Now in this account there are many things worthy of careful notice. First, mark the full authority of the Bishop in his own church; Gisa seems to do whatever he pleases. We need not suppose that he did what he did without obtaining the consent of his Chapter in some shape or other; but it is plain that the Bishop was still, to say the least, the chief mover in everything. One is also inclined to think that before Gisa's time the Canons had no property distinct from that of the Bishop. A large portion of his new acquisitions was bestowed to the benefit of the Canons; but it appears from Domesday that what they held at the time of the Survey was all held under the Bishop.[70] Secondly, mark the very important change which Gisa made in the constitution of the church of Wells by bringing in the Lotharingian discipline. He did not, like some other Prelates, drive out his canons and put monks in their stead, nor yet did he, as was done at some other places, compel his canons to take monastic vows. The Canons of Wells, after his changes, still remained secular priests and not regulars. But the changes which he made were all in a monastic direction. They brought in something of the strictness of monastic discipline among a body of men who had hitherto lived in a very much freer way. I cannot help thinking that the rule of Chrodegang was but the small end of the wedge, and that before long it would, if not by Gisa, by some reforming Bishop or other, have been developed into the rule of Saint Benedict. But the next Bishop was not a reforming Bishop, and the fear of the Canons of Wells being displaced to make room for monks, or being themselves turned into monks, happily passed away. Gisa, there can be no doubt, was a good man and a diligent and conscientious Bishop, though some of his doings were such as we Englishmen are not likely to approve. At last, after being Bishop twenty-eight years, he died in 1088, and was buried under an arch in the wall on the north side of the high altar, as his predecessor Duduc was on the south side.[71] This notice is important; it shows that Gisa, among all his works of other kinds, did not rebuild the church itself; it also shows, by speaking of an arch in the wall, that the eastern part of the church had no aisles.

The next Bishop was quite another kind of man. I know not whether he is reverenced at Bath, but we at Wells have certainly no reason to love his memory. You will remember that, as Gisa was Bishop from 1060 to 1088, the Norman Conquest of England came in his time. One result of that event was that all the Bishopricks and Abbeys of England were gradually filled by strangers, and much greater strangers to England than Duduc and Gisa had been. The new Bishops and Abbots, just as much as the new Earls, were almost all Normans or Frenchmen, who, I suspect, seldom learned to talk English. The first Bishop of Somersetshire after the Conquest was John de Villulâ, a Frenchman from Tours, who was appointed by William Rufus. About this time there was a great movement, which had begun under Edward the Confessor and which went on under William the Conqueror, for moving the sees or bishopstools of Bishops from smaller towns to greater ones. Thus, in our own part of England, Bishop Leofric, in King Edward's time, removed the united see of Devonshire and Cornwall from Crediton to Exeter, and in King William's time Bishop Hermann removed the united see of Dorsetshire and Wiltshire from Ramsbury and Sherborne to Salisbury. By Salisbury you will of course remember that I mean Old Sarum and not New. The historian William of Malmesbury, who wrote under Henry the First, calls this change the removal of Bishopricks from villages or small towns to cities. And among the villages or small towns from which Bishopricks were removed I am sorry to say that he reckons our city of Wells.[72] For the first thing that the new Bishop John did was to remove his bishopstool from the church of Saint Andrew at Wells to the church of Saint Peter at Bath, on which William of Malmesbury remarks that Andrew, although the elder brother, was obliged to give way to his younger brother Simon.[73] Bath was then, as now, a much larger town than Wells, and was a walled city, which Wells never has been. It was an old Roman town, which had been taken by the West-Saxons in 577, a good while before Somersetshire south of the Axe became English.[74] The church of Saint Peter there was founded by Offa, King of the Mercians, for secular canons, but King Eadgar had, as in so many other churches, put monks instead, and Bath had ever since been a famous monastery. So, if the Bishop's see is necessarily to be fixed in the greatest town in the diocese, Bath was undoubtedly the right place, but it had the disadvantage of being much less central than Wells, being, as we all know, quite in a corner of the diocese. The Abbey of Bath was just then vacant by the death of the Abbot Ælfsige, an Englishman who had contrived to keep his office all through the reign of William the Conqueror; so Bishop John persuaded King William Rufus to grant the Abbey of Bath for the increase of the Bishoprick of Somersetshire.[75] This was done by a charter in 1088, which was confirmed by two charters of Henry the First in 1100 and 1111. In the next year the Bishop begged or bought of the King the whole town of Bath, which had lately been burned. The effect of these changes was that the Abbey of Bath was merged in the Bishoprick. There was no longer a separate Abbot, but the Bishop was Abbot; the church of Saint Peter became his cathedral church, and its Prior and monks became his Chapter. The Bishop also, by his grant or purchase from the King, became temporal lord of the town. Bishop John, having thus got possession of Bath and all that was in it, spiritual and temporal, reigned there at first somewhat sternly. He was, as I have said, a foreigner; he was also a skilful physician and fond of learned men of every kind. The monks of Bath, no doubt mostly Englishmen, he despised as ignorant barbarians; so he oppressed them and cut their living very short, till afterwards, we are told, he repented, and gave them their possessions back again.[76] He also rebuilt the church of Bath, now become his cathedral church, and greatly enriched it with ornaments and the like, and then, after being Bishop for thirty-six years, he died and was buried in 1124.

