History of the Cathedral Church of Wells / As Illustrating the History of the Cathedral Churches of the Old Foundation

by Edward A. Freeman

LECTURE III.

I have in my former lectures carried the history both of the fabric and the foundation of the church of Wells to the time of Jocelin, and somewhat later. The thirteenth century, the great creative century of later English history, brought both fabric and foundation to a state, if not of ideal, at least of essential perfection. We now come to two centuries which found much to improve and to enlarge, but which had no need, like their predecessors, to begin afresh from the beginning. Jocelin, we may say, was the last of the line of great innovators for good and for evil, the line formed by Ine and Eadward and Gisa and John de Villulâ and Robert. We now come to what we may call quieter times. One thing to be noticed is that by this time the work of John de Villulâ, the degradation of Wells and exaltation of Bath, has been pretty well reversed. Roger, the successor of Jocelin, may be called the last Bath Bishop. In his election Bath made its last effort. On Jocelin's death the monks of Bath, contrary to the agreement which had been made, ventured to make an election without joining with the Canons of Wells. The story is very characteristic of the reign of Henry the Third. The Pope and the King joined together to do an illegal act to the prejudice of Englishmen. The monks of Bath got their congé d'élire from the King; then they elected in this irregular way; the elect went to the Pope, Innocent the Fourth, who, glad no doubt of such an opportunity, took no heed to the appeal of the Wells Chapter, conferred the Bishoprick on Roger by his own authority, bargaining that the preferment which he vacated, the Precentorship of Salisbury, should be given to his own nephew. The new Bishop was consecrated at Rome, and the temporalities were restored to him by the King.[140] This is a sort of thing which could hardly have happened at any time earlier or later. Both in earlier and in later times we suffered a good deal at the hands of both Kings and Popes, but Henry the Third was the only King who habitually conspired with the Pope against his own people. It really adds to the shamelessness of the whole story that, when Innocent had gained his personal point, when he had established the precedent that the Pope might if he pleased appoint to an English Bishoprick, when he had further established his own kinsman in an English living, he then was ready enough to confirm the former agreement, and to decree that the rights of the Chapter of Wells in the election of the Bishop should be observed for the future.[141] Roger also made up what he could to the Wells Chapter by the grant of various advantages.[142] He did not, however, think good to choose his last resting-place among them. He was the last of our Bishops who was buried at Bath. This marks the time when Wells once more became the real home of the Bishoprick, though Bath still retained its precedence in the episcopal title. And it was doubtless from this time that that comparative neglect of the church of Bath began which ended, as I have already said, in its falling into a state of decay verging on ruin.

During the time that followed I need not go through every Bishop in succession, as several Bishops seem to have had very little to do with the fabric. William Button the First, who was Bishop from 1247 to 1264, was chiefly remarkable for a practice which we certainly have not seen among us for some time past, but of which the traces still linger. In his day all the chief places of the church were filled with the Bishop's own kinsfolk. It was no doubt a most comfortable family party when the Bishop was surrounded by a Dean, Precentor, Treasurer, Archdeacon, and Provost, all of them his own brothers and nephews.[143] Yet mark that, though the fact of being the kinsman of a Bishop does not prove a man to be fit for high preferment, it does not prove him to be unfit. One of the Buttons, William the Second, first Archdeacon and afterwards Bishop from 1267 to 1274, was looked on as the holiest Prelate of his time, and after his death miracles were held to be worked at his tomb.[144] So they were said to be at the tomb of William of March, Bishop from 1293 to 1302.[145] Between these two saintly persons came Robert Burnell, whose place, whether in the history of England or in the history of Wells, is by no means small, but whose name is not specially connected with the fabric or foundation of the cathedral. In general history he appears as the minister of the great Edward; we know him here as the builder of that noble, but alas ruined, hall in the episcopal palace, which may take its place alongside of the great works of Gower at Saint David's.[146] For the next Bishop who claims any minute notice in a sketch of this kind we have to hurry on to the reign of Edward the Third, when a worthy successor of Robert and Jocelin meets us in the fortifier of the palace, the founder of the Vicars' Close, the famous Ralph of Shrewsbury.

Great works had been going on in the cathedral from the beginning of the century, although we do not find the name of any Bishop distinctly connected with them. The fact is that, now that the Chapters had gained so great a degree of corporate independence, the Bishops naturally become less prominent in such works than they were at an earlier time. The church, as designed by Jocelin, had hardly been brought to perfection by the building of the Chapter-house, when a series of works were begun which had the effect of completely transforming the whole eastern part of the church. There is reason to believe that the arrangements of the church of Jocelin were, like its style of architecture, a little old-fashioned. In the thirteenth century the tendency was to enlarge the eastern limbs of churches on a larger scale. The famous rebuilding of the choir of Canterbury late in the twelfth century had most likely set the example. The choir was now commonly placed in the eastern limb, which sometimes swelled to a length as great or greater than that of the nave. Sometimes the choir itself became cruciform by the addition of an eastern transept. Jocelin's church, on the other hand, still kept its choir under the tower, and east of the tower there was only a presbytery of three bays—the present choir—with some small chapels beyond it on the site of the present presbytery. The new scheme involved a complete recasting of all this part of the church, which seems to have been done from one general design which was carried out bit by bit. They began, as usual, at the east end, and with that part of the work which involved the least disturbance of the existing building. A distinct addition was made at the east end, an addition covering new ground which had not hitherto been part of the church. This addition was no other than the present beautiful Lady chapel, with the small transept immediately to the west of it. With the exquisite beauty of the Lady chapel every one is familiar; but every one may not have remarked how distinct it is from the rest of the church. Unlike any other of the component parts of the church, it could stand perfectly well by itself as a detached building. As it is, it gives an apsidal form to the extreme east end of the church; but it is much more than an apse; it is in fact an octagon no less than the Chapter-house, and to this form it owes much of its beauty. As an octagon standing detached at one end and joined to other buildings at the other end, it allowed the apsidal end to be combined with the exquisite slender shafts which open into the space to the west. But it must be remembered that the chapel must at first have stood almost as a detached building, and that, though it was doubtless not intended to remain so, yet the fact of its original isolation clearly had an effect on its form. There is a second transept at Wells, but, instead of dividing the choir from the presbytery, it is a mere appendage to the Lady chapel, and it is therefore far from being the important feature which the eastern transept is at Canterbury and Salisbury. The Lady chapel, with this dependent transept, clearly formed the first instalment of this general reconstruction of the eastern part of the church; and it appears, by an incidental notice in a document quoted by Professor Willis, that it was finished before the year 1326.[147] Then came the reconstruction of the eastern limb itself. This, as I said, involved an utter change in all the arrangements of the church. The eastern limb was to be lengthened by the addition of three bays, or, to speak more accurately, by substituting three bays of the full height of the church for whatever chapels had formerly stood on the site. These three bays were to form the presbytery, while the former presbytery was to be fitted up as the choir; that is to say, the stalls of the Canons were to be placed where they are now, instead of being under the tower. You must all have marked for yourselves the great difference in style between the three bays of Jocelin's work which now form the choir and the three added bays which now form the presbytery. They furnish a good study of the difference between the architecture of the thirteenth and the architecture of the fourteenth century. The two are put side by side, and their several details may be easily compared. And yet the contrast is perhaps not a perfectly fair one. The two pieces of work are rather extreme cases in opposite ways. The earlier work retains something of the character of the style earlier still; as I have said all along, it is not typical English architecture of the thirteenth century, but has something of Romanesque leaven hanging to it. On the other hand, the new work, though exceedingly graceful, is perhaps rather too graceful; it has a refinement and minuteness of detail which is thoroughly in place in a small building like the Lady chapel, but which gives a sort of feeling of weakness when it is transferred to a principal part of the church of the full height of the building. The three elder arches are all masculine vigour; the three newer arches are all feminine elegance; but it strikes me that feminine elegance, thoroughly in its place in the small chapels, is hardly in its place in the presbytery. That the same style can be worked with great vigour and boldness is shown by the nave of York Minster. The next stage, after the addition of the new presbytery, would be the attempt to adapt what had now become the choir to the new work. You all know that Jocelin's triforium and clerestory have vanished, or nearly so, from the three bays of the choir, and that a clerestory and a triforium, if I may call it so, in the same style as the three new bays, have taken its place. I conceive that this work was not absolutely contemporary with the addition of the presbytery. If it had been done exactly at the same time, care would surely have been taken to keep the arcade, triforium, and clerestory exactly on the same level. There could be no motive for doing otherwise. I take the case to be this. The three bays were added, as such additions often were, without any regard to the style or proportion of the original building, beyond keeping the walls themselves at the same height. In an addition, like the presbytery, built in an utterly different style and without any adaptation to the earlier work, it was of no great moment whether the three divisions of the elevation exactly agreed or not with the levels of the older work. But a little later, probably when the roof came to be added, the idea suggested itself of bringing the three older bays into harmony, as far as might be, with the newer ones. The roofing of the presbytery would naturally suggest this change; it would perhaps make it absolutely necessary. For the form of roof chosen for the new work was of a kind very different from the older vaults of the church, and of a kind very singular and unusual. It is in fact a coved roof, such as we are used to in woodwork in this part of England, only with cells cut in it for the clerestory windows.[148] Such a roof could hardly have been added to the three eastern bays without disturbing the original roof of the three western bays; and it could hardly have been, as it was, carried over the three western bays also without disturbing the original triforium and clerestory. When therefore the design of the roof of the presbytery was determined on, the attempt was made to adapt the triforium and clerestory of the choir to those of the new work. But it was now impossible to keep the exact levels, and the result is what we see. You will remark that the upper stages of the choir were not, strictly speaking, rebuilt, but were simply cased and new windows inserted. The latter process, as is to be seen on the outside, was somewhat awkwardly done. The aisles of the choir were also recast at the same time by the addition of a vault and the insertion of windows in the new style.

