Visiting cathedrals? Here are England’s top ten

Recently a friend from abroad, anxious to enrich himself from our past, asked me about the cathedrals. Which must he visit, which should he visit if he had time? These are not easy questions. Many years ago I wrote a book about British cathedrals and was surprised to discover how many of them there are, if you spread the net wide enough. And also how varied they are, much more so than comparable buildings on the Continent. Our individualism turns each of them into something unique. Indeed, one of the oldest and most splendid of them, Westminster Abbey, is actually a ‘royal peculiar’. Founded, renewed and adorned by kings, it has always been a sacring-place of monarchs, where they are crowned, married and buried. In the 1530s Henry VIII took it back directly into his royal hands. He dispersed the monks and set up a dean and chapter, directly answerable to himself, and the Abbey’s London gardens, farms and dairies became the royal parks — St James’s, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens and so on. So it remains; it has never had a regular diocese, and strictly speaking does not count as a cathedral at all.

Of the rest, I give my top ten. First must come Durham, first because of its situation, majestically commanding the river and town, a powerful cluster of mediaeval buildings including castle and palace. It is very early: still, essentially, a Norman church, its nave soaring on vast pillars, each with incised patterning not to be found anywhere else. Internally it was once, being the shrine of the popular St Cuthbert, the most elaborately adorned of all mediaeval cathedrals. But in the 16th century Puritan deans swept all away, and its bareness now matches its Norman origins. Its bishops were princes, with palatine powers, and round seals like monarchs — not oval ones like ordinary bishops — and were, in their day, in charge of the east marches with Scotland, running a sizeable army and a small fleet.