The permanent establishment of Hereford as the place of an episcopal see was also the work of Archbishop Theodore, who after the Council at Hertford (A.D. 673) divided the great diocese of Mercia, as he had done that of East Anglia, into several bishoprics. (See LICHFIELD, Pt. II.) Of the bishops of Hereford between (688-1012) Putta and Æthelstan little is recorded beyond their names. CUTHBERT (736-740) is an exception. In the latter year he was translated to Canterbury. (See that Cathedral, Pt. II.) It was during his archiepiscopate that the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed were ordered to be universally taught in English.
[A.D. 1012-1056.] ÆTHELSTAN, (“vir magnæ sanctitatis,” according to Florence of Worcester,) rebuilt his cathedral from the foundations. He was blind for thirteen years before his death; and the affairs of his diocese were administered by Tremerig, Bishop of St. David’s. In 1055, the year before Bishop Æthelstan’s death, the town of Hereford (Herefordport as it is called in the Saxon Chronicle[44]) was harried by a large body of Irish and Welsh, under Ælfgar, the exiled Earl of Mercia. “They burned the town,” says the Chronicle; “and the great mynstre which the venerable Bishop Æthelstan had before caused to be built, that they plundered, and bereaved of relics and of vestments, and of all things; and slew the folk, and led some away[45].” In the following year Bishop Æthelstan died, and was buried in this desolated church.
The great treasure of Æthelstan’s minster was the body of ST. ETHELBERT, King of East Anglia; whose head, says the Saxon Chronicle, was “stricken off by the command of Offa, King of the Mercians, A.D. 792.” This is the only notice of Ethelbert in the Chronicle; and Florence of Worcester is almost as brief. We know nothing of the real history of Ethelbert. Later accounts asserted that he was murdered at Sutton’s Walls, a chief palace of the Mercian kings, about eight miles from Hereford, where he had gone at the invitation of Offa, who had offered him the hand of his daughter Elfrida. His body was secretly interred at Marden, close to Sutton’s Walls. Three nights afterwards, Ethelbert appeared to a certain Brithfrid, and telling him where he had been buried, ordered him to remove his body to the “chapel of Our Lady at Fernlege,”--generally supposed, but without much authority, to have been on the site of the existing cathedral of Hereford. Brithfrid obeyed; and the translation took place, not without the occurrence of miracles on the way. Many others followed. The murdered king of the East Angles was recognised as a saint; and a sumptuous monument was raised over his remains by Offa, in token of his penitence. Bishop Æthelstan translated the relics into his new “minster,” which was dedicated to St. Ethelbert. His festival was duly celebrated until the Reformation. A fine Early English church, dedicated to St. Mary and St. Ethelbert, remains at Marden, where the body was first interred.