Chester St John's - Chester's Original Cathedral

Friday 20 June 2005. We were spending a day in Chester, a place we have visited numerous times since childhood - in fact it was one of the regular annual jaunts on a coach from primary school.

So it was with a touch of surprise that, having walked a little further up the river bank than we usually did, we stumbled across these ruins that claimed to be Chester's original cathedral.

I knew nothing about it at the time - not even the fact that part of it was and still is standing in use as a parish church. At the time of our visit it was thought to have been founded by King Æthelred in the year 869 CE. However it is now thought that Æthelred built over the remains of an even earlier Celtic church and worship here may date from the 3rd or 4th centuries, making the site one of the oldest sites in Europe still in use for worship.

The Saxon church was built of stone and in 973 CE King Edgar, only the 5th King of all England, came here to receive homage of his subject regional kings, being rowed by six of them down the River Dee to this church from his temporary headquarters at a site now known as Edgar's Field. In 1075 the first Norman Bishop moved himself here from Lichfield and pulled down the Saxon Minster to build St John's. It took 200 years and it pre-dated Durham Cathedral by just 13 years. It was known as the Cathedral and Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross and St John the Baptist. It was said to have a fragment of the true Cross - a sliver of wood from the cross of Jesus, brought back from Jerusalem after the Crusades.

In 1468 the central tower collapsed. With Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries, the east end of the church was demolished - it is the remains of these ruins that we are wandering about. The locals petitioned Queen Elizabeth I to retain the church as a parish church. She agreed at the price of taking all the lead from the roof. In 1572 the northwest tower partially collapsed. In 1574 the rest of it collapsed, destroying some of the bays of the nave which were rebuilt to a "magnificent scale".

During the English Civil War a sniper used the roof of the west tower to take a pot shot at King Charles I who was on the roof of the new (current) cathedral, watching the Battle of Rowton Heath, though other versions of the battle have Charles watching from the Phoenix Tower on Chester's city wall. Both versions may be true as, if the sound of a musket ball striking nearby was heard, he may well have been persuaded to move out of range. The surviving parish church was restored in the 19th century, though during the restoration of the twice-fallen northwest tower, it went for third time lucky and took the north porch with it.

To one side of an archway an old medieval coffin, hewn from a block of oak has been built into the stonework. Inside it has an inscription to remind people where they came from and to where they must inevitably go: Dust to Dust. Someday I really must go back and look inside the parish church. The mostly Early English-style architechture is said to be inspiring and contains much of the original Norman masonry.

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