West front Rochester Cathedral Church Christ Blessed Virgin Mary Norman Kent religion Chaplin chapel nave
Rochester Cathedral, or the Cathedral Church of Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, is a Norman church in Rochester, Kent. The bishopric is second oldest in England after Canterbury. he Rochester diocese was founded by Justus, one of the missionaries who accompanied Saint Augustine of Canterbury to convert the pagan Southern English to Christianity in the early 7th century. As the first bishop of Rochester, Justus was given permission by King Ethelbert of Kent to establish a church of St Andrew the Apostle (the same dedication as the monastery in Rome from which St Augustine and St Justus had set out for England) on the site of the present cathedral, which was made the home of a bishopric. The cathedral was to be served by a college of secular priests and was endowed with land near the city called Priestfield. A choir school was established at the same time which has functioned ever since and is now known as King's School, Rochester. The cathedral and city suffered much from the Mercians (676) and the Danes, but retained its importance, so much so that, when William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, he gave the church and its estates to his brother, Odo of Bayeux. The church was reduced to near-destitution, a situation only remedied in 1082 when Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury visited and restored some of its lands and staff. Gundulf, the Norman Bishop of Rochester, also played a very active role; a talented architect himself, the bishop commissioned and probably had a major part in designing a new cathedral to replace Justus' church. He also replaced the secular chaplains by Benedictine monks, translated the relics of St Paulinus to a silver shrine that became a place of pilgrimage, obtained several royal grants of land, and proved a great benefactor to his cathedral city. By the time of his death he had built the nave and Western front, the Western transept being added between 1179 and 1200 and the Eastern transept during the reign of Henry III.
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