Hereford Cathedral: A Norman and Gothic Episcopal Church in England
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- English, Norman
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page27 sections
History
Hereford Cathedral is a medieval church in the United Kingdom, begun in 1079 in the Norman architectural tradition and later enlarged through successive phases of English Gothic. Dedicated to Saint Mary the Virgin and Saint Ethelbert the King, it is the principal church and episcopal seat of the Diocese of Hereford in the Church of England, the Anglican established church of England.
Origins and the shrine of Saint Ethelbert
Hereford became the centre of a bishopric, traditionally in the 670s, when Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury, divided the Mercian diocese centred at Lichfield into the dioceses of Hereford and Worcester. The cathedral was also refounded by Putta after King Aethelred of Mercia drove him from Rochester. Worship has taken place on the site since at least the eighth century.
The religious importance of the site was connected with Ethelbert, King of East Anglia. According to the tradition preserved at Hereford, Offa, King of Mercia, beheaded him in 794 after a proposed marriage alliance was abandoned. A pious monk is said to have carried Ethelbert’s body from Sutton, about four miles away, to Hereford for burial. Miracles reported at the tomb helped establish the site as a centre of devotion.
Around 830, the Mercian nobleman Milfrid built a small stone church over Ethelbert’s tomb and dedicated it to the sainted king. That church stood for about two centuries before being altered during the reign of Edward the Confessor. In 1056, a combined Welsh and Irish force led by Gruffydd ap Llywelyn assaulted Hereford, plundering and burning the church. Seven canons were killed while resisting the attack, and the cathedral remained in ruins until the Norman period.
Norman rebuilding and Gothic enlargement
The present cathedral was begun in 1079, when Robert of Lorraine became bishop and undertook its reconstruction. His successor Reynelm continued or substantially reworked the project and reorganised the college of secular canons. The church was completed under Robert de Bethune, bishop from 1131 to 1148. The building then developed over approximately 440 years, incorporating Norman, Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular work. Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular were successive phases of English Gothic architecture, distinguished respectively by lancet windows, increasingly elaborate tracery and ornament, and strongly vertical compositions.
William de Vere, bishop from 1186 to 1199, transformed the east end by constructing a passage behind the choir and main altar, a crypt, and a Lady Chapel. The Lady Chapel was rebuilt in the Early English style between 1226 and 1246. The clerestory, the upper windowed level of the choir, and probably the choir vaulting were rebuilt around the middle of the thirteenth century after the central tower settled.
Under Peter of Aigueblanche, bishop from 1240 to 1268 and a royal favourite of Henry III, rebuilding began in the north transept, the cross-arm of the church. Richard Swinefield completed this work later in the thirteenth century and added the nave aisles and the eastern transept.
Thomas de Cantilupe, bishop from 1275 to 1282, defended the rights of the diocese and administered it forcefully. After his death at Montefiascone in 1282, his heart and bones were brought back to Hereford and placed in a shrine. The shrine became the focus of a major pilgrimage cult, and Cantilupe was canonised in 1320. Work connected with his cult was carried out at the cathedral.
During the first half of the fourteenth century, the central tower was rebuilt, while the chapter house and its vestibule were constructed. Bishop Thomas Trevenant, who held office from 1389 to 1404, rebuilt the southern end and vaulting of the great transept. A western tower was added around the middle of the fifteenth century. Later in that century, Bishop John Stanbury established a chantry on the north side of the presbytery, and Bishop Edmund Audley founded another on the south side of the Lady Chapel. A chantry was a chapel or endowment established for prayers and Masses for the dead, usually for its founder or patron.
Between 1504 and 1535, Bishops Richard Mayew and Charles Booth added the north porch, which became the principal entrance. Hereford Cathedral thus continued to accumulate new chapels, entrances, and memorial spaces long after the main Norman rebuilding had ended.
War, collapse, and restoration
During the English Civil War, the conflict between supporters of Parliament and the monarchy, Hereford changed hands between the opposing sides. After a siege and the capture of the city, the victorious forces severely damaged the cathedral.
