[Illustration: LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL, WEST FRONT.]
[Illustration: INTERIOR LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL, LOOKING WEST.]
[Illustration: LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL, REAR VIEW.]
We are told that in Central Staffordshire churches with spires are rare.
The region of the Trent abounds in low and simple rather than lofty
church-towers, but to this rule the cathedral city of Lichfield is an
exception, having five steeples, of which three beautiful spires--often
called the "Ladies of the Vale"--adorn the cathedral itself. The town
stands in a fertile and gently undulating district without ambitious
scenery, and the cathedral, which is three hundred and seventy-five feet
long and its spires two hundred and fifty-eight feet high, is its great
and almost only glory. It is an ancient place, dating from the days of
the Romans and the Saxons, when the former slaughtered without mercy a
band of the early Christian martyrs near the present site of the town,
whence it derives its name, meaning the "Field of the Dead." This
massacre took place in the fourth century, and in memory of it the city
bears as its arms "an escutcheon of landscape, with many martyrs in it
in several ways massacred." In the seventh century a church was built
there, and the hermit St. Chad became its bishop. His cell was near the
present site of Stowe, where there was a spring of clear water rising in
the heart of a forest, and out of the woods there daily came a
snow-white doe to supply him with milk. The legend tells that the
nightingales singing in the trees distracted the hermit's prayers, so he
besought that he might be relieved from this trial; and since that time
the nightingales in the woods of Stowe have remained mute. After death
the hermit-bishop was canonized and Lichfield flourished, at least one
of his successors being an archbishop. St. Chad's Well is still pointed
out at Stowe, but his Lichfield church long ago disappeared. A Norman
church succeeded it in the eleventh century, and has also been removed,
though some of its foundations remain under the present cathedral choir.
About the year 1200 the first parts of the present cathedral were built,
and it was over a hundred years in building. Its architecture is Early
English and Decorated, the distinguishing features being the three
spires, the beautiful western front, and the Lady Chapel. The latter
terminates in a polygonal apse of unique arrangement, and the red
sandstone of which the cathedral is built gives a warm and effective
coloring. Some of the ancient bishops of Lichfield were fighting men,
and at times their cathedral was made into a castle surrounded by walls
and a moat, and occasionally besieged. The Puritans grievously battered
it, and knocked down the central spire. The cathedral was afterwards
rebuilt by Christopher Wren, and the work of restoration is at present
going on. As all the old stained glass was knocked out of the windows
during the Civil Wars, several of them have been refilled with fine
glass from the abbey at Liege. Most of the ancient monuments were also
destroyed during the sieges, but many fine tombs of more modern
construction replace them, among them being the famous tomb by Chantrey
of the "Sleeping Children." The ancient chroniclers tell bad stories of
the treatment this famous church received during the Civil Wars. When
the spire was knocked down, crushing the roof, a marksman in the church
shot Lord Brooke, the leader of the Parliamentary besiegers, through his
helmet, of which the visor was up, and he fell dead. The marksman was a
deaf and dumb man, and the event happened on St. Chad's Day, March 2d.
The loss of their leader redoubled the ardor of the besiegers; they set
a battery at work and forced a surrender in three days. Then we are told
that they demolished monuments, pulled down carvings, smashed the
windows, destroyed the records, set up guard-houses in the
cross-aisles, broke up the pavement, every day hunted a cat through the
church, so as to enjoy the echo from the vaulted roof, and baptized a
calf at the font. The Royalists, however, soon retook Lichfield, and
gave King Charles a reception after the battle of Naseby, but it finally
surrendered to Cromwell in 1646. Until the Restoration of Charles II.
the cathedral lay in ruins, even the lead having been removed from the
roof. In 1661, Bishop Hacket was consecrated, and for eight years he
steadily worked at rebuilding, having so far advanced in 1669 that the
cathedral was reconsecrated with great ceremony. His last work was to
order the bells, three of which were hung in time to toll at his
funeral; his tomb is in the south aisle of the choir.
[Illustration: DR. JOHNSON'S BIRTHPLACE, LICHFIELD.]
Lichfield has five steeples grouped together in most views of the town
from the Vale of Trent, the other two steeples belonging to St. Mary's
and St. Michael's churches; the churchyard of the latter is probably the
largest in England, covering seven acres, through which an avenue of
stately elms leads up to the church. The town has not much else in the
way of buildings that is remarkable. In a plain house at a corner of the
market-place, where lived one Michael Johnson, a bookseller, Dr. Samuel
Johnson, his son, was born in 1709. and in the adjacent market-place is
Dr. Johnson's statue upon a pedestal adorned with bas-reliefs: one of
these represents the "infant Samuel" sitting on his father's shoulder to
imbibe Tory principles from Dr. Sacheverel's sermons: another, the boy
carried by his schoolfellows: and a third displays him undergoing a
penance for youthful disobedience by standing up for an hour bareheaded
in the rain. The "Three Crowns Inn" is also in the market-place, where
in 1776 Boswell and Johnson stayed, and, as Boswell writes, "had a
comfortable supper and got into high spirits," when Johnson "expatiated
in praise of Lichfield and its inhabitants, who, he said, were the most
sober, decent people in England, were the genteelest in proportion to
their wealth, and spoke the purest English." David Garrick went to
school to Dr. Johnson in the suburbs of Lichfield, at Edial; Addison
lived once at Lichfield; and Selwyn was its bishop a few years ago, and
is buried in the Cathedral close; but the chief memories of the ancient
town cluster around St. Chad, Johnson, and Garrick.