Bede records that Saint Augustine consecrated Mellitus…
1087 CE
Bede records that Saint Augustine consecrated Mellitus as the first bishop to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Saxons and their king, Sæberht, in 604.
Sæberht's uncle and overlord, Æthelberht, king of Kent, built a church dedicated to St Paul in London, as the seat of the new bishop.
It is assumed, although unproven, that this first Anglo-Saxon cathedral stood on the same site as the later medieval and the present cathedrals.
On the death of Sæberht in about 616, his pagan sons expelled Mellitus from London, and the East Saxons reverted to paganism.
The fate of the first cathedral building is unknown.
Christianity was restored among the East Saxons in the late seventh-century and it is presumed that either the Anglo-Saxon cathedral was restored or a new building erected as the seat of bishops such as Cedd, Wine and Earconwald, the last of whom was buried in the cathedral in 693.
This building, or a successor, was destroyed by fire in 962, but rebuilt in the same year.
King Æthelred the Unready was buried in the cathedral on his death in 1016.
The cathedral is burnt, with much of the city, in a fire in 1087, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
The Normans begin building the fourth St. Paul's (generally referred to as Old St. Paul's).
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