The choir and presbytery, as we see them now, were thus finished in the course of the first half of the fourteenth century, but there may be some question as to the exact date. Professor Willis quotes an order of Chapter in 1325, by which each Canon was ordered to make his own stall at his own cost. The Professor infers that at that time the new choir was ready for the stalls to be placed in it.[149] But perhaps the words need not absolutely bear that meaning; and one or two things seem to me to look the other way. First of all, the style of the presbytery seems to point to a time somewhat later in the century. The windows have fully advanced, and not very good, Flowing tracery, and in the east window there is a distinct approach to the Perpendicular lines of the next style. The other details too seem to belong to quite the later stage of what is called the Decorated style; they show decided signs of the near approach of the latest form of Gothic, our own local Perpendicular. Then again, our famous Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury, who sat from 1329 to 1363, and of whom I shall have presently to speak more fully, was buried between the steps of the choir and the high altar, having seemingly a detached tomb in the middle of the presbytery.[150] His tomb, which was fenced in by a grating, was afterwards moved to the north side of the presbytery, but, as Bishop Godwin says in his quaint fashion, it "lost his grates by the way."[151] But the original place of Ralph's tomb was a place of special honour; it was the place of a founder; Ralph held the same place in the new choir which Jocelin had held in the old one. The inference seems irresistible, that Ralph stood to the new work in somewhat of the same relation in which Jocelin stood to the old; that he was in some sort its founder; that, at the very least, it was done during his episcopate. I confess that these two considerations seem to me to outweigh the presumption drawn from the order of Chapter about making the stalls, which, after all, might have been made as a precaution before the works in the choir were begun just as well as after they were ended. I believe therefore that the recasting of the eastern limb, the addition of the new presbytery, the change of the old presbytery into a choir, and the architectural changes following on the change of arrangement, belong mainly to the days of Ralph of Shrewsbury.

These changes, you will see, finished the ground-plan of the church itself as it now stands. The church itself has not been extended northwards, southwards, eastwards, or westwards, since the days of Bishop Ralph. Nor, on the other hand, has any part of the church itself been destroyed. Other buildings have been attached to it, and parts of the subordinate buildings have perished, but the ground covered by the church itself is exactly the same now as it was when Ralph was buried before the high altar. As a church then, as a building set apart for divine worship, Saint Andrew's was now quite perfect and needed neither addition nor change. Nave, choir, presbytery, chapels, and the one necessary adjunct of the Chapter-house, were all finished. But besides the completion of the ground-plan, there was another great work to be done before the building could be said to be finished as a work of architecture. Jocelin had not carried his three towers above the height of the roofs; they were mere stumps, and the effect must have been unfinished and unsightly. In the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries this defect was supplied. Indeed, as far as the central tower is concerned, the defect had been supplied already. I have carried on the history of the changes which affected the ground-plan as a continuous narrative, but the raising of the central tower and its consequences belong to the same period. The raising of the tower seems to have formed part of the general plan of recasting the whole part of the church east of the crossing, and it may actually have been the first instalment of the work. I may here perhaps say a few words on the general subject of central towers. As the principal feature of churches of the highest class, the central tower is all but confined to England and Normandy; in other parts of France it is common enough, but, reversing our English rule, it is common in churches of a smaller class, but nearly unknown in the great cathedrals and abbeys. I ought perhaps to say that I am now speaking mainly of Gothic buildings, not of Romanesque. The truest way of putting the case would perhaps be that the central tower, the direct representative of the cupola, is a Romanesque feature, prevalent everywhere in Romanesque times, but which England and Normandy alone retained in large churches of later date. The question of central tower or no central tower resolves itself into this; which is the greater merit in a cathedral or other great church—the highest amount of internal majesty, or the highest perfection of external outline? England and Normandy decided for the external outline; the rest of Western Christendom decided for the internal effect. A great French church, Amiens, Beauvais, Chartres, Rheims, Saint Quentin, is carried up to a height in the inside of which we in England have no notion. But this internal majesty is bought by the utter sacrifice of external outline. The crossing of the four limbs of the church cries in vain for its natural crown in the central lantern. Indeed I am not clear that, if the central tower is left out, it is not better to leave out the transepts also. Certainly no churches ever impressed me more than those of Bourges and Alby, which follow this arrangement. Some of the great churches of France, which are most glorious within, are absolutely shapeless without. The central tower is impossible, and it is hard to adapt even western towers to a body of so great a height, unless their size is something prodigious. On the other hand, several of our English churches, on whose external outline the eye rests with the greatest pleasure, are positively depressing when we go in. Such above all is Lincoln; nothing can surpass the grouping of its three towers, but the effect of the lowness of the choir roof is positively crushing. The only church in England which affects great internal height is that of Westminster, and there, though a central tower was certainly designed, it seems to have been found impossible to carry it up. The general look of Westminster Abbey is therefore much more that of a French than that of an English church. I know of one church only which thoroughly combines both kinds of merit, namely, the church of Saint Ouen at Rouen. There are French churches of greater height; there are English and Norman churches of more perfect outline. But no other church of equal internal height carries a central tower; no other church finished with a central tower can boast of the same internal height. Inferior to Amiens in one point, to Lincoln in another, I place Saint Ouen's, as a whole, above either.

Turn we now to our own church of Wells, a church, I need not say, built on a much smaller scale than any of those of which I have been speaking. It was of course designed, according to the usual English custom, for a central tower, though most likely Jocelin did not think of carrying it up so high as was afterwards done. This was constantly the case; a tower was carried up to a vast height, in what we cannot help calling a reckless way, on piers and arches which had been designed only for a much smaller weight. The natural consequence followed; the supports began to give way under the vast mass which was laid upon them, and, to keep the whole from falling, some means or other of propping, in a way necessarily more or less awkward, had to be resorted to. In many cases the tower actually fell down, as the spire of Chichester fell a few years ago. That it fell at that particular moment seems to have been pure matter of accident. It had always been dangerous; it might just as well have fallen three or four hundred years sooner, or it might just as well have lasted three or four hundred years longer. So at Salisbury, that lovely spire, so graceful to the sight, is constructively an excrescence which ought never to have been placed there, which the piers below it were never designed to support, and which has been kept up to this day only by using various props and devices from time to time. Our own case at Wells was bad enough, though not nearly so bad as at Chichester and Salisbury. The tower was carried up between the years 1318 and 1321,[152] but if any spire was ever added or designed, it was simply one of wood and lead, like those which have vanished from all the three towers of Lincoln. Hence, though the weight which was laid on the piers was much greater than they were able to bear, it was not so great as at Salisbury and Chichester, and the danger and destruction has not been so great as it has been in those two cases. The tower then was raised, and the usual results followed, results which have been graphically described by Professor Willis both at Wells and in other places. The increased height caused the four great piers to sink into the ground. This of course tore away the masonry of the four limbs of the church from their connexion with the piers; the new tower, perhaps as yet hardly brought to perfection, stood, so to speak, on four lame legs, on four supports which were giving way beneath it, and yawning gaps began to appear between the tower arches and the main walls of the church. Thus, within twenty years after its first building, in the years 1337 and 1338,[153] the tower needed to be strengthened by supports which the first builders had never thought of, and the damage which had already been actually done had to be made good. The tower at Wells had to be propped like the towers at Canterbury and Salisbury. The question at once follows as to the way in which the propping was done. Any support of the kind must be more or less unsightly; thrust in as an after-thought, to remedy a constructive defect, it cannot fail to interfere with the original design and the original proportions. No one would have put them there, if he could have helped it; if constructive reasons had not called for the props, they would have been better away. When we compare the way in which this needful, though unpleasant, work was done in the different cases, we shall see a kind of clumsy ingenuity about the Wells work which may call for a certain measure of praise. At Salisbury and Canterbury the prop takes the form of a horizontal screen running across the arches. Such a form is more elegant in itself, and it interferes less with the general appearance of the building. But it is more distinctly an excrescence; it forces itself more strongly on the eye as something stuck in than when the props are worked into the earlier work in the way that they are at Wells. You all know the low arches under the lantern with the inverted arches on the top of them, the great circles in the spandrils, the whole arch turned into a kind of pattern of gigantic Geometrical tracery. It is very heavy, very clumsy; till the eye gets thoroughly familiar with it, it seems very ugly; but it is in every way ingenious. The prop is worked and fitted into the old work in a way in which it is not in the other cases. I can even think it possible that people who do not know the history, and who do not at once see from its details that it is an insertion, may even mistake it for part of the original design. And, granting its position at all, granting the peculiar form which it takes, there is something in the detail or rather lack of detail, something in the great size of the few mouldings and the absence of capitals and shafts, which seems to suit the boldness of the general outline. And I am not sure whether there is not a further propriety in the form chosen. The lines of the inverted arches roughly suggest a Saint Andrew's cross, and it may be that we have here, now that the affairs of Wells were beginning to brighten, a new trophy of success offered to the now triumphant elder brother.[154]