But it more concerns us to know what was going on at Wells all this time. The see had been altogether taken away, so much so that one of the charters of Henry the First speaks of the see of all Somersetshire having been moved to Bath from the town which is called Wells. I conceive that the Bishop of Bath now looked on Wells simply as one of the lordships of the see, just like Banwell, Evercreech, Wookey, or any other, where the Bishops had houses and where they occasionally lived. So, among his other doings, Bishop John built himself a house at Wells. But the way in which he found himself a site and materials was a somewhat remarkable one. For it was by pulling down all the buildings that Gisa had built for the use of the Canons, and building his own house on the spot.[77] Now this shows that either the church or the Bishop's Palace has changed its place since the time of John of Tours. For we may be sure that Gisa built his cloister, refectory, and dormitory close to the church, just as they would be in a monastery. Therefore, if John built his house on their site, it must have been much nearer to the church than the present palace is. Nothing is left of either the church or the palace as they stood then, and it is most likely that the site of the palace has been changed, and that Gisa's canonical buildings and John's manor-house both stood where the cloister, library, &c. stand now. But I thought it worth while to mention this, because it was not very uncommon, when a church was rebuilt, to build the new church a little way off from the old one.[78] The reason for this was, that the service might go on in the old church while the new one was building; and when the new church was finished, the old one was pulled down and the new used instead. It is therefore quite possible that our present cathedral does not stand quite on the same site as the church which was standing in Gisa and John's time. But on the whole the chances are the other way.

The Canons of Wells were thus turned out of the buildings which Gisa had made for them, and were driven to live where they could in the town.[79] The great and learned Bishop of Bath cared nothing about them, or rather he made spoil of them in every way. A portion of their estates, valued then at thirty pounds a year, was held by the Bishop's steward, Hildebert by name, who seems also to have been his brother and to have held the office of Provost of the Canons. On Hildebert's death, the estate, by the Bishop's assent, passed as an hereditary possession to his son John, who is described as Archdeacon and Provost.[80] As I understand the matter, the estate became a kind of impropriation; Hildebert, John, and their heirs held the estate, and paid the Canons a fixed rent-charge. For though we read of the estate being taken away from the Church, yet we also read incidentally that Provost John paid each Canon sixty shillings yearly.[81] This would seem to show that there were ten Canons, among whom the thirty pounds had to be divided. But as we read that, when Bishop Robert recovered the property, he paid each Canon a hundred shillings, it would seem that the estate increased in value, but that John simply paid the Canons their old stipends, taking to himself the surplus, which should no doubt have been employed either in raising the stipends of the existing Canons or else in increasing their number. This is the kind of abuse which we constantly light upon in all manner of institutions, and we see that at all events it is not a new abuse. Canons in their own infancy were treated by Provosts much as Canons, in the days of their greater developement, have in different places treated Minor Canons, Singing Men, Grammar-Boys, and Poor Knights. The peculiar thing is that the Provostship became hereditary, subject only to this fixed charge, exactly like a lay rectory charged with a payment to the Vicar.

