Friends' Day 2024 – a very special anniversary celebration Saturday 11 May 2024 from 1.00pm 2024 is the 75th anniversary year of the re-founding of the Fraternity of the Friends of St Albans Abbey in 1949, and to mark this important milestone we are planning an extra-special Friends’ Day programme. Our day will start with the AGM at 1.00pm in the Alban Room. This will be followed by the traditional Friends’ Day lecture delivered this year by Professor James Clark of Exeter University on ‘The social community of St Albans Abbey in the Middle Ages’. We are very pleased James can be with us – he has written widely on the life and learning of medieval monasteries and has made a particular study of the surviving archives and manuscript books of St Albans Abbey. On this occasion he will be tracing the predecessors of today’s Friends, the communities which were attached to the medieval abbey both as a place of worship and as a venerable site with a distinguished heritage. Among these was the first ‘Fraternity of St Albans’ which flourished after the Black Death and brought together the townspeople and Londoners, aristocrats and royalty with a shared devotion to the saint they knew as the ‘Protomartyr of England’. Following the lecture, we will move down to the Lady Chapel to enjoy a performance of Three Pilgrims Came, the historic masque written to accompany the re-founding ceremony in June 1949 and attended by the Duchess of Gloucester. The masque features three individuals from different walks of life who are recorded in the Book of Benefactors as supporting the medieval Abbey. This will be followed by a celebration afternoon tea in the Offa Room, catered by the Abbot’s Kitchen, then Choral Evensong at 5.00pm. All members of the Friends are warmly invited to come in person and join us for the full afternoon programme. For those unable to attend in person, both AGM and lecture will be accessible online via Zoom. Please be sure to book a ticket before the end of Sunday 5 May, choosing one of the options below. If you have any queries about the event, please email [email protected] In person: AGM only - free AGM and lecture only - £10 AGM, lecture, masque performance and afternoon tea - £18 Online: AGM only - free AGM and lecture - £10 Photo above: from the Chronicle and Register of Benefactors of the Monastery of St Albans, courtesy of the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge