Another way of raising money was to exact a contribution from church dignitaries, as a kind of "entrance fee," on their accepting preferment. William Heyworth, bishop of Coventry, (a see now owning Chester as its mother city), decreed in 1428 that "every canon on commencing his first residence should pay a hundred marks towards the structure of the cathedral, the purchase of ornaments," and other similar expenses. In 1247, Bishop Ralph Neville, of Chichester, having died indebted to some of the canons of the cathedral, left by will a sufficient sum to discharge his obligations. But these ecclesiastical creditors decided that it should be devoted to "the completion of a certain stone tower, which had remained for a long time unfinished." The same canons bitterly complained because the Pope had ordained that all vacant prebends throughout the country should remain unoccupied for a year, in order that their revenues might be devoted to the erection of the minster at Canterbury; whereas they not unnaturally felt that the needs of their own cathedral had the first claim upon them. Those churches which contained the shrines of popular saints drew, for the repair or enlargement of the fabric, no small revenue from the offerings of pilgrims. The eastern part of Rochester Cathedral was paid for by the moneys deposited at the tomb of S. William of Perth; and the large sums given by visitors to the shrine of S. Thomas of Canterbury materially assisted in keeping the building in repair. Unquestionably the sums needed for rearing these massive piles were in most cases given, either in money or in kind, by the faithful; sometimes the princely offerings of a few wealthy men, sometimes the countless small gifts of the multitude, have become transmuted into tapering spire, or ponderous tower, "long-drawn aisle and fretted vault." The poor, in some instances, as we have seen, voluntarily gave their labour; in others the hands of the monks themselves raised and cut the sculptured stones. In most cases the cathedrals which we now possess are not the first that have occupied their sites. Some humble building, often reared by one of the pioneers of the faith, was in the majority of instances the shrine that first consecrated the spot to the service of God. It was in 401, during the visit of Germanus and Lupus, bishops of Auxerre and of Troyes, to aid in exterminating the Pelagian heresy, that the earliest shrine of S. Alban, a simple wooden oratory, was erected at Verulam; S. Deiniol built a little stave-kirk, or timber church, at Bangor about 550; and Kentigern, some ten years later, raised the first religious establishment at Llanelwy, or S. Asaph; while where now the ruined Cathedral of Man rears its weather-beaten gables and sightless windows at Peel, tradition says S. Patrick consecrated S. Germain first bishop of the Southern Isles in 447.