History of the Cathedral Church of Wells. Freeman Edward Augustus
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
See Willis' Architectural History of Canterbury, p. 20; ditto Winchester, p. 34.
It is not said in so many words that the church of Dunstan was of stone, but it is plain that it was so, both because the "lignea basilica" or wooden church is distinguished from it, and because Osbern the biographer of Dunstan (Anglia Sacra, ii. 100) speaks of him as laying the foundations, which could hardly be said of a wooden church.
See the account of the Canons of Waltham in the book De Inventione, and those of Rheims in Richer, iii. 24.
I have discussed this in full in my History of the Norman Conquest, ii. 571, Ed. 2.
When a Bishop is to be elected by the Chapter, two quite distinct documents are sent; there is first the
The names of the early Bishops, of whom but little is recorded, will be found in the Canon of Wells, Anglia Sacra, i. 556, and Godwin's Catalogue of English Bishops, 290.