UK #2

Tintern Abbey (Wales) from the Northeast

Tintern Abbey was founded on May 9, 1131 by Cistercian monks from L’Aumône Abbey, near Chartres. What remains visible today at Tintern is a mixture of structures from between 1131 and 1536, with very little of the first abbey surviving in some of the outbuildings. The great church, in “Decorated Gothic” style, was built between 1269 and 1301 – quickly, by comparison to many other large churches of the Middle Ages. The Cistercian Order of monks is named for the abbey of Cîteaux, south of Dijon in France (in new tabs: Wikipedia; abbey site [in French]). It broke away from the Benedictine Order, seeking to re-impose observance of the original Rule of Saint Benedict. Abbeys were not to be built in cities, and were to remain architecturally simple – no stone towers for bells, and no wood structures of great height. There was a dual commitment to prayer and work, and a dual community of monks and lay brothers evolved. The lay brothers contributed to the worship of God by supplying manual labor. With their vows of obedience, poverty, chastity, silence, prayer and work the Cistercians became a very successful order in the 12th and 13th centuries. Today all that remains of L’Aumône Abbey is a 13th-century dovecote, two 15th-century buildings, and a piece of church wall.

After centuries of neglect, destruction and salvaging, in 1901 Tintern Abbey was sold to the Crown by the (Ninth) Duke of Beaufort and gradually placed under government protection and conservation. The sale price was £15,000. That sum in today’s money varies greatly, depending on what one is comparing. As personal income or wealth it would correspond to between £1,640,000 and  £10,000,000, or even more, with the numbers varying so greatly because so many different items can be compared. In 1900 the average income per head of family in Britain, which then would have comprised almost all the household income (except perhaps in the poorer classes), was £42. But of course being the Duke of Beaufort involved a lot of overhead expenses. At that time, one half of Britain’s income went to one-ninth of its population, and the social safety net was very thin and had many extra holes. The average salary in Britain now is £30,800, and along with that come the benefits of a large social welfare system.

Tintern Abbey (Wales) from the Northwest

The camera location is inside the ruins of the lay brothers’ dormitory. To the south is/was the cellarium (an undercroft or storage room), to the east the kitchen (and beyond it the monks’ refectory), and to the north the lay brothers’ refectory. We moderns require some rethinking to understand the logic of the buildings and their location. Of course access to the church itself was highly important, but so was separation from the outside world. The residents of the monastery could enter the church from their refectories by crossing the main cloister, joining those who were already in that space or coming from other parts of the compound. (The lay brothers’ dormitory could be some distance from the church, since they did not conduct services – and certainly not at night, as did the monks.) The monks’ dormitory was to the east of their refectory, above their day room and near a warming room and a latrine. Their way to the church led through or past the abbey’s library and sacristy, where vestments and other necessities for worship were kept. A covered passage led to the south transept of the church from the infirmary cloister and hall; coming from further to the north, the abbot and his people would have used that passage too, at least in inclement weather or for privacy. As for mundane necessities, the kitchen was located to serve both refectories; latrines and sewage drainage were nearby; and also nearby, and near the abbot’s residence as well, were sources of fresh water (and the monks had to be threatened with fines so that they did not do laundry in them). Another kind of isolation with limited but crucial access was that between the outside world and, on the other side, the monastery, its lay brothers, and its church. To the south of the cellarium was the “outer parlour”, where insiders, released here from their vows of silence, could deal with outsiders. Such spaces in similarly cloistered environments, such as prisons and colleges, might also be employed for dealing in contraband, whether objects or people. In the inner parlour, convenient to the monks’ day room and refectory, the warming house, the chapter house, the main cloister, and the infirmary cloister, the monks, here also released from their vows of silence, could conduct necessary conversations with each other.

Not all outsiders were so polite as to enter the church properly or use the outer parlour to deal with the insiders. The Black Death, striking in the middle of the 14thC, interrupted recruitment of resident lay brothers, and the abbey had to tenant out the farm lands that lay brothers had also worked. Shortage of funds was brought on partly by the uprising in Wales (1400-1415) under Owain Glyndŵr (c. 1359-c. 1415), during which the Welsh destroyed abbey properties. The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-1541) during the reign of Henry VIII ended monastic life in England, Ireland and Wales in monasteries whose annual income was less than £200. Tintern, worth only £192 in 1535 (perhaps £3,000,000 now), didn’t make the cut. So the buildings were given to the (Second) Earl of Worcester, who had the roofs dismantled for their valuable lead. And thus the real decay began. The lure of lucre in peacetime can be more destructive than armies contesting a rebellion.

