special function, in our own church and in the other churches of the
Old Foundation, that I wish specially to call your attention. I assume
of course that all are constantly resident, as constantly resident
as a parish clergyman is on his living. I assume of course that none
of them holds any preferment besides his cathedral office. These two
conditions are necessary to the effective carrying out of the ancient
scheme; it is owing to the breach of them, a breach which is no new
thing, but which began almost from the beginning, that a most wisely
and beautifully ordered system has gradually become a mere name. When
offices whose duties require the constant presence of their holders on
the spot are held by men who are resident for three months only or not
resident at all; when there is not even any provision for the proper
discharge of their duties by deputy, the whole scheme of those offices
fails, and their mere empty titles become mockeries. The great offices
of the cathedral, those of Dean, Precentor, Chancellor, and Treasurer,
are sinecures in the legal sense, as being without cure of souls;[13]
but they were certainly not meant to be sinecures in any other sense.
They are offices any one of which would afford ample occupation for a
studious and thoughtful man, whose soul was in his work and who loved
the institution of which he was a member. The Dean is the President
of the Chapter, the general superintendent of the whole institution.
I can say from the examples of men alike dead and living, that when
that important post is held by a man who understands its duties, it
is anything but a sinecure, anything but useless. A man of ability
and zeal, to whom the cathedral and everything about it supplies some
labour of love at every step, who knows and loves every stone of the
fabric, whose heart answers to every note of its services, to whom
every tittle of its history is a living thing, will not find the office
of a Dean an idle or an irksome one. Unencumbered by any parochial
charge, he will influence men's minds as the chief preacher of the
cathedral church, and as continuing the old missionary functions of
capitular bodies by preaching on fitting occasions in other parts of
the diocese. As the chief presbyter of the city and diocese, he will
be foremost in every good work within that city and diocese, ever at
his post, keeping up order and discipline alike by precept and by
example, dispensing the simple but liberal hospitality enjoined by
ecclesiastical rule. As the President of the Bishop's Council, he
will be the Bishop's right-hand man in his presence, and his most
natural representative in his absence. Such I conceive to have been
the sort of Dean whom good Bishop Robert wished to see at the head
of his Chapter; such Deans there have been and still are, and under
such Deans cathedral institutions are not found to be useless. Hardly
less important are the functions of the officer second in rank, the
Precentor. To his lot falls the immediate management of the cathedral
services; he is, as Bishop Godwin says, "the Precentor to govern the
choir."[14] Here is work, full and worthy work, for an accomplished
musician and profound liturgical scholar. It is plain that the duties
of both these great officers are constant, that the presence of some
one to discharge those duties is always needed. The pious care either
of Robert or of Jocelin therefore provided for their occasional and
unavoidable absence, by the foundation of two officers, holding the
rank of dignitaries, whose duty it was to supply their place on such
occasions, namely, the Sub-Dean and the Sub-Chanter. The office of
Sub-Chanter no longer exists; the Sub-Dean, I need not say, is still
among us. Next comes the Chancellor, the Chancellor of the Church,
whom I hope no one will confound with the Chancellor of the Diocese,
a judicial functionary with whom my history has nothing to do. His
business, says Godwin, is "to instruct the younger sort of Canons." But
his business is more than this: he is the great educational officer of
the church and diocese; the head and centre of all that is done in that
way in the city and diocese. Here, I need not say, is practical work
enough for any man, especially in these days. One very natural part of
his functions is now very efficiently discharged among us, but it is
discharged by other members of the capitular body, and by them hardly
in their capitular character.[15] The last of these great officers is
the Treasurer, who must not be taken for a bursar or steward; his duty
is to "look to the ornaments of the church." His duties are certainly
less wide and less important than those of his brethren: but they are
duties which to an ecclesiastical antiquary would be a labour of love;
and, if they were combined with the special care of the church itself,
with the office of Master of the Fabric, they would rise in importance
to a level with any of the others. Such were the dignitaries, each,
besides his share of the general revenue, having his own special
prebendal estate. Such was the case with the other Canons also, the
whole body amounting in Robert's time to about twenty-two. Other
Bishops increased their numbers till they reached the full tale of
fifty, at which they still remain.
