Cathedrals, Community, and Identity

Abstract

Is it possible to define the ‘cathedral community’? Does this encompass the staff, volunteers, and worshippers who form the cathedral’s regular constituency? Is it the people who receive the community newsletter? Or could it also include people who feel a connection to the cathedral yet do not formally belong? Historians usually apply the term either in a narrow sense to the monastic or secular capitular community, or in a wider sense as comprising the clerical and lay staff and residents within the cathedral precincts. From the medieval period until well into the nineteenth century, the sense of a resident ‘in-group’ community physically bounded by the walls of the close was reinforced through chapter acts and stringent conditions of access, if anything becoming even more closed-off and ‘inbred’ following the Reformation. The precinct community of a medieval cathedral was in all essentials indistinguishable from that of any reasonably sized urban monastery, and there was little that marked it out as distinct from any similarly sized ecclesiastical institution in terms of staffing. For most contemporary cathedrals the comparative ‘community’ includes hundreds of volunteers, staff, and regular worshippers alongside the clergy, as well as, since their foundation from the 1920s, the often-ambiguous status of the ‘Friends of the Cathedral’. Many of the community now live at some distance from the cathedral and might be irregular visitors. This is not to say that historic cathedral communities lacked such occasional but important members, but that the historiographical conception of them tends to focus on the clearly identifiable ‘in-group’.