those days had to struggle against really formidable foes. The cave-lion had indeed long ago vanished, but we cannot doubt that the wolf still preyed on the flocks, and that the wild boar still ravaged the fields, of the men who were striving to bring the land into subjection. The inhabitants were doubtless still mainly of the old British stock, no longer dealt with as wild beasts or as irreclaimable enemies, but allowed to sit down as subjects, though as subjects of an inferior class, under the rule of the West-Saxon King.11 But English influence was fast spreading; between the days of Ine and the days of Eadward the tongue and laws and manners of the conquerors had spread themselves, and, by the time of the second foundation of Wells, Somersetshire must have been mainly an English land. The evidence of nomenclature shows us that most of the sites now occupied, most of the old towns and villages, were occupied between these two dates, and the population must have been, then as now, thickly scattered over the insular and peninsular heights of the district. I need not tell you that it is mainly along those old lines of habitation that men dwell still. Along the hill-sides of Mendip and of the opposite ridges villages and houses lie thick together, while the flat land below, though it has become the wealth of the country, remains almost as little dwelled in by man as in the days when it was one impassable swamp. And in the land which was thus fast becoming part of the inheritance of Englishmen, the piety and discernment of English Kings had planted two special centres of religion and civilization, richly endowed of the wealth of the land for the common benefit of all. In the isle of Avalon, the isle of Glastonbury, the great Abbey still lived on, rich and favoured by the conquerors as by the conquered, the one great institution which bore up untouched through the storm of English Conquest, the one great tie which binds our race to the race which went before us, and which binds the Church of the last thirteen hundred years to the earlier days of Christianity in Britain. There in their island monks and pilgrims still worshipped in that primæval church of wood and wicker which time and conquest had as yet agreed to spare.12 To the north of the old British monastery, not alone on an island, but nestling under the shadow of the great hill range itself, the younger ecclesiastical foundation, the foundation of the conquerors, was growing up. Of purely English and Christian origin, claiming no Roman or British forerunner, the church and town which were rising at the foot of Mendip drew their name from no legend of old times, from no tradition of gods and heroes, but from the most marked natural feature of the spot and from the patron saint in whose name the young foundation was hallowed. While the origin of the Abbey is lost in the gloom of hoariest antiquity, while its name of Avalon has become a name of legend, a name rather of some fancied fairy-land than of an actual spot of earth, no traditions, no legends, have decorated the birth and early years of the church and city which drew its name, as intelligible to English ears now as it was then, from the holy wells of Saint Andrew.

Two ecclesiastical foundations, two centres of civilization, were thus planted in each other's near neighbourhood; but it is the history of one only of them with which we are now concerned. I have not to follow out the tale of the monks of Glastonbury, but that of the secular priests of Wells. And here perhaps it may be needful to set forth more fully the exact meaning of those words, and to say something about the two different classes of clergy in those days, the differences between whom tore the whole country in pieces at a time a little later than the foundation of our Bishoprick. Some people seem to fancy that all the clergy in old times were monks. I have heard people talk of monks even in our church of Wells, where there never was a monk. Indeed they sometimes seem to fancy that not only all the clergy but all mankind were monks; at least one hardly ever sees an old house, be it parsonage or manor-house or any other, but some one is sure to tell us that monks once lived in it. It is hard to make people understand that there were clergymen in those days, just as there are now, parsons of parishes and canons of cathedral or collegiate churches, living, as they do now, in their own houses, and in early times not uncommonly married. These were the secular clergy, the clergy who live in the world. The monks, on the other hand, the regular clergy, those who live according to rule, were originally men who, instead of living in the