Bells Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich | Page 4

plunged into his new duties at Thetford with ardour in the vain hope of distraction, but failed to find that consolation he had hoped to; and so about 1093 he determined on a visit to Rome to tender his resignation and confess his sin to Pope Urban. He journeyed to Rome and was kindly received, and the absolution he desired readily granted. The Pope was glad to see an English bishop come to him for advice, and in granting him absolution he strengthened considerably his claim to be regarded as head of the English Church.
This lengthy preamble may seem somewhat unjustifiable, but if we are to study any building aright, and if we are to interpret in any measure its meaning and symbolism, it cannot wholly be done on any line of abstract ?stheticism or arch?ological instinct, however intuitive it may be: we must in some measure think of the builders of old times and of the influences which with them produced its inception and have left it to come down the ages to us.
It is interesting to note that Herbert's early French training influenced him in the planning of the beautiful eastern termination to his cathedral, and the grand sweep of the procession path. Similar apsidal terminations, of slightly later date, once existed at Ely, and still remain in a modified form at Peterborough.
The old tribunal arrangement of presbyters' seats with the central bishop's throne facing west, which was part of Herbert's first plan, no doubt may safely be accredited to the influence of his journey to Rome, and where he may have become familiar with what was the usual basilican arrangement.
Herbert returned to England, penitent and forgiven for his sin, and it is probable that the Pope had laid on him, as a penance, an injunction to build churches and found religious houses, and that with the remainder of his wealth he determined to transfer the see from Thetford to Norwich and to build in the latter place his cathedral church. It would also have been in compliance with the decree of Lanfranc's Synod. The see was transferred on the 9th of April 1094, and Herbert was consecrated on the same day by Thomas, Archbishop of York.
Norwich was then an important town; in the Middle Ages it ranked as the second city in the kingdom. Its prosperity was chiefly due to its large trade in wool. It is a moot point whether the town was ever a settlement of the Romans, no traces of such occupation having ever been discovered. The castle mound, no doubt, formed some part of the earthworks of an earlier stronghold. The word Norwich is probably of Norse origin, meaning the north village or the village on the North Creek ("wic"--i.e. a creek). The city stood on a tidal bay in 1004, in which year the Danes under Sweyn completely devastated and ruined the town in revenge for the massacre of their countrymen by Aethelred the Unready two years before. So that the history of the town of Norwich, as we now know it, may be said to have started directly after this.
The foundation-stone of the cathedral was laid in 1096; and upon it, according to the Registrum Primum, the following inscription is said to have been placed:--"In nomine patris et filii et spiritus Sancti Amen Ego Herbertus Episcopus apposui istum lapidem." (In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen, I, Herbert the Bishop, have placed this stone.)
It was the custom of the Norman builders to start building from the easternmost part of the church, as the more sacred part of the structure, and then build westwards; so that probably this foundation-stone, for which diligent search has been made in vain, was in the eastmost wall of the original Norman Lady Chapel--in fact, the Registrum Primum describes how Herbert began the work "where is now the chapel of the Blessed Mary." This chapel was demolished to make way for the beautiful thirteenth-century Lady Chapel which Dean Gardiner destroyed.
The thirteenth-century builders of the Lady Chapel may have used Herbert's foundation-stone in their walling; Dean Lefroy quite lately, while repairing parts of the tower and east end, came across pieces of stone with beautiful "dog-tooth" ornament upon them, which had been used to repair the masonry that, it was evident, at one time had formed part of the thirteenth-century Lady Chapel. This must be so, since in no other part of the building save the arches now remaining in the extreme eastern wall of the procession path, which at one time gave access to the Lady Chapel, does such ornament occur.
It is probable, and the more generally accredited supposition, that Herbert built the presbytery with its encircling procession path and the original trefoil of Norman chapel radiating therefrom;--the