Durham Cathedral: A Norman Cathedral and Religious Centre in England
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.8
- Popularity
- High
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Modern
- Civilizations
- English, Norman
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page14 sections
History
Durham Cathedral is a Church of England cathedral in Durham, United Kingdom, begun by the Normans in 1093 in the Romanesque style. It is the mother church of the Diocese of Durham, the seat of the Bishop of Durham, and a continuing religious centre with daily services. Its history grew from the Anglo-Saxon community that preserved the relics of Saint Cuthbert, a seventh-century Northumbrian bishop and monastic saint, and later became associated with the remains of the Venerable Bede, an early eighth-century monk, scholar, and historian.
From Lindisfarne to Durham
The cathedral’s religious continuity began with the Diocese of Lindisfarne, founded by Saint Aidan at the request of Oswald of Northumbria around 635. The diocese was transferred to York in 664 and reinstated at Lindisfarne in 678. After Viking raids, the monks left Lindisfarne in 875 with Saint Cuthbert’s relics. They settled at Chester-le-Street in 882, but further Viking incursions led them to move to Durham in 995.
Tradition says that Cuthbert’s coffin became immovable on the Durham peninsula after the monks followed two milkmaids searching for a dun-coloured cow. A practical explanation points instead to the peninsula’s defensible position and the protection offered by the Earl of Northumbria, to whom Bishop Aldhun was related. A temporary wooden structure housed the relics, followed by a sturdier building probably also made of wood, known as the White Church. A stone White Church was begun in 998 and completed, apart from its tower, by 1018.
Durham became a pilgrimage centre as devotion to Saint Cuthbert grew. King Canute was among its early pilgrims and granted privileges and estates to the community. Income from pilgrimage, the site’s defensibility, and the church’s political power encouraged the town to develop around it.
The Norman cathedral and priory
In 1083 William de St-Calais founded the Benedictine Priory of St Cuthbert at Durham. A Benedictine priory was a monastic community governed by the Rule of Saint Benedict. Monks from Wearmouth and Jarrow replaced the secular canons and their families, while the church’s extensive lands were divided between the bishopric and priory. William appointed Aldwin as prior and demolished the earlier Anglo-Saxon church.
On 11 August 1093, William de St-Calais and Prior Turgot laid the foundation stone of the present cathedral. Its principal purpose was to house the bodies and relics of Saint Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede. Work began at the east end. The choir was complete by 1096, the nave walls by 1128, and the high vault by 1135. The chapter house, the room where the monastic chapter met to conduct its administration, was built between 1133 and 1140.
William de St-Calais died on 2 January 1096 before the cathedral was finished. His successor, Bishop Ranulf Flambard, continued the work, while the monks remained responsible for the monastic buildings and the bishop for completing the cathedral. In 1104 Saint Cuthbert’s remains were transferred with great ceremony to a new shrine inside the cathedral, which the monks supervised until the monastery was dissolved.
Medieval enlargement and authority
Bishop Hugh de Puiset added the Galilee Chapel at the west end during the 1170s after an eastern building attempt was halted by subsidence and cracking. The chapel served as a Lady chapel, a space dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In 1228 Bishop Richard le Poore commissioned the architect Richard Farnham to design an eastern extension where many monks could celebrate the Daily Office, the cycle of regular communal Christian prayers and services. The resulting Chapel of the Nine Altars repaired and enlarged the east end.
The cathedral’s early towers date from the beginning of the thirteenth century. Lightning damaged the central tower, which was rebuilt in two stages during the fifteenth century under the master masons Thomas Barton and John Bell. The Bishop of Durham was also the temporal lord of the County Palatine of Durham. This was a territory where a lord exercised unusually broad judicial, administrative, and military powers in the Crown’s name, a role connected with the region’s position near the Scottish border. Tensions between the bishop and the powerful landholding prior were regulated by an agreement known as Le Convenit, dated about 1229.
Reformation and the cathedral after 1540
During the English Reformation, Henry VIII ordered the destruction of Saint Cuthbert’s shrine in 1538 and transferred the monastery’s wealth to the Crown. Cuthbert’s body was exhumed and was said to have been found incorrupt before being reburied beneath a plain stone slab. The Benedictine monastery was dissolved on 31 December 1540. Its last prior, Hugh Whitehead, became the first dean of the cathedral’s secular chapter, and the building became an Anglican place of worship.
After the Battle of Dunbar in September 1650, Parliamentarian forces used the cathedral as a prison for as many as 3,000 Scottish prisoners of war. About 1,700 died in conditions without adequate food, water, or heat. Much of the cathedral’s woodwork was burned as fuel, although Prior Castell’s Clock survived. The dead were buried in unmarked graves, while survivors were transported to the American colonies as indentured servants.