The object of the inverted arches was strictly to support the tower by strengthening its piers. Other changes were needed to make good the damage done by the tearing away of the masonry on each side. This involved a partial blocking of the clerestory and triforium in the bays adjoining the tower, so as to make a set of gigantic flying-buttresses for its support. The pier-arches below them had most likely been quite shattered; those at least in the nave and transept certainly had been. New arches in the style of the fourteenth century were accordingly inserted, and it is instructive at once to compare the difference of their details from those of the original work, and to trace the exact extent of the new masonry. As ever, the mediæval builders wasted nothing; every stone of the old work which could be kept in its place or used again they did keep in its place or use again. And though the details are of exactly the same date and style as those of the inverted arches, it is worth while to notice the extreme boldness with which the mouldings are wrought in the great arches, and the extreme delicacy with which they are wrought in the smaller ones. Altogether it is plain that the raising of the tower must have been done recklessly and without due regard to the strength of its supports. It is plain also that the result of this reckless building has been the lasting disfigurement of the church by the insertion of props which the eye wishes away. Still, as the disfigurement had to be made, we must allow the praise of considerable ingenuity to the way in which it was made.

All that was now lacking to the fabric of the church was the completion of the western towers. The general effect of these towers is so exactly alike that no one would guess that nearly fifty years passed between the building of the two. A minute examination will reveal certain small differences. The height of the two towers is not exactly the same, and a niche which is found on one is not repeated on the other. But these are not differences of style: they are just the same kind of differences as those which we find at an earlier time between the different parts of the nave. Still it is strange to find that a gap of so many years had made absolutely no difference at all in style strictly so called. But this, at this time at least, is characteristic of the district. The Perpendicular style was introduced into Somersetshire very early, and it remained in use for a long time without any material change. Between the earliest and the latest examples there undoubtedly is a difference, but it is a difference much slighter than is usual in other parts of the country. In many cases there is no perceptible difference of style between buildings separated by an interval of a good many years. I have therefore always declined to guess at the dates of Perpendicular buildings in Somersetshire, when no documentary evidence could be brought forward; and I think that the case of the western towers of Wells shows that I have been discreet in so doing. I do not think that any one would have found out the difference in date between these towers by simply looking at them, and I think that any one would have been inclined, from simply looking at them, to place the earlier of the two a good deal later than its real date. I must confess that, knowing as I do that they are nearly fifty years apart, I sometimes find it hard to remember whether it is the northern or the southern tower which is the older. In fact, the southern one is the older. It was built in the time of John Harewell, who was Bishop from 1366 to 1386, at the joint cost of himself and the Chapter, the Chapter paying two-thirds and the Bishop one.[155] The tower therefore belongs to the very first days of the Perpendicular style; it must have followed so soon upon the east window of the choir, that we may count the completion of the western towers as really parts of the same work as the changes in the eastern part of the church. The other, the northern tower, was built in the days, and largely at the cost, of Bishop Bubwith,[156] whose name is well known to us all by reason of his hospital and his chantry chapel. He has also a special place in the municipal history of the city, through his gift of the old Guildhall to the citizens. His episcopate lasted from 1408 to 1424, so that the very considerable difference of date between the building of the two towers is clearly marked.

Nothing more remains to be spoken of in the fabric of the church itself, beyond a few insertions in the Perpendicular style—such, for instance, as the window tracery inserted in the nave and transept. I do not know the exact date of this not very important change, but it must have been late in the fourteenth or early in the fifteenth century. For it is plain that it was made before the reconstruction of the cloister and the addition of the rooms over it, as these last block one of the windows inserted in the transept. Now these rooms were built by Bishop Bubwith,[157] so that the insertion of the tracery was made before his time, not improbably when the southern tower was carried up. A more important change, and one which must have happened later, was the insertion of a fan-tracery vault in the central tower, hiding the original arcades which remain above it. One hardly sees the reason of this insertion, as there could be no reason for hanging bells in the central tower of a church which had two towers at the west end.

Thus, after about two hundred years from the beginning of the present building in the days of Jocelin, we may look on the cathedral church of Saint Andrew as at last finished. It was finished, in a sense, before the end of the thirteenth century, when everything had been built which was needed for its ecclesiastical completeness. But it was in the course of the fifteenth century that it finally assumed the shape with which we are all familiar, and which has from that time remained almost unchanged. Now then we have reached the point at which we can estimate the place which fairly belongs to the church of Wells among the other churches of England and of Christendom. As it seems to me, that position, as I began by saying, is a special and remarkable one. I need not say that, in point of size and splendour, the church of Wells has no claim to a place in the first rank of European, or even of English, churches. Setting aside the Welsh churches, and the churches which have become cathedral without being originally meant for that rank, Wells is one of the very smallest of English episcopal churches. It is hardly fair to compare it with Carlisle, which is a mere fragment, or with Hereford, which has lost its western tower, and with it a part of its nave. But it is, in point of scale, with Carlisle, Hereford, Lichfield, and Rochester, or again with non-cathedral churches like Southwell, Beverley, and Tewkesbury, that Wells must fairly be compared, not with churches like Canterbury and York, or even like Salisbury and Gloucester. And among churches of its own class it certainly ranks very high. It has one accidental advantage in having been much less damaged by mere destroyers than any of them, except perhaps Beverley. But this is not all. I think that those under whose hands the church of Wells gradually grew up showed a wiser discretion, and a greater skill in adapting their changes and additions to what they found existing, than was shown in most of the other cases. Let us take the two ends of the church, the two parts to which a church owes so much of its external character, the east end and the west front. Now the west front of Wells is a thing which it is the fashion to rave about. It is the finest part of the church; the finest thing in Somersetshire; the finest thing in England; for aught I know, the finest thing in the world. I am perverse enough to think differently, and to look on the west front as the one part of the church of Wells which is thoroughly bad in principle. It is doubtless the finest display of sculpture in England; but it is thoroughly bad as a piece of architecture. I am always glad when I get round the corner, and can rest my eye on the massive and simple majesty of the nave and transepts. The west front is bad, because it is a sham—because it is not the real ending of the nave and aisles, but a mere mask, devised in order to gain greater room for the display of statues. The architecture, in short, is sacrificed to the sculpture. A real honest west front, if it have two towers, will be made by the real gable of the nave flanked by a tower at the end of each aisle. So it is at York; so it is at Abbeville; so it is at Llandaff. Or a front may, like those of Winchester, Gloucester, and Bath, have no towers at all, but may simply consist of the endings of the nave and aisles, set off with turrets and pinnacles. Or a front may be, like that one glorious and unequalled front at Peterborough, built up in front of and across the endings of the nave and aisles, but without at all professing to be itself their finish. All these forms are honest; but I deny the honesty of such fronts as those at Wells, Salisbury, and Lincoln.[158] In all these cases the front is not the natural finish of the nave and aisles; it is a blank wall built up in a shape which is not the shape which their endings would naturally assume. It is therefore a sham; it is a sin against the first law of architectural design, the law that enrichment should be sought in ornamenting the construction, in giving a pleasing form, and such enrichment as may be thought good, to those features which the construction makes absolutely necessary, not in building up anything simply for the sake of effect. The main features in a front should be the windows and doorways. There must be some windows and some doorways; it is the business of the architect to make these necessary features the main sources of ornament. Now in the Wells front the windows and doorways are made nothing of; they could not be altogether got rid of, but they seem to have been felt as mere interruptions to the lines of sculpture. They are therefore stowed away as they best may be, and they do not form, as they should, the main features of the front. Look, for instance, at Llandaff; the front suffers much from the incongruity of the two towers built at different times: but look at the ending of the nave itself; that perfect composition of lancets, inside and out, is, as it should be, the main feature; at Wells the west window is made nothing of; it is simply cut through the sculpture. The small size of doorways is a common fault of English as opposed to foreign churches; but at Wells they reach the extreme point of insignificance in those narrow mouse-holes at the end of the aisles, through one of which we are commonly driven to creep, while the west doorway remains shut. But even the west doorway itself is a very small mouthful, I will not say after Laon or Rheims, but after York; nay even at Lichfield and Salisbury the doorways have a little more of dignity than they have at Wells. In a really good design the architectural features ought to be the first thing; sculpture or any other source of ornament should be secondary. At Wells the rule is reversed; a sham wall is built up and loaded with statues, and the windows and doorways are left to shift for themselves.