Bishop Philip Bisse, who served from 1712 to 1721, strengthened the central tower, installed a large altarpiece and an oak screen, and permitted the remains of the chapter house to be dismantled for building material used in alterations to the Bishop’s Palace. In 1724, his brother Thomas Bisse organised a “Music Meeting” that later developed, with the cathedrals of Worcester and Gloucester, into the Three Choirs Festival.
On Easter Monday in 1786, the western tower collapsed, bringing down the west front and at least one bay of the nave. Because the tower stood directly over the western bay of the nave rather than beside it, the collapse caused extensive damage. James Wyatt was commissioned to repair the cathedral and also introduced alterations that were not universally approved.
Restoration begun in 1841 was initiated by Dean Merewether and first carried out by Lewis Nockalls Cottingham and his son Nockalls. After Nockalls Cottingham drowned in 1854, George Gilbert Scott directed the restoration of the choir. The work continued until the cathedral reopened with solemn services on 30 June 1863. John Oldrid Scott restored the west front between 1902 and 1908, replacing Wyatt’s design with an ornate facade commemorating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Victoria’s figure appears in a seven-light stained-glass window, and women of the Hereford diocese funded the work through subscriptions.
George Gilbert Scott’s iron choir screen was removed in 1967 during liturgical changes. It was later restored and re-erected in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A new library building was constructed in the early 1990s and opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1996 to house and display the Mappa Mundi and the cathedral’s chained books. During a financial crisis in the 1980s, the dean and chapter had considered selling the map, but donations from heritage funds, Paul Getty, and members of the public enabled it to remain at Hereford.
Collections and continuing traditions
Hereford preserves one of only four surviving copies of the 1217 Magna Carta, a medieval charter that established important limitations on royal authority and principles concerning law and governance. It is regarded as one of the finest among the eight oldest surviving copies and is sometimes displayed with the Mappa Mundi.
The Hereford Mappa Mundi was produced around 1300 or in the later thirteenth century. It is associated with the cathedral prebendary Richard de Haldingham and Lafford, also identified as Richard de la Battayle or de Bello. During Cromwell’s rule it was hidden beneath the floor of Edmund Audley’s Chantry. The map was cleaned and repaired at the British Museum in 1855, and its preservation at Hereford was secured during the crisis of the 1980s. UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, which recognises documentary heritage of exceptional global significance, includes the Mappa Mundi.
The cathedral’s history also includes a continuing tradition of music and bell ringing. Its historic organists and cathedral associates included William Wood, John Bull, John Farrant, Meredith Davies, and Ivor Atkins. The building was also associated with Robert of Gloucester, Nicholas of Hereford, John Carpenter, Polydore Vergil, Thomas Wolsey, Miles Smith, and Matthew Wren. Bishops and other notable figures buried or commemorated there include Robert of Lorraine, Reynelm, Robert de Bethune, William de Vere, Peter of Aigueblanche, Thomas de Cantilupe, Richard Swinefield, Thomas Charlton, Herbert Westfaling, Augustine Lindsell, Gilbert Ironside the younger, James Atlay, Philipp Traherne, Velters Cornewall, and William Felton. Peter of Aigueblanche’s body was exhumed in 1925.
Improvements to Cathedral Green in 2010 and 2011 included paths, seating, and a gated entrance. A further landscaping and restoration campaign began in 2015 and included the reburial of thousands of bodies from the cathedral precinct, including people buried in stone-lined graves dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Until the nineteenth century, people who died within the cathedral grounds were unusually required to be buried there. Among those reburied were a possible tournament knight, a man with leprosy, and a woman whose hand had apparently been severed as punishment for theft.
Remains
Overall form and Norman fabric
Hereford Cathedral is a large Gothic building incorporating substantial Norman fabric. It measures approximately 342 feet externally and 326 feet internally. The nave is 158 feet long, the choir 75 feet, the great transept 146 feet, and the eastern transept 110 feet. The nave and choir, including their aisles, are about 73 feet wide. The nave rises about 64 feet, the choir about 62.5 feet, and the central tower reaches approximately 140 feet, or 165 feet including its pinnacles. The lantern is about 96 feet high.
