Dean

A dean heads the chapter of clergy, known as canons, responsible for the day-to-day life and worship of a cathedral, a role distinct from and, within the cathedral's own governance, largely independent of the diocesan bishop's wider authority over the diocese as a whole; historically this independence produced genuine and sometimes public friction between a cathedral's dean and chapter and its bishop over questions of the cathedral building's use and governance, an arrangement English cathedral statutes have periodically revised to clarify since the Reformation.

Cathedrals founded on the older, pre-Reformation monastic pattern, called old foundation cathedrals in English usage, and those established or re-established at the Reformation on a secular collegiate model, new foundation cathedrals, differ somewhat in the dean and chapter's precise constitutional standing, a distinction still reflected in the governing statutes of specific English cathedrals today even though both types are headed by a dean appointed, in the Church of England, by the Crown on the Prime Minister's recommendation, a pattern of state involvement in senior cathedral appointment that has no equivalent in most other Anglican provinces.

Not every cathedral dean answers to a diocesan bishop in the ordinary way. A small number of English cathedrals and collegiate churches, including Westminster Abbey and St George's Chapel, Windsor, are royal peculiars, meaning they fall directly under the authority of the reigning monarch rather than any diocesan bishop, and their deans are appointed by the Crown and answer to it rather than to a bishop's oversight.

The Dean of Westminster, for instance, governs the Abbey's daily worship and its role as the setting for coronations and state funerals without a diocesan bishop standing above him in the Abbey's own governance. In dioceses without a royal peculiar, a dean still occupies an unusual position within the church's hierarchy: he is the senior priest of the diocese's principal church and chairs its chapter of canons, yet the diocesan bishop retains overall authority over the diocese as a whole, including the cathedral, so the two offices operate side by side rather than one simply outranking the other in every respect. The relationship between dean and bishop, spelled out in each cathedral's own statutes, has at times been a source of friction precisely because neither is straightforwardly the other's superior.