To these ministers of the church must be added a number of officials of another kind, the bailiffs, receivers, and auditors of the various properties; the inferior servants of the church; the constable of the close; the porters of the gates of the close; the searchers of the church or night watch, who had a timber chamber in the choir transept; and the domestic servants of the residents.
Let the reader, who has perhaps wandered through the empty cathedral to admire its wonderful proportions and beautiful architecture, and who has, while so doing, felt the moral chill of its emptiness, try to refurnish it with the shrines, chapels, and tombs, the loft for the nightly watchers of the shrine, the cell of the recluse priest, all inclosed within the vast ground plan and towering height of the main building, reminding us of the many mansions in the House of the Heavenly Father. Or let him place himself in imagination in the choir on the day on which the mediæval bishop was holding his synod. The stalls at the west end are occupied by the dean and the four dignitaries in their copes, who face eastward and overlook the whole assembly. The canopied stalls on the sides are filled by their prebendaries in surplice and furred cope; the vicars choral and the choristers are in their places in the subsellæ on each side; the long rows of benches in front of the stalls are filled by the clergy of the diocese, so many as can find room; the bishop in cope and mitre occupies his lofty canopied throne at the east end of the south line of stalls; the great nave beyond is crowded with the rest of the clergy and their synodsmen, and the citizens, and the people from the country round, attracted to the imposing spectacle. It is the whole people of a diocese stretching from the Humber to the Thames, which by representation has assembled in the mother church to listen to their bishop’s fatherly exhortations, and to join with him in a united service of worship of Almighty God.
Let us adjourn to the chapter-house, which seems so empty and so useless to the modern visitor. See it filled now, with the bishop on the stone throne opposite the entrance, and the dignitaries of the cathedral and the archdeacons seated to right and left of him, and the whole area crowded with the clergy and synodsmen; it is the people of his diocese—the clergy in person, the laity by their representatives—come to report themselves to their bishop, to submit themselves to his jurisdiction, to receive his admonitions and counsels. The House of Lords is a rather depressing spectacle to the visitor who gazes on its empty grandeur; but see it filled on some great day, e.g. when the Sovereign opens Parliament in person, and it is not too grand for the meeting-place of the Sovereign and Peers of Britain and for the transaction of the business of an Empire. In the chapter-house it was the spiritual business of the King of kings which was transacted—business which concerned the eternal interests of those present; so the grand and beautiful building, with its soaring central pillar and its overshadowing groining, was not too grand for the spiritual significance of the multitude which its walls encircled.
So the broad lawns which surround the building were not left only to enable the spectator to obtain a good view of the building. Their use was seen on St. Hugh’s Day, when the people of the town and villages came trooping in at every gate, with crosses and banners and painted wands, and needed space in which to arrange the long procession which wound slowly round the close and entered by the western door.
The magnitude and importance of the dioceses differed greatly, and so did the emoluments of the bishops and of the cathedral establishments. We have given Lincoln as an example of the greater dioceses; we may take the Diocese of the South Saxons, with its See at Chichester, as an example of the smaller.
When the bishop-stool of the South Saxons was removed after the Norman Conquest from Selsey to Chichester, Earl Roger of Montgomery gave the south-west quarter of the city, including a portion of the old Roman walls which protected it, for a site for the cathedral. A nunnery with a church dedicated to St. Peter already existed on the site; the nuns were transferred elsewhere, and the church used as the germ of the cathedral church.[387] Bishop Stigand built a new church of timber, which was soon replaced. The able and energetic Bishop Ralph Luffa was the real founder of the present cathedral. His church was of the normal Norman plan, a cross church with a low central tower and two west towers, all of massive construction, plain almost to sternness. It was in the thirteenth century that, among other great additions to the church, the central tower was raised by the addition of another story; and not till the fifteenth century that the lofty and graceful spire was added which was the peculiar glory of Chichester.
The constitution of the cathedral was in the main the same as at Lincoln, the bishop, dean, precentor, chancellor, and treasurer, with twenty-eight prebendaries, twelve vicars choral, etc., and two archdeacons.