Bishop John Cosin, formerly a cathedral canon, repaired damage from the prison occupation and refurnished the interior with new stalls, a litany desk, and a canopy over the font. He also added an oak organ screen in place of a sixteenth-century stone screen. Dean John Sudbury founded a library in the remains of the old refectory. Its collections include early printed books, monastic records from before the Dissolution, and three copies of Magna Carta, with material dating from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries.
Restoration and modern religious life
Eighteenth-century restoration was limited partly because the deans commonly held offices elsewhere. In 1777 George Nicholson had much of the external stonework smoothed, substantially changing the cathedral’s character. William Morpeth later demolished most of the chapter house. James Wyatt proposed a radical transformation in 1794, including the demolition of the Galilee Chapel, but the chapter rejected most of his plans. Wyatt renewed the fifteenth-century tracery of the Rose Window and replaced storm-damaged glazing with plain glass.
Anthony Salvin removed Cosin’s wooden organ screen in 1847, opening the view from the nave towards the east end, and restored the cloisters in 1858. George Gilbert Scott restored the tower in 1859 and 1860, added the marble choir screen and pulpit in 1874, and worked with Edward Robert Robson. Charles Hodgson Fowler rebuilt the chapter house in 1892 as a memorial to Bishop Joseph Barber Lightfoot. Other nineteenth-century additions included the Tree of Jesse west window, donated by Dean George Waddington in 1867, and stained glass by Clayton and Bell.
Under Dean Cyril Alington, restoration of Saint Cuthbert’s shrine behind the high altar began in the 1930s and resumed after the Second World War. The work re-established the shrine as a focus of worship and pilgrimage. In 1986 Durham Cathedral and Durham Castle were inscribed together as the Durham Castle and Cathedral World Heritage Site. The designation recognized their relics and material culture, millennium of religious, educational, and residential use, archaeological remains, traditions associated with Saint Cuthbert and Bede, and political association with Norman power.
In the twenty-first century, two altars in the Chapel of the Nine Altars were rededicated to Saint Hilda of Whitby and Saint Margaret of Scotland. A painting of Margaret with her son, the future David I, by Paula Rego was dedicated in 2004. A plaque commemorating the Scottish prisoners who died after Dunbar was installed in 2011 and rededicated in 2017. Some remains were identified in a mass grave discovered during building work in 2013 outside the cathedral precinct near Palace Green. In 2016 former monastic buildings around the cloister, including the monks’ dormitory and Prior’s Kitchen, reopened as the Open Treasure exhibition, while Durham Cathedral and Durham University worked together to digitize books from the former priory library.
Durham Cathedral remains affiliated with the Church of England and the Diocese of Durham. It is a Grade I listed building, a category in England for structures of exceptional architectural or historic interest. Its principal historic structure belongs largely to the Norman campaign of 1093 to 1133, with additions continuing to about 1490.
Remains
The cathedral stands beside Durham Castle and the monastic precinct on a high peninsula formed by a loop of the River Wear. Its elevated, defensible setting is closely related to the river, castle, monastery, and town. The substantial Romanesque, or Norman, building later received Gothic additions. The interior is 469 feet, or 143 metres, long, and the original complex included a long three-aisled body, transepts, elevated galleries, and a triple choir.
The Norman nave and vaulting
The nave has a ribbed vault, a ceiling whose intersecting structural ribs support the vault surfaces, with early transverse pointed arches. Relatively slender composite piers alternate with massive cylindrical drum columns. Buttressing concealed within the triforium, an upper gallery or passage above the main church arches, carries the sideways pressure of the vault. These methods allowed taller construction, more complex plans, and larger window openings, although the cathedral remains Romanesque overall.
Evidence for early rib vaulting survives in the choir clerestory walls and choir aisles. The precise form of these vaults, whether four-part or six-part, remains unresolved. The vaulting has been interpreted as an experimental development anticipating aspects of northern French Gothic architecture, although its precise relationship with twelfth-century churches in the Ile-de-France remains uncertain. Locally quarried Frosterley marble, a black limestone containing fossilized marine organisms including coral, forms the ribs of several pillars and struts.
Western buildings and the Galilee Chapel
The Galilee Chapel is a five-aisled structure at the west end, occupying the position of a porch. It served as a Lady chapel, and its medieval association with the Virgin Mary influenced the use of the west door. An altar dedicated to the Virgin blocked the great west door during the medieval period; the door is now obstructed by the tomb of Bishop Thomas Langley. The principal entrance is on the north side, facing Durham Castle.
The Galilee Chapel contains the remains of the Venerable Bede. Its position and function also preserve the memory of Bishop Hugh de Puiset’s western addition in the 1170s. The chapel’s medieval use as a place dedicated to the Virgin Mary helps explain the altered role of the west entrance.