world to look after the souls of others, went out of the world to look after their own souls. There is no need that a monk should be a priest, or that he should be in holy orders at all, and the first monks were all laymen. Gradually however the monks took holy orders, and they did much good in many places by teaching and civilizing the people, by preaching and writing books, and, not least, by tilling the ground. But in all this they were rather forsaking their own proper duty as monks and taking on them the duty of secular priests. The main difference between them came to be that the monks bound themselves by three vows, those of poverty, chastity, and obedience, while the secular clergy did not take vows, but were simply bound, as they are now, to obey whatever might be the law of the Church at the time. Now of these two classes of clergy some of our early Kings and Bishops preferred one and some the other. But whenever a new diocese was founded, the Bishop surrounded himself with a company of clergy of one sort or the other. You will remember that when a bishoprick, say that of the West-Saxons, was founded, the cathedral church was the first church that was built and endowed. The Bishop of the West-Saxons had his home at Winchester, along with a body of monks or clergy, who were his special companions and advisers, his helpers in keeping up divine worship in the cathedral church, and in spreading the Gospel in other parts of the diocese. Gradually churches and monasteries were built in other places, and monks and clergy were appointed to serve them, but a special body of monks or clergy always remained at the cathedral church, to be the Bishop's special companions, and to keep up the cathedral church as the model and example for the whole diocese. This is the origin of the Chapters of our cathedral churches. The clergy of a cathedral were sometimes regulars and sometimes seculars; and as men looked on the monks as holier than the seculars, the seculars were turned out of several cathedral and other churches, and monks were put in their place. Hence several of our cathedrals were served by monks down to the time of Henry the Eighth, when all monasteries were suppressed, and the cathedral monasteries, as at Canterbury, Winchester, and elsewhere, were changed into chapters of secular canons. But in other churches, as in our own church of Wells, and in the neighbouring churches of Exeter and Salisbury, the secular canons have always gone on to this day. And this makes a great difference in the appearance of our buildings at Wells from those of many other cities. We have here in Wells the finest collection of domestic buildings surrounding a cathedral church to be seen anywhere. There is no place where so many ancient houses are preserved and are mainly applied to their original uses. The Bishop still lives in the Palace; the Dean still lives in the Deanery; the Canons, Vicars, and other officers still live very largely in the houses in which they were meant to live. But this is because at Wells there always were secular priests, each man living in his own house. In a monastery I need hardly say it was quite different. The monks did not live each man in his own house; they lived in common, with a common refectory to dine in and a common dormitory to sleep in. Thus when, in Henry the Eighth's time, the monks were put out and secular canons put in again, the monastic buildings were no longer of any use, while there were no houses for the new canons. They had therefore to make houses how they could out of the common buildings of the monastery. But of course this could not be done without greatly spoiling them as works of architecture. Thus while at Ely, Peterborough, and other churches which were served by monks, there are still very fine fragments of the monastic buildings, there is not the same series of buildings each still applied to its original use which we have at Wells. I wish that this wonderful series was better understood and more valued than it is. I can remember, if nobody else does, how a fine prebendal hall was wantonly pulled down in the North Liberty not many years ago. Some of those whose duty it was to keep it up said that they had never seen it. I had seen it, anybody who went by could see it, and every man of taste knew and regretted it. Well, that is gone, and I suppose the organist's house, so often threatened, will soon be gone too. Thus it is that the historical monuments of our country perish day by day. We must keep a sharp eye about us or this city of ours may lose, almost without anybody knowing it, the distinctive character which makes it unique among the cities of England.

