History of the Cathedral Church of Wells. Freeman Edward Augustus
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
On this whole matter, see Anglia Sacra, i. 553, and the Historiola de Primordiis Episcopatûs Somersetensis in Hunter's Ecclesiastical Documents, p. 10. The alleged charter of Cynewulf will be found in Kemble's Codex Diplomaticus, i. 141.
Ceawlin conquered to the Axe in 577; Cenwealh to the Parret in 658; Ine, as we see, as far as Taunton. On Ceawlin see Dr. Guest in the Archæological Journal, xix. 193.
That is, the modern shires of Monmouth and Glamorgan.
This is shown in various passages of the Laws of Ine. See Thorpe's Laws and Institutes, i. 119, 131, 147, 149.
See the whole history of the early church of Glastonbury in the first chapter of Professor Willis' Architectural History of Glastonbury Abbey.