I think then that, however our Bath neighbours may look at him, we at Wells have a right to set down Bishop John of Tours as the worst enemy that our church had from the eighth century to the sixteenth. We are told that he repented, but it must have been an ineffectual kind of repentance, as he made no restitution.[82] Or we may say that his repentance was geographical, for a deed is extant in which he restores to the monks of Bath all that he had taken from them, but there is no sign that he restored anything to the Canons of Wells.[83] Still his doings had one effect; the Lotharingian discipline was broken up for ever, and the secular priests of Wells were never again constrained to sleep in a common dormitory or to dine in a common refectory. John thus indirectly helped to put things on the footing which they assumed under the next Bishop but one, and which, in its main features, has been retained to this day. It is that Bishop, Robert by name, whose episcopate forms the natural boundary of the first portion of my subject. Hitherto I have had to deal with a church and a Chapter of Wells; but hardly with the church and Chapter which at present exist. I have had to speak of the early beginning of things, of fabrics and institutions alike which were far from having reached their full developement. With Robert a new era begins alike in architectural, capitular, and municipal matters. He was a founder in every sense. He rebuilt the fabrics of both his churches. He settled the relations between those two churches as they remained till the suppression of the monastery of Bath in the sixteenth century. He gave the Chapter of Wells a new constitution, which, with some changes in detail, it still retains. Last, but not least, he gave the first charter of incorporation to the burghers who had gradually come to dwell under the shadow of the minster. He may therefore be looked upon as the founder of Wells, church and city alike, as they now stand. The reign of this memorable Prelate therefore marks the first stage in my story; I will therefore now bring my first lecture to an end, and will reserve a detailed account of the important episcopate of Robert to form the beginning of my account of the mediæval, as distinguished from the early, history of the church of Wells.

LECTURE II.

In my former Lecture I did my best to trace the history of the church of Wells from the earliest days. We have seen its small beginnings, a colony of priests planted in a newly-conquered land, with their home fixed on a small oasis between the wild hill-country on the one side and the never-ending fen on the other. There their church had risen, and settlers had gathered round it; it had grown into the seat of a Bishop, the spiritual centre of the surrounding country, a rival in fame and reverence of that great island church which stood as a memorial of the past days of the conquered, while Wells rose as a witness of the presence of the conquerors. We have seen one Prelate of foreign birth at once vastly increase the power and revenues of his see and try to subject his clergy to the yoke of a foreign rule against which the instincts of Englishmen revolted. We have seen another foreigner undo the work of his predecessor alike for good and for evil; we have seen him forsake church and city altogether, and remove his episcopal chair to a statelier and safer dwelling-place. We have seen the local foundation again brought back to a state lower than the poor and feeble condition out of which Gisa had raised it. We now come to the great benefactor whom we may fairly look upon as the founder of Wells as it is, the man who put the Bishoprick and Chapter into the shape with which we are all familiar, and who moreover gave to the city its first municipal being.

On this last head I shall not enlarge. The subject is so completely the property of others both present and absent that I should feel myself the merest intruder if I attempted to dwell upon it. I will rather go on with those parts of Bishop Robert's career which more directly concern my subject, and look at him in three lights, as his actions concern respectively the Bishoprick, the Chapter, and the fabric of the church.

