Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Wells: A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See — John Shaqi
Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Wells: A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal SeeDearmer, Percy
History
Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Wells: A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See
Dearmer, Percy
Wells Cathedral
It is worth while to call to mind the kind of service for which the
church was built, with its aisles and chapels and screen. The usual
Sunday procession started from the north door of the presbytery,
preceded by two thurifers with censers, went round behind the
presbytery, the priest in his cope asperging the altars on his way,
then down the south choir aisle, and through the south transept into
the cloister. In the cloister-cemetery, the priest, with his
ministers, said the prayers for the dead, and then rejoined the
procession in the cloister Lady Chapel, where the first station was
made. Thence the procession returned to the great rood in the nave,
and there made the second station, the bidding-prayer being given out
to the people from the rood-screen, after which it re-entered the
choir. But on special occasions the ritual was increased; as, for
instance, at the procession of palms on Palm Sunday, or the Corpus
Christi Day procession, which is thus described by Mr J.D.
Chambers[3]: "The procession, some time before the mass, should
assemble in order at the step of the Choir (_i.e._ in the Presbytery),
a priest in Albe and silk Cope carrying the Corpus Christi in a
tabernacle or feretory under a canopy of silk raised over him and it
on four staves, borne by four clerks in Albes and Tunicles, with
lighted tapers. It should go out of the Choir down the Nave, and out
at the West Door of the Church, round the Church and Cloisters as on
Ascension Day"--_i.e._ round the outside of the whole church,
beginning with the north side and returning round the east end, and
through the cloister to the west door again, and thus back into the
nave. The colours of the vestments at Wells followed in the main the
custom of the neighbouring diocese of Sarum, but with some local
variations, such as are set down in the _Consuetudinary_ which
Archbishop Laud had copied from the late thirteenth-century MS. Indigo
and white were used on St. John's Day and on the Dedication Festival;
in Advent, indigo; at Passiontide, red, and on Palm Sunday, "except
one cope of black for the part of Caiaphas" at the singing of the
Passion; red, too, on Maunday Thursday, but with a banner of white.
Red was also used for Easter, Pentecost, and throughout the Sundays
after Trinity; while for Virgin Martyrs, red was mixed with white.
This mixture of colours was probably effected by the cantors wearing
different coloured copes; thus for confessors saffron _(croceus)_ was
mixed with green, _sicut honestius et magis proprie possunt adaptari
festo_; but St. Julian and some others had all saffron, while a few,
like St. Benedict, had all indigo. White is comparatively little in
evidence, but it was used at Christmas, and for commemorations of the
Blessed Virgin. Black was used for the commemoration of the dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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