In what I have just been saying, I have been drawing an ideal picture,
a picture of the great officers of a cathedral body, as they ought
to be, as I doubt not that their founders meant them to be, but not
as I suppose that they ever will be, or that they ever were. But
in this, as in all other matters, it is well to make our ideal the
highest possible. If we aim at the highest mark, we shall, in this
imperfect world, most likely not hit it, but we shall assuredly come
much nearer to it than if we are content to aim at a lower mark. What
hindered this goodly scheme from being carried out for any length
of time, what probably hindered it from being ever in its fulness
carried out at all, was the vice of the age, the inveterate tendency
to pluralities and non-residence. In fairness to our own age we must
say that the instances of those abuses which still remain, even those
which remained in the last generation, are trifles compared with the
pluralities and non-residence of the Middle Ages. But in fairness to
those ages we must also say that the pluralities and non-residence of
those days had not always their root in mere unscrupulous greediness,
but in a peculiar view of ecclesiastical offices, which we now hold
to be wrong, but which the circumstances of those times rendered
natural. The true theory of the endowment of an ecclesiastical office
doubtless is that an office is instituted for the common good; it
is the business of its holder to discharge its duties in person; an
endowment is attached to it, not as mere payment for work done, but as
a maintenance for its holder and a means of enabling him to discharge
his duties efficiently and liberally. But the feudal notions which
were then prevalent caused ecclesiastical offices to be looked on in
quite another light. Temporal estates, temporal _benefices_--for the
word is just as correctly applied to a lay fee as to a bishoprick or
a rectory[16]--were held of the lord by the tenure of performing some
service, military or otherwise, for the lord's behoof. So that those
services were efficiently performed, it was not necessary, it was not
always possible, that the holder of the fief should perform them in
his own person. And of course there has been no time when temporal
men have had any scruple, nor is there any reason why they should
have any scruple, in multiplying their temporal estates as largely as
they honestly can. A false analogy led men to look on ecclesiastical
offices in the same feudal light. They were looked on as benefices
rather than as offices, as estates held by a certain service, by the
discharge of certain ecclesiastical duties, but, provided those duties
were performed, it was thought to matter little whether the holder of
the benefice performed them personally or by deputy. Here and there
a specially virtuous man, a saint in short, would not cumber himself
with any office whose duties he could not perform in his own person.
But men of ordinary virtue, men who were not scrupulous beyond the
public opinion of their day, did not hesitate to heap benefice upon
benefice, and thought their consciences were perfectly clear if the
duties of each were discharged by a competent deputy. It is like any
other evil fashion; we admire those who rise above it; we are not
hard on those who conform to it, provided they do not sink before the
received morality of the time. But the prevalence of this view of
ecclesiastical property was enough to undermine from the very beginning
all such pious schemes as those of our Bishop Robert. And we find that
Robert was himself driven to a course which was probably unavoidable,
but which reads very like a compromise, not to say a job. We have seen
that Reginald the brother of Archdeacon John restored the capitular
estate. But we find that Robert invested Reginald with the office of
Precentor, and, what is more, attached to it as its prebend the whole
estate of Combe, an estate so valuable that it was provided that on
Reginald's death it should be divided into five prebends.[17] Possibly
Reginald did not personally lose much by surrendering the estate of the
Canons, when his prebend, like Benjamin's mess, was five times as much
as any of theirs. And it is further to be noticed that two nephews of
Reginald, two knights called Payne of Pembridge and Roger Witing, did
not willingly acquiesce in an arrangement which cut them off from the
succession to what they had learned to look on as an hereditary estate.
