This readable volume aimed at generalist and specialist alike surveys the history of cathedrals in England from the fourth century to the 2020s. It is a slightly revised version of the 2017 first edition, briefly adding the impact of the Covid pandemic on visitor numbers. It is very well illustrated, with 91 maps and pictures, most of them in colour, and includes a clear, six-page glossary of technical terms for the neophyte. The book covers similar ground to Stanford Lehmberg’s English Cathedrals: A History (2005) but its coverage is more even than that, which concentrated on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Orme starts his history in 314 with the first documentary evidence of British bishops —three, from York, London, and Lincoln, attending a church council in Arles, and he assumes that each would have had a cathedral church on the pattern of the fourth-century church elsewhere. The disappearance of these cathedrals with the collapse of Roman rule in Britain is the first of five great crises that Orme argues English cathedrals have faced. This one they did not survive, so that the continuous history of cathedrals in England begins with the mission of Augustine in 597. Wales is not a part of Orme’s study (Welsh cathedrals are only fleetingly mentioned), so he does not have to venture into the cloudy history of the early Welsh church and the possibility of sixth-century cathedrals there. Nevertheless, as Orme notes, that still means that, barring institutions such as the family and work, ‘cathedrals (along with bishops and dioceses) are the oldest organisations to function in England’ (pp. 261–2).

Orme’s four other crises, all of which cathedrals survived, are the Viking attacks which disrupted some cathedrals and led to the disappearance of others; the sixteenth-century Reformation, which saw two cathedrals (Bath and Coventry) abolished but which led to the permanent creation of five new ones (Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford, and Peterborough); the Civil Wars, with English cathedral chapters abolished in 1649 and then restored eleven years later; and the reforms of the 1830s which fundamentally changed the wealth and constitutions of cathedrals but which led to an increase in their number, rather than their elimination as sought by some. The book is not, however, structured around these five crises. Instead, a straightforward chronological approach is adopted with eight key chapters from ‘Romans and Anglo-Saxons 314–1066’ and then ‘Normans and Angevins 1066–1250’ to ‘The Nineteenth Century’ and ‘The Twentieth Century’.

The periodisation is only partially successful. Some periods neatly fit the history of the institutions. The coming of the Normans marks an undoubted change, with the relocation of a number of cathedrals to more significant towns (for example Dorchester to Lincoln, and Elmham to Thetford and then to Norwich), a change from canons to monks at some cathedral chapters (including Rochester and Durham), and the creation of two new sees and cathedrals in the early twelfth century (Ely and Carlisle). The changes of the Reformation, the subject of chapter 5 (here dated as 1530–1559) also mark a significant turning point, with major changes in the function of cathedrals (the abolition of saints’ cults and shrines), their staffing (from monks to secular canons at eight, and the disappearance of annuellars or chantry priests at all), and their number (six new ones, though Westminster did not last long and Orme, unlike some other scholars, excludes from his study the handful of collegiate churches that survived the Reformation as not being the seat of a bishop). It could be argued that more might have been said about the shift in focus towards preaching at the Reformation, with cathedrals seen as providing learned Protestant preachers in the middle of the sixteenth century while so many parishes were in the hands of unlearned and unpreaching ‘dumb dogs’, and thereafter cathedrals functioning as the stage for set-piece sermons on national and local occasions (5 November, assizes) which were often subsequently printed. Ending the Reformation chapter in 1559, pronouncing them as saved by the crown—principally so that canonries could continue as a source of preferment for royal servants and those the monarch wished to reward—is arguably a little premature, underestimating the threats posed to many cathedrals under Elizabeth by those who sought to strip them of their endowments. The next of Orme’s periods, ‘Survival and Abolition 1559–1660’ (chapter 6) also ends at an obvious point, with deans and chapters restored along with the monarchy and the wider episcopalian church, leaving chapter 7, ‘From Restoration to Romanticism 1660–1800’ to survey the re-establishment of cathedrals and their repairs after the damage done to their fabric by civil war (Lichfield, partially destroyed in a siege of 1646) and abolition (Exeter lost its cloisters and the church was shared by two congregations, separated by a ‘monstrous Babylonish wall’ which had to be removed, pp. 150–1). The chapter also discusses the rebuilding of St Paul’s after the Great Fire of London in 1666. The chapter’s timescale also allows Orme to chart the growth of public interest in cathedrals as buildings and tourist sites, from Daniel King’s 1656 book of cathedral views, ‘the first ever cathedral picture book’ (p. 173), to late eighteenth-century Romantic depictions in guidebooks, the paintings of John Constable, and the engravings of John Britton, which Orme associates with the architectural restoration work of James Wyatt at several cathedrals, even though Britton deplored Wyatt’s work at Hereford as lacking an understanding of Gothic.

