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Britain - Photo and History Pages Paradoxplace BRITISH ABBEYS AND CATHEDRALS
Hereford Cathedral
BACK TO WALES, CENTRAL ENGLAND AND EAST ANGLIA
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The present facade of Hereford Cathedral was built in the early 1900s to replace a medieval one which had collapsed. The foundation stone was laid "with masonic ceremonial" by the Deputy Grand Master of the Free Masons of England.
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Hereford Cathedral is not one of your gob smacking English medieval cathedrals, but it does contain a gob smacking artefact - the 1200s Hereford Mappa Mundi, a world map painted in the 1200s on a huge (1.6M high) deer hide parchment (left) which can be seen in the Cathedral Library. On the right is part of the map's representation of India.
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The Becket Reliquary Châsse Mystery
The signage in Hereford Cathedral exhorts visitors not to leave before they have seen, inter alia, Hereford's famous Thomas Becket Reliquary Casket (the only one, it is claimed, to be still in its original location).
Confusingly, if you ask the way to this you are told that it is kept locked up and can only be seen on one day a year. There are not even any postcard photos of it in the cathedral bookshop.
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The medieval pilgrimage shrine of "the other St Thomas" - Saint Thomas Cantilupe (c1218 - 1282 (64)), latterly Bishop of Hereford (though he died in Montefiascone in Lazio, where Adriano has a favourite seafood lunch Ristorante called Da Rita), who was canonised in 1320. Thomas was the Provincial Grand Master of the Knights Templar, and there are 14 of them standing in niches around the lower part of the shrine. It is not clear why this shrine escaped the general shrine destruction by Henry VIII's Commission for the Destruction of Shrines in the late 1530s, except that Hereford and Saint Thomas were not exactly mainstream and may have been overlooked in the rush for more lucrative targets.
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The cathedral no longer has many in situ medieval stone furnishings, but there is a display of rescued painted Romanesque capitals - this one involving the devil doing something complex.
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An engraved sepulchral slab and a brace of weathered heads in the crypt.
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Links to other Paradoxplace pages
All original material © Adrian Fletcher 2000-08 - The contents may not be hotlinked, or reproduced without permission
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