After the death of John of Tours the see was held by one Godfrey, a countryman of Gisa's from Lower Lorraine, and therefore somewhat nearer to an Englishman than a mere Frenchman like John. His promotion was owing to his being a chaplain of the Queen, Henry the First's second wife, Adeliza of Löwen, with whom he had doubtless come into England.[84] He is described as being of noble birth, mild, and pious, but perhaps mere mildness was not the virtue which was most needed in those days. All that we hear of him is that he tried to get back the Canons' lands from John the Archdeacon, but that King Henry and Roger Bishop of Salisbury, who was a mighty man in those days, hindered him. He died in 1135. Then came Robert. He was a rare case of a Bishoprick in those times being held by a man who could be called in any sense an Englishman. As a rule, the great ecclesiastical offices were now given to men who were not only not of Old-English descent, but who were not even the sons of Normans or other strangers settled in England. Utter foreigners, men born on the Continent, were commonly preferred to either. But Robert was a Fleming by descent and born in England. As a native of the land, and sprung from one of those foreign nations whose blood and speech is most closely akin to our own, we may welcome him a countryman, in days when the most part of the land was parcelled out among men who did not even speak our tongue. He had been a monk at Lewes at Sussex, and was promoted by the favour of Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, the famous brother of King Stephen. Henry had been Abbot of Glastonbury before he became Bishop, and, what is more, he kept the Abbey along with his Bishoprick. He is said to have sent for Robert to look after the affairs of the monastery; that is, I suppose, to act as his deputy after he became Bishop.[85] Thus we see that the comfortable practice of pluralities, and what somebody calls the "sacred principle of delegation,"—that is to say, the holding two or more incompatible offices and leaving their duties to be done by others or not to be done at all,—are inventions in which the nineteenth century was forestalled by the twelfth. Robert next from deputy Abbot of Glastonbury became Bishop of Bath, and he seems to have set himself manfully to work to bring his diocese and its two head churches out of the state of confusion into which the changes of John of Tours had brought them. First of all with regard to the Bishoprick. You understand of course that the removal of the see from Wells to Bath had been made without the consent of the Canons of Wells, who had an undoubted right to be consulted about the matter. In ecclesiastical theory a Bishop and his Chapter are very much like a King and his Parliament; neither of them can do any important act without the consent of the other. And here a thing had been done for which of all others the consent of the Wells Chapter ought to have been had, as their most precious rights had been taken away from them. All this time they had never formally submitted to the change, and they had been always complaining of the wrongful removal of the see, and asserting their own rights against the usurpations of the monks of Bath. And it is to be noticed that the change had never been approved or recognized by any Pope. The Bishops of Somersetshire were still known in official language at Rome as Episcopi Fontanenses or Bishops of Wells, not as Episcopi Bathonienses or Bishops of Bath. Robert now procured that the episcopal position of Bath should be recognized, and from this time for some while after our Bishops are commonly called Bishops of Bath.[86] But it would seem that this is merely a contracted form, for the style of Bishop of Bath and Wells, with which we are all so familiar, is found before very long. And there can be no doubt that the controversy was now settled by Robert on these terms, that Bath should take precedence of Wells, but that the Bishop should have his throne in both churches, that he should be chosen by the monks of Bath and the Canons of Wells conjointly, or by deputies appointed by the two Chapters, and that those episcopal acts which needed the confirmation of the Chapter should be confirmed both by the Convent of Bath and by the Chapter of Wells.[87] There are deeds hanging up in this very room to which you will see the confirmation of both those bodies. The Bishop of Somersetshire thus had two cathedral churches, as was also the case with the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, and as has been the case with the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol since those sees were joined within our own memory. This arrangement lasted till the cathedral church of Bath was suppressed under Henry the Eighth, after which, by an Act of Parliament passed in 1542, the Chapter of Wells was made the sole Chapter for the Bishop.[88] Things thus came back, as far as Wells was concerned, to much the same state as they had been in before the changes of John of Tours, except that Bath still forms a part of the Bishop's style. But since the Act of Henry the Eighth it has been a mere title, as the Bishop is Bishop of Bath in no sense except that in which he is Bishop of Taunton or of any other place in the diocese. He is elected by the Chapter of Wells only; he is enthroned in the church of Wells only; and when Saint Peter's church at Bath was set up again in the reign of James the First, it was not as a cathedral, but as a simple parish church.

Bishop Robert, having thus settled himself as Bishop of Bath and Wells, with two churches under his special care, began to set to work to put in order whatever needed reform in both of them. He enlarged and finished the church of Bath, if he did not actually rebuild it from the ground. I speak thus doubtingly, because our accounts do not exactly agree. The little book called "Historiola de Primordiis Episcopatûs Somersetensis" says that "he himself caused the church of the Blessed Peter the Apostle at Bath to be built at a great cost."[89] But the history commonly quoted as the Canon of Wells says only that "he finished the fabric of the church of Bath which had been begun by John of Tours."[90] Now the "Historiola" is the earlier authority, and that which we should generally believe rather than the other, whenever there is any difference between the two. But, on the other hand, stories generally grow greater and not smaller; a man's exploits are much more likely to be made too much of by those who repeat the tale than to be made too little of. When therefore the later writer attributes to Robert less than the earlier one does, one is tempted to think that the earlier writer exaggerated or spoke in a loose way, and that the Canon of Wells had some good reason for his correction. And this is the more to be noticed, because we shall find exactly the same difference when we come to the accounts which the two writers give of what Robert did at Wells. It is indeed said that the church and city of Bath were again destroyed by fire in 1135, and that this made Robert's rebuilding necessary. But the phrase of being destroyed by fire is often used very laxly of cases where a building, like York Minster within the memory of some people, was simply a good deal damaged, and had to be repaired, but did not need to be wholly rebuilt. At any rate, whether Robert altogether rebuilt or only finished, the great church of Saint Peter at Bath was now brought to perfection. Do not for a moment think that this is the Abbey Church of Bath which is now standing, and which I do not doubt that a great many of you know very well. The church of John and Robert was of course built in the Romanesque style with round arches, and in that particular variety of Romanesque which had been imported by Eadward the Confessor from Normandy into England, and which we therefore call the Norman style. But the present church of Bath is one of the latest examples of our latest English Gothic, and of that special variety of it which forms the local Perpendicular style of Somersetshire. Moreover the Romanesque church was very much larger than the present one, which covers the site of its nave only. One little bit of the Romanesque building, the arch between the south aisle and the south transept, is still to be seen at the present east end. The fact is that the later Bishops of Bath and Wells were not at all of the same mind as John of Tours. They lived much more at Wells than at Bath, and took much more care of the church of Wells. Bath indeed was quite neglected, and by the end of the fifteenth century the church was in a great state of decay. It was then, in the year 1500, that Bishop Oliver King and Prior Bird began to build the present church on a smaller scale and in a widely different style of architecture. Besides what he did to the church, Bishop Robert built or rebuilt all the conventual buildings of his Abbey of Bath, the cloister, refectory, dormitory, and the rest, all which were necessary for the monks of Bath, though the secular priests of Wells could do without them.[91]

