Jocelin of Wells died at Wells on 19 November 1242, ‘full of days’, as the chronicler Matthew Paris says. A Wells man, probably born in the town or its vicinity, he had seen the creation of a cathedral worthy of a bishop, and had dedicated it to St Andrew in 1239. His marble tomb, surmounted by a brass, was placed in the middle of the quire, flanked by tomb effigies of earlier bishops whose remains had been translated there from Bath a decade or so before Jocelin’s election. The tomb, constructed before his death, has not survived, but his elegant nave and incomparable west front stand as his present monuments. He had made Wells the cathedral church of Somerset in all but name, and had prepared the way for his successor to take the title bishop of Bath and Wells. The centre of the see had been restored to Wells, as it had been before the Norman Conquest, and the titles of bishop of Bath, and of bishop of Bath and Glastonbury, were replaced by bishop of Bath and Wells in 1245, three years after his death. Jocelin was the first bishop to be buried at Wells since Bishop Giso, whose successor John of Tours had removed the see to Bath c.1090. In death the bishop of Bath had returned to Wells, where his spirit had been from his cradle, and where he had been brought up a primo lacte,’in the bosom’ of the church of Wells.

But we concentrate here on 1206 and Jocelin’s election to the see of Bath, not his death or his birth, so to that event we must now turn. How had Jocelin come to be bishop of Bath? The short answer is he was elected unanimously by both chapters, if not with the direct intervention of the king, certainly with his approval.

And what were the qualifications for a bishopric at this time?

The advertisement, had there been one, might have read as follows:

He will be able to dispose of his own benefices freely.

This collection springs from two main initiatives.

In the mid-1990s some linear features appeared in the lawn of the Bishop’s Palace at Wells, which were investigated by the archaeologist Dr Lucy MacLaurin. Subsequently, recognising their importance, the then bishop of Bath and Wells, Jim Thompson, asked Dr MacLaurin to form a committee of local experts. With advice from the Somerset County Archaeologist, Bob Croft, and with the bishop’s enthusiastic encouragement, she gathered together a group of archaeologists and others interested in the history of the building and its site. Some of the work commissioned by this committee is now published here for the first time.

Peter Price, who succeeded Jim Thompson in 2001, and his wife Dee immediately saw the immense potential of the palace and continued to support the committee in its wish to examine their home and garden in detail and to explain the site, the ruins and the buildings still in use so that visitors might be attracted in greater numbers and receive increased satisfaction from their experience. The year 2006 provided a convenient one for drawing attention to the palace, for it marked the 800th anniversary of the election and enthronement of Bishop Jocelin, sometimes known as Jocelin Trotman, more often as Jocelin of Wells, as bishop of Bath. It may not have been in 1206 that Jocelin put up the first buildings on the present site but without question it was the beginning of his significant rule as bishop, significant both for the palace he clearly built, for the great minster church to the north which was to become his successor’s cathedral, and for the diocese that he presided over for nearly forty years. Such an anniversary needed to be marked so that the great bishop and his palace could be worthily celebrated.

Thus, during a busy week of celebrations in September 2006, actively inspired and supported by the bishop and his wife and organised under the leadership of Brigadier John Hemsley, two days were given over to a conference where an enthusiastic audience heard experts talk on historical, archaeological, liturgical, cultural and architectural aspects of the history of the cathedral, palace and city of Wells, set in both national and international contexts. Dr Lucy MacLaurin most successfully organised the conference and a large debt of gratitude is owed to her.

When Jocelin became bishop of Wells in 1206, cathedral building-work on a huge scale had been taking place in England for a century or so. Starting with Canterbury in 1071, some extraordinary new buildings were erected which evolved rapidly from the fairly crude but often massive Romanesque buildings of the later eleventh century to the wonderful early Gothic ribvaulted structures of the later twelfth century. At Wells itself a magnificent new cathedral (started in c.1175) was nearing completion, with its eastern arm, if not its nave, ready for use. Alongside this work, but less well known because most of the buildings are now much less well preserved, the bishops were putting up fine official residences for themselves, which by the late twelfth century can often be called ‘palaces’. These episcopal palaces, which could often be as grand as contemporary royal palaces in England, were almost always situated close to their cathedrals, though most of the bishops also had a series of other, lesser residences at some of the major manors that they owned.

In the early thirteenth century most bishops put up, for the first time, fine new residences in London as well, so that they could be near the developing royal court at Westminster. Many of their London houses were situated on the Thames littoral, still known as the Strand, between the royal palace at Westminster and the city. Two of the most important, the residences of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Winchester, were, however, already well established on the south bank of the Thames before 1200 at Lambeth4 and Southwark. By the later Middle Ages all bishops spent much of their time travelling around their dioceses and between their cathedral palaces and their London ‘inns’, as they were often later called, via a series of other manorial residences. The later medieval and early Tudor bishops of Bath and Wells lived at Bath Inn until 1545 (later it became Arundel House) on the Strand, when they were in London. This site had been granted to Bishop Jocelin by the bishop of London between 1221 and 1228, and in 1232 Jocelin gave it to his successors in the see of Bath and Wells ‘together with all houses and buildings there on’.

