College of Vicars Choral

The College of Vicars Choral is a building in Hereford, England, which was originally built to house the vicars choral, or lay clerks, of the adjacent Hereford Cathedral.

The vicars choral at Hereford were incorporated as a college in 1395, at which time there were twenty-seven members. Their number was reduced to twelve, with an additional five lay members, in 1637, and the college was dissolved in 1937.^[1] Its building currently houses offices and residences for the cathedral staff.^[2]

The college building stands to the south-east of the cathedral. Its earliest parts date from c. 1473, when Bishop Stanberry had the college moved from Castle Street a short distance to the east. It takes the form of a quadrangle, with four two-storey ranges around a central courtyard; the courtyard-facing elevations of the ranges contain a cloister on their ground floor. There is an early seventeenth century chapel in the east range, and a late seventeenth century hall projects south from the south range. The college is connected to the cathedral by a corridor, probably of late fifteenth-century date, which runs between the north-west corner of the former and the south-west transept of the latter.^[3]