It is to be noticed that Bishop Robert, himself a monk, when he began to reconstitute the Church of Wells in the way of which I now have to speak, made no attempt to bring in monks instead of secular canons, or even to subject the Canons to the same half-monastic discipline which had been brought in by Gisa. All his changes in fact tended in an exactly opposite direction. Hitherto the Canons had been altogether dependent on the Bishop. They do not seem to have formed a distinct corporation, and the lands which they held, when they were not taken away from them altogether were held by them as the Bishop's tenants. All Robert's changes tended to give them greater distinctness and independence. The first business was to get back the lands which had been alienated by the connivance of Bishop John, and which Bishop Godfrey had in vain tried to get back. John the Archdeacon, we are told, repented on his death-bed, and straitly charged his brother Reginald to restore the lands. This he now did; he came to Bath and surrendered everything to the Bishop, but we shall presently see that his vested interest was thought worthy of some respect. It is now that we are told that, instead of the sixty shillings which John had paid each Canon yearly, the Bishop was able to pay them a hundred shillings.[92] And now, to hinder anything of the kind happening again, Robert put the constitution and revenues of his Chapter on altogether a new footing. The Canons became a separate corporation, distinct from the Bishop; and, besides this, each Canon became for some purposes a separate corporation sole, distinct alike from the Bishop and from his brother Canons. For Robert first founded the dignities and prebends of the Church of Wells. The dignities are the chief offices of the Chapter, those of the Dean, the Precentor, the Chancellor, the Treasurer, and the Sub-Dean, all which offices still remain, to which we may add the Provostship, which still went on, and the Subchantership; these two no longer exist. Of these the Deanery and the Precentorship were certainly founded by Robert. Of the others I do not feel quite certain whether they were founded by Robert or by Jocelin.[93] But in any case all that Jocelin did in this matter was to carry out the plans of Robert somewhat more fully, and we may fairly discuss the whole constitution as one work at this point. We need not suppose that all these offices were absolutely new; for instance, there must always have been a Precentor, or some one discharging the Precentor's duties in the immediate government of the choir. But at all events these offices were not till now distinct and permanent foundations, with a special status and distinct revenues of their own, which they now became. In the Dean especially the Canons now got for the first time a head of their own body distinct from the Bishop. Now as to the prebends. There is a corrupt way of speaking in use now of calling some few members of the Chapter Canons, as if the name belonged to them only, and calling the rest of the body Prebendaries, as if they were something different and, I suppose, something inferior. That this is a mere corruption is well known to every one who knows anything of the history of these foundations. But it is also made very plain by the language of official documents to this day. Whenever a new Prebendary is installed, he is still installed into "the Canonry or Prebend" of so and so; and when the whole Chapter is summoned for the election of a Bishop, all its members without distinction are still summoned by the title of Canons. The truth is that every member of the cathedral body is at once a Canon and a Prebendary. Canon and Prebendary are two different names for the same man looked at in two different characters. He is a Canon as one of the capitular body, a member of the corporation called the Dean and Chapter; he is also a Prebendary as holding—or of later years not holding—a certain prebend, præbenda, or separate estate, in regard to which he himself forms a corporation sole. The priests of Saint Andrew's had been Canons all along, but they first became Prebendaries under Bishop Robert. For it was he who first founded the prebends or separate estates. He divided the property of the Canons into two parts. Certain estates were to be held by the whole body in common as a corporation aggregate. Certain other estates were cut up into smaller portions or prebends, of which each Canon held one as a corporation sole. Such and such lands or tithes were attached as a prebend to the Deanery, to the Precentorship, and so on through the whole body; those Canons who did not hold any dignity, such as Dean or Precentor, being called Prebendaries of the place where their estates or corpses lay, Wormestor, Buckland, or any other. Some estates, as those of Combe and Wedmore, were so large as to form several prebends; thus we get the titles which sound so odd, Wedmore the first, Combe the twelfth, and the like. Thus each Canon came to have as it were two beings. As a Canon, he was one of a body, enjoying rights and discharging duties in common with his brethren. As a Prebendary he was independent, holding his own prebendal estate like any other holder of a benefice. But mark that the title of Canon, a title of office and duty, is clearly a more honourable title than that of Prebendary, which is a mere title of property. And mark again that, now that all the prebendal estates are transferred to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, it may fairly be doubted whether there are any Prebendaries left, save the few who were appointed before those changes began. But there is nothing in the Act of Parliament which brought about those changes which at all touches the status of a non-residentiary Canon in any point except that of his property. What I want you to bear in mind is that, when a non-residentiary Canon becomes a Residentiary, he is not, as people commonly talk, changed from a Prebendary into a Canon. He was a Canon before, and, saving my own objection which I have just started, he remains a Prebendary afterwards. How the distinction between residentiary and non-residentiary Canons came about I shall explain presently.

