FOX’S CHANTRY.
The Cathedral Church of Christ and the Blessed Mary the Virgin of Worcester.
FROM NORTH.
As is indicated by the form of dedication of 1218, “The cathedral church of the Blessed Virgin and Saint Peter and of the Holy Confessors Oswald and Wulfstan,” Worcester, is one of the pre-Conquest cathedrals. With Hereford, Leicester, and Lindsey, it was carved out of the immense see of Lichfield, which was coextensive with the kingdom of Mercia, by Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury towards the end of the seventh century. Through the influence of Dunstan, who was Bishop of Worcester from 957 to 961, its secular canons were replaced by Benedictine monks by his successor, St. Oswald; and the cathedral was served by monks till the time of Henry VIII., when it was put upon the new foundation and reverted to secular canons. In 1062 St. Wulfstan became bishop. From his “great piety and dovelike simplicity” of character, he had great influence in the English Church, and was allowed by the Conqueror to retain his bishopric. He repaid William by beating off Robert Courthose, Duke of Normandy, when he attacked Worcester, and retained the see till his death, at a great age, in 1095. In the year 1201 miracles commenced at his tomb, “from fifteen to sixteen per diem being cured from every kind of sickness.” In 1203 he was canonised. The shrines of St. Wulfstan and St. Oswald stood on either side of the high altar, like those of St. Dunstan and St. Elfege at Canterbury,—in front of it, not at the back, as at Winchester, St. Albans, and elsewhere.
St. Oswald, late in the tenth century, had rebuilt the cathedral in the style of his day. Of this Anglo-Saxon cathedral nothing is left, unless it be the balusters in the arcade of the slype. This work of the holy Oswald Wulfstan now pulled down, with many searchings of heart. Almost he repented of his purpose. Long he stood silent in the churchyard, deeply groaning. At last he burst into a flood of tears. “We wretches,” said he, “pompously imagining that we do better work, destroy what the saints have wrought.” Many centuries have passed since Wulfstan’s day, and there have been many “restorations” of Worcester cathedral, but there is no record that any one but Wulfstan commenced his work with tears and groans. Our modern “restorers” enter on their work with light hearts. Rather one would venture to suggest that when a restoration is resolved on, dean and chapter and eminent architect should betake themselves in sad procession to the cathedral, intoning penitential psalms with humble and contrite hearts, observing the day as a day of humiliation.
Wulfstan commenced the new cathedral in the new Anglo-Norman style in 1084, and the monks entered four years later. This, of course, does not imply that the whole cathedral was finished; but only so much of the eastern limb as was sufficient for the daily services; and even this probably not carried higher than the triforium, and provided merely with a temporary roof Many fragments of the lower part of the walls and piers of Wulfstan’s church remain above ground, showing that it was coextensive with the present nave and transepts.
