Ely Cathedral

Most of what is known of Ely before the Norman Conquest comes from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, written early in the eighth century, and from the Liber Eliensis, an anonymous chronicle compiled at Ely in the twelfth century. By those accounts the first Christian community here was founded in 672 by Æthelthryth, also called Etheldreda or St Audrey, a daughter of Anna, King of East Anglia, who was born at Exning near Newmarket; she may have acquired land at Ely from her first husband Tondberht, whom Bede describes as a prince of the South Gyrwas. After her second marriage, to Ecgfrith of Northumbria, ended in 673, she set up and ruled as abbess a dual monastery for men and women, and when she died a shrine was built there to her memory. Later accounts suggest her three successor abbesses were also of the East Anglian royal house. The precise siting of her monastery is not known.

The monastery is recorded as destroyed in about 870 in the course of the Danish invasions, which may have destroyed it outright or at least carried off all its records; some monks may have provided a continuity through to the refoundation, and a church is likely to have survived on the site. In 970, in the revival of the English church under Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, Ely Abbey was re-established as a community of Benedictine monks, one of a wave of refoundations that locally took in Peterborough and Ramsey. The presence of Æthelthryth's relics, and the growing body of writing on her life and miracles, was a major force in the success of the refounded house, which became one of the leading Benedictine establishments in late Anglo-Saxon England. The church of 970 stood within or near the nave of the present building and was progressively demolished from 1102 as the Norman church went up around it.

By the Conquest Ely had four hundred years of history behind it, a famous saint, treasures, a library, book production of the highest order and lands exceeded only by Glastonbury, and the imposition of Norman rule was particularly problematic here. Newly arrived Normans such as Picot of Cambridge were taking possession of abbey lands, daughter monasteries such as Eynesbury were appropriated by French monks, and interference by the Bishop of Lincoln was undermining the abbey's status. All this was made worse when, in 1071, Ely became a focus of English resistance through such people as Hereward the Wake, culminating in the Siege of Ely, for which the abbey suffered substantial fines. Once the new regime had control of the area, and after the death of Abbot Thurstan, a Norman successor, Theodwine, was installed.

Under the Normans almost every English cathedral and major abbey was rebuilt from the 1070s onwards, and if Ely was to maintain its status it had to begin its own work. The task fell to Abbot Simeon, brother of Walkelin, then Bishop of Winchester, and himself prior at Winchester Cathedral when the rebuilding began there in 1079. Building at Ely began in 1083, a year after Simeon's appointment and when he was ninety years old, on a plan that owed much to Winchester, and it was one of the largest buildings under construction north of the Alps at the time. The stone came from Barnack in Northamptonshire, bought from Peterborough Abbey, whose lands included the quarries, for 8,000 eels a year. The first phase took in the eastern arm and the transepts, but a marked break in the masonry shows that work stopped unexpectedly for several years with the transepts unfinished: Simeon died in 1093 and an extended interregnum appears to have halted everything. The administration of Ranulf Flambard may have been to blame, since he illegally kept posts unfilled, the abbacy of Ely among them, so that he could take the income. In 1099 Flambard had himself appointed Bishop of Durham, and in 1100 Abbot Richard was appointed to Ely and the work resumed.

It was Abbot Richard who asserted Ely's independence from the diocese of Lincoln and pressed for it to become a diocese in its own right with the abbey church as its cathedral. Richard died in 1107, but his successor Hervey le Breton carried the case and became the first Bishop of Ely in 1109, the new diocese being taken out of the very large diocese of Lincoln. The monastic property was divided between bishopric and monastery, whose establishment was cut from seventy monks to forty under a prior, with the bishop as titular abbot. The struggle for independence coincided with the removal of the shrines from the old church and the translation of the relics into the new one, and in the midst of a Norman-French hierarchy this seems to have allowed an unexpectedly enthusiastic development of the cult of the pre-Norman saints and benefactors. Construction of the nave was under way from about 1115, and roof timbers dated to 1120 suggest at least its eastern portion was covered by then; by 1140 the nave stood complete with the western transepts and the west tower up to triforium level, after which came a pause of over thirty years. The half-built west tower and the upper parts of the western transepts were finished under Bishop Geoffrey Ridel (1174–89). The Galilee Porch at the west end, begun by Bishop Eustace (1197–1215) according to the records but of disputed date, is now the principal entrance for visitors.

