Qualla: Shrewsbury Abbey

Shrewsbury Abbey: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thorvaldsson, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 25 February 1083, Roger de Montgomery walked to the altar of a small Saxon church outside the east gate of Shrewsbury, laid his gloves upon it, and pledged to build an abbey. The gloves were the legal instrument - a public bond witnessed by Warin the Sheriff and the senior men of Shropshire. Two monks from Saint-Martin-de-Séez in Normandy came across to begin the work. Roger himself eventually became a monk at his own foundation in 1094 and was buried in the abbey he had made. Nearly a thousand years later, much of what he built is rubble - but the western nave still rings with bells on Sunday mornings, and the parish goes on.

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Image: Thorvaldsson | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shrewsbury Abbey: A Welsh Saint Arrives

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The Carlisle Kid, CC BY-SA 2.0. An abbey needed relics. In 1137 or 1138, Prior Robert led a small expedition into north Wales, to Gwytherin, where Saint Winifred had been buried for nearly five hundred years. The saint - a young noblewoman whose head had been struck off by a thwarted suitor and miraculously rej...

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Image: The Carlisle Kid | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shrewsbury Abbey: The Battle at the Door

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Garlick, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 21 July 1403, the Battle of Shrewsbury was fought a few miles north of the abbey. Abbot Thomas Prestbury tried to mediate before the fighting and failed; the armies of Henry IV and Henry Percy joined battle, Hotspur died, and the king won. The chronicler Adam of Usk records th...

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Image: Michael Garlick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shrewsbury Abbey: The Lead Comes Off the Roof

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hugh Owen and John Brickdale Blakeway (1825)., Public domain. Thomas Cromwell's commissioners arrived in January 1540. The abbey was one of the last to surrender, not from resistance but because it lay at the end of the circuit. Thomas Boteler, the last abbot, took an £80 pension. The seventeen monks shared £87 6s 8d between them. Henry VII...

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Image: Hugh Owen and John Brickdale Blakeway (1825). | Public domain

Shrewsbury Abbey: Brother Cadfael's World

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1977 the novelist Edith Pargeter - who lived only a few miles away in Shropshire and wrote as Ellis Peters - published A Morbid Taste for Bones, the first of twenty Brother Cadfael mysteries set at Shrewsbury Abbey in the years around the Anarchy. Her Cadfael was a fictional W...

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Image: Diliff | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shrewsbury Abbey: Wilfred Owen's Tablet

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hugh Owen and John Brickdale Blakeway (1825)., Public domain. Inside the west end of the church, on facing walls, are two stone tablets carrying the names of parishioners who died in the First and Second World Wars. Among the First World War names is Lieutenant W. E. S. Owen MC of the Manchester Regiment - the poet Wilfred Owen, killed in t...

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Image: Hugh Owen and John Brickdale Blakeway (1825). | Public domain