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THE DIOCESE OF PETERBOROUGH…
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THE DIOCESE OF PETERBOROUGH AND ITS CATHEDRAL CHURCH. BY THE VEN. W. H. HUTTON, B.D. THE Church Congress meets again at Leicester after an interval of thirty-nihe years. It meets in a city which has in- creased enormously in size and in im- portance during that time. Leicester is full of life, and the activities of the Church there were never greater than they are to-day. We all hope that the county may soon form a separate See. A Commission appointed by the last Bishop of Peterborough reported unani- mously in favour of the creation of a Bishopric of Leicester. At present financial difficulties stand in the way of the realisation of our hopes. But there can be little doubt that a beginning will soon be made, and that Bishop Glyn will help the present Bishop to the utmost of his power in the necessary foundation of the scheme. The union of Leicester with the See of Peterborough is quite modern. Till 1839 it belonged to the vast diocese of Lincoln, alld the Bishopric of Peterborough, founded by Henry VIII. in 1541, con- sisted only of the counties of Northamp- ton and Rutland. The union has hardly had time to become firm, and the counties are so different that, even if population had not increased so greatly, it is not likely that it would ever have been close. Peterborough, though so badly placed for a diocesan centre, has exercised a great influence on the diocese; and Leicester can never have felt that it enjoyed its proper consideration, though the Bishops of recent years have certainly striven to the utmost to give it promin- ence, even to the oolmparative disadvan- of other parts of their See. The his- tory of the See of Peterborough must of necessity find its chief interest in its Bishops; and its Bishops have lived at Peterborough, though, as Bishop Magee 6aid, its position is but that of the stalk in relation to the pear, the huge diocese, Which depends upon it. Some years ago, in the somewhat un- enlightened days of the now vigorous S.P.C.K., a series of diocesan his- tories was published. That of Peter- borough, which is not even dated, is one of the worst of them all There really could hard4 ibe a worse book of the kInd. Facts and dates, which, tiresome though they sometimes are, are after all essential to the understanding of history, ape conspicuous by their absence." Historical criticism is equally to seek. Irrelevance is rampant. One '\Vould think that the most conspicuous figures in the Church history of the dio- Photo Frith. The Choir—Peterborough Cathedral. cese were Latimer (who happened to be born in Leicestershire, which was not then in the diocese at all), Mary Queen of Scots (who died in the diocese, but was not a member of the English Church), Charles 1. (who was defeated, and i imprisoned for a short time, in the county of Northampton). If anyone wishes to study the history of the diocese of Peter- borough, he had better avoid the S.P.C.K. history. Very different, though all too brief, is the excellent article by Dr. G. F. Assinder in the Dictionary of Eng- lish Church His- tory, which will certainly be read before attending the Congress of 1919 by all sensible persons who possess that most useful book (and every sensible person does 1). But even the learned Dr. Assinder, being doubtless more of a lawyer than a historian, has been misled by legend. The Peter- borough insets in the English Chronicle have led too many folk astray. If I may quote former words of my own, the meaning of which I could not, I think, express more clearly, I would say this about those early tales: A legend grew up that Peada, Ealdoman of the Middle Eng- lish, and Oswin, .King of the North- umbrians, the brother and suc- cessor of Oswald, the hero saint, were concerned in the endowment of the great Abbey of Me d ehamsted.' They may, indeed, have said, after the fashion of the time, a word of approval; but all the grants of j land supposed to have been made then to the abbey are certaiiil, spuri- ous, and the earliest of such grants probably goes no further back than King Edgar's day, 300 years later. There is an earlier grant, though, from iEthelred, King of Mercia; but can it be be- lieved ? Certainly there was a high flight of forgery when the monks in- serted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle a .magnificent privilege from Pope Agatho and dated it 675." (Since I wrote this Photo Russell. THE RT. REV. THEODORE WOODS, D.D., LORD BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH.
PRESIDENTS MESSAGE TO "CHURCH…
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PRESIDENTS MESSAGE TO "CHURCH FAMILY NEWSPAPER" READERS. The Bishop of Peterborough kindly sends the following Congress Wessage to our Readers:- THB PALACK. PETERBOROUGH. "I am glad, at the request of the Editor, to send a message to your readers in view of the forth- coming Congress. Most earnestly I would ask for their prayers, that God may be pleased to use this a f -e-n.bly of Church people for the furtherance of His plans, both for the world and for our own beloved Church. Grave issues will be raised, and momentous subjects will be discussed. But if we have faith in th; Holy Ghost He will guide us into all truth, and will give us at once the vision of the new age which He alcne can produce, and. the spiritual strength by which we may hope to do our part in bringing it about."
