WEST FRONT.
This is how Lichfield presented itself to Mrs. Van Rensselaer. “Approaching it from one street or another, we see it suddenly across the silver stretches of its Pool, and it is hard to determine whether the shining water at Lichfield or the green lake of turf at Salisbury makes the lovelier foreground. Standing on the causeway which leads towards the western entrance of the Close, it is not merely a fine view that we have before us; it is a picture so perfect that no artist would ask a change in one detail. Perhaps accident has had more to do than design with the planting of the trees and shrubs which border the lake, and above which spring the daring spires. But a landscape-gardener might study this planting to his profit; and when we see or think of Lichfield from this point of view, we wish that the tall poplar may be as long-lived as the tree Yggdrasil—so pretty a measure does it give of the loftiness of the spires, so exquisite is the completing accent which it brings into the scene. If we come from the south-east, we cross another causeway, on either side of which the lake spreads out widely; and we see not only the spires, but the apse and the long stretch of the southern side. Enormously long it looks—longer almost, owing to its peculiar lowness, than those cathedrals which are actually greater. To the north of the church the ground rises quickly into a broad, terrace-like walk flanked by rows of large and ancient, yet graceful lindens; and beyond the trees, behind low walls and verdurous gardens, lies a range of canons’ dwellings. And in any and every aspect, but more especially when foliage comes near it, Lichfield’s colour assists its other beauties. Red stone is warm and mellow in itself; and Lichfield is red with a beautiful soft ruddiness that could hardly be matched by any sandstone of any land.”
The ancient kingdom of Mercia was converted to Christianity, like the rest of England north of the Thames, by missionaries of the Irish Church from Lindisfarne, c. 653; and the first two Mercian bishops were Irishmen. Of the early bishops, by far the most famous was St. Chad (669-672). St. Chad, or Ceadda, was a good and saintly man. He is first heard of as Abbot of Lastingham, a sequestered abbey hidden away in a fold of the Cleveland moors. Then Abbot Chad became Bishop of York; and he set to work on a visitation of his vast, wild diocese—not in a carriage and pair, but on foot. Plainly these early bishops were what we should now call Missionary Bishops, such as that Missionary of the South Seas who lies in Lichfield’s Lady chapel, his face irradiated by the southern light. Archbishop Chad visited town and country, village and hamlet, cottage and castle; and preached everywhere. It was another Progress of St. Paul. But in 669 the famous Greek Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore, pronounced his consecration faulty, and deposed him from York. Soon afterwards, however, finding him a saintly man and an excellent preacher, he appointed him to the bishopric of Mercia, to the see of Lichfield. What was York’s loss was Lichfield’s gain. At Lichfield he lived, tradition says, in a cell with his missioners, at the upper end of the Pool, where now stands St. Chad’s Church. It behoves all who come to Lichfield to visit St. Chad’s Church and to drink the water of St. Chad’s Well—water which still retains somewhat of efficacy and repute, for a line of pipes has been laid from the Stowe Pool to Burton, and an immense volume of Lichfield’s hallowed water is annually converted into beer. Two years and a half only Bishop Chad had left of life; but that was enough for him to win the reverence of his own and many successive generations. Beautiful stories are told of him by Bede. One of the eight monks who lived with him declared that he one day heard a joyful melody of some persons sweetly singing, which descended from heaven into the Bishop’s oratory, and filled the same for about half an hour, and then rose again to heaven; and that on the seventh day thereafter, having received the Body and Blood of our Lord, he departed unto Bliss, to which he was invited by the happy soul of his brother, St. Cedd, and a company of angels with heavenly music.
NAVE.
Thus the diocese of Lichfield preserves the memory of the by-gone kingdom of Mercia; and its cathedral is largely built of the offerings at St. Chad’s shrine. How big the ancient diocese was is seen from the fact that the present dioceses of Hereford and Worcester, as well as the suppressed ones of Sidnacester, Lindsey, and Leicester, were all carved out of it by Archbishop Theodore, the great organiser of the early English Church, A.D. 673. For a time even greater honour came to Lichfield. From 755 to 794 a great and mighty king reigned in Mercia: this was Offa. In one direction he defeated Kent; in the other he drove back the Welsh. It was Offa who settled once for all the Welsh frontier: Shrewsbury became an English town. Offa’s Dyke, which still exists, from the mouth of the Wye to the mouth of the Dee, became the effectual bulwark of England to the West. A king so mighty disdained to owe allegiance to an archbishop of defeated Kentishmen, and got from the Pope of the day an archbishop of his own, to be head-bishop of all Mercia and East Anglia. But Offa died, and the pope died; and this was the first and only archbishop that Lichfield ever had. Lichfield was never so important again. Indeed, she had a narrow escape of losing her bishop altogether, just after the Norman conquest. The new Norman prelates did not feel safe, and probably were not safe, in open towns amidst an alien and disaffected population. The Bishop of Dorchester set up his pastoral staff under the shadow of the new Norman castle at Lincoln; Exeter castle attracted the Bishop of Crediton; in similar fashion the Norman Bishop of Lichfield transferred himself to Chester, where also was a castle of strength. The next bishop migrated again—this time to Coventry, which possessed a famous monastery, founded by famous people, Earl Leofric and Lady Godiva, the church whereof was so wealthy that “its walls were all too strait for the treasures that were therein.” Finally the bishops returned once more to Lichfield, retaining, however, their hold on Coventry; and till the Reformation they styled themselves “Bishops of Lichfield and Coventry.” Lichfield, however, was and is a cathedral of the old foundation; it had no monks, but secular canons. It may well be imagined, therefore, that there was not much peace and good will between the canons of Lichfield and the monks of Coventry. They quarrelled scandalously; above all when they had to meet for joint election of a bishop. There was even a desperate free fight in Coventry cathedral in 1190, when Bishop Hugh ejected the monks. The holy bishop himself was wounded at the altar.
