Manchester Cathedral

A history of the Collegiate Church and Cathedral, 1421 to the present

Jeremy Gregory

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526161253
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Religious Architecture

Founded in 1421, the Collegiate Church of Manchester, which became a cathedral in 1847, is of outstanding historical and architectural importance. But until now it has not been the subject of a comprehensive study. Appearing on the 600th anniversary of the Cathedral's inception by Henry V, this book explores the building's past and its place at the heart of the world's first industrial city, touching on everything from architecture and music to misericords and stained glass. Written by a team of renowned experts and beautifully illustrated with more than 100 photographs, this history of the 'Collegiate Church' is at the same time a history of the English church in miniature.

Fire Window

‘A little dusty angel’

1

‘A perpetual college’: writing the history of Manchester’s Collegiate Church and Cathedral

JEREMY GREGORY

FOUNDED IN 1421, the Collegiate Church of Manchester, which became a cathedral in 1847, is of outstanding importance – both historically and architecturally – but has not yet received a full modern scholarly study, largely because until recently its archives and records were not properly ordered and catalogued. The histories which have been written are now mostly well over a century old and are based on a relatively small number of sources. It is therefore fitting that this up-to-date history is published during the sexcentenary of the College’s foundation and that it presents a state-of-the-art history of the first six hundred years of the College and Cathedral.

‘A perpetual college’ is a phrase from the first charter of 1421, which envisaged Manchester College lasting for ever.¹ As this history emphasizes, while right from the start national and even international factors and contexts had a vital bearing on the institution’s history, yet enshrined in its foundation documents, and building on its predecessor’s function as a parish church, was the crucial role of the Collegiate Church in Manchester’s life. A mid-seventeenth-century fellow of the College, summarizing the early charter, underlined the part played by the parish community in the original foundation: ‘& all & every Parishioner[s] gathered together at the sound of the Bell & the community and univers[al]ity of the sayd parish so farr as this might any way concerne them did for themselves, their heirs & successors give their free assent and consent thereunto’.² The Collegiate Church continued both to shape and to be shaped by this local milieu in the following centuries, helping to give at least a partial collective identity to the town, and later city, in ways which are akin to the Italian concept of campanilismo, where the bell-tower of the communal church represents (and gives) a sense of place and belonging to inhabitants. Even after it became a cathedral in 1847, and without denying or downplaying its wider diocesan role during the next hundred and seventy years, this volume underscores the religious, social, political, cultural, and economic contribution of the Collegiate Church and Cathedral to the history of Manchester.

‘A perpetual college’ thus alludes to the ways in which, even after the mid-nineteenth century Cathedral foundation, loyalties to, and associations with, what was affectionately called ‘Th’Owd Church’³ continued to be central to what Manchester’s Cathedral stood for. The Dean of Manchester may have been overstating the case in 1921 when he claimed that ‘today I think it might be said without exaggeration that no Cathedral is more closely in touch with the Community than is Manchester’,⁴ but the remark is at least suggestive of the ways the Cathedral engaged with the locality during the twentieth century. The Cathedral’s position in the life of the city remains strikingly strong in the twenty-first century (arguably even stronger now than at some times in its past) and aspects of its contemporary role and symbolic influence, seen for example in the special services to mark particular Manchester events, such as those after the 2017 Manchester Arena bomb,⁵ echo the civic responsibilities and aspirations of its early fifteenth-century founders. Over the course of the six hundred years covered by this volume, the population of Manchester potentially most closely connected to this building rose from little more than 3,000 in 1421⁶ to around 550,000 today (with in excess of 2.5 million in Greater Manchester), and it is perhaps remarkable that the institution persists in having such an impact on the people of Manchester, reaching far beyond Church of England and even Christian affiliations. One explanation might be that, unlike some other collegiate churches and many cathedrals, Manchester’s Collegiate Church and Cathedral has never been detached from its environs by a wall or close and this may have helped connect it to its surrounding world and account, to some extent, for its continuing resonance with Mancunians. The author of an early twentieth-century history noted how near the Cathedral was to the city’s shops, warehouses, and hotels, and ‘the scream of railway engines, the bells of tramcars, and the roar of the traffic’ which marked it off from most other cathedrals;⁷ today it is cheek-by-jowl with the designer shops, restaurants, bars, public spaces, and the tram stop around Exchange Square.

Reflecting its foundation documents, this volume also places the history of Manchester’s Collegiate Church and Cathedral within a national and international context. Throughout the chapters, references are made to the world beyond Manchester, and in particular to London and Europe, especially France. Furthermore, the volume sheds light on what the Manchester evidence can contribute to our broader understanding of the role of collegiate churches and cathedrals, and the history of Christianity in England more generally, in the six centuries after 1421, so that in some measure the volume is a micro-study of aspects of England’s religious history from the fifteenth century to the present.

