Monastic site
The Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban
Infirmerar monkA monastery, a cathedral and a parish church; a unique set of identities for one building.
The present church, begun in 1077 and the largest building in the land at the time, replaced an earlier Benedictine abbey founded by King Offa in ad 793. Within the abbey's boundary walls a small town existed with almost every daily necessity on site or brought in from the town or outlying farms owned by the monastery. Senior monks ran the various "departments": guest house, refectory, infirmary, etc. aided by numerous lay servants and craftspeople.
A Benedictine community's prime objectives were prayer and worship, but it was also a centre for art and literature. St Albans flourished particularly from the 12th to 14th centuries. Notably, early in the 13th century Walter of Colchester beautified the church's interior with wall paintings, and the scribe Matthew Paris (1200-1259), a veritable monastic polymath, adorned his histories with innovative secular illustrations and pithy comments.
Suppressed in 1539, the present abbey church and gatehouse are all that now remain from what was once the premier Benedictine abbey in the country. Extensive but fragmentary remains of the monastic buildings, long since robbed for their building materials, lie beneath the greensward to the south. In the North West corner of the nave a large painted reconstruction shows how the abbey may have appeared prior to the Dissolution.
Following suppression the town bought the church for parish worship, the gatehouse became a prison and the Lady Chapel, "decommissioned", became a grammar school. St Albans achieved cathedral status in 1877 and is still a vibrant parish church.