The first Cathedral at Worcester was built by St. Oswald in 983 A.D. but was almost completely destroyed when Wulstan built the great Norman Church in 1084. All that remains of St. Oswald's Cathedral is the Saxon arcade in the Slype in the Cloisters.
It was at the building of the Saxon Cathedral that a 'miracle' was ascribed to St. Oswald. The story has come down to us as follows:
'A square stone lay not far from it, very fit and necessary to be used in it, which all the artificers could not stir out of place. Oswald, seeing the fruitless pains they took, wondered; but silently praying to his God, his eyes were opened, and he saw sitting on the stone a little black devil, deriding the labourers with obscene gestures, upon which the Man of God, making the sign of the cross, drove him away, and the stone, which eighty men could not move before, was by three persons easily lifted up and put into the place designed for it'.