The cathedral has but few monuments, and these are not of great interest. It is somewhat remarkable that monuments seem to prevail in some cathedrals, and that there is an absence of them in the others. Some communities then, as in our own day, appeared to consider the commemoration of the dead as a religious duty, and others to neglect the practice, or consider it hardly worthy of their attention. The places of New England burial in their respective variety of care or neglect attest this.
"For thus our fathers testified,-- That he might read who ran,-- The emptiness of human pride, The nothingness of man."
This cathedral has had a long list of bishops, and among them very distinguished men. The name Durham has an ecclesiastical charm to a churchman, and to him the phrase, "Bishop of Durham," suggests honor, dignity, and renown.
Here once presided Bishop Poore, the famous architect of the cathedral of Salisbury. He was translated from that See to this, and was bishop here from 1228 to 1237, when he died; and then, in 1311, Richard Kellow was elected bishop. He brought with him an inflexible piety, but colored with the extremest humility of the cloister. He was celebrated for a steady and unflinching sense of duty. The meanest vassal shared his protection, and neither wealth nor rank could with him screen a criminal from punishment; and the proudest baron within his bishopric was once obliged to submit to the public penance imposed by a humble ecclesiastic, who, without forgetting his duties, made the imposition, and was sustained by Kellow.
Richard Fox, the founder of Corpus Christi College at Oxford, was bishop here from 1494 to 1501, when he was translated to Winchester. He was afflicted with blindness for many years before his death, but under the pressure of age and infirmity, yet doing his work well, his spirit of integrity was yet unbroken; and when Cardinal Wolsey, desiring his place, wished him to resign his bishopric, he replied that he could no longer distinguish black from white, yet he could discriminate right from wrong, truth from falsehood, and could well discern the malice of an ungrateful man. He then warned the proud favorite of the king to beware, lest ambition should render him blind to his surely approaching ruin; and he bade him attend closer to the king's legitimate business, and leave Winchester to her bishop. The aged prelate died in 1528, and was buried in his own chapel in Winchester Cathedral, where his tomb and its monument exist as fine specimens of the latest style of Gothic architecture.