“‘Glory to thee, my God, this night,
For all the blessings of the light.’
Beyond the gardens and the moat run avenues of stately elms; hard by, to the north, are the cathedral’s triple towers, and, for background, the mighty range of the Mendips; all round is meadow-grass; to the west nestles the little town, with the stately tower of St. Cuthbert’s church; and, five miles away, conical tors rise on either side of the isle of Avalon, the storied land of Glastonbury, where twice each year bloomed the sacred thorn struck by Joseph of Arimathea from a thorn in the Saviour’s crown; where, too, lies King Arthur, borne thither after the fatal battle of Camelot, and buried in an unknown grave with the inscription, ‘Hic jacet Arturus rex quondam rexque futurus.’ This land of Somerset to the Englishman should be holy ground.”
NORTH TRANSEPT.
The peculiar charm of Wells lies, as Professor Freeman remarks, in the union and harmonious grouping of the cathedral with its surroundings. It does not stand alone. On the other hand, it is not crowded by incongruous buildings, like the great cathedrals of France, rising in precipices from narrow lanes or stone paved place. Nor, again, is it isolated from those buildings which are its natural and necessary complement—the palace of the Bishop, the deanery, the residence of the Archdeacon, the Cathedral school, the Vicar’s Close, the homes of precentor, organist and architect. Nearly all the officials still live in the houses which Bishop Beckington built four centuries ago. And with the most perfect and picturesque of all these, “a double row of little ancient houses,” the Vicar’s Close, the north transept of the cathedral is connected by a delightful mediæval bridge.
SUGAR’S CHANTRY IN NAVE.
The diocese of Wells is an offshoot of that of Winchester. When Wessex grew populous, the bishopric of Sherborne was split off from that of Winchester; and in 909 the shire of the Sumorsaetas was split off from Sherborne, and the men of Somerset got a bishop of their own. The diocese long had two cathedrals: one at Wells, served, as at this day, by secular canons; the other at Bath, served by the monks of the Benedictine abbey. The latter was suppressed by Henry VIII., and ever since the bishop has been but in name Bishop of Bath.
Of the earlier cathedrals not a trace remains. The oldest part of the present cathedral consists of the nave, transepts, and the piers and arches of the three western bays of the choir. All this was designed, and much of it built in the time of Fitz-Bohun, who became bishop in 1171. The design is what is called Transitional. It is not early Transitional; for there is none of the heaviness and massiveness of the early Transitional work of Malmesbury, Kirkstall, or Fountains. It is not middle Transitional; for the semicircular arch, which still appears here and thereat Ripon, is conspicuously absent. It is late, very late, Transitional work, done at the very end of the Transitional period (1145-1190), and therefore contemporaneous with the famous French choir of Canterbury (1175-1184) and the beautiful presbytery of Chichester (built after the fire of 1187). But it is more Gothic than either Canterbury or Chichester. In fact, Wells is the most advanced of all the cathedral designs of the Transitional period. There is indeed little of the Romanesque or Norman about it; still it is there. Among the survivals of Romanesque feeling may be noticed the zigzag ornament in the doorways of the north porch, the classical character of several foliage-capitals, the retention of man-headed birds and other Romanesque monsters in the capitals, and, above all, the universal square abacus. All these, however, except the square abacus, find parallels in advanced Gothic work of the thirteenth century elsewhere. And as we find precisely the same stiff foliage-capitals in Chichester presbytery subsequent to 1187, and in St. Joseph’s chapel, Glastonbury (1180-1190), we may be certain that the design belongs to Fitz-Bohun’s episcopate, before whose death in 1191 the church was rising fast, and its style an object of universal admiration.