There is still a cattle market in Hereford (they don’t call those beef cattle Herefords for nothing), but it is now used as an open-air market. There is also a cathedral and several government buildings from long ago. Both of us are very interested in architecture and history – and cathedrals combine both. It may sound as if we are on a religious pilgrimage, but we are really on a historical hunt. There are all kinds of shops in all these towns, but we aren’t really interested in shopping (although Ron has never seen a supermarket that he didn’t want to visit). We like to walk the streets, see the really old buildings and listen to the voices around us.

Back to Hereford. This is a very old cathedral, built by the Normans back in the 11^th and 12^th centuries, using huge circular columns. Perhaps the most pleasing part was the so-called Lady Chapel, which has beautiful stained glass windows, but it was all interesting. There were the usual groups of school children. One group was middle school age, and they were all dressed in medieval costumes and were being instructed in how to conduct a medieval pilgrimage. As the lady next to me said, school was never like this before.

We decided not to view the Mappa Mundi (the very first map of the world) which is owned by the cathedral. We looked at the tomb of a knight whose name was Pembridge (which turned out to be the name of the next town we saw) and who fought in the Battle of Poitier in 1356. This was very interesting to both of us because Poitier and nearby Crecy, both in France, were places where battles occurred that permanently changed the way wars were fought. In both places, English long-bow archers decimated the French chivalric knights who fought in armor on horseback with lances, swords and axes. These battles marked the end of that sort of fighting.

We were ready to leave, when Adelle asked the Verger about the dispute during the English Civil War about altars made of stone. Why should the Puritans demand that they be taken away and replaced by altars made of wood, preferably a wooden table. The Verger stopped a volunteer guide, and asked that the guide tell us about it. He never did really explain why the Parliamentary Army and Cromwell got so incensed about an altar of stone. However, he did explain a lot of other things about the cathedral to us, pointing out the pagan images that are sculpted in stone in various places. And showing us the 26,000 stone flowers that were used to decorate the arches as well as the bell tower. These were quite expensive, since it took a mason one full day to make three! The cathedral had to negotiate a loan from the Vatican sometime in the 15^th century just to pay for them!

As we go through these buildings, we consistently see the names of the men whose exploits are described in the histories we are reading. Sometimes they paid for parts of the cathedrals, or donated something to them, and sometimes they are buried there. In any case, it adds interest both to the building and to the history book.