Cathedrals Of England

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English Cathedrals: A History Cathedrals Of England. English cathedrals, including Canterbury, Durham, Winchester and York, are the greatest collective work of art and architecture in Great Britain, reflecting over a thousand years of history. English Cathedrals is an account of their foundation, construction and decoration, their architectural history, but also of who used them and what happened in them, their human history. Cathedrals were centres of learning, music and wealth. Continuity of worship over hundreds of years was broken by the two great crises of the sixteenth-century Reformation and the seventeenth-century Civil War. There were also dramatic episodes such as the loss of St Paul’s in the Great Fire of 1666, subsequently to be rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren. All have changed over the centuries. These great buildings remain striking monuments in the landscape with a unique power to evoke the past.

Vicars Choral of the English Cathedrals: Cantate Domino - History, Architecture And Archaeology Cathedrals Of England. Staffing medieval cathedrals was always a problem. Some English cathedrals introduced monks, but almost half of them put themselves in the hands of secular priests (canons). As cathedrals became complex 'prayer factories' between the 12th and 16th centuries, the canons appointed Vicars Choral to perform liturgical functions in their stead. From the moment of their first appearance in the 12th century, there was concern about the vicars' morals and behaviour and, for more than 400 years, cathedral deans struggled to impose discipline. Eventually all of the English cathedral vicars were subjected to quasi-monastic discipline in carefully regulated colleges, which were strategically located within the close and formed a very distinctive group of ecclesiastical buildings, which were ancestors of the Oxbridge colleges. Several of these important medieval building complexes have survived, but significant traces of all nine colleges - Chichester, Exeter, Hereford, Lichfield, Lincoln, St Paul's London, Salisbury, Wells and York - have been recovered in this study. As these colleges survived the Reformation, most retain extraordinarily rich archives, which modern historical scholarship is only just starting to explore. For the first time, this volume brings together the wealth of architectural, archaeological and historical information relating to these major, but little known, medieval institutions. It reveals an extraordinary interdisciplinary resource that can be used to understand, not just the working of individual colleges and cathedrals, but also the life and work of the lower orders of medieval clergy in England.

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