CHAPTER II
THE ROMANO-BRITISH AND SAXON CHURCH
A.D. 597-741
THERE are three writers to whom we are indebted for most of what is known about the building and arrangement of the Metropolitical Church down to the twelfth century—these are, the Venerable Bede already quoted, who wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English Church, and died on Ascension Day, May 26, 735, to whom we owe much, and not least for the statement as to the actual origin of the building. Secondly must be named Edmer the Singer, who was a boy at the Monastic School and afterwards a monk in the establishment, and Precentor of the Cathedral. Edmer has left an account of the Saxon Church of Austin and Odo, a picture indeed of what he remembered of the Church as a boy before the fire of 1067, which burnt out and destroyed the Cathedral, the Church of St. John, and the domestic buildings, all of which Lanfranc pulled down in order to erect his own Norman Cathedral on the site. Edmer was a voluminous writer; he wrote biographies of the Archbishops in which he gives much information concerning the history of the Saxon Cathedral and the Norman one which followed it.[1] The third authority is the monk Gervase, who was a member of the Priory at the time of the mur-
- ↑ Edmer became the friend of St. Anselm about 1093. In 1120 he was chosen Bishop of St. Andrews, but he refused this dignity as the Scottish King would not consent to his consecration by the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose supremacy was not recognized in Scotland. Edmer remained at Canterbury, and died about January 1124. Besides the lives of the Archbishops, his best known work is the History of his own Times from 1066 to 1122. (Historia Novorum.)
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