London, England, diocese of
London, England, diocese of
Founded 604, with Mellitus as first bishop, after whose successor, Wine, the line is unbroken until the incumbency of the last Catholic bishop, Edmund Bonner (1553-1569), with whose imprisonment by Elizabeth the Catholic diocese ends. Numbered among its bishops are two canonized saints, Erkenwald (675) and Dunstan (958); another, Roger Niger, popularly so venerated; and six archbishops of Canterbury. The fourteenth-century Norman cathedral of Saint Paul’s, which replaced the Saxon cathedral of the tenth century, was despoiled under Henry VIII and the have used as a market and theater until its destruction by fire in 1666.