In the thirteenth century there must have been a series of great building bishops; but little is known of them. Bishop Langton, however, was a very great personage, Keeper of the Great Seal, Treasurer of England, and executor to Edward I. He built a new episcopal palace at Lichfield, and other castles and manor-houses elsewhere, also a magnificent new shrine for the relics of St. Chad; and he surrounded the cathedral with a wall and foss, thus making of it a moated fortress, such as one sees to this day at Wells. Robert Stretton (1360-1385) had the distinction of not being able to read. Then we pass on to the great Civil War, when Bishop Langton’s fortifications proved a heritage of woe. Being fortified, and being Loyalist, Lichfield Cathedral was besieged by the Parliamentary forces under Lord Brooke, who prayed aloud that God would by some special token manifest unto them His approbation. The special token came on St. Chad’s Day, March 2nd, and is commemorated by a tablet on a house in Dam Street, which the visitor should look for: “March 2nd, 1643.—Lord Brooke, a general of the Parliament forces, preparing to besiege the Close of Lichfield, then garrisoned for King Charles the First, received his death-wound on the spot beneath this inscription, by a shot in the forehead, from Mr. Dyott,” a deaf and dumb man, “who had placed himself on the battlements of the great steeple to annoy the besiegers.” It may interest some to know that the distance of the shot was 185 yards 1 foot 3 inches. In the end the garrison was starved out. Six weeks later Lichfield Close was recaptured by Prince Rupert. In 1646 it was retaken by the Parliamentarians. In the first siege the Parliamentary cannon brought down the central tower and most of the vault of the choir. This was not all. The Puritans smashed the stained windows, battered down the statues, stripped the lead from the roof and the brasses from the tombs, burned the registers, and broke up the bells and organs. They are said to have each day hunted a cat down the aisles, and to have draped a calf and given it a mock baptism at the font. “I confess,” says an apologist for her Puritan ancestors, “there were moments in my English journey when I hated the Puritan with a godly hatred, and wished that he had never shown his surly face to the world: a rude destroyer of things ancient, and therefore to be respected; a vandal devastator of things rare and beautiful, and too precious ever to be replaced; a brutal scoffer, drinking at the altar, firing his musket at the figure of Christ, parading in priest’s vestments through the market-place, stabling his horses in the house of God.” Then came the Restoration, and with the Restoration Bishop Hacket, best of good bishops. The very next morning after his arrival he set his coach horses to work at clearing away the ruins of the fallen spire and roof. For nine years he gave himself and his substance to the work; his contributions in money amounted to £10,000; the King gave “one hundred fair timber trees”; the prebendaries and canons subscribed half their income; every town, every village in the diocese aided the good work; the central tower was re-erected; most of the clerestory of the choir was rebuilt; his last task was to put in a peal of bells. “He went out of his bedchamber to hear it, and blessed God who had favoured him with life to hear it, but that it was his own passing-bell; whereupon he retired to his chamber and never left it till he was carried to his grave.” Next to St. Chad, one likes to think of good Bishop Hacket in connexion with Lichfield. In 1788 James Wyatt arrived, but did less mischief than at Salisbury, Hereford and Durham. Even more terrible vandals followed Wyatt, with a mania for Roman cement, in which beautiful material they reconstructed the statuary of the west front. All this is now swept away, and this fairest of façades is seen in its pristine beauty.
At Lichfield there was as usual a Norman cathedral; and as usual the authorities set to work to improve it. Elsewhere the improvements were of a very conservative character. At Lichfield and at Wells they were drastic: the Norman cathedral was improved by being swept off the face of the earth, not a scrap of it being left above ground. Beginning at the east end, it was pulled down and rebuilt, the work occupying a century. The most astounding thing about Lichfield is that when the new thirteenth-century cathedral was finished, they set to work once more at rebuilding, and in the first half of the fourteenth century reconstructed the whole of the eastern limb of the cathedral. But though for convenience we divide the work into two great periods, that of the thirteenth and that of the fourteenth century, and each of these into shorter building-periods, it is not to be understood that there were any breaks or cessations in the works: the cathedral was never out of the builders’ hands from 1190 to 1350.
