Chester Cathedral, North West England

Legend says that there was originally a Druid temple on the site of what is now Chester Cathedral, but there have been many places of worship in that location.  The Romans are said to have built a Temple to Apollo here in the 1st Century, which they converted to a Christian church in the 4th Century.  St. Werburgh died in 706, she was the daughter of a 7th Century Saxon King. The body of St. Werburgh was moved to Chester in the 9th Century, to protect it from Viking Raiders.  Her body was entombed in the church which was then on the site of Chester Cathedral.  In 907, King Alfred the Great’s daughter, Aethelflaed of Mercia, transformed the church into a college of secular canons, she re-dedicated the church to St. Werburgh. 

When the church of St. Werburgh in Chester was in need to restoration in 1057, the rebuilding cost was paid for by Leofric, Earl of Mercia and the husband of Lady Godiva, who infamously rode through the street of Coventry naked.  Having repeatedly asked her husband to lower the taxes, he finally conceded, if she would ride through the streets of Coventry without any clothes.  Having asked the towns people to stay indoors, she proceeded to ride her horse through the town and the people respected her wishes and did not look upon her, all except Peeping Tom, who could not help himself. As lovely as this story is, it wasn’t written down until the 13th Century, 300 years after Lady Godiva died, which was between 1066 and 1086. 

When Gerbod the Fleming, 1st Earl of Chester, was taken prisoner in France in 1071, William the Conqueror bestowed the title of Earl of Chester upon his nephew, Hugh d’ Avranches. In 1090, the Anglo-Saxon church of St Werburgh had been destroyed. In 1092, Earl Hugh decided to found a Benedictine Abbey on the site and the Abbey church was rebuilt in the Romanesque style, this church was also dedicated to St. Werburgh. 

A late 12th Century document tells us that in the 10th Century, during the reign of Edward the Confessor, the monks at Chester carried the body of St. Werburgh up to the city’s walls and paraded it around the wall walk, in order that the saint would help to defend the town from its attacker, ‘Griffin’. This was probably Prince Gruffudd ap Llywelyn of Wales. 

It was decided by the monks, in 1270, to begin the rebuilding of the abbey church of St. Werburgh in the new Gothic style.  The remodelling work carried on for the next 300 years, with areas slowly being updated and replaced.  Chester was not a Cathedral that was ever really finished and there were few years when building work was not in progress. The last of the 16th Century building work ended at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, at this point the nave of Chester Cathedral was without a roof and there was no glass in the upper windows.  Calling it Chester Cathedral at this point is not accurate, as the building did not become a Cathedral until after the Monastery was suppressed. As it was decided in 1541 to create a new diocese at Chester, the Abbey church became a Cathedral at this time.

The Baptistry is located in what is the oldest part of the Cathedral. The plan had been to rebuild these walls, but work never progressed to this point.  The masonry here dates from the first half of the 12th Century. 

The South Cloister was where the Scriptorium was located. It was here that manuscripts were written and books were copied.  Located between each of the columns would have been a monk’s desk, arranged sideways on to the window to take advantage of the light.  The stained-glass windows we see today are modern, originally the openings would have been unglazed.

Chester Cathedral is built of a soft sandstone. As the stone had become overly worn, the entire building was refaced in the second half of the 19th Century.  While the exterior is much more modern, this does not reflect the interior of the building.  The interior can be quite confusing because the church seems to have been in a constant state of progress throughout the Middle Ages, therefore the interior’s fabric spans nearly 1,000 years.