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Monument Types

• CATHEDRAL (EARLY MEDIEVAL - 411 AD to 1065 AD (between))

Associated Events

• College Hall undercroft (Ref: WCM100027)
• Ongoing work: Chapter House Lawn (Ref: WCM100192)
• South Passage (refectory) (Ref: WCM100768)
• College Green (adjacent to refectory) (Ref: WCM100769)

Full description

7th century and later cathedral church.

Documentary evidence.
The first cathedral church of St Peter would have been built c.680 at the time of the foundation of the see. A charter of 991 records that the bishop's throne was still in St Peter's, although by then St Mary's had been built, either by St Oswald or by one of his predecessors (see WCM 96369). 11th- and early 12th-century sources, Hemming and William of Malmesbury, probably based on oral tradition, record that St Mary's had been built in the cemetery of St Peter's, was 'almost contiguous' and that St Peter's presbytery was enlarged after 1040-41 by Aelfric, brother of Bishop Brihtheah, incorporating stonework re-used from a cemetery memorial {1} {2}. The spatial relationship of the two buildings has been disputed, Carver suggesting that they lay in line, following the common Anglo-Saxon planning tradition {3}.

William of Malmesbury adds information about the church buildings when Wulfstan was prior before 1062. Wulfstan had constructed 'over the roof of the church a fabric in which the bells might hang'; and he used to shut himself away to pray in the western porticus of the church, where was the altar of All Saints, with the monument of the Lord's Cross'. These observations could equally well apply to either St Peter's or St Mary's {2}.

No certain archaeological evidence of St Peter's has been found, though the concentration of pre-Conquest burials (WCM 96370) in and near the refectory (WCM 96377) has been taken to imply that a church lay in that immediate area (WCM 100027, 100768, 100769). If the assumption is correct that the transfer to Wulfstan's new cathedral church of the dedication to St Mary implies that the one replaced the other on the same site, then this raises the possibility that it was St Peter's church that lay in the refectory area. A series of excavations (WCM 100192) to the east and south of the chapter house (WCM 96372) have uncovered a circular wall (WCM 96386) outside and concentric to the Norman chapter house, with clasping buttresses of Romanesque type opposite those of the chapter house and radial 'sleeper walls' heading inwards under the chapter house buttresses. The wall has been shown stratigraphically to be of the same date as, or earlier than, the Norman chapter house. The excavators suggest the possibility that the wall represents part of a rotunda added to a pre-Conquest cathedral church, possibly St Peter's {5}.

Sources and further reading

Related records

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