St Albans in English Church History

The institution that grew from the martyr’s grave: the Benedictine abbey that claimed — and by papal grant of the English pope Adrian IV obtained — precedence among the monasteries of England; the historical school of Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris that made St Albans the chronicle-house of the realm; the assembly of 1213 and the revolt of 1381 that made it a stage of constitutional history; and the after-history — dissolution, town church, and the Victorian diocese whose cathedral now keeps the restored shrine.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism, Roman Britain)

The Premier Abbey

Whatever the truth of the Offa foundation narrative (see The Abbey and the Shrine), the medieval abbey of St Alban was a first-rank power in the English Church: a great Benedictine house on Watling Street a day’s ride from London, holding wide estates and an exempt “liberty,” rebuilt from 1077 by Abbot Paul of Caen with Roman brick from Verulamium’s ruins (Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, ed. H. T. Riley, Rolls Series, London, 1867). Its singular boast came in the twelfth century, from a local boy made supremely good: Nicholas Breakspear of the St Albans district, who as Pope Adrian IV (1154–1159) — the only English pope — granted the abbey exceptional privileges, by house tradition including the precedence of its abbot among the abbots of England, in honour of the protomartyr whose church it kept (Gesta Abbatum, ed. Riley; the abbey pressed the claim, styled “premier abbey,” for the rest of the Middle Ages) [Disputed: the precise scope and texts of Adrian IV’s grants are known substantially through the abbey’s own records, an archive with a documented habit of improvement (cf. Crick, ed., Charters of St Albans, Anglo-Saxon Charters 12, Oxford: OUP, 2007, for the pre-Conquest stratum); the papal connection itself and substantial privileges are not in doubt]. The abbey’s rank made the martyr’s cult a national institution: the shrine of England’s first saint, kept by England’s first abbey, on the road from London to the Midlands.

The Chronicle-House of England

St Albans’s most enduring contribution to English church history was made in its scriptorium. From the early thirteenth century the abbey maintained what modern scholarship calls the St Albans school of historiography: an in-house tradition of national chronicle-writing, running from Roger of Wendover (d. 1236), whose Flores Historiarum is a principal narrative source for the reigns of John and Henry III, to his successor Matthew Paris (d. 1259), the greatest and most prolific chronicler of medieval England — historian, artist, cartographer, hagiographer — whose Chronica Majora remains fundamental for thirteenth-century Europe, and thence through Thomas Walsingham (d. c. 1422), the chief narrative source for the Peasants’ Revolt and the Lancastrian usurpation (Vaughan, Matthew Paris, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958; Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307, London: Routledge, 1974, chs. on Wendover and Paris). The house that guarded Alban’s relics also, in effect, guarded the realm’s memory; and Matthew Paris joined the two vocations in his illustrated Life of St Alban, the summit of the martyr’s medieval legend (Dublin, Trinity College MS 177; Wogan-Browne and Fenster, trans., The Life of St Alban by Matthew Paris, Tempe: ACMRS, 2010; see Gildas, Bede, and the Medieval Legend).

The abbey was also, on the chroniclers’ own showing, a stage for the realm’s constitutional drama. On 4 August 1213 a council of magnates and clergy met at St Albans — remembered by the St Albans writers as an early airing of the demands that ripened into Magna Carta two years later (Roger of Wendover, Flores Historiarum, s.a. 1213; the assembly’s precise constitutional weight is a matter for the historians of the charter, but its venue is the abbey’s fixed claim on the story). In 1381, during the Peasants’ Revolt, the townsmen of St Albans under William Grindecobbe rose against the abbey’s lordship, extracting charters that were afterwards revoked; the revolt’s suppression brought the itinerant royal courts to the town, where John Ball, the priest of the rising, was executed on 15 July 1381 — all of it narrated, from the abbey’s side, by Thomas Walsingham (Walsingham, Chronica Maiora, s.a. 1381; Gransden, Historical Writing in England II, 1982). The martyr’s town thus witnessed, in one summer, the collision of English lordship and English liberty — with the abbey, uncomfortably, on lordship’s side.

