It’s the most famous date in English history. So famous it barely needs a name. Just 1066, and everyone knows what you mean.
So pivotal was the Battle of Hastings that it still, to this day, captures our imaginations. More than 100,000 people trek down to East Sussex every year to stand on the ground where the battle took place, nearly a thousand years after it happened.
The Abbey built to commemorate it still dominates the surrounding countryside, and is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Southern England.
Far fewer cross the road to the modest Norman church standing directly opposite, St Mary the Virgin -one of the most quietly fascinating buildings in East Sussex.
This blog is part of my Building of the Week series, where I explore a different remarkable story each week.
A town born from bloodshed
We all know the story of the Battle of Hastings. William the Conqueror, believing he was the rightful King of England, landed upon its shores.
Initially he found it undefended, and marched several miles inland, where he met Harold Godwinson (the actual King) and his army, defending from the high point of Senlac Hill.
What ensued was a bloodbath. The battle lasted for hours and in a single afternoon, thousands died. Bodies strewn across the nondescript English countryside.
William was, of course, victorious. A few months later he was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey, and the trajectory of the whole nation was changed.
But he needed legitimacy. The often repeated story is that the Pope ordered William to build an Abbey, as penance for the killing at the Battle. And so a new Abbey was born out of the bloodshed, on the very same fields.
For William, the Abbey was also extremely useful politically. It consecrated the Norman victory in stone. God willed this, he was saying.
The Abbey quickly grew to be one of the most wealthy in the country, boosted by visiting pilgrims, and with this came jobs. Builders were needed. Cooks, markets, tanneries, shoemakers, and many more besides.
The town of Battle grew up around it, and much of that medieval character survives to this day.
A church to keep the riffraff out
At first, the townsfolk were allowed to use the Abbey’s church, one of the largest in the country at the time.
But being a Benedictine Monk was serious business. They needed to pray several times a day, and all those plebeians just kept getting in the way.
So in the early 12th century, the Abbey founded a new church for the town: St Mary the Virgin. Much of what we see today dates from around 1200, with later additions including the tower, which is largely 15th century.
Understated next to the in-your-face abbey next door, it’s Grade I listed and designated one of only 300 Major Parish Churches in England.
This story also marked the start of a legacy that continues to this day: the title of Dean of Battle, a continuous role since the 12th century.
The dissolution and a town in decline
When Henry VIII began the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, Battle had a lot to lose. The Abbey was literally the reason the town existed. It had built it, employed it and fed it.
Practically overnight, this economic and cultural heart was gone. Parts of the Abbey slowly fell into ruins; the rest became an aristocratic family’s country home.
The town of Battle ceased to grow. In the 18th century, the writer Daniel Defoe described it as “remarkable for little now, but for making the finest gun-powder”: a bleak epitaph for what had been one of the most important monastic centres in southern England, and the wealthy town that had sprung up around it.
Medieval wall paintings, whitewashed
If you’d visited St Mary’s in the 15th century, you’d have been met with something remarkable.
Many parish churches’ walls were extensively painted with biblical scenes at the time – but even by those standards, St Mary’s would have stood out.
Its walls carried an ambitious and carefully executed scheme, the work of skilled painters likely associated with the Abbey itself rather than the rougher hands seen in many parish churches.
The Reformation, which believed visual decoration to be unholy decadence, put an end to that. Its statues were removed, and those accomplished wall paintings were whitewashed over.
They were hidden until the 19th century, when they were uncovered during Victorian restoration work. W.H. Brooke produced a meticulous set of watercolours recording the full scheme. Then, maddeningly, they were covered over again. When the church underwent major restoration 22 years later, half were destroyed in the process.
Nonetheless, what we see today is still remarkable. Faded but legible: scenes from the life of St Margaret of Antioch, her birth, tortures, execution and entry to heaven.
Battle’s paintings are unusually extensive, and executed with a clarity and confidence that lifts them above the fragmentary remains found in many churches.
The Crusaders’ crosses
The church’s hidden details don’t end there. Carved into one of the nave pillars are a series of small crosses, said to have been scored into the stone by crusader knights with their swords.
This was common practice during the crusades: carving crosses before departing for the Holy Land as a mark of piety. A prayer scratched into permanence in case you never came back.
It took me far too long to find these crosses. They’re very small and easy to miss, hidden round the back of a pillar directly by the Dean’s stall, just past the altar.
But it was worth the effort to see such a simple message carved into stone, and imagine the young men who made those marks, motivated by a misguided sense of honour, in search of a glory they wouldn’t find, convinced God was on their side.
If you know where to look, you’ll find marks like these in many medieval churches. But in Battle, they seem to hold extra weight. A church built in the shadow of an abbey founded as penance for violent conquest, marks carved by knights in search of another.
A town that lives with its history
Battle is a town that wears its history with pride – and why wouldn’t it? 1066 is everywhere, and the town has always drawn visitors: first pilgrims, now tourists.
This pride has found its way into the church, too. A small tapestry, made by local people in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry, tells the story of the town from abbey settlement to the present day. More striking is the Senlac stained glass window, a modern installation commemorating the battle.
William the Conqueror and Harold Godwinson face each other across the glass, enemies frozen in coloured light nearly a thousand years after their confrontation on the hill outside.
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