The Abbey and the Shrine

The site of Alban’s grave across fifteen centuries: the church “of wonderful workmanship” that Bede knew in 731; the tradition that King Offa of Mercia founded the abbey in 793 — recorded only in the abbey’s own late sources and of disputed reliability; the great Norman and medieval abbey with its Purbeck marble shrine of c. 1308; the destruction at the dissolution in 1539; the recovery of the shrine’s smashed fragments in 1872 and the full restoration rededicated in 1993; and the Cologne relic question — St Pantaleon’s ancient claim, and the shoulder-blade relic given to St Albans in 2002.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism, Roman Britain)

From Grave to Church

The earliest state of the site is known only from texts. In 429 there was a sepulcrum worth a bishop’s pilgrimage (Constantius, Vita Germani 16, trans. Hoare, The Western Fathers, 1954; see The Visit of Germanus); by 731 Bede knew a church there “of wonderful workmanship, worthy of his martyrdom” (ecclesia est mirandi operis atque eius martyrio condigna exstructa), built “when peaceable Christian times returned,” where the sick were healed and wonders wrought to his own day (Bede, Historia ecclesiastica I.7, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, Oxford, 1969). Between those two notices lies the largest archaeological question in the dossier. Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle’s excavations south of the present cathedral (1978, 1982–84 and after) sought the Roman and early medieval predecessors of the abbey; they found no identifiable Roman martyrium, but argued from the topography — a hilltop outside the walls, in the zone of Verulamium’s cemeteries, whose sanctity alone can explain why the medieval town grew there rather than in the walled Roman city — for continuity of the cult-site from late Roman times through an Anglo-Saxon phase (Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, “The Origins of St Albans Abbey,” in Henig and Lindley, eds., Alban and St Albans, Leeds: Maney, 2001) [Disputed: direct archaeological proof of a late Roman shrine under the abbey is lacking; the continuity argument is topographical and onomastic, and is the prevailing but not a demonstrated view — Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle 2001; cf. the cautions in Sharpe, “The Late Antique Passion of St Alban,” same volume, 30–37].

Offa and 793: The Foundation Tradition

The abbey’s own history began, by its house tradition, with a king. The story as the St Albans chroniclers tell it: King Offa of Mercia (757–796), moved by an angelic vision, sought and found the long-hidden relics of the protomartyr, translated them with honour, and in 793 founded a double monastery at the site, endowing it richly and obtaining privileges from Pope Adrian I — the foundation narrative recorded in the thirteenth-century Gesta Abbatum compiled at the abbey (drawing on Matthew Paris and his predecessors), and in Roger of Wendover’s chronicle under the year 793 (Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, ed. H. T. Riley, Rolls Series, London, 1867; Roger of Wendover, Flores Historiarum, s.a. 793).

Per §3.5 the attestation gap must be stated: the full foundation narrative is first extant in sources written more than four centuries after the event, in the house with every interest in a royal founder; and the abbey’s pre-Conquest charter archive, edited by Julia Crick, is notoriously problematic — much of it forged or heavily reworked in the post-Conquest period to secure the abbey’s claims (Crick, ed., Charters of St Albans, Anglo-Saxon Charters 12, Oxford: OUP for the British Academy, 2007). [Disputed: the reliability of the 793 foundation narrative — an eighth-century Offan foundation of some kind at an already-venerated site is widely accepted as plausible (a monastery at St Albans certainly existed before the Conquest, and Offa’s patronage is consistent with his known church politics), but the date, the vision, the relic-invention, and the papal privileges rest on late and interested house tradition; Crick 2007; Levison, “St Alban and St Albans,” Antiquity 15 (1941): 337–359, already treated the Offa dossier critically.] What is certain is the sequel: by the tenth and eleventh centuries a substantial Benedictine abbey of St Alban existed, and after the Conquest Abbot Paul of Caen rebuilt it from 1077 on the grand Norman scale — largely of brick robbed from the ruins of Roman Verulamium across the river, so that the martyr’s church is built, literally, out of the martyr’s city (Gesta Abbatum, ed. Riley; Niblett, Verulamium: The Roman City of St Albans, Stroud: Tempus, 2001).

The Medieval Shrine

Through the Middle Ages St Albans was among the greatest abbeys of England — from the mid-twelfth century, by papal grant associated with the English pope Adrian IV (Nicholas Breakspear, a local man), claiming precedence among the English Benedictine houses (Gesta Abbatum, ed. Riley; see St Albans in English Church History) — and the shrine was its heart. About 1308 the relics were housed in a new shrine: a tall pedestal of Purbeck marble, carved with censing angels and scenes of the martyrdom, on which the jewelled feretory containing the relics stood; beside it a watching loft of timber (c. 1400) from which monks guarded the treasure, and nearby the companion shrine of St Amphibalus for the Redbourn relics of 1177 (on the shrines and their architectural history see the studies gathered in Henig and Lindley, eds., Alban and St Albans, Maney, 2001; on Amphibalus, Gildas, Bede, and the Medieval Legend). Pilgrimage to the martyr — attested by Bede’s healing notices in 731, by the medieval miracle collections, and by the fabric itself — was continuous for as long as the abbey stood.