You may perhaps be surprised, perhaps even a little indignant, at the freedom of my criticism on a work which you have doubtless all learned to look on with traditional admiration. But there is nothing like truth, and I think that, if you go and fairly examine for yourselves, you will see that the censures which I have made on our west front rest on good grounds. Those censures are pretty well summed up in the one charge of unreality. But, if we can get over that charge, there is much to be said for the design on the score of boldness and originality. You know that the towers, instead of standing, as usual, at the ends of the aisles, stand beyond them, an arrangement which I have seen nowhere else except in the metropolitan church of Rouen.[159] Now in a church of the comparatively small size of Wells the effect of this arrangement is undoubtedly to sacrifice height to width, and thereby to take away from the truest dignity of the front. Still it is not to be denied that even the width has a dignity of its own, and the arrangement was well planned with regard to the special object in view, that of gaining the greatest possible space for the display of sculpture. And after all, though the west front of Wells is a sham, it is by no means so contemptible a sham as the west fronts of either Salisbury or Lincoln. The form given to the front, if unreal, is at least stately. At Salisbury the form given to the front is equally unreal, and it is indescribably mean; as no western towers were intended, one cannot conceive why the natural endings of the nave and aisles were not left, as at Winchester, Gloucester, and Bath, and in our great parish churches of Yatton and Crewkerne. The Wells front again is at least a whole; the Lincoln front is a mass of incongruous pieces. Large parts of two earlier fronts are left to disturb the harmony of the design, and a blank wall is actually carried in front of two of the noblest towers in the world, as if of set purpose to destroy their effect. The Wells front, after all, unreal as it is, has more connexion with the main building than that of Beverley, where a front, poorly imitated from that of York, is built up against the church, with a gable which has no reference whatever to the real gable of the nave.[160] At Wells, again the later builders seem to have had more feeling than usual for the harmony of the front. Wells has not suffered like Southwell, where a huge Perpendicular window was cut through the noble Romanesque front, and a sham wall with a flat battlement carried up above it. The towers were carried up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in a way which harmonizes very well with the general design of the front, though there is no kind of adaptation to its details. And here comes the question which I believe everybody asks at a first sight of Wells Cathedral. As I once heard it clearly and tersely put, "Well, that is a fine piece of work, but what are those pieces without their tops?" Every one, I suppose, feels the unfinished look of the towers; the eye craves for something or other more than there is, be it pinnacles, spires, or anything else. Now I once very carefully examined the tops of the towers in company with Mr. Parker, and we could see no signs that there ever had been, or had been designed to be, any stone-work more than there is now. But any sort of finish that any one chooses to imagine may have been added, or designed to be added, in wood. I suspect that people seldom take in how many of our great churches had their towers finished with spires of wood covered with lead or shingle. Spires of this sort were either destroyed by accident or taken away in wantonness at Old Saint Paul's, Lincoln, Ely, Hereford, Exeter, Southwell, and a crowd of other churches. A single one of two still remains at Ottery Saint Mary. On the Continent they are far more common, and they sometimes furnish beautiful examples of work in lead. Among the English examples, the towers of Lincoln supply the example which is most instructive for our own case. The spires are gone, but the angle turrets are still finished with pinnacles of wood covered with lead. Whether such an arrangement as this ever actually existed at Wells I do not know, but there can be no doubt that a finish of this kind, spires of wood sheeted with lead, with pinnacles of the same materials at the angles, would be the true means of getting rid of the flat and imperfect look of which every one complains.

If we turn to the east end, we shall, as I have already said, find the church of Wells holding a far higher position among its fellows. The east ends of English churches are of various kinds; the apsidal form, that most usual on the Continent, being the rarest. We do indeed find the German apse without aisles repeated at Lichfield, and the French apse with its divergent chapels is found on a vast scale at Westminster, and on a smaller at Tewkesbury. And there are a few other examples of apses of less merit and importance at Pershore, Coventry, Wrexham, and a few other places.[161] But the apsidal arrangement never was thoroughly English. Of the three great examples Tewkesbury is the only one where the apse fills its proper function of a canopy over the high altar. At Westminster the high altar is displaced by the shrine of Eadward the Confessor, and at Lichfield it is not the choir, but a Lady chapel of the full height, of which the apse is the ending. English east ends fall for the most part under two classes. Sometimes, as at York, Lincoln, Ely, Beverley, and Southwell, the Lady chapel and whatever else stands east of the high altar is carried on at the full height of the church. In other cases, as at Winchester, Hereford, Exeter, and Salisbury, the Lady chapel and other chapels east of the choir are much lower than the main body of the church. Now of these arrangements I confess that I myself prefer the apse to all others. No other plan gives such dignity to the high altar, or makes it so evidently the central and crowning point of the whole church. There is undoubtedly great stateliness in such an arrangement as that of York and Lincoln; but its good effect is almost wholly confined to the outside. The high altar seems to have come where it is by accident; its position is marked by a mere screen, not by anything in the arrangement of the building itself. In the third arrangement, where all that is east of the choir is much lower than the choir, some share of its proper dignity is or may be restored to the high altar. But, on the other hand, it is not easy to add on a lower building which shall be in full harmony with the loftier parts of the church. There is something insignificant about the Lady chapel at Salisbury, and it is hard to admire, externally at least, the long masses of low chapels at Winchester and Saint Alban's. A happy accident, as I have already explained, gave the opportunity at Wells of producing a form of east end which I think certainly surpasses all others of its class. The general outline and proportion of the church are no less excellent, and it is fortunate in having had everything finished, and in having nothing destroyed. At Hereford, as I have already said, the western tower has vanished, and it has carried part of the nave away with it. But, even while it stood, the single western tower could never have grouped so well with the central lantern as the two western towers at Wells. Wimborne, the chief surviving example of this arrangement, I have heard irreverently compared to driving tandem, and I cannot deny the aptness of the saying.[162] At Southwell, where the grouping of the three towers is as perfect as it well may be, the general effect has greatly suffered by the lowering of the roofs throughout. We shall hardly venture to compare the four limbs of Wells with the four limbs of Beverley, but of the Beverley west front I have already spoken, and the general effect of the church is altogether ruined through the central tower never having been carried up. Even at Lichfield, the faultless grace of the three spires, even the loveliness of the apse, cannot reconcile us to the long low body and to the extravagant length of the eastern limb. The eastern view of Lichfield, graceful as it is, cannot compare with the real stateliness of the east end of Wells. I have seen many fine churches both in our own country and abroad, many of them of course on a scale which might seem to put Wells out of all comparison. But I can honestly say that I know of no architectural group which surpasses the harmony and variety of our own cathedral, as seen by the traveller as he first enters the city from Shepton Mallet.

From the outside we turn to that of which the outside is after all the mere shell. When we enter the church, we find ourselves in a building which can fairly hold its own against competitors of its own class. The nave has a distinct character of its own: there may be differences of taste as to its merit, but it has a character, and that character is clearly the result of design. The main lines of the interior are horizontal rather than vertical. We can hardly say that there is any division into bays; no vaulting-shafts run up from the ground, nor does the triforium take, as usual, the form of a distinct composition over each arch. In short we cannot, as we can in most churches, take each arch with the triforium and clerestory over it as a thing existing by itself. One would rather say that three horizontal ranges, one over the other, all converged to the centre, without thinking of what was above or below them. Now tastes may differ as to whether this is a good arrangement or not, but there is no doubt that it is in its way an effective arrangement; there is no nave in which the eye is so irresistibly carried eastward as in that of Wells. And it is worth notice that this arrangement, in its fulness, is confined to the nave; in the transepts the bays are much more clearly marked. The idea of producing this marked horizontal effect was clearly one which came into the heads of the designers as they were working westwards.