It is then in this way that Wells became, what it still is, the seat of the Somersetshire Bishoprick. The Bishop had his throne in the church of Saint Andrew, and the clergy attached to that church were his special companions and advisers, in a word his Chapter. We have thus the church and its ministers, but the church had not yet assumed its present form, and its ministers had not yet assumed their present constitution. Of the fabric, as it stood in the tenth century, I can tell you nothing. There is not a trace of building of anything like such early date remaining: while in other places we have grand buildings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at Wells we have little or nothing earlier than the thirteenth. But it is quite a mistake to fancy that our forefathers in the tenth century were wholly incapable of building, or that their buildings were always of wood. We have accounts of churches of that and of still earlier date which show that we had then buildings of considerable size and elaboration of plan.13 And we know that in the course of the same century Saint Dunstan built a stone church at Glastonbury to the east of the old wooden church of British times.14 The churches both of Wells and Glastonbury must have been built in the old Romanesque style of England which prevailed before the great improvements of Norman Romanesque were brought in in the eleventh century. You must conceive this old church of Saint Andrew as very much smaller, lower, and plainer than the church which we now have, with massive round arches and small round-headed windows, but with one or more tall, slender, unbuttressed towers, imitating the bell-towers of Italy. I do not think that we have a single tower of this kind in Somersetshire, but in other parts of England there are a good many. There is a noble one at Earls Barton in Northamptonshire, and more than one in the city of Lincoln.

Of the foundation attached to the church at this time there is but little to say. The clergy of the cathedral did not as yet form a corporation distinct from the Bishop, and the elaborate system of officers which still exists had not yet begun. The number of canons was probably not fixed; in the next century we incidentally hear that there were only four or five. They had no common buildings besides the church, and they lived no doubt each man in his own house.15 The revenues of the church seem not to have been large. The ceremony which happened among us last week may make some of you ask whether the canons of Saint Andrew had already the right of electing the Bishop. This is a question which it would be hard to answer. I am not prepared with any detailed account of the appointment of a Bishop of this particular see in the tenth or eleventh century. But it is certain that the way of appointing Bishops in those days was very uncertain.16 It is clear that no Bishop could be consecrated without the King's consent, and that it was by a document under the King's writ and signature that the Bishoprick was formally conferred. But the actual choice of the Bishop seems to have been made in several ways. Sometimes we hear of the monks or canons choosing whom they would, and then going to the King and his Witan or Wise Men, the great assembly of the nation, to ask for the confirmation of their choice. This confirmation was sometimes given and sometimes refused. Sometimes we expressly read that the King gave the monks or canons leave to elect freely. This is exactly what would happen now, if the letter missive should be lost on the road and the congé d'élire should come by itself.17 At other times we read of the King alone, or the King and his Witan, appointing, seemingly without any reference to the monks or canons. The truth is that in those days the Church and the nation were more truly two aspects of the same body than they have ever been since, and that those questions as to the exact limits of the civil and ecclesiastical powers, which have gone on, in one shape or another, from the days of William Rufus till now, had not yet arisen.

Things thus went on in our church of Wells without anything very memorable happening, from the days of Æthelhelm the first Bishop, who was appointed in 909, to those of Duduc, who was Bishop from 1033 to 1060.18 Tombs bearing the names of several Bishops of those days are still to be seen in the church. But they are all work of the thirteenth century, and, if the names given to them are trustworthy, Bishop Jocelin, when he rebuilt the church, must have made new tombs for his predecessors, a thing which sometimes was done. But when we get to Duduc, we are getting towards things which ought to be remembered; we are getting to the actual local history of the church of Wells itself, which hitherto it has been hard to distinguish from the general history of the Church in England. Duduc was the first Bishop who was not an Englishman; he was a Saxon. Of course there was a sense in which the Bishops before him might be called Saxons, that is West-Saxons, subjects of the King of the West-Saxons and probably in most cases themselves of West-Saxon blood. But Duduc was a Saxon from the Old-Saxon land in Germany, the old land of our fathers, and this is always the meaning of the word Saxon in the history of those times.19 This Bishop Duduc was in high favour both with King Cnut and afterwards with Eadward the Confessor. And his name at once brings us to a story which connects our church of Wells with the greatest Englishman of those days, though in a way which has brought undeserved obloquy on his name. I dare say some of you have read the tale of Harold's plundering the church of Wells, banishing the Bishop, bringing the Canons to beggary, and what not. However, I will read you the story as it stands in Collinson's "History of Somersetshire." He is speaking of the next Bishop Gisa, of whom I shall say more presently.

