ereford Cathedral is dedicated to St. Mary and St. Ethelbert. According to the historian Bede, in 676 Bishop Putta of Rochester, after the sack of his own city and cathedral by Aethelred, was granted a plot of land assumed to be at Hereford for a new church. In around 792 King Ethelbert of East Anglia was murdered on the order of Offa, King of the Mercians. Ethelbert's body was buried in a wooden church on the site of the present Cathedral. Between 1052 and 1056, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, Bishop Aethelstan built a new church on the site. The new church was destroyed in 1056 by Griffin King of the Welsh who killed the Cathedral's bishop and many of the clergy. The Norman invasion brought some stability and in 1080 under Bishop Losinga rebuilding work began on the Cathedral which had been in ruins since the Welsh attack. There is a chair within the Cathedral supposed to be the chair used by King Stephen at his royal proclamation in 1138.St. Thomas Cantilupe was Bishop at Hereford from 1275. He was Lord High Treasurer and twice Chancellor of Oxford. He supported Simon de Montfort in his attempts to prevent foreigners taking religious posts in England, and left the country after Simon was defeated. King Edward I brought Cantilupe back to become Hereford's Bishop. In 1786 the west end of the Cathedral fell down damaging the Norman nave. Repairs were undertaken by James Wyatt.