The framing of chapter 8, ‘The Nineteenth Century 1801–1900’ is perhaps the least effective. The ‘New Reformation’ with which it begins (p. 186)—an attack on clerical wealth, privilege, and idleness—was more a feature of the 1820s and 1830s than earlier in the century and led to the reforms of the Ecclesiastical Commission, 1836–7. Those had a profound impact on the cathedrals and their senior clergy, stripping them of much wealth and leading to the creation of new cathedrals, a process that extended from Ripon, 1836, to Derby, Guildford, and Portsmouth, 1927, and which Orme therefore splits somewhat arbitrarily between chapter 8 and chapter 9, ‘The Twentieth Century 1901–2000’. These quibbles about periodisation are, however, minor, for throughout Orme’s narrative is clear and his evident scholarship worn lightly.

Unlike so many other cathedral histories, the focus is not on architecture and buildings per se, but on what cathedrals were for and what they did. Orme provides excellent accounts of the changing worship in cathedrals. This extends from what can be gleaned of the round of services in the tenth and eleventh centuries from the Regularis Concordia and the ‘Enlarged Rule of Chrodegang’, to the congregation-focussed changes such as nave altars introduced since the 1900s, inspired by the Liturgical Movement. As might be expected from the author of Going to Church in Medieval England (2022), these accounts of worship concentrate less on expositions of cathedral music typically found in more specialist histories, and more on how the liturgy was experienced, both the bad—William Cobbett’s dismissal of ‘a sort of humming’ at Salisbury in 1826 (p. 186)—and the good —the ‘varied tones, sometimes low, sometimes swelling into a great volume of harmonious sound’ that William Richardson encountered at York in 1769, reminding him of ‘the songs of the blessed and the chorus of praise round the Throne of God and the Lamb’ (p. 169). The book’s approach also benefits from the stamp of another of Orme’s other areas of expertise, education, for one of its key themes is the varied educational roles that cathedrals have played since the 600s, noting the educational failings of cathedrals as well as their successes.

The book places cathedrals in their local and national contexts, and hence is something of a history of Christianity in England over 1,400 years. One question considered is the changing idea of a cathedral. Here, wider perception has played a role alongside what cathedral clergy have done. Pre-modern evidence is limited, but Orme notes that a list of fourteen country guilds written in an Exeter book of c. 1100 suggests that the wealthy of parishes within a radius of twenty miles of the city looked to Exeter cathedral ‘as the centre of spiritual excellence in their region’ (p. 31). That is a theme he explores in later centuries through diverse evidence such as records of medieval travellers, eighteenth-century visitors, and nineteenth-century novelists. He argues, however, that until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, cathedrals were merely one type among many great churches and so received limited public attention, with the English noun ‘cathedral’ only emerging in the Elizabethan period.

In the final chapters of the book, Orme takes in not just Anglican cathedrals but those of the Roman Catholic church in England too, stemming from the formation of Catholic dioceses in 1850. Cathedrals of other denominations such as the Greek or Russian Orthodox churches are not, however, included. Much of the story of the twentieth century is taken up with buildings, Westminster and Liverpool cathedrals for the Catholics, Liverpool, Coventry, and elsewhere for the Anglicans who established twelve new cathedrals out of parish churches between 1905 and 1927. Neither the governance of Roman Catholic cathedrals nor their relationship with the wider church is discussed, but for the twentieth-century Church of England Orme’s account is one of a succession of cathedral measures (1931, 1963, 1990, 1999, and 2020) as the Anglican church has sought to impose increasing uniformity on its cathedrals while managing depleting resources.

The impression given by most cathedral buildings—solidity, elegance, beauty—is often of longevity and immutability. Orme’s history of cathedrals over seventeen centuries firmly establishes the former for cathedrals as a whole, while noting the much shorter lives of some. But his theme of the constancy of change for cathedrals explodes myths of immutability. As he notes, since Augustine’s arrival in Kent in 597, the Church of England has lost around 15 cathedrals and has gained 43, 20 of them since 1836, while since 1850 the Roman Catholic church has gained 19 and lost 1. The 2014 reorganisation of Anglican sees around Leeds demonstrated that its is easier to abolish sees than cathedrals: three dioceses were merged into one, but all three cathedrals (Bradford, Ripon, and Wakefield) remained. For anyone wishing to comprehend the structures of the Anglican church, or seeking to understand how any single cathedral, Anglican or Roman Catholic, fits into the wider pattern, Orme’ scholarly but accessible book is essential reading.