The Diocese of Chester is a Church of England diocese in the Province of York covering the pre-1974 county of Cheshire and therefore including the Wirral and parts of Stockport, Trafford and Tameside.
History
Ancient diocese
Before the sixteenth century the city possessed a bishop and a cathedral, though only intermittently. Even before the Norman conquest the title "Bishop of Chester" is found in documents applied to prelates who would be more correctly described as Bishop of Mercia, or Bishop of Lichfield. After the Council of London in 1075 had decreed the transfer of all episcopal chairs to cities, Peter, Bishop of Lichfield, removed his seat from Lichfield to Chester, and became known as Bishop of Chester. There he chose The Collegiate Church of St John the Baptist as his cathedral. The next bishop, however, transferred (1102) the see to Coventry on account of the rich monastery there, though he retained the episcopal palace at Chester. The Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield was of enormous extent, and it was probably found convenient to have something analogous to a cathedral at Chester, even though the cathedra itself were elsewhere; accordingly the church of St John ranked as a cathedral for a considerable time, and had its own dean and chapter of secular canons down to the time of the Reformation.
The chief ecclesiastical foundation in Chester was the Benedictine monastery of St Werburgh, the great church of which finally became the Cathedral Church of Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary. The site had been occupied even during the Christian period of the Roman occupation by a church dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, and rededicated to St Werburgh and St Oswald during the Saxon period. The church was served by a small chapter of secular canons until 1093, when Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester, converted it into a major Benedictine monastery, in which foundation he had the co-operation of St Anselm, then Prior of Bec, who sent Richard, one of his monks, to be the first abbot. A new Norman church was built by him and his successors. The monastery, though suffering loss of property both by the depredations of the Welsh and the inroads of the sea, prospered, and in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the monks transformed their Norman church into a gothic building which, though not be reckoned among the greatest cathedrals of England, yet is not unworthy of its rank, and affords a valuable study in the evolution of Gothic architecture. It has been said of it that "at every turn it is satisfying in small particulars and disappointing in great features". The last of the abbots was John, or Thomas, Clark, who resigned his abbey, valued at £1,003 5s. 11d. per annum, to the king.
1541 to 1836
The diocese was created, during the Reformation, on 14 August 1541 from the Chester archdeaconry of the Diocese of Lichfield and Coventry, covering Cheshire and Lancashire, and the Richmond Archdeaconry of the Diocese of York. The diocese was originally formed as part of the Province of Canterbury, but was quickly transferred to the Province of York later in the same year. The twenty deaneries of the new diocese were: Amounderness, Bangor, Blackburn, Boroughbridge, Catterick, Chester, Copeland, Frodsham, Furness, Kendal, Leyland, Lonsdale, Macclesfield, Malpas, Manchester, Middlewich, Nantwich, Richmond, Warrington, and Wirral. The deaneries as shown in the accompanying map, were established by 1224 and remained largely unchanged until the nineteenth century.