English Cathedrals: If Only You'd Started Ringing Your Bell

How can you go wrong visiting a little country Cathedral which happens to hold the remains of Jane Austen?

Maybe it's nice a little country town, but Winchester is a bit Southwest of London and taking the Underground across London during rush hour and then hopping on the Southwest Train out of Waterloo makes one appreciate the calmer and pastoral atmosphere (even buccolic) of a town like Winchester.

Like all cathedrals it trumpets its "biggest" or "grandest" or "whatever-est" as compared to other houses of worship. Winchester claims to have the longest cathedral in England. Not sure if I could tell, but it is amazing to see, like all the others.

And though we have been in countless cathedrals, some names come up all the time, like William the Conquerer. Once he took over and appointed a new Archbishop, things started moving forward...at least cathedral wise. Today we have a thriving small city called Winchester.

When they began the cathedral, they were missing one crucial component: laborers. So, like all the time tested methods of securing labor...they "drafted" the peasants from the fields ("It's for the Lord's Work...trust us....you'll like it.") These guys were not stone masons and some of their early work clearly demonstrates that they and the cathedral would have been better off milling and harvesting and doing whatever they did with grain.

So about a hundred or so years after the place was completed, a large section of a transept collapsed, but they forged ahead and in succeeding generations they had the skills to continue.

Like so many of these cathedrals, the architecture changed from Norman to Gothic duirng the succeeding centuries of building. The photo above is Norman Architecture. Smaller windows, not as much light and a lack of "soaring" arches and windows as the photo just above it which is Gothic.

Life was cruel in the Middle Ages (like being yanked out of the fields and tossed onto a scaffold to lay brick and stone) and the Black Death came along in 1100 and killed one in three people. Yet some of the work lasted through the ages in spite of the mishaps.

There is a wonderful fresco in the Holy Sepulchre in the cathedral. Painted around the year 1100.

We could not walk into the Sepulcre so I had to lean in. This was painted in the small room. Years later they installed the organ above it and years of vibrations from the huge organ pipes caused the room to crack and nearly crumble. No matter, they just plastered over the frescos (which were paid for centuries earlier by the grandson of William the Conquerer) and buttressed the walls and forgot about the painting. Then around 1950, someone discovered the frescos and realized they had a Middle Ages masterpiece right in to cathedral. They have been restored as much as possible and are a delight to see.

Like all good cathedrals, they have the bones of saints and this one also has the bones of some ancient kings and queens. But bones have a way of getting hidden and stolen and lost and its like any possession you own, it takes work to keep possessing it.

Case in point: Winchester has the remains of St. Swithum from the 9th Century. Many came to visit these relics and legend or truth has it that the cathedral was filled with crutches of the infirm who came and were cured. (They also have the remains of Alfred the Great, king of Wessex buried in 899. Bones and relics were moved and re-moved like chandeliers or plumbing, there was a constant updating and relpaciing. If you built a new cathedral, you would relocate the relics or scour the countryside for relics. Once you got them in the cathedral and declared them relics, who was to say that they were NOT relics. I think I'm on firm footing when making the previous statement.)

So, Winchester had the remains of St. Swithum, but then Henry VIII took charge of the Church of England in a dispute with the Pope in Rome. Henry's men went about attacking cathedrals and priories and confiscating the funds of said religious institutions and finally re-forming as the Church of England headed by the King.

Convenient.

The monks hid the bones of St. Swithum. They hid him well. To this day, they can't find St. Swithum. Probalby just as well, Henry's men came and tossed all the bones of the other Greats and Saints on the floor and left town. The Puritans were not displeased.

All cathedrals have stunning stained glass windows, but this one with its Medievel Stained Glass was a masterpiece until Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans shot it full of holes and detroyed it completely. The locals painstakingly collected all the broken stained glass, (like they did the broken relic bones) and the colors, but not the design were refitted into the cathedral windows. (Damn those Puritans!)

Some of the details of the cathedral are astounding.

And some of the detalis are whimsical. (Green Man carved into the choir seating)

The crypt is below the cathedral and yet it floods each winter because the building is built in lowlands (more on that in a minute). So, whatever bones they have, which have not been dececrated by HenryVIII, Oliver Cromwell or my Puritan ancestors would be stored down here. Yet, it floods. So, they commissioned a statue to stand in the middle of the crypt to demonstrate the rise and fall of the water. it is a stunning, solemn (and damp) place.

Now, about that water source. It seems the Romans (of course, this cathedral is built over the ruins of a Roman church from the 7th Century.) were pretty smart and they diverted the river a few hundred meters west and bult. William the Conquerer came along a few hundred years later and built over top. It never occured to anyone (when you are out conquering, the finer points of cathedral engineering may be overlooked) that a huge, heavy cathedral might weigh a lot and that it might sink and if its built in what was essentially a bog, that disaster would someday come about.

Long story short...the cathedrals one end is sinking, about to collapse. In the early 1900's they hire a great man named William Walker who was a diver (wearing that pre-scuba diver hard helmet connected to an oxygen tank via a rope type thing). He worked for six years, diving for eight hours a day, shoring up the foundation of one wing of the cathedral. How they got the cement under there though he was under water, I am not sure, but he save the whole cathedral with his bare hands (all the while underwater). He's a hero.

And then the Spanish Flu epidemic came long in 1918 and he died.