It might have been expected that the marked prominence which is thus given to the horizontal line might have gone far to destroy all effect of height in the interior; but it is not so. There is no special feeling of height in Wells Cathedral—not so much, for instance, as there is in the church of Saint Mary Redcliff; but there is no such crushing feeling of lowness as there is at Lincoln. This I imagine to be mainly owing to the form of the arch chosen for the vaulting, one boldly but not acutely pointed, and to the way in which the lantern-arches fit into the vault. Contrast this with the far larger and loftier nave of York. In that nave the positive height is second only to Westminster among English churches, and the design of the separate bays can hardly be surpassed in its soaring effect. But in the direct eastern or western view the nave of York loses almost its whole effect, partly, no doubt, from the excessive breadth, but partly also from the flat and crushing shape of the vaulting-arch. Another point which I think helps to redress the balance between horizontal and vertical effect is the great height of the clerestory. In a church where the vertical bays are strongly marked I do not think that great comparative height in the clerestory helps to increase the effect of height. But in such cases the question rather lies between the arcade as one thing, and the triforium and clerestory together as another. Here the question lay between the triforium and the clerestory, and I cannot help thinking that, if the triforium had been on the same scale as that in the choir of Ely, the effect of height would have been less. At any rate, the nave of Wells makes the most of its small actual height: so do the choir and presbytery also; for, though I cannot at all admire the kind of vault which is there used, the shape of the arch is as judiciously chosen as it is in the nave. In the presbytery we also get the vaulting-shafts rising from the ground, so as to give the vertical division, and the consequent effect of height, in its highest perfection. Of the exquisite beauty of the Lady chapel, looked on, as it should be, not as a part of the whole, but as a distinct and almost detached building, I have already spoken. In short, the internal effect of the church, whether looked at as a whole or taken in its several parts, if not of the highest order, which its comparatively small scale forbids, may claim a high place among churches of its own class.

I think then on the whole that, even looking at the church by itself, we have every reason to be thankful for what we have got. We have not a church of the first order; but we have a church whose several parts fit very well together, all whose parts have been finished, and of which no part has been destroyed. And I may add that we may be thankful for another thing, for the goodness of the stone of which the greater part of the church is built. The sculpture of the west front indeed has crumbled away; but elsewhere at Wells, as at Glastonbury, wherever the work has not been wantonly knocked away, it is as good as when it was first cut. Now we might have had a church like Chester or Coventry, where the whole surface of the stone has crumbled away, and where the whole ornamental design has become unintelligible. I have said that the church of Wells forms a harmonious whole, that it was perfectly finished, and that no part has been destroyed; and this is a great thing to say. Let me compare the good fortune of Wells in this respect with the cathedral church of a much more famous city at the other end of England. At Carlisle there is a noble choir, ending in what is probably the grandest window in England. If that choir only had transepts, nave, and towers to match it, the church of Carlisle would be a splendid church indeed. But the choir is built up against a little paltry transept and central tower, and nothing remains by way of nave but two bays of the original small Norman church, the rest having utterly vanished. Here then is a church which does not form a harmonious whole, a church which remains utterly unfinished, and of which one essential part has been destroyed. Or, without taking such an extreme case as this, we may compare our church with some of those of which I have already spoken, with Hereford, Southwell, Beverley, and Tewkesbury. In all of these some important feature has either never been finished or has been destroyed at a later time. The church of Wells then, simply taken by itself, claims a high place among buildings of its own class, that is, among minsters of the second order. But, as I began these lectures by saying, the real charm of Wells does not lie in the church taken by itself, but in the church surrounded by its accompanying buildings. Of some of these I must now speak a word. I do not intend to go minutely into either their architecture or their history; but some of them are inseparably connected both with the fabric and with the foundation of the cathedral. And it is the preservation of them which gives Wells its peculiar character. Each part may easily be equalled or surpassed, but the whole has no rival in England, and I cannot think that it has many in Christendom.

It was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, alongside of the works in the church itself of which I have already spoken, that those subordinate buildings were also rising, which have given Wells this its peculiar character as the most complete and most uninjured example of the buildings of a great secular foundation. The greatest name in this way in the course of the fourteenth century is one which we all know, that of Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury; I have already spoken of him as having probably had a chief hand in the reconstruction of the choir and presbytery. He also gave the palace its present form. The house had been originally built by Jocelin. The great hall had been added by Robert Burnell. It was Ralph who fenced himself in with a moat and a wall as we now see.[163] But his greatest work is to be looked for on the other side of the church, and it is closely connected with the constitutional change which may be looked on as putting the finishing stroke to the existing constitution of the cathedral, I mean the foundation of the College of Vicars. The great offices of the church were now all in being, and the relations between the two classes of Canons had been pretty well fixed. It now remained to fix the exact position of that subordinate body of clergy which had grown up through the prevalent practice of non-residence among the Canons. The Vicar, we have seen, was at first simply the personal deputy of some particular Canon, appointed by him to discharge his duties in his absence. But it could hardly fail that the Vicars as a body should gradually enter into some sort of relation with the Chapter as a body. This would especially be the case, when residence became the fixed duty of one class of Canons and no part of the duty of another. The Vicars would gradually change from deputies of absent Canons into assistants of Canons who at least professed to be present. As such, it was natural that they should receive a fixed status in the church, and, with the ideas of those times, it was equally natural that they should receive somewhat of corporate independence. The Vicars of Wells then, like the Vicars of most or all of the Old Foundation churches, became a distinct corporation. They were subordinate to the Chapter as regards their duties in the church, but they were independent of it as regards the estates with which they were endowed, and they were governed by statutes given them by their founder. That founder was, as we all know, Ralph of Shrewsbury. Most of you, no doubt, have seen the picture with the Latin verses in which the Vicars set forth their hard case to the Bishop, how they are driven to live where they can about the town, and how he promises to give them a house where they may live together.[164] Then arose the Vicars' Close of Wells, and, though the present buildings mainly belong to a later time, yet portions of Ralph's work may still be seen, especially in the hall, where several of his windows still remain. But the complaint of the Vicars, that they were scattered through the streets of the town, deserves notice. In the first state of things, as is plain from the stories told by Richard of the Devizes, the Vicar lived in the house of the Canon whom he represented.[165] But it is equally plain that as the number of prebends increased, even the institution of ribs did not provide a house for every Canon, and, as the institution of special Residentiaries became fixed, the available houses would be mainly occupied by them. We can thus understand how there might now be many Vicars unprovided with any place to dwell in. The buildings of the Close were recast and almost rebuilt by the three executors of Bishop Beckington, Richard Swan the Provost, Hugh Sugar the Treasurer, and John Pope, Prebendary of Saint Decumans.[166] They were commissioned to dispose of the unbequeathed portion of the Bishop's goods to pious uses at their discretion, and, besides other works in other parts of the diocese, the Vicars' Close now assumed its present shape. In that shape it is certainly without a rival. I know nothing to compare to those two quiet ranges of houses, the hall at one end, the chapel at the other, suggesting the very perfection of collegiate life; and, as an ingenious device for turning a piece of practical convenience into a matter of high architectural ornament, nothing can well surpass the chain-bridge. I need not say that the original design of the institution was at once broken in upon as soon as marriage was allowed to its members. The two rooms, with the separate approach to each, were designed as college rooms for men who took their meals in the common hall; and, as college rooms, they give very far from contemptible accommodation. But they were, of course, utterly unsuited for the reception of wives and families, and the architectural features of the Close have been sadly damaged by throwing two or more houses into one. I have always cherished a sort of dream that, by some means or other, the old institution of the Vicars' College and the new institution of the Theological College might be rolled into one, that the office of Vicar in the cathedral might be held by young clergymen and by men preparing for holy orders, and that collegiate life might be again restored in the old hall of Ralph and Beckington. But, however this may be, I would at least call on the clerical members of the College to stick to their good old title of Priest Vicar, and not to call themselves, or allow themselves to be called, by the new-fangled name of Minor Canon. It is historically incorrect; it was in use at Saint Paul's and at Hereford, but it was never in use at Wells. That it is better sounding or more honourable than that of Priest Vicar I cannot believe. To me it seems exactly the reverse, as the stress is always laid on the word Minor, never on the word Canon. And it tends to confound the Priest Vicars of our Old Foundations with men holding a position very inferior to theirs, namely the Petty Canons or Minor Canons of the churches founded by Henry the Eighth. These are simple subordinates of the Chapter, without any separate endowment or corporate independence of any kind. The supposed legal necessity for the change arises from a misconstruction of an Act of Parliament, which really orders nothing of the kind. To hear of a Minor Canon of Wells is as bad as to hear of an Honorary Canon; that is to say, to hear a Canon or Prebendary of Wells, whose stall dates perhaps from the twelfth century, pulled down to the level of those mysterious personages, not only without revenues but without either rights or duties, who have sprung up at Bristol or Manchester within the present reign.