Northwold, bishop from 1229 to 1254, undertook the first major reworking of the Norman building. The eastern arm ran only four bays, from the choir, then at the crossing itself, to the high altar and Æthelthryth's shrine; in 1234 Northwold began an eastward addition of six further bays, built over seventeen years in a richly ornamented Early English Gothic. Æthelthryth's remains were translated to a new shrine immediately east of the high altar, and on completion of the works in 1252 the cathedral was reconsecrated in the presence of King Henry III and Prince Edward. The relics of Wihtburh and Seaxburh, Æthelthryth's sisters, and of Ermenilda, Seaxburh's daughter, would also have been accommodated, and the new east end gave pilgrims far more room to reach the shrines, entering by a door in the north transept. The presbytery has since taken the burials and memorials of more than a hundred people connected with the abbey and cathedral.

In 1321, under the sacrist Alan of Walsingham, work began on a large free-standing Lady Chapel linked to the north aisle of the chancel by a covered walkway and built in an exuberant Decorated Gothic over the following thirty years. On the night of 12–13 February 1322, possibly as a result of digging the foundations for that chapel, the Norman central crossing tower collapsed, and work on the Lady Chapel was suspended as masons and money were diverted to the disaster. Rather than raise a new tower on the same ground plan, the crossing was enlarged into an octagon, removing all four original tower piers; mistrust of the soft ground beneath them may have been a major factor in moving the weight further out. Alan of Walsingham oversaw the work, though the extent of his influence on the design, and the reasons for so radical a step, are still debated. The elaborate joinery and timberwork was brought about by William Hurley, master carpenter in the royal service.

What damage the falling tower did to the Norman chancel is unclear, but its three remaining bays were reconstructed under Bishop John Hotham (1316–1337) in an ornate Decorated style. New choirstalls with carved misericords were installed beneath the octagon, close to where their predecessors had stood, work resumed on the Lady Chapel, and extensive building went on at the same time on the monastic ranges, including the chapel of Prior Crauden. At the west end the trouble was subsidence in soft ground, which builders had tried to correct through every phase of construction: the western octagonal tower was installed in 1400, and in 1405–1407 four new arches were added at the west crossing to carry its extra weight. That additional masonry may have compounded the problem, for at the end of the fifteenth century the north-west transept collapsed, and a great sloping mass of masonry was built to buttress the remaining walls.

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries elaborate chantry chapels were inserted in the easternmost bays of the presbytery aisles: on the north for Bishop John Alcock, on the south for Bishop Nicholas West. Alcock, born about 1430 the son of a Hull merchant, was given charge of Edward IV's sons who became known as the Princes in the Tower, was made Lord President of Wales in 1476 and interim Lord Chancellor after Henry VII's victory over Richard III in 1485, and came to Ely as bishop in 1486; the resources of the see allowed him to found Jesus College, Cambridge and to build his chantry chapel, in which he was buried on his death in 1500. Nicholas West, who had studied at Cambridge, Oxford and Bologna and served Henry VII and Henry VIII as a diplomat, became Bishop of Ely in 1515 and for the remaining nineteen years of his life kept more than a hundred servants; his fan-vaulted chapel at the south-east corner of the presbytery holds his tomb.

On 18 November 1539 the royal commissioners took possession of the monastery and all its possessions, and for nearly two years its future hung in the balance while Henry VIII and his advisers considered what part cathedrals might play in the emerging Protestant church. A new charter was granted to Ely on 10 September 1541, and Robert Steward, the last prior, was reappointed as the first dean; with eight prebendaries he formed the dean and chapter, the new governing body, most of the former monks becoming prebendaries and minor canons alongside Matthew Parker, later Archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Cox, later Bishop of Ely. The veneration of Æthelthryth was suppressed, her shrine destroyed, and the dedication to her and St Peter replaced by the present dedication to the Holy and Undivided Trinity.

Under Bishop Thomas Goodrich's orders the shrines of the Anglo-Saxon saints were destroyed first, and as iconoclasm increased nearly all the stained glass and much of the sculpture was destroyed or defaced during the 1540s; in the Lady Chapel the free-standing statues were destroyed and all 147 carved figures in the frieze of St Mary were decapitated, as were the sculptures of West's chapel. The cathedrals were eventually spared on the grounds of three useful functions: the propagation of true worship, educational activity and care of the poor. Vicars choral, lay clerks and boy choristers were appointed, many of them previously members of the monastic community; a grammar school with twenty-four scholars was established in the monastic buildings; in the 1550s plate and vestments were sold to buy books and found a library; and the passageway running to the Lady Chapel was turned into an almshouse for six bedemen. The Lady Chapel itself was handed to the town as Holy Trinity parish church in 1566, replacing an unsatisfactory lean-to against the north wall of the nave, and it served that purpose until 1938. Much of the cathedral had little use, the whole east end serving simply for burials and memorials, and stones fell from the vaulting in the Dover Straits earthquake of 6 April 1580.

