Frome in Wessex
Wells
Abstract
Contents Updated: Thursday, 26 October 2006
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Wells is about 20 miles (30km) west of Frome, so is little more than a short car drive, or about an hour by bus, from Frome Market Place, but even little Wells, a third of the size of Frome, is more famous than our town. It has the glorious cathedral that dominates the city—having a cathedral makes Wells into a city while Frome is only a town!
The diocese of Wells Cathedral is called the Diocese of Bath and Wells, so, in clerical terms at least, the two main rivals of Frome gang up against their Cinderella neighbour. Still at least Frome citizens did not have to put up with the bullying of bishops as the folk of Wells had to in the Middle Ages. Even in recent times, the difference in class between the ordinary townsfolk and the affluent and upper-crust bishops and clergymen attached to the cathedral from afar was marked. Yale History Professor, David Underdown, a native of Wells, explains:
It still rankles that, even in the war, the Cathedral School was never willing to play the Blue School cricket team, yet, in 1941, we played and beat Millfield (a nearby expensive private school—called a “public” school in the UK).
It shows that the church’s espousal of democracy is pure expediency forced upon the church by the social changes brought on by and since the war. The present Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells, despite a long apprenticeship in a poor area as Bishop of Stepney in London, still likes to uphold the unpeakable habits of the upper crust in defending foxhunting, a rural pastime for rich people with country mansions and paddocks for their horses, that gives them the temporary illusion that they are medieval princes, hunting in the royal forests.
Bishop Jim (the Right Reverend Jim Thompson) tells us that it is a depressing time for farmers. Which of us can remember when it was not allegedly depressing for farmers, but they somehow manage to come through with a lifestyle that is considerably better than most people’s in Britain. The church is supposed to be interested in the plight of the poor, and since only two per cent of people are employed in the countryside, the poor mainly live in the towns, places like Stepney—and Frome, for that matter.
Farmers have for years been heavily subsidized by taxpayers via the UK government and then even more so by the EEC, yet they still, it seems, have holes in their shoes. One suspects that what they gripe about is that they are gradually being weaned off the bland subsidised fare they have lived on and are being obliged to gnaw at the tough meat of competition. If they cannot manage, they should sell their horses and turn their paddocks into affordable homes for the rural poor. But then, they would be obliged to stop foxhunting, and that would not do.
Still, it was ever thus. In 1341 AD, the townspeople rebelled at the heavy dues placed upon them by the bishop. The bishop had to send out his soldiers with swords drawn to collect the tithes (taxes and dues) from the people. As a precaution, the bishop built the moat and curtain wall around the palace. Most will think that walls and moats were to defend against foreign invaders, but their real purpose—to defend the robber barons and bishops from their subjects—is clear in this instance. The mott and bailey castles thrown up by the Normans after the conquest had just that purpose. Who else did they expect might invade and take the land of England from them? No one. The enemy lived just outside the ramparts of the fortified mansions of the conquering Normans. Forts with the same purpose were built by the Europeans invading North America from the sixteenth century until the nineteenth. The enemy was the native Americans.
The Black Death (bubonic plague) halved the population of the city. Bishop Beckington is praised for having the water channel built for the town in the fifteenth century (Wells, like Frome, has a stream running down its main street). It is equally likely that it was a cynical gift that in reality was a necessity for the drainage of the moat. Since the water had to go somewhere why not allow it to supply the town, thereby improving health and hygiene—in as much as they knew anything about it—and ensuring a more reliable supply of tithes?
In Elizabethan times, the effects of the plague were being overcome and the citizens would hold “Church Ales” to raise funds to pay the tithes demanded by the bishops. These were riotous and boozy fairs and the bishops banned them. In 1607, however, the people who preferred to worship in the local church, St Cuthberts, decided they needed a new bell for the church and asked for a dispensation to hold a “Church Ale” to raise the sum needed. Curiously the Dean defied the bishop’s refusal and granted permission. The fair had Morris Dancers, stick walkers, and a pageant of popular heroes like Robin Hood, St George and the Dragon, and the Sultan of Egypt—all mocking the tyranny of the Bishop. Even the Cathedral choiristers were allowed to parade by the Dean who overruled the choir master also.
