Peter of Blois, in expounding a difficult law-suit to the Pope, remarked on the confusion of customs in English cathedral churches: some have a dean, he says, some not, some a treasurer, some not, in some the cantor is aminor canon, in others the treasurer is one of the greater canons. In fact, one cannot generalise about what one will find there. My theme today is an attempt to discover what happened when one such a cathedral church was founded, and how the circumstances of the foundation affected the particular organisation which evolved there.

A good deal of time and thought has gone in the last thirty years to the consideration of the rô1e assumed by the cathedrals in the Anglo-Norman church and of the purposes served by such institutions within the dioceses, and in the two national churches. Professor Douglas, and more recently, Dr Bates, have demonstrated the importance of the new or re-founded cathedral chapters in the ecclesiastical revival (reformation is not, perhaps, too strong a word) in Normandy. Professor Barlow has looked rather sceptically at the place of the new or revived chapters in the post- Conquest church in England, and Miss Edwards surveyed thirty years ago, in a magisterial work, the origins of the English secular cathedrals. Such general surveys have been based on, or followed by, important archaeological and architectural studies of individual minsters and cathedral churches, which allow us to see that in late Anglo-Saxon England cathedrals were scarcely to be distinguished, except as the place where the Bishop kept his chair and consecrated the holy oils, from a range of imposing hundredal minsters served in some cases by groups of priests, and exercising some degree of primacy over the churches and inhabitants of a wide area. A good example of the latter type was Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, where, according to Domesday, the freemen of eight hundreds in its circuit paid each a load of corn to it for every hide of land they held.

Some of these minsters were already the property of the diocesan by 1066: one thinks of Beverley, Ripon, and Southwell in the diocese of York in this context. It seems certain, nevertheless, that after the Conquest churchmen regarded the bishops' own churches, where their chairs were placed, and perhaps even the bishops themselves, with greater respect than had been usual in Anglo-Saxon England.