All the Cathedrals (12): Lichfield

 Zero and I are once again taking up our visits to Cathedral towns (aided at the moment by the half price rail fare offer - we made it to Lichfield and back from East London yesterday for the ridiculous price of £6 each!).

The website of Lichfield City Council has an informative page on the Cathedral: Lichfield Cathedral. The Cathedral has its own website here. Wikipedia provides a detailed account of St Chad, with the section on "Cult and Relics" indicating how his life is marked in the history of Lichfield Cathedral: Chad of Mercia. In the present day Cathedral, an icon showing St Chad stands as a shrine, positioned above the point where St Chad was buried behind the high altar of the original cathedral. The relics of St Chad are now located above the high altar of the Roman Catholic cathedral in Birmingham. Again, Wikipedia includes an account of how the relics come to be in the possession of the Catholic diocese.

As you visit Lichfield Cathedral today, you see a unified Gothic cathedral that dates from the mediaeval period. The shrine to St Chad which was previously to be found in the apse behind the high altar was removed at the time of Henry VIII's reign, though the present day building does not show any destructive signs of the dissolution of the shrine. The years of the Civil War, however, led to much greater destruction due to war damage and troop occupation. Where another town might have had a castle that would have been a focus for defence and attack, it was the Cathedral and its close that played that part in Lichfield. After the end of the Civil War, and the restoration of the monarchy, Bishop Hackett and his collaborators undertook a major repair of the damage, so the present day cathedral again does not readily show the destruction that occurred.

Highlights to see: (1) The Lichfield Angel - the account here also indicates something of the two previous Cathedral buildings that exist underneath the present Cathedral, but which are not apparent to the visitor to today's Cathedral; (2) the St Chad Gospels. (3) The stained glass windows in the apse of the Lady Chapel - known as the "Herkenrode glass", but I can't find a convenient link for this. We were unable to take part in a tour of the Cathedral, but I suspect that the tour would have given us a fuller impression of the history of the Cathedral.

Lichfield is also the birth place of Samuel Johnson. The town house in which he was born is now the Samuel Johnson Birthplace, Museum and Bookshop. The museum is well worth a visit - we took particular interest in leafing through a (replica) copy of Samuel Johnson's encyclopaedia next to an original copy enclosed in a glass case. The museum enables you to get a feel both for Samuel Johnson himself and for the climate in which he lived and wrote. His life's work reads something like that of a present day newspaper columnist and author, with his eventual "fame" being akin to what we today would call "celebrity". Not surprisingly, a couple of charities have good bookshops on the same street as the Samuel Johnson museum!