The parades became a regular thing after that but were still resisted by the authorities. The annual carnivals of the Somerset towns that usually involve fancy dress competitions and a strong rivalry between carnival clubs that put on floats, pageants and tableaux is a reminder of the older tradition that came out of defying the church.
No sooner had the processions and fairs become established under Elizabeth than they were attcked by the Puritans, another branch of Christian know-alls. The English Civil War, which is portrayed in schoolbooks as being a religious war, was really a war between burghers and the Norman nobility. The burghers, it so happened, were also mainly Protestants because their business interests demanded honesty in transactions, and legality. The nobility, including the bishops, were not noted for either, when their own interests were involved. So, the burghers supported the reform of the old corrupt church in favour of the pure new church, based on a return to the fundaments of Christianity—in effect a return to Essenism.
Royalists and Roundheads took it in turn to occupy the city, while the city corporation tried to humour either faction. Cromwell and the Puritans won and the old bishop and his clerical court were ousted. The Presbyterians and the town council now squabbled over ownership of the palace, deanery and canonical houses. The Presbyterian preacher, Cornelius Burgess, was seen as a Puritanical equivalent of the bishop and the town tried its best to stop his plans. The Restoration of the Monarchy also saw the restoration of the church to its ill-gotten property and the old enemy returned, with the old rivalry of bishop and dean. At one time the bishop and dean excommunicated each other—neither seemed too concerned by the threat excommunication had for their immortal souls.
Though the eighteenth century was the beginning of the industrial revolution, it overlapped with the death of the Middle Ages. The genteel and the barbaric stood cheek by jowl. Betting on bull-baiting, cock-fighting and cudgel fighting between teams of 25 men a side were commonplace, the dean holding cock fights in his garden. Bull baiting was held on Cathedral Green but so were the first cricket matches. The nouveau riche class of the descendants of the old burghers, who had conceded the restoration of the king but had won their political and economic demands, attended music, literary and scientific clubs, coffee and tea houses, and elegant balls.
Wells is still a posh town compared with Frome, perhaps because it has a steady source of wealth through the thousands of people visiting the town’s central attraction—the cathedral. It is subject to the same presures from big business and governments as other small rural towns—the worst being the destruction of the sense of community in the centre by the siting of new retail hypermarkets on the outskirts, adjacent to motorways. The shopowners play off neighbouring towns one against the other to get the concessions they need, and if they fail to succeed, appeal to higher authority, the government, who usually overrule the local authorities.
The citizens themselves are confused. Some support the idea of out-of-town shops on the grounds of pollution of town centres, when unnecessary car journeys to widely separated town-edge sites cause far more pollution. Traders seem to prefer not to have a supermarket next door, on the grounds that it will take away trade, but it will do that anyway, whereas by being next door, they could get some spin-off, or take up complementary niches. Would you want to open a pizza parlour where there was no competition, or in the middle of a street full of fast food outlets? Sensible business people choose the latter, and, if customers want choice, they too would pick it.
So give us back our town centres. If they are a bit polluted, at least the countryside is not, and they give us choice and stimulate services peripheral to shopping like entertainments, restaurants and bars, right where we want them, in a compact area, and away from our homes.
Anyway, to return to Wells, it is an ideal place for a day trip from Frome, with its magnificent attraction and its, at present, compact but busy centre. The cathedral now returns to the people of Wells, in its tourist pull, what it has robbed from them in the past. Sadly, they are not the same people, and the prelates of the church would do better to dwell upon righting the past wrongs of their institution than feeling sorry for wealthy farmers, heavily subsidised in their comfortable lives. Now some farmers want to force GM food on to us. Does Bishop Jim object to that?
