The Normans brought many changes to the religious life of the city, of which the most dramatic was the transfer of the north-west Mercian see in 1075 from Lichfield to St. John's, already an episcopal possession. The reasons for the move were mixed. Chester was much larger and more important than Lichfield, and the bishop already had considerable property there. The new Norman bishop, Peter, may also have seen a chance for diocesan expansion in tandem with the earl's plans for the conquest of north Wales. There was then no neighbouring bishop at St. Asaph (Flints.), and Peter may have felt that if large territories in north-east Wales were to come under his jurisdiction, Chester would be a more central base than Lichfield. His ambitions were probably stimulated by claims, inherited from his Anglo-Saxon predecessor, in the area of English occupation immediately west of the Dee.
In the event, by 1087 those claims had been rejected or ignored, and in 1098 the Norman attempt to conquer north Wales suffered a severe setback. Moreover the prospect of gaining control of the rich abbey of Coventry tempted Peter's successor Robert de Limesey away from Chester. Although any chance of a return ended with the collapse of the earl's hopes of conquering north Wales in the 1140s, and although St. John's had lost its cathedral status by 1100 and the chapter its rights in episcopal elections by 1237, the bishops continued to use Chester in their official style and to maintain a presence in the city. In the 12th century St. John's remained the centre of an ecclesiastical enclave, including the minster of St. Mary, the chapel of St. James, a hermitage, and residences for the bishop and archdeacon of Chester. The archdeaconry, probably in existence by the late 11th century and certainly by 1151, was closely associated with St. John's, where the archdeacon's court was held throughout the Middle Ages.
The Normans also established regular monasticism within the city. In 1092 Anselm, then abbot of Bec (Eure), visited Chester at Earl Hugh I's invitation to refound the minster of St. Werburgh's as a community of Benedictine monks. The new monastery received large endowments from the earl and his principal tenants, and from the beginning was clearly intended as their pantheon. Earl Hugh's cousin and leading baron, Robert of Rhuddlan, was initially buried in the abbey in 1093 or 1094, before his removal to Saint Evroul (Orne), and all the Norman earls except Richard, drowned in the White Ship, were also interred there.
St. Werburgh's also played an important part in the life of the community. The greatest landowner in Chester, it held a large manor, centred on the chapel of St. Thomas Becket outside the Northgate, where the abbot held court for his tenants. The abbey's holding included numerous properties in Northgate Street, Parsons Lane, and Bridge Street, and much extramural territory outside the Northgate, extending from the walls to the city limits and taking in most of the fields east of Bache Way. Exempted by the earls from the jurisdiction of their officials and those of the citizens, it had its own corn mill, controlled the Midsummer fair, and administered the city's principal parish, which under an arrangement probably already ancient by the 13th century was focused on the altar of St. Oswald within the abbey church. Through its parochial responsibilities it was guardian of two of the city's principal burial grounds: that immediately south of the abbey church, in being by the 12th century, and another outside the Northgate. St. Werburgh's and St. John's, which held the city's other main graveyard, took good care to defend their burial rights. In the 12th and early 13th century they negotiated agreements with new religious foundations within the city, including hospitals and friaries, to prevent them establishing burial grounds for any but their own inmates or those especially closely connected with them.
The refoundation of the abbey seems to have revitalized the cult of its patron saint. A translation feast, probably commemorating Werburg's removal to Chester and apparently known in Abingdon (Berks.) before the Conquest, was revived by being made the focus of the city's summer fair. By 1150 Werburg's association with Chester was sufficiently well known for William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon erroneously (but apparently independently) to make the city the scene of the saint's resurrection of a goose that had been cooked and eaten. The story was an embellished version of a miracle in the earliest surviving Life of the saint, probably compiled at Ely (Cambs), and may reflect a separate tradition preserved in Chester by the monks of the new abbey.