Surviving elements of the Norman church include the nave arcade, the lower choir up to the springing of the clerestory, the choir aisle, the south transept, and the crossing arches. Some authorities regard the south transept as the oldest surviving part. Its eastern wall retains Norman arcading. The nave has columns and arches built by Reynelm’s masons, with piers formed from square bases and paired semi-cylindrical shafts on their north and south faces. Small paired capitals crown the shafts. The pavement concealed the square bases until the nineteenth-century restoration, when they were exposed in 1847.
Nave, entrance, and cloisters
South aisle
The south nave aisle contains two fourteenth-century tombs with sculpted effigies of unidentified ecclesiastics. It also contains the tomb of Sir Richard Pembridge, from the reign of Edward III. The effigy shows a knight wearing the Garter and provides an important depiction of contemporary armour. A square-headed doorway leads from the aisle to the Bishop’s Cloister, while a Norman font has a circular bowl large enough for immersion baptism of children.
North porch
The north porch, built during the episcopates of Richard Mayew and Charles Booth, is a Decorated Gothic structure with an elaborately ornamented doorway. In the sixth bay on the north side of the nave stands the tomb of Bishop Charles Booth, enclosed by the cathedral’s only surviving ancient iron grille.
East end and Lady Chapel
Lady Chapel and crypt
The Lady Chapel is an Early English structure built across the passage behind the choir and main altar, above the crypt. Five steps lead into it, and its eastern wall has five lancet windows, each with a quatrefoil opening above. The windows contain nineteenth-century glass designed by Lewis Nockalls Cottingham as a memorial to Dean Merewether, who is buried in the crypt. A black marble slab also commemorates his restoration work.
The chapel contains monuments to Joanna de Kilpec and Humphrey de Bohun. Joanna, a fourteenth-century benefactor, gave the dean and chapter an acre of land at Lugwardine, about 0.4 hectare, together with the right to nominate a parish priest there and at associated chapels. The small crypt is known as Golgotha because it was used as a charnel house, a place where human bones are stored after burial sites are disturbed or reused. It is Gothic rather than Norman and is an unusual surviving example of a post-Norman crypt in an English cathedral.
Edmund Audley’s Chantry
Edmund Audley’s Chantry stands on the south side of the Lady Chapel behind an intricately designed screen. The chapel is pentagonal and has two storeys, with two windows in the lower level and five in the upper. Audley was later transferred to Salisbury and was buried there rather than in this chantry.
Choir
The choir consists of three Norman bays arranged in three stages. Its ornamental panel behind the altar, designed by the younger Cottingham, has five canopied compartments containing sculpture of the Passion of Christ. Behind it are pointed arches whose spandrel, the roughly triangular area between an arch and its frame, contains modern sculpture of Christ in majesty, angels, and the four Evangelists, with a figure of King Ethelbert below.
A small effigy of Ethelbert, excavated near the entrance to the Lady Chapel around 1700, is displayed at the eastern end of the south choir aisle. The choir also contains the bishop’s throne, an ancient episcopal chair, restored fourteenth-century stalls, and forty fourteenth-century misericords. A misericord is a projecting support beneath a folding choir seat that allowed clergy to rest while appearing to stand. These carvings show mythological beasts, grotesques, and scenes of daily life. Five additional seats known as the Judges’ Seats may be misericords or may be purely ornamental, and their function remains uncertain.
Stanbury Chapel
The Stanbury Chapel in the north choir aisle is a late Perpendicular chantry created around 1480 for Bishop John Stanbury. It has an intricate fan-vaulted ceiling and an alabaster medieval tomb. Two stained-glass windows installed in 1923 were designed by Archibald John Davies of the Bromsgrove Guild to depict Stanbury’s life and connections with Eton College.
Transepts and episcopal monuments
North transept
The north transept was rebuilt in the Decorated period under Peter of Aigueblanche and later restored by George Gilbert Scott. Its triforium arcade has diapered decoration. A triforium is an arcaded gallery or passage above the main arches of a church interior. The transept’s pointed arches and windows have such slight curvature that they resemble two straight lines meeting at an angle.