"On his entry into his diocese, he found the estates of the church in a sad condition; for Harold earl of Wessex, having with his father, Godwin earl of Kent, been banished the kingdom, and deprived of all his estates in this county by King Edward, who bestowed them on the church of Wells, had in a piratical manner made a descent in these parts, raised contributions among his former tenants, spoiled the church of all its ornaments, driven away the canons, invaded their possessions, and converted them to his own use. Bishop Giso in vain expostulated with the King on this outrageous usage; but received from the Queen, who was Harold's sister, the manors of Mark and Mudgley, as a trifling compensation for the injuries which his bishoprick had sustained. Shortly after [after 1060] Harold was restored to King Edward's favour, and made his captain-general; upon which he in his turn procured the banishment of Giso, and when he came to the crown, resumed most of those estates of which he had been deprived. Bishop Giso continued in banishment till the death of Harold, and the advancement of the Conqueror to the throne, who in the second year of his reign restored all Harold's estates to the church of Wells, except some small parcels which had been conveyed to the monastery of Gloucester; in lieu of which he gave the manor and advowson of Yatton, and the manor of Winsham." ("History of Somersetshire," iii. 378.)

Now all this, as is commonly the case with what we read in county histories and books of that class, is pure fiction, but it is very curious and instructive to see how the fiction arose. We can trace every step. Collinson improved on the account in Bishop Godwin's Catalogue of Bishops, which was written in the time of Elizabeth.20 Godwin improved on the Latin history of Wells, written by a Canon of Wells in the fifteenth century, which is one of our chief authorities on all local matters.21 The Canon of Wells, in his turn, improved on the original account given by Bishop Gisa, the person concerned. We have no account from Harold's side, but we have the contemporary version from the other side, and it certainly differs not a little from the version given by our worthy local antiquary. All about Harold's estates being granted to the church of Wells, all about his seizing the estates of the church, all about Gisa being banished and the Canons being driven away, is all pure invention, which has gradually grown up between Gisa's time and Collinson's. Gisa's own account, which is printed in Hunter's Ecclesiastical Documents, is to this effect.22 King Cnut had given to Duduc the two lordships of Banwell and Congresbury, not as a possession of his see, but as a private estate. These lands, together with some ornaments and relics, Duduc wished to leave to the see. But on his death Harold, the Earl of the district, took possession of them. This is the whole of the charge. Gisa does not accuse Harold of taking anything which had ever belonged to the see, but only of hindering Duduc's will in favour of the see from taking effect. We thus have Gisa's charge, but we have not Harold's answer. That answer, I conceive, would have been that, as Duduc was a foreigner dying without heirs, he had no power of making a will, but that his property went to the King or to the Earl as his representative. I cannot say for certain whether this would have been good law everywhere, but it certainly would have been good law in some places, and it at once suggests an intelligible explanation of Harold's conduct. But churchmen in those days always held that the Church was always to gain and never to lose, and we find other cases in which laymen who prosecuted legal claims against ecclesiastical bodies are called nearly as hard names as if they had robbed the Church by fraud or violence.23 Gisa does not say that he complained to the King or attempted any legal prosecution of the matter; but he made private appeals to Harold and threatened him with excommunication. You must remember that all this concerns only the moveable goods and the lands at Banwell and Congresbury, which, before Duduc's death, had never belonged either to Harold or to the church of Wells. With Winesham Harold had nothing to do; that lordship, Gisa says, was wrongly detained from the see by a man named Ælfsige. Gisa was never banished, and it so happens that the only writ of Harold's which we have is one addressed to Gisa, assuring him of his friendship and confirming him and his see in all their possessions.24 Gisa himself adds that Harold, after his election to the Crown, promised to restore the two lordships and to make other gifts as well. This he was hindered from doing by what Gisa calls God's judgement upon him, that is to say, by the Conquest of England.25