Tintern Abbey (Wales): View from the West End of the Interior of the Church

The poets and painters of the Romantic era, or movement, or whatever it was, loved ruins and wild landscapes, and some of them had a penchant for the supposed organic unity and strong (if, scandalous thought at the time, Catholic!) faith of the Middle Ages. So they loved Tintern Abbey, and it and the Wye River area were an important impetus for the pioneering presentation of the “picturesque” by William Gilpin in 1770. But here we have to cut through some conceptual, visual and verbal under- (and over-) brush to distinguish our view from theirs. By far the most famous poem about Tintern Abbey is by William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Its title, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798; text; background), tells us we have a problem: the poem gives no picture of the Abbey, though there is plenty of landscape, both external and natural and internal and psychological. A sampling of the poems that actually picture the Abbey yields trite tropes, such as “mournful ruins” and “grandeur in decline”, that soon give way to meditations about feats of medieval warriors and about the present, when “Black forges smoke, and noisy hammers beat” (Charles Heath, 1797; text [scroll to pp. 29-32]). The paintings of the Abbey better picture the picturesque, but their picture of the Abbey is not our picture of it now. Views of the Abbey in its setting during older times show that the trees had returned to many of the once-open grounds around it (Loutherbourg, credit Robert Bowyer, public domain USA), and what open ground there was near the ruins was peopled with farm people and their animals (though the local mill workers who had taken up residence in the ruins did not appear). Early in the 20th C systematic archaeology and maintenance began, and the ivy on the buildings, so Romantic to earlier eyes (Turner, public domain USA) and so intrusive to our own, was removed. Thus now we can look on the Abbey’s remaining original features, seeing less the decay and overgrowth and imagining or even, often now by computer, imaging more what the basic structure would look like with its old roof, windows, flooring, facings, equipment for worship – and the people who once used it as a church for worship, not as a ruin for (post-)Romantic sic-transit-gloria-mundi meditation or indulgence of Arthurian fantasies.

Factories, above all metalworks, came to the Tintern site as early as 1568. The Romantics’ forests became sources of charcoal, the Wye and Angiddy furnished water power, and mineral deposits were conveniently nearby. For 300 years the picturesque village of Tintern and its even more picturesque abbey were dominated by the unsightliness of the forges and factories and then by the railway – themselves themes of the Romantics, which were encapsulated in Blake’s phrase, “dark Satanic mills” and Thoreau’s mournfully witty “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us” (text and discussion). The Wireworks Bridge was built in 1875, crossing the Wye upstream (northwest) of the Abbey. It is now listed as Grade II in the Heritage Category. One source praises its “rubble stone abutments and large flood arches”. Perhaps a century and a half can give such a structure a certain picturesqueness. But in a view (credit Mzilikazi1939) of it from further northwest, at near river level, the girders of the bridge slash horizontally, and brutally, across the base of the seemingly half as small Abbey. The wireworks closed around 1895 and the bridge served for a while as a horse-drawn tramway. It now carries a footpath for tourists going to hiking trails on the Wye, and the village train station, closed to passenger traffic in 1959, is now a tourist center – possibly picturesque, not likely Romantic, and certainly not sublime.

Tintern Abbey (Wales): View from the East End of the Interior of the Church

Tintern Abbey may be a shell, but it least it is a shell. It is not the only Cistercian abbey, not the only abbey, not the only abbey in Britain, and not the only abbey in the world that has fallen into ruin – been thrown into ruin is the more accurate expression. But from what is there on the site, and at other Cistercian abbeys, and from what we know about Cistercian principles, we can conclude much about what Tintern Abbey once looked like. While the style is “Decorated Gothic”, Cistercian abbeys had to be extremely simple and plain in their architecture. One low central tower was permitted; unnecessary pinnacles and turrets were not. Windows had to be plain, and stained glass was forbidden, as was needless ornament. Crosses were to be of wood. While some of the extant stonework may look ornate to us after Frank Lloyd Wright and the Bauhaus, it is not so by comparison to that of other religious structures of the time and, Heaven knows, later. From what we observe in Cistercian abbeys that have survived fairly intact, such as Pontigny, the interior of the Tintern Abbey we see here could – of course after missing structural elements were replaced – be restored by a coat of white plaster on the walls, plain glass in the windows, and a new roof.