The eastern chapels and Saint Cuthbert’s tomb
The Chapel of the Nine Altars forms the eastern extension planned for the simultaneous celebration of the Daily Office by many monks. Its altars include two rededicated in the modern period to Saint Hilda of Whitby and Saint Margaret of Scotland. The eastern arrangement also contains the Feretory, the space associated with a saint’s shrine or relics, where Saint Cuthbert’s shrine was located within the apsidal end.
The inner wall of the apse is marked on the pavement. Cuthbert’s tomb is covered by a plain stone slab worn smooth by pilgrims’ knees, and ancient paving survives around it. The former shrine was described in 1593 as an exceptionally sumptuous monument enriched by offerings, jewels, and reputed miracles. The present tomb remains a place of pilgrimage, while fragments of Cuthbert’s coffin are displayed in the cathedral.
Monastic buildings and collections
The cloister is a covered walkway enclosing an open courtyard and connecting the former monastic buildings. Around it are the monks’ dormitory and Prior’s Kitchen, now incorporated into the Open Treasure exhibition. Objects associated with Saint Cuthbert displayed there include an eighth-century wooden coffin, a gold-and-garnet pectoral cross, a portable altar, and an ivory comb. The cathedral also contains the head of Saint Oswald of Northumbria, a seventh-century Christian king and martyr, as well as the remains of Bede and material culture associated with the saints buried at Durham.
Furnishings, clock, and scientific marker
Important furnishings include the medieval bishop’s throne and Neville screen, seventeenth-century choir stalls and font cover associated with Bishop Cosin, the litany desk, and Prior Castell’s Clock. The clock bears the Scottish thistle and survived the destruction of much of the cathedral’s woodwork during the prison occupation. It was installed between 1494 and 1519 on the eastern side of a screen and moved to the south transept in 1593. Richard Hunt renewed it between 1620 and 1628. Its case was removed in 1845, parts were recovered in 1936, and its surviving wooden supports were reinforced with metal rings after cracking in 1969.
The north cloister contains a meridian line authorized in 1829. A circular opening about 1 inch, or 2.5 centimetres, wide in the tracery of an adjoining window, roughly 10 feet, or 3 metres, above the floor, directs sunlight onto the line when the sun crosses the meridian.
Organ, bells, and stained glass
The organ cases in the choir galleries were designed by C. Hodgson Fowler and decorated by Clayton and Bell in 1876. The organ originated with a seventeenth-century Smith instrument, was replaced by Father Willis in 1876, and was repeatedly altered by Harrison and Harrison, including a major restoration in 1996. Some earlier pipes were reused in Durham Castle chapel.
The central tower contains ten bells hung for English-style change ringing. Five were cast in 1693, one in 1780, one in 1781, one in 1896, and two in 1980. The tenor weighs about 1,425 kilograms, measures approximately 1.5 metres in diameter, and is tuned to D.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century stained glass includes the Tree of Jesse in the great west window, the Te Deum window in the south transept, the Four Doctors window in the north transept, and the Rose Window of Christ in Majesty. Other works include windows by Hugh Ray Easton, Mark Angus’s Daily Bread window of 1984, and Leonard Evetts’s Stella Maris window of 1992.
Later artworks and burials
The Galilee Chapel contains a wooden Annunciation statue by Josef Pyrz, added in 1992. The Chapel of the Nine Altars contains Fenwick Lawson’s wooden sculptures Pietà and Tomb of Christ, installed in 2004, and a Transfiguration window by Tom Denny, dedicated in 2010 in memory of Michael Ramsey. Two large batik banners representing Saints Cuthbert and Oswald were added in 2001 by Thetis Blacker. Paula Rego’s painting of Saint Margaret with her son was dedicated in 2004.
Burials in the cathedral include William de St-Calais, Ranulf Flambard, Geoffrey Rufus, William of St Barbara, Walter of Kirkham, Robert of Holy Island, and Richard Kellaw in the chapter house; Nicholas Farnham; John Neville, third Baron Neville, in the south transept; Robert Neville, Bishop of Durham, in the south aisle; the heart of Robert Stitchill; Bishop Anthony Bek; Thomas Sharp in the Galilee Chapel; Thomas Mangey in the east transept; Thomas Langley at the west door; James Pilkington near Beaumont’s tomb before the high altar; Alfred Robert Tucker outside the cathedral; Cyril Alington; John Robson; Bishop Joseph Barber Lightfoot; and Stephen Kemble. Memorials commemorate Bishop Joseph Butler, Bishop Edward Maltby, John Wessington, John Robert Davison, and Brigadier General Herbert Conyers Surtees.