Difficult as the sixteenth century had been, it was the Commonwealth that came nearest to destroying both the institution and the buildings. Through the 1640s, with Oliver Cromwell's army occupying the Isle of Ely, a puritanical regime of worship was imposed, and Bishop Matthew Wren was arrested in 1642 and spent the next eighteen years in the Tower of London. That no significant destruction of images occurred in these years appears to be because it had been done so thoroughly a century before. In 1648 parliament encouraged the demolition of the buildings so that the materials could be sold for the relief of sick and maimed soldiers, widows and children; that this did not happen, and that the fabric suffered nothing worse than neglect, may have been due to Cromwell's protection, though the uncertainty of the times and apathy rather than hostility may count for as much. All cathedrals were abolished from 1649 to 1660. With the return of Charles II, Wren, whose high church views had kept him in prison throughout the Commonwealth, was able to appoint a new chapter, the dean being appointed by the crown, and the search for lost deeds and records with which to recover the cathedral's lands, rights and incomes took over twenty years, most of them being regained in the end.

In 1699 the north-west corner of the north transept collapsed. The rebuilding took from 1699 to 1702 under the mason Robert Grumbold and, apart from a new classical doorway inserted in the north face, faithfully reinstated the Romanesque walls, windows and detailing, a landmark approach in the history of restoration. Christopher Wren has sometimes been associated with the doorway and may have been consulted by Grumbold, who had worked with him on Trinity College Library in Cambridge a few years earlier; Wren knew the cathedral through his uncle Matthew Wren, bishop from 1638 to 1667, and was among those with whom Dean John Lambe discussed the proposed works during a visit to London.

Two men shaped the eighteenth century here: James Bentham (1709–1794), a minor canon who published The History and Antiquities of the Conventual and Cathedral Church of Ely in 1771, and the architectural contractor James Essex (1722–1784), who surveyed its plans, elevations and sections and by that means showed how poor the condition of parts of the building was. Essex identified the decay of the octagon lantern as the starting point for repairs and was appointed to the work in 1757; shortage of funds and a Georgian suspicion of ornament left the lantern's timber and leadwork plain and pared down, after which he re-roofed the entire eastern arm and restored the eastern gable. In 1769 the two embarked on a longstanding plan to move the fourteenth-century choir stalls from under the octagon, with Bentham as clerk of works, opening the octagon as a spacious public area for the first time. They dismantled the stalls with alarming lack of care and cleared away medieval walling at the east end, but the misericords were kept and the work was relatively sympathetic by the standards of the period; in the north wall they found the bones of seven Saxon benefactors, among them Byrhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, which were rehoused in Bishop West's chapel in 1771.

The next major campaign began in the 1840s under Dean George Peacock (1839–58), who with the Cambridge professor Robert Willis investigated the structure and archaeology of the building and started by restoring the south-west transept, which had been used as a workshop. In 1845 the architect George Basevi, inspecting the west tower while works were under way in many parts of the cathedral, tripped and fell thirty-six feet to his death, and was buried in the north choir aisle. George Gilbert Scott was brought in from 1847 to bolster the amateur partnership of Peacock and Willis, in what was his first cathedral commission: he moved the fourteenth-century choir stalls back towards the octagon while keeping its open space clear, and in 1876 saw his designs for the lantern parapet and pinnacles carried out. From 1845 Edward Sparke, a canon and son of Bishop Bowyer Sparke, led a campaign to re-glaze the cathedral at a time when hardly any medieval glass survived, and William Wailes glazed the great east lancets in 1857. A further programme of structural restoration ran from 1986 to 2000 under Deans William Patterson and Michael Higgins, directed by the surveyors to the fabric Peter Miller and, from 1994, Jane Kennedy, and in 2000 a Processional Way restored the direct link between the north choir aisle and the Lady Chapel. The Stained Glass Museum, founded in 1972 to preserve windows from churches being closed by redundancy, opened to the public in the north triforium in 1979 and moved to improved space in the south triforium in 2000. The annual honouring of Æthelthryth, suppressed at the Reformation, has been revived since 1873, with festivals commemorating events in her life and the successive translations of her remains. The cathedral has been a grade I listed building since 1950, is governed by its dean and chapter, keeps a daily pattern of morning and evening services, and receives around 250,000 visitors a year.