=The Close.=--The cathedral stands in a close which was once surrounded by strong walls with bastions and a moat. Nature had supplied the moat on the south side, and the Cathedral Pool, as it is now called, is still there. The artificial moat has been drained, but its course can be easily traced running round the bishop's palace, and its water has been replaced by lovely gardens and gravel walks. Some bits of the old walls remain, the north-east bastion in the palace gardens and a turret on a house at the south corner: the "beautiful gates" of Bishop Langton are gone; but in the Vicars' Close at the west of the cathedral are two small irregular courtyards with houses so old that we feel sure that their wooden beams and plaster were there when the Royalists of the neighbourhood housed themselves within the fortified close.
The close is not large, and of course, as Lichfield is a cathedral of the old establishment, there are no monastical buildings, no ruined cloisters. On the north side the ground rises rapidly in a grassy slope to a terrace, behind which are some of the canons' houses. Opposite the north transept is the deanery, a substantial red brick house in the style of the middle of the last century; next to it, and farther east, is the bishop's palace.
=The Bishop's Palace= is of stone, and was built by Thomas Wood, the bishop who succeeded Hacket, and who is said to have been compelled to erect it as a fine for his neglect of the diocese. It bears on the front the date 1687. The old palace of Bishop Langton, which occupied the same position in the close, was swept away in the Civil Wars. The bishops of Lichfield had another palace at Eccleshall until the time of Bishop Selwyn, who sold it, and with a portion of the money erected here the two unsightly wings and the still more unsightly chapel. In the palace gardens, in the south-west corner, stood the old bell-tower of the cathedral, of whose destruction in 1315 we have a record. From the bishop's garden there is a charming view through the trees of Stowe pool and St. Chad's Church apparently standing at its farther edge: its old towers stand out finely, and the gravestones in the churchyard remind us that in far-off Mercian days St. Chad was laid to rest in this very spot.