After the slaughter of St. Brice's Day, King Ethelred made a vow that he would rebuild St. Frideswide's church. And well did he keep it; if in 1004 he built the splendid church which forms the main part of the cathedral as we know it to-day, sparing the more sacred part of the rude old building, it may be, because of the veneration in which everything connected with St. Frideswide was held. His charter contains the following sentence:--
"In the year of our Lord 1004, in the 2nd indiction, and in the 25th year of my reign, according to the disposal of God's providence, I Ethelred ruling over the whole of Albion, have with liberty of charters by royal authority and for the love of the Almighty, established a certain monastery situated in the city which is called Oxoneford, where the body of St. Frideswide reposes."
And here another question of the deepest architectural interest occurs. This church of Ethelred's was of a size and magnificence until lately considered not to have been attainable in England till many years after the Conquest. It was therefore taken for granted that the church was wholly rebuilt in the years 1160-1180, and that Ethelred's work was as entirely lost as Didan's was supposed to be. Dr. James Ingram, President of Trinity, had, it is true, written in the thirties to prove that the cathedral was Saxon, but, great authority as he was, he wrote at a time when architectural history was in its infancy; and at the restoration of 1869, Sir Gilbert Scott was content to write--"Dr. Ingram evinces great anxiety to prove that traces of his (Ethelred's) work still exist, but I need hardly say there is not a shadow of foundation for such a supposition." However, a greater authority than either of the preceding showed that the tide of knowledge was turning against the accepted view. Professor Freeman in his "History of Architecture" wrote that the cathedral might be "in the main portions of the fabric a monument of the later days of Saxon architecture," and that "the evidence between the conflicting statements which would assign it, some to the days of Æthelred II., others to those of Henry I., seems very evenly balanced;" in the former case, he said, "we have a complete minster of comparatively small size, but of the fullest cathedral type, belonging to the early part of the eleventh century." Mr. J.H. Parker, himself, who had been the chief authority for the theory that the Saxon architects built almost entirely in wood, at length changed his mind; and even went so far as to say, in the fourth edition of his "A.B.C. of Gothic Architecture," that "the Saxons, at the date of the conquest, appear to have been more advanced in the fine arts, such as sculpture, than the Normans," that "their work was more highly finished, had more ornament," and that their masonry was more finely jointed than that of the Normans.