Strange as it may seem to open an account of the election of Bishop Jocelin of Wells with personalities of the twentieth rather than the thirteenth century, it would be an act of lèse-majesté were I to fail to acknowledge that what follows is not so much my own work but a mere précis of that of two of the greatest of twentieth-century ecclesiastical historians. The first of these giants was a local man, Joseph Armitage Robinson, born at Keynsham, professor of divinity at Cambridge, dean of Westminster and after his controversial removal from that (still controversial) office, dean of Wells from 1911 to 1933. Although principally remembered today as a patristics scholar, famed for his rediscovery of early Christian manuscripts in libraries from London to Vienna, in turning his attention to the thirteenth-century church Robinson not only brought into commission all, or very nearly all, of the relevant unpublished sources relating to Bishop Jocelin’s election, but supplied a quite masterly reconstruction of Jocelin’s background and early career. Robinson’s essay ‘Bishop Jocelin and the Interdict’, first delivered in 1913 and published a decade or so later, remains a definitive statement of the facts. Besides elucidating the circumstances of Jocelin’s election, Robinson also sought to explain the ins and outs of that most vexed and perplexing of jurisdictional disputes, between the bishops of Bath and Wells and the monks of Glastonbury abbey, that will necessarily occupy us in part of what follows. What little Robinson left unsaid here was comprehensively stated in the work of the second of my twentieth-century giants: Christopher Cheney, himself professor at Cambridge, mentor to several of the contributors to this present volume and, in his Pope Innocent III and England, author of a definitive account not only of Anglo-papal relations but of the wider history of the English church in the early years of the thirteenth century.

With Robinson and Cheney already ahead of me in the field, what then remains for me to do here save to draw attention to the magnificence of their contributions? In what follows, I shall attempt two tasks. Spared by Jane Sayers and Diana Greenway from the need to supply an outline of Jocelin’s career as bishop, I shall attempt to explain why Jocelin still matters to our wider understanding of the early thirteenth-century church.

When I was invited to speak on Jocelin of Wells and his cathedral chapter at the 2006 conference on the bishop and his career, I accepted readily and with great pleasure. But later it occurred to me that it would have been more accurate to have entitled my lecture ‘Jocelin of Wells and his quasicathedral chapter’. For in Jocelin’s time the church of Wells was technically no longer, and not yet, a cathedral. It was existing in an interim, quasi, phase.

Historically the ancient minster of St Andrew at Wells had been made the mother church of the newly created see of Somerset in 909. But after a flowering of chapter life under Bishop Giso (who ruled from 1061 to 1088), Wells lost its cathedral status when Bishop John of Tours removed the episcopal throne to the abbey of Bath in c.1090. John demolished the cloister, refectory and dormitory which Giso had built for the canons of Wells. The canons were forced to return to the unreformed practice of living in houses in the town. Further, John impoverished the chapter by alienating a portion of its revenues to a layman, Hildebert, who was probably his brother. From 1090 until 1245, the sole cathedral of the see was not the church of Wells but the abbey church of Bath, and the monks of Bath, not the canons of Wells, formed the cathedral chapter.

As we know, eventually Wells did recover its cathedral status. In the process of recovery, the accession of Bishop Robert in 1136 was a turningpoint. From that time further decline was halted, and the church and its chapter began to be nurtured under active episcopal patronage. The constitution was developed in line with the customs of the greater Anglo-Norman cathedrals, such as Salisbury, Lincoln and York, and landed endowments and income were recovered, expanded and secured so as to support a growing and well-ordered community. As a result, the chapter’s sense of identity developed to the point where the canons were able to assert their right to participate, with the monks of Bath, in the episcopal election of 1173, when Bishop Reginald was elected, and again in 1206, at the election of Jocelin.

Introduction

It may seem rather unusual to have such a chapter as this one within an historical and archaeological book. This arises because I was asked to carry out a survey of the lichens on the walls and stonework of the Bishop’s Palace and walls as part of the investigations about the building prior to its development as an historic site for the public to visit. As far as I am aware, this is the first lichen survey that has been done there. The full results have been previously privately reported more fully and this chapter summarises those findings with some additional analysis of the data relating it to the possible age of the stonework. The justification for taking an interest in the lichens (why these of all the possible groups of organisms?) is as follows.