THE DIOCESE OF PETERBOROUGH…
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< the omniscient Dr. R. L. Poole has had I somewhat to say of Pope Agatho and this matter.) The bedrock fact is simply this: Seax- 1 wulf founded in 655 the monastery which is called Medehamstedi in the country of the Gyrwas (the fenmen). He became bishop of the Mercians in 675. This monastery was burnt and beaten down by the Danes in 870. The pseudo-Ingulf of Crowland, whose enter- taining tales have got into all the books, gives a nuimber of details. None of them can be believed. In the first-rate Peter- borough Museum we have a cast of a gold ring found in the Nene some sixty years ago, and it is only a pleasant fiction that this was the abbot's ring lost in 870. There is nothing abbot-like about it, and its design is certainly two hundred years later. The real founding of Peterborough as a prosperous monas- tery came- from Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester, in the peaceful days of good King Edgar, when a woman with her babe could walk unharmed from shore to shore. Then the name of the place was changed to Peter- borough, the borough of Saint Peter, to whom iEthelwold had dedicated the newly built Benedictine church and house. Fragments of this church remain be- low the nave and south transept of the present cathe- dral. This it was which was plun- dered by Hereward and a mixed gang of depredating hus- carls. It is a plaus- ible conjecture that Hereward, a thorough English- man would have used the Danes to drive away the new abbot, Turold from Fecamp, whom William the Conqueror had ap- pointed to set the house in order and overawe the neigh- bourhood. All this is told in the de- lightful chronicle of our monk, Hugo Candidus, of the twelfth century; and the later his- tory of the me- diaeval abbey is worthily continued by his successors, to be read in that Photo, Frith. West Front—Peterborough Cathedral. noble volume which we call Swaff- ham, the greatest treasure of our chapter library, and, in print, in Sparke's beautiful volume. Lately, I may add, we have come into the way of learning much more of the local do- tails of our house, since Mr. Fitz- willialm's sale last year of manuscripts which had somehow or other found their way to Milton at the time of the dis- solution of the monastery. Two impor- tant volumes, full of topographical and z;1 genealogical detail, are now safely housed in Peterborough, and we hope ere long will add much to the student's power of reconstructing the mediaeval history of our district. But, to return. In 1116 this great abbey, already so famous and so rich, was burnt to the ground in the time of the abbot John of Seez. On March 12, 1116, the feast of S. Gregory, the father of English Christianity, as our ancestors loved to call him, the foundation of the great church which is now the cathedral of the diocese was laid. John of Seez lived to see great progress made. He died in 1125, and he had spent all his money, it seems, on the work, for the King's justices sent to inspect found no treasure left at his decease. On S. Peter's Day, 1140, when Walter was abbot, the monks used their new church for the first time. From then to now the voice of prayer has never been silent within the splendid fane, save in the dark days of Puritan persecution and Cromwellian desecration. The dates usually given for the com- pletion of the different parts of our cathedral church are, of course, for the most part conjecture. As such I give them. The choir finished 1143; tl-e transept circa 1150 (there the wonderful wooden roofs, unique, I suppose, still remain) the nave about 1190. Then the western transept, where Norman is seen to turn into Early English, as it were, before the spectator's eyes, was speedily begun—about 1200. From within the work went on till it culminated in the magnificent west front, which Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, who had been Archdeacon of Northampton, dedi- cated (if that is the right term) on October 6, 1238. The later history of the minster is full of incident. About 1290 the lady chapel, which stood at the north-east of the choir and has now almost entirely disappeared, was finished. It was destroyed in the bad days of 1651, and there has never been a proposal to rebuild it. Towards the end of the fourteenth century the upper chamber in the porch, now the chapter library, full of treasures (of which a word later), was built. Was it a library at first? I do not know. It makes a good one now, though it is get- ting too simall and badly needs a heating apparatus. The eastern chapel, at the end of the apse which finished the Nor- man building, was added at the very end of the fifteenth century. Its beautiful roof, like that of Henry VII.'s chapel, of the staircase at Christ Church, and the passage between the two quad- rangles of S. John's College, in Oxford, is a noble ending to the work of the Middle- Ages in the great churicih. The manner in which the Norman choir-apse is squared, so as to adapt it to the new building, should be remarised," says that excellent book, Ktn'1! Cathedrals (1862). The Nor-