III.
THE FIRST DEANS OF WELLS
St Osmund was the nephew of the Conqueror. He became bishop of Salisbury in 1078, three years after the united sees of Sherborne and Ramsbury had been removed to Old Sarum. His first task was the building of his cathedral church in the grand Norman fashion: his next was to provide for a large body of clergy to offer a splendid worship to God day and night. In earlier days the clergy of the bishop's church were called his family: the endowments of the see were common to him and to them, and he was directly responsible for their bodily needs. But the Normans brought new ideas in this and in other matters. They moved the bishop's seat from the country to the town: they built new churches on an unexampled scale: they assigned part of the estates to the cathedral clergy, as prebends for individual canons and as a common fund to be divided among those who were actually in residence. An independent corporation was thus created, with a dean at the head as president of the chapter and ordinary of the church, a precentor to look after the services and the music, a chancellor to rule the schools and provide the books, and a treasurer to care for the vestments and other valuables.
This was the system which was transplanted from Normandy to England, and appears simultaneously at York, Salisbury, and Lincoln about the year 1091. St Osmund seems to have been the leading spirit: at any rate he wrote down his brief Institution, and Salisbury became the pattern church to which almost every other looked for guidance. Wells was slow in following, and for a good reason. Giso was an excellent bishop, brought from Lorraine by Edward the Confessor. He had already reformed his church, not on Norman but on Lotharingian lines, bringing his canons together in a semi-monastic life, with a common dormitory, refectory and cloister. He therefore would not move his see from the country to the town as the Norman bishops were doing. He survived the Conqueror, and died in 1088. Then John of Tours, his successor, deserted Wells and took the abbey church of Bath as his cathedral, and the monks became his chapter. Wells was desolate for the next fifty years. The bishop of Bath, as he was now called, gave its estates to his nephew under