Dissolution and the Long Parish Centuries

The abbey fell with its order: surrendered and dissolved on 5 December 1539, the shrine destroyed, the monks pensioned, the estates dispersed (see The Abbey and the Shrine for the shrine’s fate). The great church survived by purchase: in 1553 the town bought it to serve as the parish church of St Albans, and for three centuries the largest parish church in England slowly decayed under a burden of maintenance no parish could carry — the nave partly derelict, the Lady Chapel serving as the town grammar school. The Victorian rescue came in two instalments: structural restoration from the 1850s–70s (Sir George Gilbert Scott), and then the drastic, controversial rebuilding funded and imposed by Edmund Beckett, Lord Grimthorpe, in the 1880s, which saved the fabric at the cost of the west front’s medieval character — a standing lesson in the perils of wealthy zeal (on the building’s post-Reformation and Victorian history see the architectural studies in Henig and Lindley, eds., Alban and St Albans, Leeds: Maney, 2001).

Diocese and Cathedral, 1877

Institutional resurrection followed physical. In 1877 the ancient abbey church became a cathedral: the Diocese of St Albans was created by Act of Parliament out of the diocese of Rochester, covering Hertfordshire and (then) Essex, with the abbey church as its seat and the city raised to city status in the same era (the diocese’s foundation is documented in its own records and the standard histories of the Victorian church; the first bishop, Thomas Legh Claughton, was enthroned in 1877). The medieval title survives in the cathedral’s formal name — the Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban — and the ancient cult revived with the building: the shrine reassembled in 1872 was restored to use in 1993, the annual Alban Pilgrimage around 22 June now brings thousands to the city with its great procession, and the cathedral presents itself, with pardonable pride and defensible history, as the shrine-church of Britain’s first saint (St Albans Cathedral, pilgrimage and shrine literature; see The Abbey and the Shrine and Protomartyr of Britain).

The Pattern

Seen whole, the St Albans story is a case study in how a martyr’s cult structures a national church’s history. The grave makes a shrine; the shrine makes an abbey; the abbey makes a town, a school of history, a liberty, a stage for king and commons; the ruin of the abbey leaves a church too great to lose, which becomes a cathedral; the cathedral revives the pilgrimage; and at every stage the generative datum is the one fixed thing — the name of a man executed seventeen centuries ago, on a date no one knows, for sheltering a hunted priest. Institutions rose and fell around him; the cult persisted through all of them. For the Orthodox observer this is Holy Tradition working in its ordinary way: the Church’s memory of a saint outlasting, and repeatedly rebuilding, the structures that carry it (cf. Holy Tradition).

References

Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, ed. H. T. Riley. Rolls Series. London, 1867. (Paul of Caen; Adrian IV’s privileges; the abbey’s institutional memory.)
Crick, Julia (ed.). Charters of St Albans. Anglo-Saxon Charters 12. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007.
Roger of Wendover. Flores Historiarum, s.a. 1213. (The St Albans assembly.)
Thomas Walsingham. Chronica Maiora, s.a. 1381. (The town’s revolt; John Ball’s execution at St Albans, 15 July 1381.)
Vaughan, Richard. Matthew Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958. (The St Albans school; Paris’s life and works.)
Gransden, Antonia. Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307. London: Routledge, 1974; and Historical Writing in England II: c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1982. (Wendover, Paris, Walsingham.)
Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, and Thelma S. Fenster (trans.). The Life of St Alban by Matthew Paris. Tempe: ACMRS, 2010.
Henig, Martin, and Phillip Lindley (eds.). Alban and St Albans: Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology. Leeds: Maney, 2001. (The building’s history; the Victorian restorations.)
St Albans Cathedral. Pilgrimage and shrine literature (the modern Alban Pilgrimage; the 1993 restoration).