Hereford Cathedral

Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA · EN · 04/10/2026

Hereford Cathedral, formally the , is a Church of England cathedral in Hereford, England. It is the seat of the bishop of Hereford and the principal church of the diocese of Hereford. The cathedral is a grade I listed building.

A place of worship has existed on the site of the present building since the 8th century or earlier. The present building was begun in 1079. Substantial parts of the building date from both the Norman and the Gothic periods.

The cathedral has the largest library of chained books in the world, its most famous treasure being the Mappa Mundi, a medieval map of the world created around 1300. The map is listed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

Origins

The cathedral is dedicated to two saints, St Mary the Virgin and St Ethelbert the King. The latter was beheaded by Offa, King of Mercia, in the year 794. Offa had consented to give his daughter to Ethelbert in marriage: why he changed his mind and deprived him of his head historians do not know, although tradition is at no loss to supply him with an adequate motive. The execution, or murder, is said to have taken place at Sutton, four miles (6 km) from Hereford, with Ethelbert's body brought to the site of the modern cathedral by "a pious monk". He was buried at the site of the cathedral. At Ethelbert's tomb miracles were said to have occurred, and in the next century (about 830) Milfrid, a Mercian nobleman, was so moved by the tales of these marvels as to rebuild in stone the little church that stood there and to dedicate it to the sainted king.

Before this, Hereford had become the seat of a bishopric. It is said to have been the centre of a diocese as early as the 670s when Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury, divided the Mercian diocese of Lichfield, founding Hereford for the Magonsæte and Worcester for the Hwicce. In the 7th century the cathedral was refounded by Putta, who settled there when driven from Rochester by Æthelred of Mercia. The cathedral of stone, which Milfrid raised, stood for some 200 years, and then, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, it was altered. The new church had only a short life, for it was plundered and burnt in 1056 by a combined force of Welsh and Irish under Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, the Welsh prince; it was not, however, destroyed until its custodians had offered vigorous resistance, in which seven of the canons were killed.

Norman period

Hereford Cathedral remained in a state of ruin until Robert of Lorraine was consecrated as the diocese's bishop in 1079 and undertook its reconstruction. His work was carried on or, more probably, redone by Reynelm who was the next but one bishop and who reorganised the college of secular canons attached to the cathedral. Reynelm died in 1115 and it was only under his third successor, Robert de Betun, who was bishop from 1131 to 1148, that the church was brought to completion.

Of this Norman church the surviving parts are the nave arcade, the choir up to the spring of the clerestory, the choir aisle, the south transept and the crossing arches. Scarcely 50 years after its completion William de Vere, who occupied the see from 1186 to 1199, altered the east end by constructing a retro-choir or processional path and a lady chapel.

13th century

Between the years 1226 and 1246, the Lady Chapel was rebuilt in the Early English style—with a crypt beneath. Around the middle of the century the clerestory, and probably the vaulting of the choir, were rebuilt, having been damaged by the settling of the central tower. Under Peter of Aigueblanche (bishop 1240–68), one of Henry III's foreign favourites, the rebuilding of the north transept was begun, being completed later in the same century by Swinfield, who also built the aisles of the nave and eastern transept.

Aquablanca

Peter of Aigueblanche, also known as Aquablanca, was one of the most notable of the pre-reformation Bishops of Hereford, who left his mark upon the cathedral and the diocese. Aquablanca came to England in the train of Eleanor of Provence. He was a man of energy and resource; though he lavished money upon the cathedral and made a handsome bequest to the poor, it cannot be pretended that his qualifications for the office to which Henry III appointed him included piety. He was a nepotist who occasionally practised gross fraud.

When Prince Edward came to Hereford to deal with Llywelyn the Great of Gwynedd, Aquablanca was away in Ireland on a tithe-collecting expedition, and the dean and canons were also absent. Not long after Aquablanca's return, which was probably expedited by the stern rebuke which the King administered, he and all his relatives from Savoy were seized within the cathedral by a party of barons, who deprived him of the money which he had extorted from the Irish.

Thomas de Cantilupe

Thomas de Cantilupe was the next but one Bishop of Hereford after Aquablanca. He had faults not uncommon in men who held high ecclesiastical office in his day, however he was a strenuous administrator of his see, and an unbending champion of its rights. For assaulting some of the episcopal tenants and raiding their cattle, Lord Clifford was condemned to walk barefoot through the cathedral to the high altar, and Cantilupe himself applied the rod to his back. Cantilupe also wrung from the Welsh king Llewellyn some manors which he had seized, and Cantilupe, after a successful lawsuit against the Earl of Gloucester to determine the possession of a chase near the Forest of Malvern, dug the dyke which can still be traced on the crest of the Malvern Hills. Excommunicated by John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, he went to the papal court in Orvieto to plead his case with the pope. He moved with the court to Montefiascone where, already ill, he died in 1282 before his case was fully resolved. His flesh was buried in the monastery of San Severo outside Orvieto and his heart and bones were brought back to England. His bones were placed in a shrine at Hereford Cathedral where they became a focus of a large pilgrimage cult. Rome was urged to canonise him, and among the evidences of his saintliness which his admirers appealed to, in addition to the miracles of healing wrought at his shrine, were the facts that he had exhibited extreme dislike of the Jews and appealed for their expulsion, never ceased to wear his hair-shirt, and would never allow even his sister to kiss him. The testimony was regarded as conclusive, and 40 years after his death, in 1320, Cantilupe's name was added to the roll of saints. His arms were adopted for those of the see.

