Stand on Pride Hill and you can feel it - the slope falling away on every side toward the brown ribbon of the Severn. Roger de Montgomery understood the geography. When William the Conqueror handed him Shropshire in 1071, he chose the high ground at the neck of the meander and raised a red sandstone castle there in 1074, demolishing fifty-one homes to do it. Twelve years later he founded Shrewsbury Abbey on the eastern side of the river, completing the pincer. The town between them - guarded by water on one face and stone on the other - became the natural capital of the marches between England and Wales. It has been the county town of Shropshire ever since.

On a July afternoon in 1403, Henry IV broke the rebellion of Henry Percy in a field a few miles north of town. Hotspur died in the fighting, his body taken away by Thomas Neville for burial at Whitchurch. Then rumour started: Percy was alive, the rumours said, hiding somewhere in the north. The king reacted as kings did. He had the corpse exhumed, brought to Shrewsbury, and propped upright in the market place between two millstones for the crowd to see. Only after that public display - posthumous execution, the chronicles call it - was Hotspur finally allowed his rest. Eighty years earlier, in 1283, Edward I had summoned Parliament here to sentence Dafydd ap Gruffydd, the last native Prince of Wales, to be hanged, drawn, and quartered in the streets. It was one of the first parliaments at which commoners were represented. Even Shrewsbury's worst days came with constitutional firsts.

On 12 February 1809, in a large Georgian house called The Mount above the western bank of the Severn, Susannah Darwin gave birth to her fifth child. They called him Charles. He would spend his boyhood roaming the river meadows, attending Shrewsbury School in its old buildings on Castle Street, and listening - without much enthusiasm - to the Greek and Latin lessons that bored him senseless. Years later he would write that school had taught him almost nothing useful. But the river, and the Shropshire fossils, and the long hours wandering Wenlock Edge with a collecting jar - those stayed. Shrewsbury claims him now without apology. A bronze statue of Darwin sits outside the library that occupies his old school building, and the town's slogan, once "Town of Flowers," was changed in 2007 to "The Birthplace of Charles Darwin."

Shrewsbury Abbey survived the Reformation in pieces - the eastern parts demolished, the nave kept as a parish church - and slept through the centuries as Holy Cross, a working church inside the bones of a Norman monastery. Then in 1977 the novelist Edith Pargeter, writing as Ellis Peters, set a murder mystery here. She called her hero Brother Cadfael, a Welsh Benedictine herbalist with a battlefield past, and the books spread across the world. Television adaptations followed. Pilgrims still come - not to St Winifred, whose relics were brought from Wales in 1138 and made the abbey a major medieval shrine, but to the fictional monk who solves crimes in her shadow. Cadfael's herb garden is now planted at the abbey gate, a quiet act of literary tourism the medieval pilgrims would have understood perfectly.

Walk the town long enough and you learn its private language. The narrow alleys that thread between buildings are not lanes or passages but shuts - from "shoot through," the way you slip from one street to another. Wyle Cop is said to hold the longest uninterrupted row of independent shops in Britain. Grope Lane is exactly what it sounds like, and has been since the Middle Ages. The covered market, named Britain's Favourite Market four years running by 2025, sells everything from raw oysters to vinyl records. Try a Shrewsbury cake, mentioned in William Congreve's 1700 play The Way of the World - "as short as a Shrewsbury cake" - a crisp lemon biscuit traced back to a Mr Pailin in 1760, whose shop near Castle Street is marked by a small plaque. The town has been making them, and arguing about the recipe, for more than two and a half centuries.