Page:The Saxon Cathedral at Canterbury and The Saxon Saints Buried Therein.djvu/80

THE SAXON CATHEDRAL AT CANTERBURY Convocation of his clergy, wherein it was ordered that instead of only one Bishop at Winchester and another at Sherborne, there should be an additional one at Wells in Somerset, another at Crediton in Devonshire, and another at St. Petrocks in Cornwall; and he even gives their names, anticipating the fact by five years. This statement is also found in a MS. which was given to Exeter Cathedral by Bishop Leofric, who died in 1073; but there seems to be a great deal of apocryphal matter mixed up with the story, and it has been rejected by all ecclesiastical writers.

Dr. Stubbs has presented very skilfully the facts of the Consecration of the Seven Bishops in Canterbury Cathedral in his Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum (1897), p. 23. It was the year 909 that saw the subdivision of the West Saxon Sees; Edward the Elder in that year divided the diocese of Winchester into two, and probably the rest of Wessex was split up at the same time, for from this date the Sees of Ramsbury (for Wilts and Berks), Wells and Crediton begin. Dr. Stubbs does not think that there is any special improbability of the consecration of seven bishops, though he thinks it unwise to risk a positive identification of those consecrated as given in the Leofric Missal and mentioned by William of Malmesbury. But he gives a list of those consecrated by Plegmund in 909, and also the authorities and proofs for all of them save one. They are

Dr. Stubbs, in his edition of the Gesta Regum in the Rolls Series, gives an explanation of this curious tangle. He states that the ordinations of the Pope Formosus were annulled in 897. This of course affected the consecration of Archbishop Plegmund, who was consecrated by 48