Considerable work was done to the Cathedral at this time to accommodate his cult. Among the works believed to be associated with his cult are works to the north porch, which include the figures of Synagoga, representing the supposed blindness and obstinacy of the Jewish faith, Luxuria and a bagpiper. It is also likely that the Hereford Mappa Mundi is associated with the cult; it also shows antisemitic features.

14th to 16th century: completion of the fabric

In the first half of the 14th century the rebuilding of the central tower, which is embellished with ball-flower ornaments, was carried out. At about the same time the chapter house and its vestibule were built, then Thomas Trevenant, who was bishop from 1389 to 1404, rebuilt the south end and groining of the great transept. Around the middle of the 15th century a tower was added to the western end of the nave, and in the second half of this century bishops John Stanberry and Edmund Audley built three chantries, the former on the north side of the presbytery, the latter on the south side of the Lady Chapel. Later bishops Richard Mayew and Charles Booth, who between them ruled the diocese from 1504 to 1535, made the last additions to the cathedral by erecting the north porch, now forming the principal northern entrance. The building of the present edifice therefore extended over a period of 440 years.

17th to 18th century

In the war between King and Parliament (the English Civil War) the city of Hereford fell into the hands first of one party, then of the other. Once it endured a siege, and when it was taken the conquerors ran riot in the cathedral and, in their fury, caused great damage which could never be repaired. In the early years of the 18th century, Philip Bisse (bishop, 1712–21), devised a scheme to support the central tower. He also had installed a large altarpiece and an oak screen, and instead of restoring the Chapter House he allowed its stones to be utilised for alterations to the Bishop's Palace.

It was during this period that his brother, Thomas Bisse, was the chancellor of the cathedral. In 1724 Thomas Bisse organised a "Music Meeting" which subsequently became, with the cathedrals at Worcester and Gloucester, the Three Choirs Festival.

1786: Fall of the western tower

On Easter Monday, 1786, the greatest disaster in the history of the cathedral took place. The west tower fell, creating a ruin of the whole of the west front and at least one bay of the nave. The tower, which, unlike the west tower of Ely, was in the west bay of the nave, had a general resemblance to the central tower; both were profusely covered with ball-flower ornaments, and both terminated in leaden spires. James Wyatt was called in to repair the damage. As he did at Durham, instead of just repairing, he made alterations which were (and are) not universally popular.

19th-century restoration and 1904 reopening

In 1841 the restoration work was begun, instigated by Dean Merewether, and was carried out by Lewis Nockalls Cottingham and his son, Nockalls. Bisse's masonry, which by this time had been found to be useless, was swept away from the central tower, the lantern was strengthened and exposed to view, and much work was done in the nave and to the exterior of the Lady Chapel. When Nockalls Cottingham drowned on a voyage to New York in September 1854, George Gilbert Scott was called in, and from that time the work of restoring the choir was performed continuously until 1863, when (on 30 June) the cathedral was reopened with solemn services. Renn Hampden, Bishop of Hereford, preached in the morning and Samuel Wilberforce preached in the evening. In his diary, Wilberforce characterises his right reverend brother's sermon as "dull, but thoroughly orthodox"; but of his own service he remarks (not without complacency), "I preached evening; great congregation and much interested."

The west front was restored by John Oldrid Scott over the period 1902 and 1908.

Between them these restorations cost some £45,000, . Since then much else has been done. "Wyatt's Folly", as James Wyatt's west front was often called, has been replaced by a highly ornate façade in commemoration of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, whose figure is to be seen at the beautiful stained glass which fills the seven-light (i.e. with seven main vertical "lights", or sections of glass) window subscribed "by the women of Hereford diocese".

20th-century extensions

A new library building was constructed in the early 1990s and opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1996. In 1967 with the new liturgical fashion, George Gilbert Scott's iron choir screen was removed in pieces and discarded. It has since been restored and is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

21st-century changes

Work on a new Cathedral Green, with pathways, seating and gated entrance to the cathedral was undertaken in 2010 to 2011.

In 2015, landscaping and restoration efforts began at the cathedral, financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund. These efforts involved reburying thousands of corpses, some from 12th century to the 14th century stone-lined graves, from the cathedral burial plot. Unusually, from the Middle Ages until the 19th century, anyone who died on church grounds had to be buried within the precinct. Notable among those reburied during the restoration was a knight who may have participated in tourney jousting, a man with leprosy (it was unusual for lepers to be buried anywhere near a cathedral due to the stigma associated with the disease), and a woman with a severed hand (a typical punishment for a thief, who would normally be unlikely to receive cathedral burial).

Dean and chapter

As of 11 May 2022:

Dean — Sarah Brown (since 2021 installation)

Precentor – Andrew Piper (since 9 March 2003 installation)

Chancellor – The Revd Canon James Pacey

Eminent persons

Among eminent men who have been associated with the cathedral – besides those who have already been mentioned – are Robert of Gloucester, the chronicler, prebendary in 1291; Nicholas of Hereford, chancellor in 1377, a remarkable man and leader of the Lollards at Oxford; John Carpenter, town clerk of London who baptised there on 18 December 1378; Polydore Vergil, prebendary in 1507, a celebrated literary man, as indeed with such a name he ought to have been; and Miles Smith, prebendary in 1580, promoted to the See of Gloucester – one of the translators of the Authorized King James Version of the Bible.

Source and attribution

Adapted from “Hereford Cathedral” by English Wikipedia contributors. Main paragraphs and sections are retained; tables, reference markers and technical markup are omitted. This is an encyclopedic adaptation, not a personal review. Original revision and contributor history ↗. Text is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗. Check current visitor access, tickets and transport with the relevant operator.