The outbuildings are another matter, since they have largely been demolished completely or reduced to a few feet of wall height. On the other hand, they are not – and probably were not intended to be – memorable architecture, and there exist plentiful depictions, and some intact actual exemplars, of such things as monastic dormitories, refectories, kitchens, and even latrines. Academically sound attempts to portray the original Abbey, like those at medievalheritage.eu, show a single slender central spire with no tower beneath it. They also restore the outbuildings to their likely original height and contours, reminding us that the abbey church was not so isolated in its compound as it now appears. The credible reconstructions also show the outbuildings that, further away, supplied the material needs of the monastery for food and fuel, and the structures in the compound that facilitated the Abbey’s religious purposes, such as the cloisters and the covered ways from the monks’ quarters into the sacristy and the church itself.  The reconstructions also fit out the church with its choir, rood screen, altar, and even west entrance porch. At least one reconstruction shows even the garden plots in the garth of the main cloister. Monks, even Cistercians, gotta eat too, and they need medicinal herbs and perhaps even want a few flowers, if only to attract the bees to make some honey, perhaps for some mead.

Wells (England): View from Just West of the Cathedral

Wells Cathedral was built in 1176-1450, replacing an earlier church from 705. It has been called Europe’s first truly Gothic structure; it lacks the Romanesque feature that survive in many other churches. More precisely, the predominant style is Early English Gothic, and the arcades and fluted piers are in a foliate or “stiff-leaf” style. Above the stone arch that encloses the doors, and within the niches enclosed by the next row of arches, are holes from which choristers sang on festival days, especially Easter. Higher up, just below row of the twelve Apostles, there are eight more obvious holes. Trumpeters would stand on the walkways behind the holes and blow their horns against the walls of the holes to project their sound out into the large courtyard. With the architecture suggesting the walls of Jerusalem, at least as they were pictured by those at the time, the effect was to invite those below to join the trumpeting and singing angels within the walls of the cathedral and, by extension, the earthly and heavenly City of God. The exterior, impressive in itself as it remains even now, was far more colorful in the Middle Ages. Research between 1974 and 1986 found traces of red and green paint and gilt on and around the sculptures.

Ancient place names may change over time and thus conceal their earlier meanings, as has “York” in England, whose original form meant “yew-tree”, though later the name was transformed into words meaning “settlement of the man named Eborus”, and even later “village of [named for] a boar.” And ancient names may be applied to new settlements that are thus declared to share something with older ones, like New York, itself a replacement for New Amsterdam, which latter never much resembled old Amsterdam. But the name of the city Wells indeed refers to, well, wells. Water flowing underground from the Mendip hills, just north of Wells, emerges at the Saint Andrew Spring, near what became the Bishop’s Palace, south of the Cathedral. Flowing at a rate of 40 gallons a second, the water fills the moat around the Palace. It then flows from the southwest corner of the moat, as Keward Brook, and continues southwest, roughly paralleling Silver Street and then the A39. At Coxley the Brook enters the River Sheppey, making for a total course of two miles from Saint Andrew Spring.

Wells Cathedral (England): View from the Back of the Nave

Both the larger lineaments of cathedrals and their detail-work show that Gothic cathedrals were the product of systematic design and masterly craftsmanship. Still, constructing them was a chancy business at best, given undetected weaknesses in the underlying earth and rock. Moreover, those who commissioned the project and designed the structure sometimes attempted more than could be accomplished. Not a few buildings suffered major collapses. Wells Cathedral was finished in 1306, or so it might have seemed right then. But soon expansion was underway. Horizontal enlargement was a minor matter, in structural terms if not in the raising of funds, settling the legalities, and formulating decisions. But some years after the central tower was heightened the central piers of the crossing, where the main transept intersects the nave, were found to be sinking and the tower itself showed cracks. There had also been damage from an earthquake. And the problem may well have been worsened by all the water flowing underneath to become the nearby springs that gave the city its name, however sacred those “wells” might have been considered to be. Attempts to provide internal reinforcement and external buttresses seemed not enough, so in 1338 master mason William Joy undertook a solution that is certainly breathtaking, whether one views it as, aesthetically, supreme achievement or an eyesore. Completed in 1348, the “scissor” or “strainer” arches span the north, west, and south expanses of the crossing. (A choir screen provides some bracing of the east expanse.) At Salisbury cathedral at around the same time the same solution – strainer arches – was applied to the same architectural problem caused by the same urge to heighten the central tower to proclaim the same glory of God or of His human vicars on earth. The ordinary laboring people working underneath or on top of the arches no doubt had their own thoughts about the matter and about who it was, actually, that was showing the most faith.

