Archbishop Usher asserts that Hereford was the place of an episcopal see in the first half of the sixth century, when (A.D. 544) one of its bishops was present at a synod convened by the Archbishop of Caerleon. However this may have been, it is certain that the existing succession of bishops dates from A.D. 676; when Putta, Bishop of Rochester, whose Kentish cathedral had been plundered and desolated by Ethelred of Mercia, was placed at Hereford by Sexwulf, Bishop of Lichfield. Hereford was at this time a place of no great consequence. It lay about one mile distant from the Roman road which ran from Magna Castra (Kenchester) to Wigornia (Worcester); but it was not itself a station, and its later importance arose mainly from its position on a ford of the Wye, which Athelstane fixed as the boundary between the English and Welsh, in the same manner as he made the Tamar the boundary of the English and the Cornish of “West Wales.” Hereford thus became a frontier town; and one of the strongest castles on the marches of Wales rose near the cathedral, on its south side. [A.D. 676-688.] PUTTA, the first Saxon bishop, received no great wealth with the church of Hereford. He was, says Bede, “more careful about ecclesiastical than secular matters.” During his rule here he taught, “wherever he was asked,” the chants of the Church,--those ancient Gregorian tones which Augustine had introduced at Canterbury, and which Archbishop Theodorus was now carefully disseminating throughout England. The permanent establishment of Hereford as the place of an episcopal see was also the work of Archbishop Theodore, who after the Council at Hertford (A.D. 673) divided the great diocese of Mercia, as he had done that of East Anglia, into several bishoprics. (See LICHFIELD, Pt. II.) Of the bishops of Hereford between (688-1012) Putta and Æthelstan little is recorded beyond their names. CUTHBERT (736-740) is an exception. In the latter year he was translated to Canterbury. (See that Cathedral, Pt. II.) It was during his archiepiscopate that the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed were ordered to be universally taught in English.