In the reign of Henry the Second they brought an action to recover the
lands which had been restored to the Church by their uncle Reginald. It
is said in a marked way that this happened after the death of Stephen
and the accession of Henry. This looks therefore as if Henry had some
ill-feeling against a Bishop who had been so specially favoured by
his mother's rival. It sounds very strange to read that, though the
claim of the two knights was strongly withstood by the Bishop, by Ivo
the first Dean, and by their own uncle Reginald, now Precentor, yet in
the end the matter had to be compromised, and the claims of Reginald's
nephews were bought off with a payment of twenty marks.[18] This case
is only one of many in which the Church found it very hard to recover
lands of which it had once parted with the possession, whether in the
usual form of a lease for three lives--a very old custom indeed[19]--or
of any other. We have no statement from the side of Reginald's nephews,
and it is quite possible that their case may really have been not
unlike that of those who in our own day have enfranchised lands held
of ecclesiastical bodies. In any case the name of one of the claimants
is worth notice, and local genealogists may perhaps be able to tell
me something about his descendants. It would be remarkable indeed if
Roger Witing, the obstinate enemy of the Church of Wells, should prove
to have been a forefather of Richard Whiting, the Abbot and martyr of
Glastonbury.
In the deed by which Bishop Robert founds the Deanery and
Precentorship, he distinctly says that his object is to secure the
Canons against such spoliations as they had suffered at the hands of
the Provosts.[20] This object, there can be no doubt, was effectually
compassed. When part of the estates of the church was held by the
Canons in common, while each Canon held another portion as his own
separate endowment, it is clear that they could no longer lie at the
mercy of any one officer. He also founded an admirable system of
offices in his church, which, if fully carried out, would greatly
improve its discipline within and greatly extend its usefulness
without. But there can be no doubt that his changes had indirectly,
and certainly undesignedly, another effect of which we cannot so fully
approve, the effect of weakening the old connexion between the Bishop
and his cathedral church. We must remember that a spirit of corporate
isolation was the spirit of the times. Liberty, as has been well said,
meant privilege. Every body of men, ecclesiastical or civil, strove
rather for its own independence than for the well-being of the whole
country. Every town, district, monastery, university, ecclesiastical
body of any kind, did all it could to procure exemptions of one kind or
another, to withdraw itself from the general and ordinary jurisdiction
and to set up some exceptional jurisdiction of its own. Traces of this
system linger here and there, wherever there is a temporal jurisdiction
different from the jurisdiction of the ordinary Judges and magistrates,
wherever there is an ecclesiastical jurisdiction different from that
of the Archbishop, the Bishop, and their regular officers. I am far
from saying that the working of this system has been altogether bad.
In many cases it has been conspicuously good. For it was simply by
one application of this system that the boroughs of England each, one
by one, wrested or bought their independence from their temporal or
spiritual lords. But it illustrates the difference between those times
and ours that the original independence of those boroughs was won by a
series of isolated local struggles, while their reform in our days was
wrought by a single Act of Parliament for the whole country. The spirit
of local and corporate independence was the natural, and in many cases
the beneficial, result of the circumstances of the time. But it had its
weak side, especially in ecclesiastical matters. The monasteries set
the example in obtaining exemptions from the jurisdiction of the Bishop
of the diocese. Other ecclesiastical corporations followed them. Each
cathedral Chapter now became a distinct corporation, with a head, in
the person of its Dean, distinct from the Bishop. I suspect that the
institution of the Deanery, more than any of the other changes, tended
to weaken the tie between Bishop and his Chapter. Hitherto the Bishop
had been the head of his Canons, much as an Abbot was the head of his
monks. Now the Chapter became a separate body, with interests and
possessions of its own distinct from those of the Bishop. It had a head
of its own, who must have been strongly tempted to set himself up as a
rival of the Bishop. The old tie was gradually loosened; the Bishop,
from being the immediate head of his cathedral, sank into the mere
Visitor of an independent corporation, having less authority in his own
church than in any other church in the diocese. It became a point of
honour with capitular bodies to lay more stress on maintaining their
chartered rights against the Bishop than on working with the Bishop
to promote the ends for which both Bishops and Chapters were founded.