While the scissor arches are the cathedral’s very public trademark, what gives the structure its aesthetic unity is the consistency of its Early English Gothic style. That may be due at least in part to the continuity among its master masons (architects) and their own lengthy careers. The first of them for whom a name is known was Adam Locke, who served from about 1192 until 1230. Later came Thomas Witney, whose other sites include Exeter Cathedral. He was active in his profession for an amazingly long time: about fifty years, from c. 1292 to 1342, though not all of that at Wells. His colleague was William Joy, who took over the work in 1329 and stayed until 1342; he too worked on the cathedral at Exeter. William Wynford was appointed master mason in 1365, before which he had worked on Windsor Castle. During his long career (1360-1405) he was active at Oxford, Abingdon, Southampton, Winchester and Wardour, and influenced many later buildings.

Wells Cathedral (England): View from South End of Main (West) Transept

The font (to the immediate northwest) is the oldest part of the present church. It is from the original Saxon church, built in 705 by Aldhelm, who was the first bishop of the Diocese of Sherborne. That original church was located in what are now the cathedral’s cloisters, which are at the south and west of the cathedral. The cover of the font is ca. 1635. To the south is the effigy and tomb of William of March, who was Bishop of Bath and Wells from 1293 until his death in 1302.(Inscription: “Willelmus de Marc[hia]…Bathon[iensis] et Wellen[sis]…[MCC]CII.) The plaque below the grave to the left of William’s identifies the resting place of Joan, Countess of Lisle (c. 1425-1464). She was – this the result of deep research and shallow Latin – the daughter of the delightfully-named Thomas de Cheddar (or Cheddre). Both he and the cheese are named for the village a few miles northwest of Wells. Sir Thomas was a commoner but wealthy. One wonders whether that – the wealth – is why she was taken to wife by John Talbot (c. 1426-1453), First Viscount Lisle. For this John Talbot was the son, by a second marriage, of the redoubtable (=tough, brutal, quarrelsome) John Talbot, First Early of Shrewsbury (c. 1387-1453). (”Salopia” on Joan’s plaque is the Latin name of Shrewsbury and Shropshire.) “Old Talbot’s” first marriage had also produced a John Talbot (c. 1413-1460), and it was this one, already the heir, who took over as Second Early of Shrewsbury on the death of his father (and of the younger John Talbot) at the Battle of Castillon. Before becoming Joan’s husband this John Talbot, lacking clear claims to inheritance from his other ancestors, had engaged in at least one violent attempt to assert such a claim. Joan’s husband’s maternal grandfather was Richard Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick (1382-1439) – another redoubtable sort, close to Prince Hal, the later Henri V. The Warwicks appear prominently in Shakespeare, as do the Talbots.

To the south is the Chapel of St Martin, which is a memorial to the men of Somerset, almost 11,300 of them, who fell in WWI, and also to those who were killed in WWII. To the northwest of the cathedral, across the street Cathedral Green, is the Wells & Mendip Museum. In its front garden is a memorial to Harry Patch (1898-2009), who until his death was the last living combat veteran of WWI. He remained active well into his final years, and his funeral was held in Wells Cathedral.

Wells Cathedral (England): View from the Choir

Cathedrals with two transepts, rather than one, are a distinctively English feature, though not particularly common even there. At Wells, the earliest parts of the present structure were the nave and the larger (western) transept, built between about 1175 and 1230. Next the west front was built, from 1230 to around 1260. The east transept appears to have been finished by 1306. But even by 1326 the structure was extended to the east with the “Lady Chapel”, which was then connected to the east end of the cathedral. Thus the original choir, between the two transepts, was joined by a “retrochoir” in the center of the east transept. The choir stalls here have stone canopies from the 19thC, with modern embroideries. Choristers of bygone centuries would have had to endure rougher stations, and those of the “Little Ice Age”, between the 14th and 19th centuries, might be forgiven, from their vantage point in God’s heavenly choir, if they  wished for some of the global warming that occurred both before and after their time.

