Qualla: Worcester Cathedral

Worcester Cathedral: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sonofden62, CC BY-SA 4.0. King John asked to be buried at Worcester before he died at Newark in 1216. He chose his spot carefully: between the shrines of two Anglo-Saxon saints, Wulfstan and Oswald, where he hoped their reputation for holiness might offset his own for tyranny. The shrines are gone now, smashed at the Reformation. The tomb of John remains - the oldest royal effigy in England, his stone face still wearing the crown that lost him most of his French possessions and almost all his English allies. Worcester Cathedral has accumulated this kind of irony for over thirteen centuries. Founded in 680 AD, rebuilt by a Saxon saint, spared at the Dissolution because of an elder brother who died too young to be king, looted in the Civil War, and revered today as one of the most musically distinguished cathedrals in England.

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Image: Sonofden62 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Worcester Cathedral: Saint Wulfstan's Crypt

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheElfFromAbove, CC BY-SA 3.0. Go down the steps beneath the chancel into a forest of stone. The crypt of Worcester Cathedral is the oldest fabric in the building, begun in 1084 by Wulfstan - the last Anglo-Saxon bishop, who survived the Norman Conquest and would still be bishop of Worcester when he died in 10...

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Image: TheElfFromAbove | CC BY-SA 3.0

Worcester Cathedral: The Brother Who Saved a Cathedral

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael D Beckwith, CC0. Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries should have ended Worcester Cathedral. It was a Benedictine priory church; 35 monks worked here at the dissolution in January 1540 (eleven were pensioned off immediately, the rest were converted into secular canons of a new Royal Colleg...

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Image: Michael D Beckwith | CC0

Worcester Cathedral: The Cathedral in the Civil War

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0. What Henry's commissioners spared, Cromwell's soldiers ransacked. Worcester declared for the King in 1642 and was used to store munitions; when the Earl of Essex briefly retook the city after the Battle of Powick Bridge that September, Parliamentary troops vented their frustratio...

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Image: Diliff | CC BY-SA 3.0

Worcester Cathedral: Libraries and Ledgers

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Nicholls, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two treasures survive that the iconoclasts somehow missed. The cathedral library, tucked since the 19th century in a loft above the south nave, holds 289 medieval manuscripts, 55 incunabula (books printed before 1501), and 6,600 post-medieval printed volumes. The collection also ...

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Image: Bill Nicholls | CC BY-SA 2.0

Worcester Cathedral: Elgar's Cathedral

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PicturePrince, CC BY-SA 4.0. Edward Elgar grew up here. His father William ran a music shop in Worcester High Street; the boy studied scores in the cathedral's music library, which still holds the original manuscripts of his early works alongside those of the 17th-century composer Thomas Tomkins (organist he...

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Image: PicturePrince | CC BY-SA 4.0

Worcester Cathedral: The Long View From the Top

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip Halling, CC BY-SA 2.0. Climb the cathedral tower in summer (there are 235 steps) and the view that opens out is one of the most varied in England. To the west the Malvern Hills run their nine-mile spine of Precambrian rock, rising 1,394 feet at the Worcestershire Beacon. To the south the Severn winds t...

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Image: Philip Halling | CC BY-SA 2.0