History of the Cathedral Church of Wells: As Illustrating the History of the Cathedral Churches of the Old FoundationFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
History of the Cathedral Church of Wells: As Illustrating the History of the Cathedral Churches of the Old Foundation
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Wells Cathedral
In my former Lecture I did my best to trace the history of the church
of Wells from the earliest days. We have seen its small beginnings, a
colony of priests planted in a newly-conquered land, with their home
fixed on a small oasis between the wild hill-country on the one side
and the never-ending fen on the other. There their church had risen,
and settlers had gathered round it; it had grown into the seat of
a Bishop, the spiritual centre of the surrounding country, a rival
in fame and reverence of that great island church which stood as a
memorial of the past days of the conquered, while Wells rose as a
witness of the presence of the conquerors. We have seen one Prelate of
foreign birth at once vastly increase the power and revenues of his see
and try to subject his clergy to the yoke of a foreign rule against
which the instincts of Englishmen revolted. We have seen another
foreigner undo the work of his predecessor alike for good and for evil;
we have seen him forsake church and city altogether, and remove his
episcopal chair to a statelier and safer dwelling-place. We have seen
the local foundation again brought back to a state lower than the poor
and feeble condition out of which Gisa had raised it. We now come to
the great benefactor whom we may fairly look upon as the founder of
Wells as it is, the man who put the Bishoprick and Chapter into the
shape with which we are all familiar, and who moreover gave to the city
its first municipal being.
On this last head I shall not enlarge. The subject is so completely the
property of others both present and absent that I should feel myself
the merest intruder if I attempted to dwell upon it. I will rather
go on with those parts of Bishop Robert's career which more directly
concern my subject, and look at him in three lights, as his actions
concern respectively the Bishoprick, the Chapter, and the fabric of the
church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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