The history of Vicars' Colleges at Wells and elsewhere should be written in full. No one could do it so well as my friend Mr. Dimock, once himself a Priest Vicar of the collegiate church of Southwell.[167] One point to be worked out with special care would be the steps and causes by which the office came to be held by laymen. The change in this respect was fully recognized by the charter of Elizabeth, which confirmed the rights and estates of the Vicars, and regulated, without absolutely fixing, the numbers of the two classes of Vicars, clerical and lay. It is a change which has not taken place everywhere. The Vicars at York are still a purely clerical body, the lay members of the choir being mere stipendiaries. And, unless some change has been made very lately, the same is the case at Hereford.[168] And as the Priest Vicars of our Old Foundations should never be confounded with the Petty Canons of the New, still less should the lay members of those colleges, equal in corporate rights to their clerical brethren, ever be degraded to the level of the mere lay clerks or singing-men of other churches, who are sometimes simply stipendiaries, and who, even when they are statutable officers, have no separate endowment or corporate being.

There were thus, before the end of the fourteenth century, two distinct corporations attached to the cathedral church, namely, the Chapter and the College of Vicars. These two were and are distinct and independent as regards their property and personal being, though, as regards the duty and discipline of the church, the members of the younger foundation were and are subordinate to the members of the elder. These two bodies still remain, and I trust they may long remain and flourish; but, in the first years of the fifteenth century, a third body arose, which has vanished from among us. We read that Ralph Erghum, who was Bishop from 1388 to 1401, and who was a benefactor to his church in several ways,[169] founded by his will a College of fourteen priests in a place which was then called the Mounterye, and which from this foundation took the name of College Lane.[170] That is to say, he seems to have incorporated the Chantry-priests of the cathedral, the priests who, besides the public services performed by the Canons and Vicars, said masses for particular persons at particular altars. All foundations of this kind were suppressed by the Act of the first year of Edward the Sixth, and the only memory which Erghum's foundation has left among us is the name which still belongs to the lane.

The separate houses of Canons and other officers belong mainly to the fifteenth century, though there are some portions of earlier date. Let me here especially mention one small and decaying but very beautiful fragment, namely the round window with wooden tracery at the east end of the house which formerly belonged to the Archdeacons of Wells. The house itself, strangely disguised as it is without, contains within a very fine timber roof; the Deanery too, much as it has suffered from the insertion of modern windows, still retains much of the dignity of design which it received from its builder, the learned Dean Gunthorpe, who held the office from 1473 to 1498.[171] But I will not enlarge more fully on the particular houses; they are the especial province of Mr. Parker, and he has dealt with them all from the Bishop's palace to the house of the organist.[172] I would only again insist on the necessity, on the duty, of carefully preserving every one of these ancient buildings to the assemblage of which our city owes its special position among the cities of England. We have lost too much already. Every year some ancient building is destroyed or threatened.[173] Let those whose business it is awake before it is too late; let them see that not another stone is sacrificed to niggardliness, to caprice, or to ignorant notions of improvement. Look, for instance, at what was some time back trumpeted as a vast improvement, the pulling down of a house to open a view of the west front of the Cathedral to the windows of the Swan Inn. The doers of that deed most likely knew not what they were doing. They perhaps did not even remember that, in opening the view of the west front of the Cathedral to the windows of the Swan Inn, they were also opening the not very picturesque view of the Swan Inn to those who came out of the western doors of the Cathedral. They did not stop to think that the space before the west front was really too open already, and that at any rate matters were not mended by opening a view through so ludicrous a gap, which I have heard witty people compare to the space left in a man's mouth by drawing a single tooth. Still less did they think that, in a thoughtless moment of destruction, they were wiping out the whole history of the church and city. The house indeed was in itself valueless; I should not have wept for the removal of the house or of the whole row of houses of which it formed a part. But, along with the house, the destroyers overthrew the wall against which the house was built up, and that wall was the history of the city of Wells. At Wells, as I have already set forth, the church was not founded in the city, but the city grew up under the shadow of the church.[174] The church and its precincts were not taken into the city till the days of parliamentary and municipal reform. The wall of the Close is everywhere a sign of separation, marking off ecclesiastical and temporal property, and often marking the limits of distinct jurisdictions. But at Wells the wall has a special significance, as a memorial of the days when the city arose outside the ecclesiastical precinct. Thus, by a single thoughtless act, not only is a material piece of antiquity destroyed, but a page of local, and thereby of national, history is torn away.

The only remaining work to be mentioned is one to which I have incidentally referred more than once, namely, the cloister and the buildings attached to it. I have now to add that the detached Lady chapel in the east walk of the cloister was rebuilt by Robert Stillington, who was Bishop from 1464 to 1487, an event which is best recorded in the words of Bishop Godwin.

"He built that goodly Lady Chappell in the cloysters, that was pulled down by him that destroyed also the great hall of the palace ... and was entombed in the said Chappell, but rested not long there: For it is reported, that divers olde men, who in their youth had not onely seene the celebration of his funerals, but also the building of his toombe, Chappell and all; did also see, toombe and Chappell destroyed, and the bones of the Bishop that built them, turned out of the lead in which they were interred."[175]

This quotation may serve as a fitting transition to the times which we have now reached. We have now done with the age of building up, and we have come to the age of pulling down. At the end of the fifteenth century the church of Wells had reached its highest degree of perfection. The church was complete; its appurtenances were complete. Of the fabric itself it is enough to say that our great Beckington, so bountiful a benefactor to the city and diocese in every other way, did nothing to the actual fabric of the cathedral, because there was really nothing for him to do. My subject, you will remember, is the cathedral church, alike in its fabric and in its constitution. Had my subject been the city generally, I should have found something to say about the parish church, about the hospitals, about the Guild-hall, about Beckington's houses in the marketplace. But I keep myself to the cathedral and its immediate belongings. The destruction spoken of in the extract which I just before made from Godwin carries us on to the reign of Edward the Sixth. But I must first say a few words about the reign of Henry the Eighth. I must now once more call on you carefully to bear in mind the distinction between the regular and secular clergy, and between the cathedral churches served by each of them severally. In the course of the reign of Henry the Eighth all the monastic foundations in England were destroyed. Everybody knows this fact, but everybody does not put the fact in its right place. People talk of an event called the Reformation, as if it were a single event which happened in some one particular year, like the passing of the Reform Bill or the cutting off of Charles the First's head. No such event ever happened. A great many ecclesiastical changes took place in the course of the sixteenth century, but those changes did not happen all at once, and many of them had no immediate connexion with one another. Above all, do not fancy that an old Church was destroyed and a new Church founded; do not fancy that property was taken from one set of clergy and given to another set of clergy. Nothing of the sort ever happened. Great changes were made in the Church of England, changes which, as some people at the time thought, went too far, and which, as other people thought, did not go far enough. But these changes in no way touched what we may call the personal identity of the Church before and after them. Remember that I am not talking theology but history. No one here will suppose that I, of all men, deny the power of Parliament to disestablish and disendow a Church, if it sees good reason to do so; I only say that, as a matter of fact, that power was not exercised by Parliament in the sixteenth century. Certain ecclesiastical changes were made; certain ecclesiastical foundations were suppressed; but the Church itself went on. The throwing off of the authority of the Bishop of Rome, the suppression of the monasteries, the introduction of the English Prayer-Book and Articles, were three different events, which happened at three different times, and which had nothing directly to do with one another. The monastic foundations accepted the King's supremacy just as fully as the secular foundations did, and, after the monasteries were suppressed, mass went on being said in the cathedral, collegiate, and parochial churches, just as it had been before. And let no one fancy that the two suppressions familiar to us in the reign of Henry the Eighth, the suppression of the lesser and of the greater monasteries, were the first cases of the suppression of ecclesiastical foundations known in England. The supreme power of the state in England has in all ages, as it has done in our own day, exercised that authority over the temporalities of the Church, which, in its own nature, it must exercise over everything. Cardinal Wolsey suppressed a number of small monasteries in order to transfer their endowments to his colleges at Ipswich and Oxford.[176] Before that, in the reign of Henry the Fifth, the Alien Priories, that is the monasteries which were dependent on monasteries in foreign countries, were suppressed by Act of Parliament.[177] The main difference is that in these cases monasteries were suppressed for good political reasons, and their revenues were applied to useful public purposes, while in the suppression under Henry and Cromwell all that was thought of was the scramble of the King and his courtiers for their own private pelf.[178] The most sickening havoc and sacrilege ran wild among the noblest and holiest fabrics of the land. We have but to go as far as Glastonbury, to see the desolation of the most venerable spot in Britain, to ask in vain for the burying-places of our Kings and heroes, and to look up to the height where the last Abbot of that great house won the martyr's crown rather than betray his trust and provide for his own enrichment and promotion by wilfully surrendering his church to the illegal bidding of the spoiler.[179]

