St Oswald

History
The south transept of Chester Cathedral served as the ancient parish church of St. Oswald, which originally served the townships of Bache, Croughton, Great Boughton, Newton by Chester and Wervin, and parts of Blacon cum Crabwall, Upton by Chester, and the City of Chester. It also included the ancient parochial chapelry of Bruera: St. Mary. Further afield lay Iddinshall and Hilbre Island. The parish in that form perhaps represented the remains of a once much greater Anglo-Saxon unit, together with some outliers added to it only after they became part of St. Werburgh's estates. The parish was termed indifferently St. Oswald's and St. Werburgh's in the 13th century, when the parishioners used the altar of St. Oswald in the abbey nave as their chief place of worship.

A late tradition that the cult of St. Oswald was introduced when the minster was refounded by Æthelflæd of Mercia gains plausibility from the fact that she translated the same saint's remains to Gloucester in 909 after being involved in a military expedition to recover them. A new minster in Gloucester, was renamed St Oswald's Priory in his honour. Æthelflæd, and her husband Æthelred, ealdorman of Mercia, were buried in the priory, and their nephew (and foster son), King Æthelstan, was a major patron of Oswald's cult. Oswald's head was interred in Durham Cathedral together with the remains of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (a saint with whom Oswald became posthumously associated, although the two were not associated in life; Cuthbert became bishop of Lindisfarne more than forty years after Oswald's death) and other valuables in a quickly made coffin, where it is generally believed to remain, although there are at least four other claimed heads of Oswald in continental Europe.

The parish possessed burial rights in the city and its environs, originally shared only with St Johns, the other early minster church in the city. Besides the churchyard south of the abbey nave, it had by the later 12th century a cemetery outside the Northgate, associated with the chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury and served by the monks of St. Werburgh's. Its burial rights were guaranteed by agreements with St. John's and by a papal bull in the late 12th and 13th century. Shortly after 1348 the monks removed the congregation to the chapel of St. Nicholas in the south-west corner of the abbey precinct, where the parish continued to worship until 1539, when it moved back to the abbey and the chapel was leased to the city.

St Oswalds bell has an interesting history, it is said to have first been moved to Hilbre Island and then later to Bidston.

What was later the Music Hall was built in about 1300 for Simon de Albo, the abbot of St Werburgh's, Chester. It was used for a period as the church of the parish of St Oswald (who were kicked out of the Cathedral), then closed as a church and conveyed to the Mayor and Assembly of Chester in 1488. In 1545 an upper floor was inserted and it was used as the Commonhall and Wool Hall. The building was used for staging plays from around 1750, then further converted as the New Theatre in 1773 and the Theatre Royal in 1777–78. James Harrison modified it again into a hall for concerts and entertainments in 1854–55, when it was known as the Music Hall.

Sources and Links

 * British History Online;