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St Paul's Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral on Ludgate Hill, in the City of London, England and the seat of the Bishop of London. The present building dates from the 17th century, and is generally reckoned to be London's fifth St Paul's Cathedral, although the number is higher if every major mediæval reconstruction is counted as a new cathedral. The cathedral is one of London's most visited sites.
There had been a late-Roman See in London, but the first Saxon cathedral was built out of wood, probably by Mellitus or another of the Augustinian missionaries, on the see's re-foundation in AD 604 on Ludgate Hill in the western part of the old Roman city and the eastern part of Lundenwic. It was these missionaries' habit, as in mainland Europe, to build cathedrals within old Roman city-walls. This building is traditionally said to have been on the site of an ancient megalith, or stone circle, and a temple dedicated to the goddess Diana, in alignment with the Apollo Temple that once stood at Westminster, although Christopher Wren found no evidence of this (Kruger, 1943). This would have only been a modest chapel at first and may well have been destroyed after Mellitus was briefly expelled from the city by Saeberht's pagan successors. It burned down in 675.
The cathedral was rebuilt in stone, in 685. In it was buried King or Saint Sebbi of Essex. It was sacked by the Vikings in 961, as cited in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
The third cathedral was begun in 962, again in stone. In it was buried Ethelred the Unready. It burnt, with the whole city, in a fire in 1087 (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle).
'Old St Paul's'
Main article: Old St Paul's Cathedral
Old St. Paul's prior to 1561, with intact spire.The fourth St Paul's (known as Old St Paul's, a nineteenth century coinage, or the pre-Great Fire St Paul's), was begun by the Normans after the 1087 fire. Work took over 200 years, and a great deal was lost in a fire in 1136. The roof was once more built of wood, which was ultimately to doom the building. The church was consecrated in 1240, but a change of heart led to the commencement of an enlargement programme in 1256. This 'New Work' was completed in 1314 - the cathedral had been consecrated in 1300. It was the third-longest church in Europe. Excavations in 1878 by Francis Penrose showed it was 585 feet long and 100 feet wide (290 feet across the transepts and crossing), and had one of Europe's tallest spires, at some 489 feet (149 metres).
By the 16th century the building was decaying. Under Henry VIII and Edward VI, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Chantries Acts led to the destruction of interior ornamentation and the cloisters, charnels, crypts, chapels, shrines, chantries and other buildings in the churchyard. Many of these former religious sites in St Paul's Churchyard, having been seized by the crown, were sold as shops and rental properties, especially to printers and booksellers, who were often evangelical Protestants. Buildings that were razed often supplied ready-dressed building material for construction projects, such as the Lord Protector's city palace, Somerset House.
Crowds were drawn to the northeast corner of the Churchyard, St Paul's Cross, where open air preaching took place. In 1561 the spire was destroyed by lightning and it was not replaced; this event was taken by both Protestants and Catholics as a sign of God's displeasure at the other faction's actions.
England's first classical architect, Sir Inigo Jones, added the cathedral's west front in the 1630s, but there was much defacement and mistreatment of the building by Parliamentarian forces during the English Civil War, when the old documents and charters were dispersed and destroyed (Kelly 2004). "Old St Paul's" was gutted in the Great Fire of London of 1666. While it might have been salvageable, albeit with almost complete reconstruction, a decision was taken to build a new cathedral in a modern style instead. Indeed this had been contemplated even before the fire.
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