HE foundation of this cathedral was due to an unhappy love and a treacherous crime. Offa, king of Mercia, a great warrior and leader of men, had a very lovely daughter. Ethelbert, king of the East Angles, saw her, loved her passionately, and asked her of her father for his wife. Offa received the proposal graciously, and invited Ethelbert to visit him at his palace at Sutton, about three miles from Hereford. On the young king's arrival he was treated with great kindness and courtesy by the king, and his love was returned by the princess. But Offa's queen was a Lady Macbeth in character. She saw only in the visit of her daughter's lover a chance of securing the kingdom of East Anglia for her husband. She insinuated her evil thought into the mind of her lord, and by her influence and exhortations he was induced to forget the duties of hospitality and the sanctity of a guest's person, and to consent to the queen's crime, She had a hollow space beneath her bedchamber. Inviting Ethelbert into her room, on pretence of showing him something, she pushed him down an opening made into this cavity, and left him to be stifled there, her agents securely covering the oaken floor over him. He was, when dead, removed, and a royal burial was given to him, his sudden death being, we suppose, plausibly accounted for by the king. Another legend changes the manner of his murder, and says he was beheaded. In either case, on the night of his burial a column of light, as bright as the sun, is said to have appeared, rising towards heaven, and three nights after the figure of the wounded king appeared to a nobleman named Brithfrid (probably one of his own subjects), and commanded him to carry his body to a place called Stratus Waye, and to bury it near the monastery there. Brithfrid obeyed his dead master, and bore away the body and head on a rude carriage. On the way the head was jerked out, but was found by a blind man, who picked it up and restored it to the driver; in return he received his sight. On their arrival at Stratus Waye, now called Hereford, they interred the body.

The numerous miracles that usually attended the burial of a betrayed and murdered person of eminence then commenced, and were so wonderful that Offa sent two bishops to Hereford to inquire into the matter. They saw a Welsh bishop cured of palsy at the tomb, and at once confirmed the reports of its sanctity and power.

Offa believed their account of the miracle, and was not a little alarmed at finding that he had murdered, or permitted the murder, of a saint. He at once erected a magnificent tomb over the remains of his victim, and gave the tenth of all his possessions to the saint, i.e., to the monastery where he was buried. He was so troubled by his conscience that he made a pilgrimage to Rome to get absolution from the Pope, and consented, at the request of his Holiness, to make his kingdom pay Peter's Pence in future.

Milfrid, governor of Mercia under King Egbert, built over the tomb a stone church. By the beginning of the eleventh century it became decayed, and Bishop Athelstan rebuilt it. The Welsh destroyed his building in an incursion in 1055, and one of William the Conqueror's Norman bishops, Robert de Lozing or Lozinga, built instead of it the existing cathedral. This bishop was an able architect as well as priest and mathematician; but he was extremely superstitious. It may be remembered by the reader that he was an astrologer, and that when invited to attend the dedication of Lincoln Cathedral by Remigius, he declined, because, he said, the stars foretold that the cathedral would not be dedicated during the lifetime of Remigius. He was the only bishop not present when the dedication took place; but then Remigius himself was dead, having died suddenly the day before that fixed for the ceremony, and thus confirmed the superstition of his friend.

During the illness of Wulstan, Bishop of Worcester - he who fixed his staff, as we have told, in Edward the Confessor's tomb - Lozing being then at court, had a dream in which the form of his friend appeared before him, saying, "If you wish to see me before I die, hasten to Worcester."

Hurrying to the king, Lozing obtained leave to go there, and travelled night and day till he reached Cricklade, where, overcome by fatigue, he slept. His friend again appeared to him in a dream saying, "Thou hast done what fervent love could dictate, but art too late. I am now dead; and thou wilt not long survive me; but lest thou shouldst consider this only a fantastic dream, know that after my body has been committed to the earth a gift shall be given to thee which thou shalt recognise as having belonged to me."

Lozing, much depressed, hurried on, however, the following morning to Worcester, but found on his arrival that Wulstan, the last of the Saxon bishops, lay dead. In much sorrow he read the service over his noble old friend's grave, and was then preparing to return home when the priest said to him, "Receive as a testimony of our departed lord's love this lambskin cap which he wore."

Lozing shuddered, and doubted not that he had really seen and heard Wulstan.

The prophecy probably wrought its own fulfilment. Wulstan died in January, 1094, Lozin; in June of the same year.

The cathedral stands near the banks of the beautiful Wye. Its chief characteristic is its broad, low, and highly enriched square tower. The original west front was lost, being destroyed by the fall of a tower - a noble one. A very inferior one now supplies its place.

In its extreme length the cathedral measures 325 feet; the extent of the great transept is 100 feet; the height of the body of the church, 91 feet. There were two beautiful appendages formerly to the cathedral - the chapter-house and a genuine Saxon chapel; but they were destroyed during the last century. There are many, objects of great interest, and some very fine and highly decorated monuments in Hereford Cathedral.