1539: Destruction

It ended administratively. The abbey was dissolved on 5 December 1539 in the general suppression of the greater monasteries under Henry VIII; the shrine was demolished, its feretory’s precious metals confiscated, and the Purbeck pedestal smashed — the fragments used as rubble, much of it in a wall blocking the eastern arches of the presbytery. What became of the relics themselves is unrecorded: dispersed or destroyed, as at the other great English shrines (on the dissolution and its aftermath at St Albans see the architectural histories in Henig and Lindley 2001; the town had already, in 1553, purchased the abbey church to serve as its parish church, which is why the building — unlike most great abbeys — survived). For three centuries the martyr’s church stood shrineless, a vast parish church slowly decaying, until the Victorian restoration (and Lord Grimthorpe’s heavy-handed rebuilding of the west front) and the creation of the Diocese of St Albans in 1877 made it a cathedral (see St Albans in English Church History).

1872 and 1993: Resurrection of the Shrine

The shrine’s modern history is one of the happier stories of English antiquarianism. In 1872, during works in the presbytery, the demolished blocking wall yielded the smashed shrine itself — upwards of two thousand fragments of the 1308 Purbeck pedestal — and the pieces were painstakingly reassembled in the retrochoir, an extraordinary feat of Victorian reconstruction (the recovery and reassembly are documented in the cathedral’s architectural literature; see the studies in Henig and Lindley 2001). Twelve decades of wear later, the pedestal was conserved and re-restored in 1991–1993, completed with a new embroidered canopy over the shrine table, and rededicated in 1993, restoring the shrine to liturgical use as a place of prayer and pilgrimage — candles burn at the protomartyr’s shrine again, in a church that had lacked them for four and a half centuries (St Albans Cathedral, shrine history; Henig and Lindley 2001). The parallel shrine-base of St Amphibalus was likewise reassembled from recovered fragments (most recently re-restored in the twenty-first century).

The Cologne Question and the 2002 Relic

Where are Alban’s relics? The medieval abbey’s were lost in 1539 — but Cologne has an older and independent claim. The Romanesque church of St Pantaleon in Cologne has possessed, since the tenth century, relics venerated as those of St Alban; the tradition connects their arrival with the imperial circle of the Ottonians (the empress Theophanu, who is buried at St Pantaleon, or her contemporaries), the relics said to have been brought from Rome. Whether the Pantaleon relics are those of the British protomartyr, however, is genuinely uncertain: the Rhineland also venerated Alban of Mainz, a distinct martyr (traditionally d. c. 406, commemorated 21 June — one day before the British Alban), and the two cults were confused throughout the medieval period; Levison, who knew both dossiers intimately, treated the German Alban traditions as a study in exactly this kind of hagiographic contamination (Levison, “St Alban and St Albans,” Antiquity 15 (1941): 337–359) [Disputed: the identity of the St Pantaleon relics — the Cologne tradition claims the British Alban; the proximity and antiquity of the Mainz Alban cult makes confusion plausible; no adjudication is possible on the surviving evidence].

The modern churches have handled the question with grace rather than litigation. In June 2002, the church of St Pantaleon presented to St Albans Cathedral a relic from its Alban shrine — a shoulder-blade (scapula) — which was received with ecumenical solemnity and placed in the restored 1308 pedestal, so that the shrine of St Alban again contains a relic venerated under his name (St Albans Cathedral, shrine and relic history; the gift was widely reported at the time). Per §3.5 the relic’s chain of custody shares the Cologne claim’s uncertainty — and per the theology of relics, veneration passes to the martyr regardless: the honour is paid to Alban, at Alban’s grave-site, in the communion of one Church that the 429 relic-exchange first enacted (see The Visit of Germanus and A Pre-Schism Western Saint).

The Site as Argument

Step back, and the site itself is the cult’s best document: a hilltop outside a Roman town, venerated so persistently that a monastery, then a medieval town, then a modern city grew around the grave rather than the walls — until the map itself said St Albans where it had said Verulamium. Buildings burn, shrines are smashed, relics wander; the placement holds. That argument — geography as attestation — is weighed with the rest of the evidence in The Attestation Ledger.

See Also

References

  • Bede. Historia ecclesiastica I.7, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The church “of wonderful workmanship”; healings “to this day.”)
  • Constantius of Lyon. Vita Germani 16, trans. F. R. Hoare, The Western Fathers. London: Sheed and Ward, 1954.
  • Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, ed. H. T. Riley. Rolls Series. London, 1867. (The Offa foundation narrative; the abbey’s institutional memory; Paul of Caen’s rebuilding.)
  • Roger of Wendover. Flores Historiarum, s.a. 793. (The 793 foundation date in the chronicle tradition.)
  • Crick, Julia (ed.). Charters of St Albans. Anglo-Saxon Charters 12. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007. (The problematic pre-Conquest archive.)
  • Biddle, Martin, and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle. “The Origins of St Albans Abbey.” In Martin Henig and Phillip Lindley (eds.), Alban and St Albans: Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology. BAA Conference Transactions 24. Leeds: Maney, 2001. (The excavations; the continuity argument.)
  • Henig, Martin, and Phillip Lindley (eds.). Alban and St Albans: Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology. Leeds: Maney, 2001. (The 1308 shrine, the watching loft, the 1539 destruction, the 1872 recovery, the 1991–93 restoration.)
  • Levison, Wilhelm. “St Alban and St Albans.” Antiquity 15 (1941): 337–359. (The Offa dossier; the German Alban traditions and the Mainz confusion.)
  • Niblett, Rosalind. Verulamium: The Roman City of St Albans. Stroud: Tempus, 2001.
  • St Albans Cathedral, shrine history and the 2002 St Pantaleon relic gift (cathedral publications and contemporary reporting, June 2002).