Page:The Dioceses of England.djvu/14

8 diocese. The accepted division of Yorkshire seems to follow other lines, and any lines would have some difficulties. Yet somehow one cannot help pointing to St. John's Minster at Beverley as asking for a bishopstool on one ground and to Trinity Church at Hull as asking for it on another.

The fate of Nottinghamshire is the strangest of all. It was lately torn from York, diocese and province, not to set it up as an independent diocese, but to join it with Lincoln; now it is haled from Lincoln to Derbyshire, taken in like sort out of Lichfield, and asking for its separate Bishop as much as Nottingham. The head towns of both shires have been passed by, and the bishopstool has been set in a village where the Bishop does not live and which it has been felt too grotesque to raise to the rank of a city. The mere sentimental respect for a grand church was probably never carried so far. Ancient founders would have cut the knot by building churches at Nottingham and Derby yet grander than that at Southwell.

The other diocese affected by the foundation of Henry VIII.'s diocese of Chester, that called at different times Lichfield, Coventry, and Chester, was originally one of the largest in England. We have seen its dismemberments in favour of Chester and Southwell. Warwickshire has also been taken off and added to Worcester. Thus of its three old bishopstools the oldest alone remains, that of Lichfield. What is left to it is the county of Stafford and part of Shropshire. The rest of that shire remains attached to the diocese of Hereford, also increased of late times by part of the diocese of St. Davids. Worcester, which anciently took in the shire of Worcester and Gloucester, was divided by Henry VIII. between Worcester and Gloucester. He also founded the diocese of Bristol, with its head at Bristol and its body in Dorset. At present Worcester diocese takes in Worcestershire and Warwickshire; Gloucester and Bristol takes in Gloucestershire, part of Wiltshire, the city of Bristol, and a small scrap of Somerset.

In this region new dioceses seem needed for Derbyshire, Shropshire, and Warwickshire. The place of the bishopstool in either of the first two can admit of no doubt; that of Warwickshire might stir up controversies.

Eastward lay the vast diocese whose bishopstool was once at Dorchester and then at Lincoln. Ranging from Thames to