The Bishop and his Chapter became alike isolated. Two authorities
which were intended to work together very much like a King and his
Parliament, silently divided the departments of administration between
them. The Bishop came to manage the affairs of the diocese without any
reference to the advice of his nominal Council the Chapter. The Chapter
came to manage the affairs of the cathedral with very little reference
to the authority of the Bishop. Instead of an immediate ruler, he
became an external power, called in ever and anon to reform an abuse
or to settle a dispute. It gradually came, in most places at least, to
be held in law that the freehold of the cathedral church was vested in
the Dean and Chapter or Prior and Convent. The old theory that, when
the cathedral was served by monks, the Bishop was their Abbot, had thus
quite died away. At the dissolution of religious houses, the monastic
cathedrals were surrendered by their Priors and Convents, just like
the other monasteries. The metropolitan church of England became the
property of Henry the Eighth, and he had the right in law, not only, as
he did, to despoil it of all its treasures, but to destroy, dismantle,
or desecrate the fabric itself, as was actually done with the churches
of Bath and Coventry. The Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield earnestly
prayed that his head church might be spared, but the tyrant was not to
be moved, and in law, as law had gradually come to be understood, no
right of the Bishop was touched by its destruction.[21]
Thus the Chapter of Wells gradually became, like other Chapters,
no longer a body of clerks headed by the Bishop, but a separate
corporation subject only to the Bishop's visitation. But this was not
the only instance of the spirit of local and corporate isolation
which is supplied by the history of capitular bodies. Besides the
Chapter becoming an independent corporation aggregate, we have seen
that each Canon became for some purposes a separate corporation sole,
independent alike of the Bishop and of his brother Canons. Nor did
this independence always affect matters of property only. The notions
of property and jurisdiction were closely connected in the ideas
of those times. It followed that in many cases the parishes where
either the Chapter or any particular Prebendary had property, those
especially where they possessed advowsons or rectories, became exempt
from the ordinary jurisdiction of the Bishop, and were placed under
the peculiar jurisdiction of the Chapter itself or of the particular
Prebendary.[22] My friend the Sub-Dean can bear witness that, though
his rectory and advowson have gone elsewhere, he still retains, or very
lately retained, some small remnants of ecclesiastical jurisdiction
among my neighbours at Wookey. But the spirit of corporate independence
went further still. We have not yet come to the days of Vicars and
Chantry-priests. But we shall find that even these purely subordinate
officers, mere assistants to the Canons as regards their ecclesiastical
duties, became perfectly independent corporations as regards their
temporal possessions.
I have dwelt at length on the changes wrought by Bishop Robert in the
constitution of the foundation, because they were the beginning of the
constitution as it still exists, and because these changes of Bishop
Robert's were simply one example out of many of the changes which
were going on everywhere. The constitution which was assumed by the
church of Wells was essentially the same as the constitution which was
assumed by all the secular cathedrals, some a little sooner, some a
little later. The exact number and functions of the officers are not
everywhere precisely the same. But we everywhere find the Precentor,
the most absolutely indispensable functionary of all, and we commonly
find the Dean, Chancellor, and Treasurer. The distinction too between
the property of the Chapter as a body and the property of separate
Prebendaries is common to all the cathedrals of the Old Foundation.
