Rochester - Rochester Cathedral

Rochester, today a town with a population of around 24,000, was founded by the Romans in 43 AD as a fortified town with a bridge over the Medway River.

The area had been inhabited by Romano-British, Jutes and Saxons since the Anglo-Saxon conquest in the middle of the 5th century. In 604, St Augustine of Canterbury sent Justus to build a cathedral near Rochester. The cathedral´s school, the King's School, still exists today. Rochester became the second episcopal see on the British Isles after Canterbury.

In 676, Rochester was sacked by Æthelred of Mercia. In the Viking Age, the city was sacked by the Danes in 842 and 884. In 877, Alfred of Wessex ordered ships to be built to fight the Danes. This heralded the era of shipbuilding in the towns on the Medway. In 930, Rochester was granted the right to mint coins. Around 1100 Bishop Gundulf began building the new Rochester Cathedral on the remains of the former cathedral. The cathedral was completed in 1130. In 1215, the city was conquered by John, King of England (John Lackland) and attacked by Simon V de Montfort in 1264.

The cathedral's founder and first bishop was Justus, one of the missionaries sent to England by Pope Gregory I at the request of St Augustine of Canterbury in 601.

After the Norman conquest of England, Bishop Gundulf, a Benedictine from Le Bec Abbey, had a Benedictine monastery built next to the cathedral and the cathedral itself was rebuilt. The consecration took place in 1130 in the presence of King Henry I. The nave and west façade as well as parts of the crypt have been preserved from this construction.

A fire damaged the cathedral in 1137, and reconstruction began in 1180 with the construction of the Gothic choir, which surpassed the nave in size.

The veneration of William of Perth, who, according to local tradition, was slain by his foster son as a pilgrim to Jerusalem near Rochester in 1201 and canonised by Pope Alexander IV in 1256, brought pilgrims to the cathedral, enabling the Gothic building project to continue. The new choir was consecrated in 1227 and the northern and southern transepts were built in the following decades. Bishop Hamo Hythe had them vaulted and the mighty crossing tower erected. One hundred years later, the current clerestory of the nave and the western façade window were built.

With the English Reformation, the Benedictine monastery of St Andrew was dissolved and the cathedral was given a new, Protestant cathedral chapter.



Extensive restoration work was carried out in 1825 and 1872. The crossing tower was renovated in 1904.