Impressions of Chester (1)
Over the next few weeks, different members of the project team will be contributing their impressions of the team’s research trip to Chester in early September, and how this helped us to start thinking about ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’.
My contribution to the project is editing and translating portions of a late-twelfth-century prose text De laude Cestriae (‘In Praise of Chester’), which the only surviving manuscript attributes to a certain Lucian, who from internal evidence may have been a monk of St Werburgh’s. For me, then, the hours I spent exploring St Werburgh’s during our research trip were a chance to get to know where my author may have lived, written and performed the Opus Dei.
Little of Lucian’s monastery survives in the fabric of the present cathedral. There’s the base of a column from the twelfth-century choir, a round arch in the North transept, the chapter house vestibule, a few stray grave slabs now in the cloister. On the surface, this was a meagre survival rate. Yet in the progressive layers of restoration, in the continuing devotion to the cathedral’s founders and patrons, and in the ongoing fascination with the region’s Christian history, there are whispering echoes of what Lucian’s experience of the monastery of St Werburgh must have been like.
Take A. K. Nicholson’s stained glass portrait of St Anselm which is in the North transept; take the altar of St Oswald, King and Martyr, where prayer is now offered for the City and County of Chester; take the numerous Anglo-Saxon and Christian saints whose likenesses adorn the windows in the cloister; Anselm, Oswald, Bede, Aldhelm, Augustine – they would have been the heroes in Lucian’s perception of his lineage as a Benedictine monk in Chester.
To quote Lucian’s own words: ‘After the venerable Earl Hugo summoned him, the life-giving Archbishop Anselm arrived and religion flourished and grew strong according to ancient customs’. Chester’s cathedral, like Lucian before it, does a fine job of remembering its debt to these men and to ancient customs.
Tags: Lucian, St Werburgh's