But we have now chiefly to see how these various changes affected the constitution and position of our church of Wells. As Wells was a secular foundation, the suppression of the monasteries did not touch it at all; Glastonbury and Bath fell, but Wells went on just as it had done before. If anything, the church of Wells gained by the suppression, as it was thereby restored to the rank which it held before the days of John de Villulâ. As I have already said, the church of Bath was suppressed along with the other monasteries, and the Chapter of Wells was once more made, by an Act of Parliament in 1543, the sole Chapter of the Somersetshire Bishoprick.[180] It is undoubtedly true that, for three years, from 1537 to 1540, the Deanery was irregularly held by the King's favourite, Lord Cromwell, who, of course, as a layman, could not perform its duties.[181] This was a great abuse, but it was not altogether a new abuse. To search no further, earlier in Henry's reign the two Deaneries of Exeter and Wimborne had been held at once by the King's cousin, Reginald Pole, who was afterwards Cardinal and Archbishop, but who had not then taken holy orders. Reginald Pole was, to be sure, a theological student, a description which would hardly apply to Thomas Cromwell; still Pole could as little discharge the duties of Dean of Exeter as Cromwell could discharge those of Dean of Wells.[182] It was not till the reign of Edward the Sixth that the systematic picking and stealing from ecclesiastical bodies, as distinguished from their regular suppression, set in like a flood. The first instalment of destruction was indeed done in a regular and legal way. In his first year (1547), all chantries and colleges were suppressed, the cathedral chapters, the colleges in the Universities, and a few others only being spared.[183] The suppression of the chantries, where masses were said for the souls of particular persons, necessarily followed on the change of doctrine; but the general suppression of Colleges, which had the effect of destroying the capitular bodies at Beverley, Wimborne, and a crowd of other places, was sheer destruction, and not reformation. Then came the general plunder of Bishopricks, Chapters, and ecclesiastical bodies generally, which began under Edward, and went on again in a form one degree less shameless under Elizabeth. A Bishop was commonly bullied into exchanging the estates of his see for some pretended equivalent, commonly in the shape of impropriate tithes. No church suffered in this way more than that of Wells. William Barlow, who became Bishop in 1547, the first year of Edward the Sixth, was driven in the course of that year and the next to give up to Edward Duke of Somerset pretty well everything belonging to the see, including the palace of Wells itself, in exchange for a few rectories.[184] A large part of this property was lost for ever; but a good deal was recovered by Barlow himself after the Duke's execution, and by his successor Gilbert Bourne in the days of Queen Mary.[185] It is not easy for us to conceive that there was a time when the palace had ceased to be the house of the Bishop, and had become the dwelling of a lay nobleman. And when we remember that that lay nobleman, besides receiving endless estates elsewhere, was also the grantee and the destroyer of the Abbey of Glastonbury, we get a good specimen of the way in which the property of the Church was squandered away, not for the public good in any shape, but for the private enrichment of greedy courtiers. Of the other foundations in Wells, the Priory of Saint John had fallen in 1541. This, I should explain, though its chief officer bore the title of Prior, was not a monastery, but a hospital.[186] The college of Chantry-priests fell by the Act of 1547;[187] the plunderers then fell upon the property of the Chapter and of its individual members. The estates of the Deanery were swallowed up, and, in order to patch up a new endowment for the Dean, an Act was passed for the suppression of the offices of Provost and Sub-Chanter, the estates of which formed a new corps for the Deanery.[188] But as with the lands of the Bishoprick, so with those of the Deanery, a great part was recovered in the days of Queen Mary; so that, as the provostship and sub-chantership were never restored, I suspect that the Deans in the end gained by their spoliation. Some of the common possessions of the Chapter were also lost, and were partly recovered by Bishop Bourne, as also were the lands of the Archdeaconry; but the Archdeacon's house of which I have already spoken has remained alienated to this day.[189]

These are specimens of the spoliations, many of them positively illegal, all of them wrought, not for the public good but for private enrichment, which our Bishopricks, Chapters, and other ecclesiastical foundations underwent in the course of the sixteenth century. But at Wells these spoliations had an important effect on the constitution of the church. Legal cavils were raised as to the right both of the Chapter and the Vicars to their possessions. It was affirmed that the reconstitution of the Deanery had somehow involved the complete suppression of the Chapter. Both the Chapter and the College of Vicars therefore found it expedient to procure charters from Queen Elizabeth confirming them in their rights and properties. The charter granted to the Chapter is a most curious document, because it is evident that the Residentiaries took this opportunity to procure something like a legal confirmation of the usurpations by which the non-residentiary Canons were gradually cheated out of their rights and powers. The Queen refounds all the dignities and prebends, and endows them afresh with their old possessions. Then, as if the holders of these dignities and prebends did not form the Chapter, the Charter goes on to found the Chapter, as a body consisting of Residentiaries only, and to grant to them the cathedral church and other property. The deed winds up by saying that the non-residentiary Canons are to have votes in Chapter, but only for the purpose of electing a Bishop.[190] I do not profess to know what may be the legal force of such a document, though it certainly seems to me that nothing short of an Act of Parliament can take away from any man or any corporation any rights which they already legally enjoy. But whatever it may be worth, this charter is the authority for the practice by which at Wells the non-residentiary Canons are summoned to the election of a Bishop and not to other meetings of the Chapter, while at York they are still summoned to every meeting. I am not a lawyer and I do not speak as one. But historically the thing is a cheat and an usurpation. The Elizabethan charter carries its own contradiction with it; and, as an ecclesiastical reformer, I say once more that the point to be most strongly insisted on, if our cathedral bodies are ever again to fulfil their ancient uses, is to make both classes of Canons realities. The Residentiaries must be Residentiaries, living on the spot, not making the cathedral a place of holiday retirement from duties elsewhere. And lest the smaller body of Residentiaries should again sink into a narrow oligarchy, the whole body of Canons must be again restored to their ancient rights, not only in the formal election of a Bishop, but in all those matters of election, patronage, discipline, and business of every kind, which are expressed in the ancient formula of "a stall in the choir and a voice in the chapter-house."[191]