The Church of Wells thus received a new constitution at the hands of Bishop Robert, who was helped in his undertaking by King Stephen and by his former patron, the King's brother Henry, Bishop of Winchester.[94] This constitution is essentially the same as that which, in theory at least, exists still, and it is one which, in all its main features, is shared by Wells with all the other cathedral churches of the Old Foundation. The cathedral churches of the Old Foundation are those which have always had secular canons, which therefore were not suppressed at the dissolution of monasteries, but have gone on uninterruptedly with essentially the same constitution down to our own time. Such, besides our own church, are the neighbouring churches of Salisbury and Exeter. Such, in other parts of England, are York, London, Lincoln, Lichfield, Hereford, Chichester, and the four cathedrals of Wales. The churches of the New Foundation are those which in the time of Henry the Eighth were served by monks, which were therefore dissolved along with the other monasteries, and all of which, except Bath and Coventry, were refounded by him as Chapters of secular canons. Such was our old mother church of Winchester; such was the common mother church at Canterbury; such were Rochester, Norwich, Worcester, Durham, and the newer sees of Ely and Carlisle. With these are also reckoned the churches which became cathedral by Henry planting Bishops in them for the first time, Oxford, Peterborough, Saint Werburgh's at Chester, our own neighbours of Gloucester and Bristol, and Westminster, which lost its Bishop in the next reign, and is now only a collegiate church. And to these I suppose we must again add the churches of Ripon and Manchester, which have become cathedral in our own time. In all these the constitution is very different from that of the churches of the Old Foundation; among other things, they have not that variety of officers, each with his separate duties and revenues, which are to be found in the Old Foundations. And the influence of the Crown is much greater in the New Foundations than in the Old. Their Deans have always been appointed by the Crown, and in several of them the Canons also are appointed either by the Crown or by the Lord Chancellor. In the Old Foundations the Dignitaries and other Canons, except the Dean, have always been appointed by the Bishop. In the Welsh churches the Deans also have always been, and still are, appointed by the Bishops.[95] In the others the Canons elected their own Dean, but a custom gradually came in by which the Crown recommended a person, who was always chosen. But within the reign of the present Queen, there chanced to be some legal objection to the person recommended by the Crown to the Chapter of Exeter, so that the Canons freely elected their own Dean, who held his place till his death; only meanwhile an Act of Parliament was passed, vesting in the Crown the appointment to the Old Deaneries as well as to the New. You will see easily that, though the connexion between the Bishop and his Chapter is everywhere much weakened from what it once was and from what it ought to be, it still is much closer in the churches of the Old Foundation than in those of the New.

It is to the wise and careful gradation of officers, each with his 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;[96] 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."[97] 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.[98] 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[99]—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.[100] 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.[101] 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[102]—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.[103] 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.[104]

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.[105] 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.[106] 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,[107] 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.[108] 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;[109] 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.