A stained-glass window by Hardman commemorates Archdeacon Lane-Freer, who died in 1863. The transept also contains the restored tomb or lower structure of Thomas de Cantilupe’s shrine, an early Decorated work in Purbeck marble. Its lower stage has fourteen figures of Knights Templar in chainmail armour set within cinquefoiled niches. The Knights Templar were a medieval military religious order founded to protect pilgrims and operate in the Holy Land.
Peter of Aigueblanche’s tomb
Between the north choir aisle and the eastern aisle of the north transept stands the tomb of Peter of Aigueblanche, the cathedral’s oldest episcopal monument. His effigy shows him in full vestments beneath a carved canopy supported by slender shafts.
Eastern transept
The eastern transept has a central octagonal pier supporting the vaulting in its northern half and contains preserved monumental fragments. Its north-eastern part includes an alabaster and polished-marble altar tomb commemorating former Dean Richard Dawes, who died in 1867. The effigy was made by Noble.
The south-eastern transept contains monuments to several bishops of Hereford. The remains and black marble tombstone of Gilbert Ironside, who died in 1701, were moved there in 1867 from the demolished church of St Mary Somerset in Upper Thames Street, London. Other features include an effigy of John the Baptist, a marble bust attributed to Louis-François Roubiliac, an eighteenth-century sculptor who worked chiefly in England, and the canopied Perpendicular tomb of Richard Mayew, who died in 1516. A doorway leads to the Vicars’ Cloister, a Perpendicular structure associated with the college of the vicars choral.
South transept
Three tapestries designed by John Piper hang on the eastern wall of the south transept. They depict the Tree of Life, the Tree of Knowledge, and the Deposition. Artists in Namibia made them in 1976, and they were installed in the cathedral the following year.
Library and documentary heritage
Chained library
The chained library contains mainly ancient manuscripts, including books illustrated with gold and coloured pigments. Its notable volumes include a well-preserved thirteenth-century Hereford Antiphonary and the Hereford Gospels, an Anglo-Saxon copy of the Gospels dating from at least the eighth century.
The library also preserves an oak reliquary covered with copper plates decorated in Limoges enamel, a technique applied to decorated metal surfaces. The scenes depict the murder and burial of Thomas Becket. Canon Russell gave the object to the cathedral after obtaining it from a Roman Catholic family that had reportedly kept it for many years.
Hereford Mappa Mundi
The Mappa Mundi is a single sheet of vellum with east at the top. It represents the earth as a round, flat landmass surrounded by ocean, and combines geographical information with biblical history, sacred places, cities, animals, and moral or theological imagery. Paradise, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the Last Judgement appear alongside animals, birds, fish, fantastic creatures, and many British cathedrals. Jerusalem, Babylon, Rome, and Troy receive particular prominence.
Chapter house, bells, and organs
Chapter house and precinct buildings
The chapter house stood between the Bishop’s and Vicars’ Cloisters on the south side of the cathedral. Its roof lead was removed in 1645 and melted down for bullets. The remaining fabric was dismantled in the early eighteenth century for material used at the Bishop’s Palace. The surrounding complex includes the Bishop’s Palace, the deanery, residences for canons, the cathedral school, and the college of the vicars choral, which forms a quadrangular residence.
Bells
Ten bells hang about 140 feet above the ground in the tower. The tenor weighs 34 hundredweight, approximately 1.7 tonnes, and the sixth bell is the oldest, dating from the thirteenth century. The peal is traditionally known as the “Grand Old Lady.”
Organs and former choir screen
The principal organ stands on the south side of the choir. George Gilbert Scott designed its case, and Henry Willis built the instrument in 1892. It has 69 stops on four manuals and a 30-note pedalboard, with a lowest register of 32 feet. The organ was rebuilt by Harrison and Harrison in 1978 and restored in 1932 and 2004 to 2005.
An organ built in 1911 for How Caple Court was moved to the Lady Chapel in 1951. It has eleven stops on two manuals and a 30-note pedalboard. A portable organ with one 54-note manual and five stops was built in 2003 in an oak Gothic-style case.
The former choir screen was made of painted and gilded wrought iron, designed by George Gilbert Scott and executed by Skidmore of Coventry. Removed in the 1960s, it was restored in the late 1990s and re-erected at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