The current volume builds on a long heritage of historical writing about Manchester’s Collegiate Church and Cathedral. The composition of cathedral histories, and those of other ecclesiastical institutions, has served many functions and has had an extended pedigree, although the definition of what might be regarded as such a history is extremely elastic. Some of the earliest manuscripts which might just about bear the title, since they included accounts of the foundation of the institution concerned, were penned in the Anglo-Saxon period, and were usually written as part of a life of a saint or prominent churchman, or to defend jurisdictional or property rights against a monarch, a bishop, another ecclesiastical body, or neighbouring landowner, and these became more numerous in the Middle Ages.⁸ The founding texts of Manchester’s Collegiate Church, compiled in 1421–23, were, in some ways, such a history, detailing the reasons for its establishment, its purpose, privileges, and income. Not surprisingly, these documents (and those of the subsequent re-foundations in 1556, 1578, and 1635) featured heavily in future histories, and some of these were in fact just re-wordings and digests of those original records.

In the 1650s, Richard Hollingworth, a Presbyterian fellow of the College, was writing a history of Manchester, which was largely a history of the Collegiate Church and of religious life in Manchester more broadly – work which continued almost until his death in 1656. The nineteenth-century historian of the College considered this ‘the ground-work of most that is known of this period’,⁹ but it remained largely hidden as an unfinished manuscript in the College Archives until it was published in 1839.¹⁰ Nationally, more serious attention to the history of ecclesiastical institutions emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as antiquaries (often of a Tory bent) became fascinated by the ecclesiastical remains of the medieval past.¹¹ The College was referenced by a number of these in their findings, although pretty fleetingly. Names of some of the wardens were given very brief notices in William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum (1655), and a late nineteenth-century commentator remarked that ‘he might perhaps be regarded as the antiquary who supplied the first incitement to the compilation of a continuous history of the College, for he printed a copy of the charter of Henry V for the collegiation of the parish church’.¹² The College was name-checked in Browne Willis’s monumental A History of the Mitred Parliamentary Abbies and Conventual Churches (2 vols, 1718–19) and A Survey of the Cathedrals (1727),¹³ but as none of these works focused on collegiate churches to any great extent there was little sustained attention to the College, even though it was mentioned favourably in John Strype’s Annals as a ‘noble and useful foundation for learning and propagation of religion in those northern parts’.¹⁴ Defoe included a short account of the College in his tour of Britain as one of the ‘four extraordinary Foundations’ in Manchester, ‘all very well supported’.¹⁵Although there exists a broadsheet from the 1720s which has elements of a historical record of Manchester’s Collegiate Church,¹⁶ perhaps the earliest publication which can be considered to be called a published ‘history’ of the College was the anonymous: An Account of the Wardens of Christ’s Collegiate Church, Manchester since the foundation in 1422 to the present time (1773).¹⁷ This provided a short description of each warden from John Huntingdon, appointed in 1422 while Rector of Ashton-under-Lyne, up to and including Samuel Peploe Junior, who succeeded his father in 1738 (and died in 1781). The Charters of the Collegiate Church, the Free Grammar School, and the Blue Coat Hospital (with a frontispiece illustration of the Church) was published in 1791,¹⁸ and The History of the Collegiate Church of Christ, in Manchester appeared in 1804.¹⁹

A feature of eighteenth- and especially nineteenth-century descriptions of the Collegiate Church and later Cathedral were the images which accompanied the text. A stimulus to these was the copperplate engravings made by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck which included the panoramic ‘The South West Prospect of Manchester in the County Palatinate of Lancaster’ (1728),²⁰ with the Collegiate Church dominating the skyline and referred to in the extensive descriptive caption as ‘a noted building with its lofty pile and fine tower, built in the Gothick manner’. Robert Whitworth’s massive (over four feet by sixteen inches) ‘South West Prospect of Manchester and Salford’ (c. 1734) placed the Collegiate Church even more centre stage, with the townscape surrounded by a large area of rural hinterland.²¹ John Aikin’s Description of the Country from thirty to forty miles round Manchester (1795) incorporated illustrative plates within the text, including one of the Collegiate Church.²²

Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, ‘The South West Prospect of Manchester in the County Palatinate of Lancaster’, 1728

Robert Whitworth, ‘South West Prospect of Manchester and Salford’, c. 1734

Histories written from the perspective of the institution’s own official records, accompanied by pictorial images, reached an apogee in the Manchester-born (but Edinburgh-based)...