On the two following centuries I need not dwell. I will rather hasten on to our own times. The last great changes in the church of Wells come within our own memory. Those changes say a great deal for the zeal and energy of those who carried them out, but they say very little for their taste and knowledge. The pity is that they were done at the particular time when they were done, when it was quite possible to get detail well executed—and the detail certainly is very well executed—but when ecclesiastical arrangement was not understood. It would have been far better to have let the church remain in its old state, wretched as that state was, for twenty or thirty years longer. As it was, the change was made in one sense so badly as to make the whole thing a by-word, in another sense so well that I fear there is little chance of undoing it for a good while to come. Some things were done which were deeds of sheer havoc, deeds worthy of no one but of Protector Somerset himself. What had those Bishops done whose figures may be seen in the undercroft of the Chapter-house, that they should be torn away from their places and shut up as it were in a posthumous dungeon? What had our famous Beckington done that his canopy should be carried away, and set up where, as covering nothing, it is simply ridiculous and unmeaning? To be sure even that was not the lowest depth in store for the great benefactor. His canopy had yet to be mutilated and moved backwards and forwards in order the better to display the most hideous stoves with which human perversity ever disfigured an ancient building.[192] When we think of the havoc of last year, one is half inclined to forgive the havoc of twenty years back. Yet one cannot help asking why the long continuous ranges of stalls which give such dignity to the choirs of Winchester, Ely, and Manchester, were forsaken for the absurd arrangement which sticks the stalls piecemeal between the pillars, and which so lessens their numbers that, if the whole Chapter were ever to assemble, some less lucky Canons must sit on the laps of others?[193] Why was all this done? I know the answer well. It was to provide room for the congregation; it was thought a great feat to give a little more width to the choir, and so to gain a few more sittings, by putting the stalls between the pillars instead of in their proper place in front of them. Now to provide for the congregation is an excellent object, but the wisdom of our forefathers had already found ample room for the congregation in quite another way. Did those who planned the last arrangements of Wells Cathedral know that there was a nave, and, if they did know it, for what end did they suppose that that nave was built? A Bishop, coming in by the cloister door, might possibly never find out that there was a nave at all; but a Dean, coming in at the west end, must have seen that there was a good deal of building between that door and his own stall, and one would have thought that he must sometimes have stopped to think for what end that building was set up. Was that long array of arches, that soaring vault, made simply as a place for rubbing shoes before the service begins or for chattering after the service is ended? I think that Robert and Jocelin had better notions of the adaptation of means to ends than to rear so great a work for such small purposes. When the last changes were made at Wells, these elementary questions seem not to have presented themselves to men's minds. Had the work waited till now, Wells might not have been, as it now is, a reproach and a proverb among the minsters of England, but we might have held our place alongside of our fellows at Chichester and Hereford and Lichfield and Llandaff. The truth, simple as it is, though it seems so strange to many minds, is that the nave of a cathedral, no less than of any other church, is nothing in the world but the place for the congregation. There is something wonderful in the kind of difficulty which some people seem to have in taking in so plain a fact. It is a thing which I have said over and over again, and people stare and seem not to know what I mean. Yet I am not putting forth any dream of my own; I am saying what is a sober fact in many other places, and what might easily be made a sober fact at Wells also. I do not ask you to go to the ends of the earth; I do not ask you even to go to places like Ely and Durham in distant parts of our island. A short trip will take you to Llandaff, and a trip a little longer will take you to Hereford, and there you will see English cathedral churches as they ought to be, but as the church of Wells is not. Enter the church of Wells, you find yourself in a vast empty space; a solid wall in front of you, with an organ on the top of it, blocks off the small part of the church which alone is used for divine worship. Into that small part, designed originally for the clergy and choir only, the whole congregation is rammed, jammed, crammed without distinction; or rather there is distinction, and too much distinction, but it is distinction wholly of the wrong kind. Can the small space in which we find ourselves be the common church of the diocese, the church of the Bishop, the church of his flock? Alas! it looks far too much like the private chapel of some half-dozen clergymen and their private friends. Think too of the burning shame of appropriated seats in a cathedral choir. The gold ring and the goodly apparel soon find their way to the chief seats of the synagogue, while the poor man in vile raiment is bidden by an unconscious irony to go and further crowd up the space which should be left void to give dignity to the approach to God's altar. Is this the way to make the whole people of the diocese feel at home in the temple which was built for them? Is this the way to strengthen a Church which seems to shrink from proclaiming itself as the Church of the People, and which seems to clutch at the shadowy dignity of being the Church of the exclusive few? Ten arches of nave stand empty, and the worshipper seeking a place has to ask, "Is this or the other person likely to come to-day?" before the spot sacred to exclusiveness may be safely intruded on. Cross the Channel, and you will see another sight. Enter by the western door of the church of Llandaff, and right before your eyes stands the altar, raised aloft in fitting majesty. Below it, open to all eyes, is the Bishop on his throne, the clergy and singers in their stalls. The long nave is filled with the people, the faithful of the city and diocese. Nothing distinguishes worshippers of higher worldly position; nothing distinguishes the households of the dignitaries of the cathedral from their fellow Christians of lower degree. There is the church as it should be;[194] can we apply that name to our own church as it is? Here is the great reform; here is the one great work to be done. Make the church once more a church, before we trouble ourselves with the enrichments of the building. Make clean the inside of the cup and the platter, and the adornment of the outside may come afterwards.[195] Do not misunderstand me; do not think I am asking for the wretched half-and-half mockery which is called "service in the nave." We know what that means; we see it once or twice in the year; it means a return to chaos. It means a sham altar, sham stalls, sham everything. At the very times when an unusual number of the cathedral clergy are present, it is impossible for them to take their proper places, and they are driven higgledy-piggledy into the places of the congregation. What I want is service in the nave and in the choir at once. Then comes the answer, "Oh, but it is impossible; the screen is in the way." The remedy is easy; pull the screen down.[196] There are churches where so simple a remedy could not be so easily applied. In churches of the vast size of Canterbury, York, and Winchester, where also the screen is often a work of great antiquity and architectural beauty, there are no doubt real difficulties in the way of carrying out the scheme for which I am fighting. The close screen, shutting off the choir from the nave, was in its right place in a monastery, where the church really belonged to the monks, where the people were present only by sufferance, and where the monks needed some such shelter during their midnight worship. But in a cathedral church, which exists for the sake of the whole diocese, such screens were an abuse from the beginning, which ought never to have been brought in. Still we should think twice before we pulled down the ancient and splendid screens which divide the naves and choirs of some of our greater minsters. But at Wells there is no difficulty at all. The size of the church is moderate, and the screen is of no architectural value. Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground? Break down the middle wall of partition that is against us, and let the people of the diocese of Wells again have their own church for their own. Did you not feel the lack at the last great ceremony held in this place, when our new Bishop came to take possession of his seat and to show himself as a father among his children? That ceremony, which in its very nature ought to have been done in the sight of the whole people of the diocese, could be done only in the sight of a favoured few. It was a very different sight which I saw two years back in the cathedral church of Bayeux. There I saw the installation of a new Bishop of that see,—a Bishop, I may add, who is at this moment bravely defending Gallican liberties against Roman usurpations. The rite was done in the face of the world, and the whole of that noble minster was thronged with clergy and laity from the west door to the high altar. Tell me not of impossibilities; what has been done at Lichfield and Hereford and Llandaff may be done at Wells also. I remember Llandaff a ruin; go and see for yourselves what it now is. I remember the choir of Lichfield in a far worse case than ever the choir of Wells was. I remember it blocked off from the nave, glazed and plastered, and room for the congregation found by throwing the Lady chapel into it. Go and see what the model church of England is now. "Oh, but, if we are in the nave, and if the altar is raised as it is at Llandaff, we shall not be able to see into the Lady chapel." Certainly you will not; but, of all the possible lawful and unlawful uses of a Lady chapel, that of acting as a peep-show to the choir certainly never came into the heads of its founders. But if you are not able to see the Lady chapel, you will be able to see something much better: you will be able to see what you never have seen; you will see the inside of the cathedral church itself. You will see the mighty whole, from west door to high altar, each part performing its proper function, and, as a mere view, affording a far nobler sight than the pretty peep into the eastern chapels which would be lost. And then comes another objection. "Oh, but if we are in the nave, we shall never be able to hear." Solvitur audiendo. If the officiating minister spouts or mumbles, of course you will not hear; if he chants as there is at least one among us who can chant, you might hear to the end of Saint Alban's Abbey. The light open screen, such as you see at Lichfield and Hereford, in no way hinders sight and hearing; and for those parts of the service for which chanting is unfit, for the sermon and the lessons, the preacher or reader would of course come out into the nave. The pulpit is ready for him, the lectern is ready for him, and the new device of a pulpit stuck so grotesquely opposite the Bishop's throne might, I should think, be swept away without anybody weeping for it. But from the elder pulpit, the quaint design of the seventeenth century, I will draw a lesson. It bears the legend, "Be instant in season, out of season," and instant in season, out of season, I will be, and let every one who thinks with me be also, till we have broken down the dull mass of prejudice and ignorance which stands in our way. We must work till we have given new life to what is not dead but only sleeping—till we have reformed our ancient institutions on their ancient principles—till we have swept away all traces of the days of greediness and ignorance—till pluralist Deans and non-resident Residentiaries have become things of the past—till the mother-church of the diocese has again become the church of the Bishop and the church of his flock, open to all, free to all, whose doors are never shut against any, and where every inch from western door to rood-screen stands ready for men not only to admire but to worship. Thus let us reform, lest others destroy. The true conservative is ever the true reformer, and the true reformer is ever the true conservative. If we would preserve the essence of our institutions, we must sweep away their abuses. And none of our institutions are nobler in their theory, none have more sadly fallen away in their practice, than our ancient cathedral churches. The Church of England is at this moment on her trial, and, above all her institutions, her cathedral foundations are pre-eminently on their trial. There never was a moment when a little more sleep and a little more slumber was less fitted to be the order of the day. Those who, with me, love and venerate those ancient fabrics and foundations, those who, by seeking their reformation, are thereby seeking their preservation, are bound to be up and doing. The work has begun; wherever there is a will, there is a way; many an ancient minster has put on a new garb, alike in its material fabric and in the worship carried on within it. Why should we lag behind our neighbours? Why should the mistakes of twenty years past be hung like a clog around our necks? Some needful reforms indeed could not be done without the legislative help, but it needs no Act of Parliament to make the nave of Wells Cathedral as truly a living thing, as truly a place of real and living worship, as the naves of Llandaff and Lichfield. A zeal not according to knowledge condemned us to the mischiefs of a restoration which was done too soon. Whenever zeal accompanied by knowledge appears in authority among us, as it has already appeared among others, the work will be done.

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