diocese of London, England
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.
New Catholic Dictionary