While the “scissor” arches are, to many, the most striking individual feature of Wells Cathedral, the “Jesse Tree Window”, here to the east and up high, is probably its greatest single artistic treasure. (Only the bottom quarter shows here.) As the ancient Christmas carol has it, Jesus is the rose “of Jesse’s lineage coming”, Jesse being the father of King David and thus the ancestor of Jesus. The trope of the “tree of Jesse” is the origin of the family tree as a representation of a genealogy. The royal descent of Jesus is less emphasize now than in the Middle Ages, when heredity and inheritance were of prime importance. The Wells Jesse Tree Window, dating from 1325-30, fortunately survived the iconoclasm of the 17thC. It incorporated the new technique of “silver staining”, which enabled painting of details on the glass not only in black but also in yellow. That, and the rich use of yellow and green glass, gave the window the popular name “the Golden WIndow”.

Wells Cathedral (England): View from the Cloister Garth

Wells was not founded as a monastic cathedral, so a cloister and cloister garth (garden, yard) were not really necessary. If the cloister at Wells was built out of habit or aesthetic preference, or as a way to support the usual processions, that was an expensive indulgence, though far less expensive than the cathedral itself. Perhaps constructing it was seen as a way to replace, in – so to speak – a constructive way, the earlier church of St Andrew, which earlier occupied the site of the cloister. Even early on monks were not needed to sing in the services, since that duty was performed by a choir of boys which was established even before building the cathedral was begun. Also puzzling – or perhaps not, given the special circumstances outlined here – is that a paired cloister, to adjoin the north side of the cathedral, was never built. With regard to its cloister at least, Wells Cathedral was not severely affected by the Dissolution of the Monasteries (and other such institutions) under Henry VIII between 1536 and 1541.

The two tombstones which are barely legible here are those of two of the organists of the cathedral: Dodd Perkins (c. 1760-1820, organist 1781-1820) and his son William (1784-1860, organist 1820-1859). A certain mystery and a bit of humor attend the lives here. The eulogy for Dodd Perkins in “The Gentleman’s Magazine”, 1820, notes: “…organist of Wells Cathedral. He studied and practised the organ under the auspices of the celebrated Dr. Hayes, of Oxford, who was not only in genius, but in bulk, the prototype of Mr. Perkins”. Wells had its Perkinses, father and son, and Oxford had its Hayeses, father (William, 1708-1777, professor at Oxford, 1742-) and son (Philip, 1738-1797, succeeded his father 1777). While one source gives 1750 as the birthyear of the elder Perkins, most have it as c. 1760. If that is true, then it is possible, barely possible, that Perkins senior studied a year or two with Hayes senior, who was probably a more “celebrated” a musician than was his son. But Perkins, in his late teens or older, would likelier have begun and then continued for some time his study at Oxford under Hayes junior. The clincher is “bulk”. While a portrait of the senior Hayes at age 41 shows some heft (though not really that much for a prosperous professional of that time), Hayes junior, was known for his abrasive personality, his corpulence, and his frequent trips to London in a post chaise. Thus his punny nickname: Phil Hayes – Fill Chaise. Dodd Perkins died on April 7 (or 9), 1820, at age 60. His son Dodd junior was born in 1820, the year of his father’s death. Less than a year before his death, on or about August 3, 1819, Dodd senior, whose second wife Ann had died on or about November 9, 1817, married Sarah Brimble, his third wife, in Bridgwater, southwest of Wells beyond even Glastonbury. The only Sarah Brimble of Bridgwater who was likely to have been Dodd senior’s bride was baptized there on January 1, 1790. For that era (and most), she would have been a November bride to her December groom. But she was still fertile, as she and Dodd may have found out to their surprise, whether before or after their wedding. One wonders what occasioned the elder (and, for that time, quite elderly) Dodd’s death; perhaps apoplexy brought on by obesity, for starters. The remaining mystery is the profoundest: We do not have a date of birth for Dodd junior, or any place of birth, not even Bridgwater, not even Wells, where his father had long been resident. Apparently no Dodd Perkins was baptized in the Church of England between 1817 and 1823. Perhaps Dodd junior, wherever his name was eventually recorded, was given his father’s name in part to ensure that he could claim his lineage and whatever inheritance to which he might be entitled after his older half-brother got his share. We do know that Dodd junior died on January 31, 1854, in Devonshire, after having established himself well enough as a surgeon and assistant apothecary to marry, with his first child being born in 1850. Write your own novel here. Mine would have the widower organist finding it desirable, or necessary, or both, to marry, quietly, his semi-spinster housekeeper. Such a novel, if written as magical realism, might include the underground conversations of the two Perkins organists in their cloistered graves. No magical realism is needed for the episode in the novel which would relate a concert festival in Wells on September 19-20, 1787, where the senior Dodd joined musical forces with Fill Chaise and (foreigner! Catholic! castrato [maybe]!) Venanzio Rauzzini, from 1777 until 1810 the director of the prestigious concert series in not-far-off Bath. At times like these one so longs for a Jane Austen.