The episcopal reign of Bishop Robert has thus occupied a large part of our time. Nor has it done so unworthily, for his episcopate is the most important of all in the constitutional history of the Church of Wells; and, though all Robert's architectural works happen to have perished, yet his episcopate must have been almost equally important with regard to the material fabric. We may pass more lightly over the time of the two Bishops who came between the first great founder Robert and the second great founder Jocelin. Their time is a most important time in the history of the see of Bath and Wells; it is the most important of all times in the later history of the Church of Glastonbury; but it provides but little matter bearing on the history of either the fabric or the constitution of the Church of Wells. Bishop Robert died in 1166, and the see remained vacant for seven years. The next Bishop, Reginald, founded several new prebends,[110] but I do not find any mention of the fabric in his time. Then came the famous Savaric, the last of our Lotharingian Prelates, whose detailed history belongs in a special manner to Professor Stubbs.[111] His great object, as we all know, was to annex the Abbey of Glastonbury to the Bishoprick, and to make Glastonbury a third, or perhaps rather the first, cathedral church of the Diocese.[112] The controversy which arose about this matter fills up the whole of his episcopate, and part of that of his successor, Jocelin, who was Bishop from 1206 to 1242. For a short time Glastonbury, much against the will of its own monks, remained an episcopal see, with the Bishop for its Abbot, and Jocelin himself signs the Great Charter by the title of Bishop of Bath and Glastonbury. One might have thought that this change was one which tended still more to the lowering of the position of the Church of Wells. But we may perhaps infer that it was not so taken, as we find the Dean and some of the Canons of Wells acting zealously on the Bishop's side in the course of the long dispute.[113] In the end, as is well known, the monks of Glastonbury gained their point at the expense of considerable sacrifices. Jocelin gave up his claims over the Abbey; the Bishop of Bath and Wells ceased to be Bishop and Abbot of Glastonbury, and the minster of Glastonbury ceased to be a cathedral church. It became once more simply a monastery governed by its own Abbot, as it had been for so many ages. On the other hand, the monks of Glastonbury had to buy their independence by the surrender of several manors and advowsons; and, though the Bishop ceased to be Abbot, yet he retained a more efficient right of visitation over the Abbey than Bishops could commonly retain over monasteries so great in wealth and dignity.[114] This agreement was made in the year 1218, and from that time till Jocelin's death in 1242, it would seem that his chief attention was given to the rebuilding of the fabric of the church of Wells, to some further changes in the constitution of the Chapter, and to other good works in the city. He could not have begun his works at Wells before the year 1211; for the first five years of his episcopate were spent in banishment under the tyranny of John.[115] Jocelin was a Wells man in every sense of the word. As he is called Jocelin of Wells, and as his brother Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, is called Hugh of Wells, both were doubtless natives of the city, and Jocelin had been a Canon of the Church before he became its Bishop. He is a memorable man indeed in our local history; he may be called the creator of the cathedral as it now stands, he put the last finishing touches to the capitular constitution devised by Robert, and he also began another of our institutions which has lasted to our own time, I mean that of the Vicars. With regard to the fabric, I now come upon ground which Professor Willis has made his own. As many of you doubtless remember, he has twice lectured on Wells Cathedral: once in 1851, when the Archæological Institute at their Bristol meeting paid a hurried visit to Wells; and again in 1863, at the meeting of our own local Archæological and Natural History Society, an honour, let me tell you, of a very rare kind, and which I believe has not been granted to any other local society. Now, if we had Professor Willis's lecture as he delivered it, there would be little else for any future historian of the fabric to do except to make spoil of what the Professor said. But unluckily, the great work of which this and all other Professor Willis's lectures of the same kind were to form parts has not yet appeared, and I greatly fear that it never will appear. We have therefore to draw our own recollections, helped by the report in our own Society's Proceedings, 1863, which is at least fuller and more accurate than that in the Bristol volume of the Institute. I shall therefore, in what I have to say as to architectural facts, follow Professor Willis as nearly as I can, though I shall have to make more use of my own light than I need have done if I really had the Professor's lecture before me. I speak thus of architectural facts, with regard to which he who follows Professor Willis will seldom go wrong; as for matters of taste and opinion, architectural or otherwise, I hold myself independent of Professor Willis as of every other man. But I should add that I have not had, like the Professor, the advantage of a diligent study of the manuscript documents in possession of the Chapter. I once glanced at them in company with Professor Stubbs, and that is all. When these documents are printed, as all documents of the kind ought to be printed, I hope I may be able to make good use of them; but while they are shut up in manuscript they are useless to me. Searching into manuscripts is a special gift, one which Professor Willis and Professor Stubbs, and some nearer to ourselves, possess in the highest degree, but it is a work for which I have neither time nor inclination.

