OF WELLS. AS ILLUSTRATING THE HISTORY OF THE CATHEDRAL CHURCHES OF THE OLD FOUNDATION. BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN, M.A. FORMERLY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD. London: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1870. LONDON: R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, BREAD STREET HILL ....

This small volume is a reprint, with hardly any change, of three lectures which were given to a local society in Wells in the months of December 1869 and January 1870, and which were printed at the time in a local paper. I have added some notes and references, but the substance is essentially the same. The subject seemed to deserve more than local attention on more grounds than one. I wished to point out the way in which local and general history may and ought to be brought together. As a genera

The subject which I have chosen for this course of lectures is one which must always have an interest beyond all others for us who live in this city and neighbourhood. In every place which boasts of a cathedral church, that cathedral church is commonly the chief object of interest, alike as its present ornament and as the chief centre of its past history. But in Wells the cathedral church and its appurtenances are yet more. Their interest is not only primary, but absorbing. They are not only the

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 reverenc

I have in my former lectures carried the history both of the fabric and the foundation of the church of Wells to the time of Jocelin, and somewhat later. The thirteenth century, the great creative century of later English history, brought both fabric and foundation to a state, if not of ideal, at least of essential perfection. We now come to two centuries which found much to improve and to enlarge, but which had no need, like their predecessors, to begin afresh from the beginning. Jocelin, we ma

[39] "Domus eleemosynaria nobilis paupertatis" is the style of the Hospital of Saint Cross near Winchester, as enlarged by Cardinal Beaufort. See the Licence of Incorporation in the Monasticon, vii. 724. [40] I refer to the debate in the House of Commons on the Scotch Reform Bill of 1868, when it was discussed whether Wells or Evesham should be disfranchised. "Sir Lawrence Palk argued on behalf of Wells that it is 'a cathedral city of great antiquity.' This appeal on behalf of the seculars was a

[84] The Historiola and the Canon both call Godfrey simply "Teutonicus;" but it appears from the Continuator of Florence of Worcester (ii. 78) and from the Annals of Waverley (Ann. Mon. ii. 219) that he was Chancellor to Queen Adeliza. We can hardly doubt that he was one of her countrymen from the Netherlands. [85] This account of him is given both by the Historiola and by the Canon (Angl. Sacr. i. 561), who gives as a reason for his mission to Glastonbury, "eo quod non recte eorum aratra incede