Wells Cathedral (England): View from the West End of the North Side

The octagonal chapter house, to the east, was built between 1275 and 1310, and is an example of “Decorated Gothic” architecture in the “Geometric Style”. Its main entrance is by a flight of well-worn stone steps that rise off the north choir aisle of the Cathedral. A chapter is a college of clerics that advises a bishop. Related words that, like “chapter” itself in the meaning here, are now obscure to most people include: “canon”, a member of some body subject to ecclesiastical rule; “prebendary”, a canon who has a role in administering a cathedral or collegiate church; “precentor”, some one who leads a congregation in singing or otherwise facilitates worship (related to “cantor” and “chant”).

To our left of the Chapter House is the “Chain Gate”, built around 1460 to connect the Cathedral, via the Chapter House, to Vicars’ Close, which appears also in another panorama. To our right of the Chapter House, midway up the north façade of the main transept, is  the Cathedral’s astronomical clock, from about 1400. The two figures, of knights in armor, strike the quarter-hours. On the interior of the transept is an earlier and more complex clock, from about 1325, whose mechanism serves both blocks. At the quarter-hours a figure hits two bells with hammers and two more with his heels, and jousting knights also appear. The interior clock shows as well the Sun and Moon (with its phases and the time since the last new moon). The configuration is the geocentric or pre-Copernican one.  In the 19thC the original mechanism, from between 1386 and 1392, was replaced and moved to the Science Museum in London, where it still works.

Wells Cathedral (England): View from the Entrance to Vicars’ Close

The opening view seems unprepossessing, until one understands its architectural significance and – very troubled – historical context. Vicars’ Close was begun before 1348 and completed in 1430. It was built to house the Vicars Choral, whose duty was to chant the divine service eight times a day. The complex included the entrance arch with pedestrian and wagon gates; adjacent to that a storeroom and, above that and the gates, a common hall, kitchen, bakehouse and various other rooms; at the other end of the street a chapel and library; and the street with the vicars’ residences, 22 on the east and 20 on the west. The street, from the gate end, looks longer than it is because it narrows by 9 feet over its length of 460 feet. The Close is considered to be Europe’s oldest residential street with the original buildings remaining. Even rarer: it was a medieval planned street.

Times change, sometimes violently. The Protestant Reformation, initiated in England by Henry VIII, hurt Wells Cathedral less than those that had been founded by monastic orders. The abolition of priestly celibacy did bring the need to combine some of the houses in Vicars’ Close into larger units. During the Commonwealth of England (1653-59) following the English Civil War (1642-1651) the cathedral fell into disrepair as the monopoly of the Church of England on Christian worship was put to an end. In later times the church has been restored, renovated and maintained, partly for the same of worship, partly as a cultural heritage and a draw for tourism. Currently the Vicar Choral has twelve men. The Choristers of Wells Cathedral number 18 boys and 18 girls. They are educated at Wells Cathedral School; its Music School is to the west of the camera node here, and visiable in the panorama whose node is near the west front of the Cathedral. There are yearly more than 1000 worship services in the Cathedral, attended by a total of about 150,000. Yet that is an average of but 150 people per service, in a cathedral that can hold thousand, and the ranks of the unchurched in the West steadily grow. It is anybody’s guess what the number of the sincerely faithful is now, or was in times of officially widespread religiosity, or will be as the various hammers attack the anvil.