Oliver King, Bishop of Exeter, was translated to the See of Bath and Wells in 1495. He went at once to Bath, and found the church in a dilapidated condition. While there, he had a repetition of Jacob’s famous dream of a ladder reaching from heaven to earth with angels ascending and descending. Above them stood the Lord, who said: “Let an Olive establish the crown and a King restore the church.” Taking the hint, Bishop Oliver King immediately set to work to rebuild the church and had his dream recorded upon the west front. He also had an olive-tree and crown carved on each of the corner buttresses. Bishop King’s new church was smaller than the old one. It only occupied the site of the former nave. He died before it was finished. Prior William Birde continued the work, not forgetting a chantry for himself, which is regarded as the best thing in the church. Birde died in 1525; and the work was still unfinished when it was seized by the king’s commissioners. The roofless and neglected church soon fell into decay; but in 1572 it was patched up a little in order that services might be held in it. The east window was glazed and the choir was roofed. The nave, however, was not roofed until Bishop Montague’s rule (1608-1616). At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, many mean houses that had clustered around Bath Abbey were removed, and buttresses and pinnacles were added to strengthen the walls. Repeated restorations have made it exceedingly trim in appearance. About 775, Offa, the Mercian king, founded here a college of secular canons, who were expelled by Dunstan in the Tenth Century and superseded by monks. One great event in the abbey church was the coronation of King Edgar on the Feast of Pentecost, 973; and for centuries afterwards it was the custom to select on Whitsunday a “King of Bath” from among its citizens, in honour of this circumstance. John de Villula, a Frenchman from Tours, who was Bishop of Somerset in the reign of William Rufus, greatly preferred Bath to Wells. He was able to merge Bath Abbey into the bishopric; and then he began to rebuild the church dedicated to St. Peter. When it was finished, he transferred the bishop’s seat from Wells to Bath. This did not satisfy Wells, however, and when Robert of Lewes became bishop of Bath and Wells, he seems to have arranged matters by allowing the Bishop of Somerset to have a throne at St. Andrew’s in Wells and at St. Peter’s in Bath, the bishop to be chosen by the monks of Bath and the canons of Wells (See page 108). The church built by John of Tours having suffered from fire, Robert was compelled to rebuild it; but subsequent bishops neglected Bath; and at the end of the Fifteenth Century, when Oliver King was removed here from Exeter, he found the church was in a ruinous condition and began to rebuild it, as we have seen.