Firstly, the appearance of stone buildings by way of colour and texture is often more to do with the lichens growing on the stone than the stone itself. Indeed, if one were, as if by magic, to remove instantly all the stone substance from the palace, one would still recognise the buildings and walls as they are now by the remaining lichens making their outlines. Secondly, lichens grow in communities (rather like people) but they grow extremely slowly and it takes a long time (hundreds of years) for communities to develop. The consequence is that the large area of stonework on the palace, some dating back to medieval times, is potentially of importance as a reserve of unusual lichen species. And with our commitment to the conservation of biodiversity, we should recognise and try to conserve where possible the lichens of the palace for their own sake. This also will conserve the appearance of the buildings and walls. Thirdly, it may be possible to date some of the stonework from the lichens that occur on it. I found from looking at dated gravestones that the lichen communities which had developed on older gravestones were different in their species make up from those on more recent gravestones; the nineteenth-century stones had species on them that were not found on twentieth-cenury stones and some were only found on eighteenth-century and earlier stones.

Jocelin of Wells was a local man whose family networks and rapid career rise were both firmly rooted in the Somerset diocese, and most particularly in the up-and-coming borough of Wells. His life spanned the very decades when English provincial towns were experiencing their most rapid growth and when so many were emerging onto the national map as centres of wealth and power. Across the country communities like Wells were undergoing a dramatic demographic and commercial expansion, securing their most decisive political liberties and creating new forms of civic government. Jocelin and his brother Hugh are distinctive examples of the many ways in which a bishop’s career and identity might be forged by these rapidly growing towns of post-Conquest England. They were from a local landholding family, but they took their names, as did their father, from the borough. The swift rise of father and, especially, his sons owed much to the emerging ecclesiastical and urban communities in Wells: the borough had fostered their father’s fortune and influence, while the church nurtured the brothers’ careers as episcopal and soon royal clerics. Both were promoted to sees, their titles of bishop of Bath and bishop of Lincoln drawn respectively, as was customary, from the urban seat which gave the diocese its name. Yet whereas Hugh’s civic affiliations as native son (of Wells) and bishop (of Lincoln) remained discrete and stable, Jocelin’s were intertwined and shifting, complicated both by the diverging fortunes of Wells and Bath as towns and by controversy over the location of his episcopal seat. The Somerset see had failed to settle in one city, and the situation had reached crisis point by his accession, with Bath, Wells and Glastonbury each having a claim. The ties between a bishop and city were perhaps never so complex, nor so laid bare, as during the episcopate of Jocelin of Wells, bishop of Bath.

The problem of bishop and city

Of course, the relationship of a bishop to his cathedral city was in fact mediated through a web of ties to place and community. This was particularly true for the Somerset diocese, where the bishops’ shifting, sometimes controversial, uses of Bath, Wells and Glastonbury were often more concerned with the major churches of each place than with the towns themselves.

The Bishop’s Palace at Wells is rightly considered to be one of the most important groups of surviving medieval buildings in Britain. Its completeness and modern appearance are, however, the result of long architectural development throughout the Middle Ages, and a certain degree of antiquarian restoration, landscaping and deliberate ruination during the nineteenth century that positioned the palace within its extraordinary setting of gardens, moat and pools.

Understanding the development of this complex site requires the use of a variety of different approaches – documentary, archaeological, antiquarian, architectural and geophysical. Particular difficulties relate to the depth of deposits through the deliberate raising of the ground level to avoid flooding, the intensity of horticultural activity over the years, and the surprising lack of detailed documentary evidence for changes to the buildings and landscapes. The excavation work on the site which took place in 2003–4 was the culmination of a long process of desktop and geophysical survey in order that the scale of invasive archaeology could be kept to an absolute minimum.

This chapter sets out to locate Bishop Jocelin’s palace within its landscape and argues that it was much more extensive than the sole surviving range. This conclusion raises the question of the early plan and layout of the site, and more precisely the function of a medieval bishop and his residence. Antiquarian interest in the Bishop’s Palace dates from the eighteenth century and by the end of the nineteenth the basic architectural sequence was well known. Key illustrative material includes a view of the palace by Samuel and Nathanial Buck dated 1733 (Figure 14) and schematic details shown in William Simes’s map of Wells of 1735 (Figure 15). Of particular importance were John Carter’s sketch and plan of 1784 (Plate 12). Nineteenth- century sources include drawings by John Buckler (1825–47) and A.W. Pugin and two important analyses of the architecture by J.H. Parker (1866) and E. Buckle (1888) (Figure 16).

There have been few previous archaeological investigations on the site. George Henry Law, bishop 1824–45, had archaeological interests: he supported John Skinner, rector of Camerton, in various excavations in Somerset, even displaying some of the finds in the undercroft of the palace.