In the thirteenth century there must have been a series of great building bishops; but little is known of them. Bishop Langton, however, was a very great personage, Keeper of the Great Seal, Treasurer of England, and executor to Edward I. He built a new episcopal palace at Lichfield, and other castles and manor-houses elsewhere, also a magnificent new shrine for the relics of St. Chad; and he surrounded the cathedral with a wall and foss, thus making of it a moated fortress, such as one sees to this day at Wells. Robert Stretton (1360-1385) had the distinction of not being able to read. Then we pass on to the great Civil War, when Bishop Langton’s fortifications proved a heritage of woe. Being fortified, and being Loyalist, Lichfield Cathedral was besieged by the Parliamentary forces under Lord Brooke, who prayed aloud that God would by some special token manifest unto them His approbation. The special token came on St. Chad’s Day, March 2nd, and is commemorated by a tablet on a house in Dam Street, which the visitor should look for: “March 2nd, 1643.—Lord Brooke, a general of the Parliament forces, preparing to besiege the Close of Lichfield, then garrisoned for King Charles the First, received his death-wound on the spot beneath this inscription, by a shot in the forehead, from Mr. Dyott,” a deaf and dumb man, “who had placed himself on the battlements of the great steeple to _annoy_ the besiegers.” It may interest some to know that the distance of the shot was 185 yards 1 foot 3 inches. In the end the garrison was starved out. Six weeks later Lichfield Close was recaptured by Prince Rupert. In 1646 it was retaken by the Parliamentarians. In the first siege the Parliamentary cannon brought down the central tower and most of the vault of the choir. This was not all. The Puritans smashed the stained windows, battered down the statues, stripped the lead from the roof and the brasses from the tombs, burned the registers, and broke up the bells and organs. They are said to have each day hunted a cat down the aisles, and to have draped a calf and given it a mock baptism at the font. “I confess,” says an apologist for her Puritan ancestors, “there were moments in my English journey when I hated the Puritan with a godly hatred, and wished that he had never shown his surly face to the world: a rude destroyer of things ancient, and therefore to be respected; a vandal devastator of things rare and beautiful, and too precious ever to be replaced; a brutal scoffer, drinking at the altar, firing his musket at the figure of Christ, parading in priest’s vestments through the market-place, stabling his horses in the house of God.” Then came the Restoration, and with the Restoration Bishop Hacket, best of good bishops. The very next morning after his arrival he set his coach horses to work at clearing away the ruins of the fallen spire and roof. For nine years he gave himself and his substance to the work; his contributions in money amounted to