19th January is the saint’s day for Wulfstan who
was the Bishop of Worcester at the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066.
Wulfstan was born in about 1008 and was educated at the
monasteries of Evesham and Peterborough. He became a monk at Worcester in 1038,
where he served as treasurer and prior, and was noted for his dedication to
prayer and study.
In 1062 he was appointed Bishop of Worcester and had
therefore been in post for only four years before the Anglo-Saxon monarchy was
brutally suppressed by the Normans.
Medieval bishops were not just church leaders but also
wealthy men in their own right because the church owned large tracts of land
from which rents were extracted. The Normans were therefore keen to replace
English bishops with their own men, especially as a number of churchmen had
fought alongside Duke William at the Battle of Hastings and were on the lookout
for a rich diocese as their reward. One very prominent fighting bishop, for
example, was William’s brother Odo, the extremely rich and greedy Bishop of
Bayeux.
As a result, by the year 1075 every bishop in England was a
Norman, with one exception. This was Wulfstan, whose saintliness had impressed
even William, one of the least saintly men imaginable. It may well have been
that William appreciated the respect in which Wulfstan was held and reckoned
that replacing him would be a cause for discontent, of which William had plenty
to deal with in other parts of his new kingdom.
Wulfstan remained as bishop for more than 30 years until his
death in 1095. During that time he rebuilt the cathedral at Worcester and also
ended a slave trading enterprise based at Bristol.
The photo is of the crypt of Worcester Cathedral, this being the only part of Wulfstan's cathedral that still exists.
© John Welford
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