Let us now look, in a general historical way, without attempting to enter into any very minute detail, at the church of Wells, as it was designed and begun, if not absolutely finished, during the long episcopate of Jocelin. That episcopate reached over twenty-four years from the settlement of the Glastonbury controversy, over thirty-six from Jocelin's first consecration. That any part of the church is older than Jocelin I see no reason to believe; but if anybody holds that the porch may be a little earlier than his time, I will not dispute against him. The church of Jocelin, thus understood, takes in the nave, the transepts, and what is now the choir proper, that is, the three western arches of the eastern limb. It takes in the three towers, up to the point where they rise above the roof of the church, but no higher. With the present presbytery, that is, the three eastern bays of the eastern limb, with the Lady chapel and the other small eastern chapels, with the Chapter-house and the tops of the towers, we have as yet nothing to do. Now within these limits, that is, between the west door and the Bishop's throne, I think that every one of common observation must have remarked that there are two styles of architecture in use. I do not speak of certain small changes and insertions made at later times, such as the tracery which has been put into the nave windows, or of the changes which were made when it was found needful to add new props to the great central tower. Of these I shall have to speak further on. I speak of differences of style in the original fabric itself. The west front, within and without, differs widely in its architectural detail from the arcades of the nave and transepts. If there is any one here who has never remarked the difference, I can only say, let him go into the church to-morrow and use his eyes for himself. Both parts are built in the style which is called Gothic, the style which uses pointed arches with an appropriate form of ornament; both are built in that variety of Gothic which is called Lancet or Early English, that is, the first form of Gothic, which in England is mainly distinguished by the use of long narrow windows without tracery. But, notwithstanding this general likeness, there is a wide difference between the two. To those who have never marked the difference I am not sure that I could make it perfectly intelligible, except either on the spot or with the help of large drawings. But go, I say, into the building itself, go especially under either of the western towers, at the point where the two styles join, and I think any one of common observation will easily see the difference. The west front is built in that form of Early Gothic which is common in other parts of England, the style of Ely, Lincoln, and Salisbury. The rest of the Early work is built in a style which in England is almost peculiar to Somersetshire, South Wales, and the neighbouring counties, and which is much more like French work. Among greater churches it is the style of Glastonbury and Llandaff as well as of Wells; among smaller buildings good examples will be found in parts of Whitchurch in Somersetshire and Cheriton in Gower, and above all in the beautiful church of Slymbridge in Gloucestershire. Of the two styles used in this part of the building this is the one which, speaking of England generally, we should be inclined to call foreign, and the other native. Here in the West we must call the ordinary English style of Ely and Salisbury foreign, and the French-looking style of Wells and Llandaff we must call native or local. Our local Somersetshire and South-Welsh style has a good deal of the earlier Romanesque leaven hanging about it; its mouldings and the clustering of its pillars are much less free; the abaci or tops of the capitals are square or octagonal instead of round; it makes no use of those detached shafts, often of marble, which are so abundantly found in the west front. Now which of these two is the older? The local style is no doubt older in idea; but that does not absolutely prove that the parts of the church which are built in it are necessarily older in date. The evidence of the masonry is puzzling; some bits look one way and some the other. Mr. Parker and I once looked very carefully at it, and we were both inclined to think that the west front was the oldest part, that it had been built up against the earlier church, like the west front of Peterborough, and that the nave and the rest had been built later. Then Professor Willis came and told us that we were wrong, and showed us other signs to prove that the west front was the latest part built. We of course dutifully bowed to our master; but, if the west front is the latest part, then it follows, what Professor Willis is inclined to doubt, that the whole work was finished during the episcopate of Jocelin—and surely thirty-one years is enough even for so great a work. For that Jocelin built the west front I have no doubt at all. It is certain that he built the oldest parts of the palace at Wells and of the manor-house at Wookey[116], and the style in both of those buildings exactly agrees with the foreign style of the west front, and not with the local style of the nave. And these buildings are certainly earlier than some works in the local style. For it is certain from an account in Matthew Paris that in 1248, six years after Jocelin's death, the vault, which was not commonly put on till some time after the walls and arches were finished, was then being put on some part of the church of Wells. The vault fell in by reason of an earthquake and did a good deal of damage.[117] The present vault then is later than Jocelin, and to the repair rendered needful by this accident I am also inclined to attribute the breaks and style of differences—not amounting to differences of style—which it is easy to see between the eastern and western bays of the nave. The chances therefore seem on the whole to be that Jocelin began to build in the local style; that for his later works, the west front and the two houses at Wells and Wookey, he sent for architects from a distance, who brought in the more advanced style which was usual in other parts of England; but that the mere damage caused by the fall of the vault was, even after his death, repaired by the local workmen in the local style.