I now come to what Bishop Robert did with regard to the fabric of the
church. I have already said, while speaking of Robert's building at
Bath, that our two chief accounts, earlier and later, do not exactly
agree as to the extent of his works at either place. The earlier
account seems to assert a complete rebuilding from the ground; the
later implies only a thorough repair of a church which had become
ruinous and dangerous.[23] As all the work of this date at Wells has
vanished, it is impossible to say for certain how the case really
stood, but at all events Robert's repair must have been very extensive,
as it was followed by a reconsecration of the church. But what I
want you specially to remark is this, that the church which Robert
either repaired or destroyed in order to rebuild must have been the
Old-English church, one can hardly venture to say the church of Ine,
but very possibly the church of Eadward the Elder. The old church thus
lasted, certainly to the middle of the twelfth century, perhaps even
some way into the thirteenth. Now at either of those times large
churches earlier than the Norman Conquest must have been almost as rare
in England as they are now. The Norman and other foreign Prelates, who
were thrust into English Bishopricks and Abbeys, had almost everywhere
rebuilt their minsters in the newly imported style long before the time
of Robert's episcopate. But it is plain that such was not the case at
Wells. The acts of Gisa and John of Tours are so fully recorded that,
if either of them had rebuilt the church of Wells, we could not fail to
have heard of it. Gisa, we know, thought poorly of the building,[24]
but he does not say that he did anything to improve or enlarge it. His
architectural works were all devoted to the accommodation of the Canons
on his new system. And it is plain from the account of his burial that
he was buried in the same church in which his predecessor lay, which it
therefore follows that he had not rebuilt. John of Tours, I need not
say, was not likely to rebuild the church of Wells. In short, we have
no mention of the actual fabric of the cathedral till we come across
this description of its dangerous and ruinous state in Robert's time.
The Old-English church was therefore still standing, and, if Robert
merely repaired and did not wholly rebuild, parts of it must have been
standing down to the great rebuilding under Jocelin. Perhaps we may
be the more inclined to think that this was the case, when we see how
soon Robert's work was done, and when we remember how utterly his work
was swept away so soon after his own time. The church was consecrated
in the presence of three other Bishops, one of whom, Robert, Bishop
of Hereford, died in 1148.[25] Our Robert therefore had at the outside
only thirteen years of the stormy reign of Stephen for the rebuilding
of his church at Wells, and that at a time when he was also occupied
with his architectural works at Bath, and with his efforts to recover
the lost property of the Canons. At all events, whatever was the exact
extent of his work, it is certain that not a single bit of detail
of his age is to be seen in the present church; a single stone with
Norman mouldings, which must have formed part of Robert's building, is
built up in the house which was lately restored by Mr. Parker. That
is literally all; in the church itself I think I can show one small
bit of masonry of Robert's age, but it is merely masonry, without any
ornamental work. It is seldom that one of the massive piles of that
day has so utterly gone, without leaving any trace of itself. But it
is easy to call up before our eyes what the church of Robert must
have been. It was small compared with the great Romanesque minsters
of Peterborough, Ely, and Norwich, or with its own rival at Bath. The
present building is one of the very smallest of the original cathedral
churches of England, and, as it stood in Robert's day, it must have
been much smaller than it is now. The western limb was most likely of
its present length; the eastern limb was very much shorter than it
now is, containing probably only one or two bays and the apse. The
choir--the place for the stalls--if not actually placed in the western
limb, was under the central tower, the usual place for it in Norman
minsters. It has indeed struck me that what Robert did was perhaps
mainly to rebuild and enlarge the choir and presbytery,--a change
which the increase in the number of the Canons would make needful,
and which, as changing the site of the high altar, would call for a
fresh hallowing of the building. In this case it is quite possible
that the ancient nave may have remained substantially untouched down
to the building of the present church. As for the style of Robert's
building, whatever he built or added was of course built in the fully
developed Norman style of the middle of the twelfth century, somewhat
less massive, somewhat more highly enriched, than the church of John de
Villulâ at Bath is likely to have been. But the style was essentially
the same; the church of Eadward at Westminster was still the great
model for English buildings;[26] it is not likely that the pointed arch
found its way, even as a purely constructive feature, into any part of
the church of Robert. If the nave or any other considerable part of the
ancient minster really survived, it would have been most curious to
trace the way in which the architect, like the architects of Le Mans
and of Saint Remigius at Rheims, doubtless strove to throw a coating
of the more refined Romanesque of his own day over the still living
body of the old primitive building. But on these matters we cannot get
beyond fairly probable conjecture. Whatever stood before the days of
Robert, whatever was built in the days of Robert, has utterly vanished.
Still there does seem every reason to believe that the ancient church
of Wells, a church most likely of the tenth century, remained at least
to the middle of the twelfth century, and that large portions of it
were not improbably standing even in the thirteenth.