Special Features: The West Front; the New Building.
The great fenland monastery of St. Peter, the holy house of Medeshampstead, attracting houses around it, grew into a borough, and finally into a city—Peterborough. The village was first called Medeshampstead—homestead in the meadows. For centuries the settlement had no interests outside the monastery. In the Seventh Century Penda, King of Mercia, and his family were converted to Christianity, and it was his son Penda who founded the monastery here in 654. The first monastery was destroyed by the Danes in 870. It lay in ruins for a hundred years. With the religious revival under Duncan and King Edgar, the holy house of Medeshampstead was rebuilt by Bishop Ethelwold, of Winchester, and henceforth known as the Burgh.
The foundations of the old Saxon church still remain under the east wall of the south transept. It is related that when King Edgar visited the monastery and saw some old deeds he wept for joy on reading the privileges of the place and granted a new charter renewing and confirming these. The church seems to have been, even in those days, dedicated to St. Peter. The Abbey flourished for a time; then it was plundered by Hereward, the Saxon leader, and suffered also from fire while the monks were carousing. In the time of Henry I. a great fire destroyed the whole building. The picturesque imagination of the period attributed it to a servant, who, trying unsuccessfully to light a fire in the bakehouse, lost his temper and called upon Satan for aid, crying “Veni, Diabole, et insuffla ignem.”
John de Sais, who was then Abbot (1114-1125), began the building of a new minster, the one that we now see. As usual the work was begun at the east end. The choir was finished with an apse. A small apse also terminated each choir-aisle. The whole church was in progress of building for eighty years. This was all Norman work of course.
The western transept, dating from the close of the Twelfth and beginning of the Thirteenth Century, shows a change.
“The Norman style was giving place to the lighter and more elegant architecture of the Early English period, the round arch was beginning to be superseded by the pointed arch, and the massive ornamentation which marks the earlier style was displaced by the conventional foliage that soon came to be very generally employed. Most wisely, however, the Peterborough builders made their work at the west end of the nave intentionally uniform with what was already built. Very numerous indications of this can be seen by careful observers. The bases of the western pillars, the change in the depth of the mouldings, characteristic changes in the capitals in the triforium range, and especially the grand arches below the transept towers, which are pointed but enriched with ornamentation of pronounced Norman character, all point to the later date of this western transept.
“At the west wall of the church all trace of Norman work disappears. The arcade near the ground, the large round arch above the door, the great west window and its adjacent arches (not, of course, including the late tracery), are all of distinct Early English character. The whole of this wall may be held to be an integral part of the west front, and not of the transept which it bounds.
“When we come to the most distinctive feature of the cathedral, the glorious west front, we find we have no help whatever from the chronicles. Nowhere is there the smallest reference to its building. Other works raised by the Abbots of the period are named, but the noble western portico is never once mentioned.”—(W. D. S.)
According to Matthew Paris the church was dedicated in 1238 by the Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste.
In the Thirteenth Century many changes were made. The bell-tower was built, and bells from London, called Les Londreis, were hung in it. The Lady-Chapel (now destroyed) was built in 1272 at the east of the north transept (as at Ely).