Church of St Catherine, Montacute

The Church of St Catherine at Montacute, in the golden-stone country of south Somerset, is a beautiful and historic Anglican parish church, first built in the twelfth century and listed at Grade II*. Standing in one of the loveliest villages in the county — famous above all for the great Elizabethan mansion of Montacute House — the church is bound up with the history of a Cluniac priory, with the powerful Phelips family who built the house, and with one of the most remarkable legends of late Anglo-Saxon England: the story of the Holy Rood of Montacute, a miraculous cross whose discovery here led to the founding of Waltham Abbey and which became the battle-cry of King Harold's armies at the Battle of Hastings.

Montacute has been a place of religious significance since at least the year 1035, when, according to the famous legend, a black stone crucifix — a life-sized Holy Rood — was discovered on the steep hill above the village, from which Montacute takes its name (the Latin mons acutus, the "sharp hill", now St Michael's Hill). The cross was loaded onto a cart by Tofig the Proud, a great landowner, who named a series of his estates as possible destinations; the oxen pulling the wagon refused to move until he named Waltham in Essex, whereupon they set off and continued without stopping until they reached it. There Tofig built Waltham Abbey to house the holy cross, which became a celebrated object of pilgrimage, venerated above all by Harold Godwinson. "Holy Cross" became the battle-cry of Harold's armies at the battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings in 1066, and legend holds that the Rood foretold his defeat: stopping to pray at Waltham on his way south to Hastings, Harold is said to have seen the figure of Christ "bow down" off the wall, a portent of the doom that awaited him. Thus the quiet Somerset village of Montacute is woven into the very fabric of the Norman Conquest.

The church itself grew up in association with Montacute Priory, a Cluniac monastery of the Benedictine order founded between 1078 and 1102 by William, Count of Mortain — built, tradition holds, under threat that the King would otherwise seize his land. It was the only Somerset dependency of the great abbey of Cluny in France until 1407, when it gained its independence, and at its height in 1262 it housed twenty-five monks. Around 1100 a church dedicated to St Peter was built in association with the priory, and by about 1200 a chapel dedicated to St Catherine had been added next to the monks' burial ground. Village tradition holds that the earlier church of St Peter was destroyed by fire, and fire-reddened carved stones said to come from it were later reused elsewhere in the village. When the priory was dissolved in 1539 — after a brief restoration under the Catholic Queen Mary — St Catherine's became the parish church of Montacute, the role it has held ever since. The extensive earthworks to the south of the church, including what may be the claustral range and a fishpond, are all that remain visible of the once-great priory.

Much of the fabric of the present church dates from its thirteenth-century extension, while the tower was added in the fifteenth century, in the great age of Somerset church-building, and the church was sympathetically restored in the Victorian period. Within, the church is rich in monuments to the Phelips family, the great landowners of Montacute who built the magnificent Montacute House nearby; their tombs and memorials make St Catherine's a gallery of the family that shaped the village for centuries. Sir Edward Phelips, who built the house at the very end of the sixteenth century, was a distinguished lawyer who served as Master of the Rolls and as Speaker of the House of Commons, and who opened the prosecution at the trial of the Gunpowder Plotters in 1605 — so that the church's monuments connect this quiet village to the high politics of Tudor and Stuart England.

For all the grandeur of its associations, St Catherine's remains a working village church, serving the small and beautiful community of Montacute. Built of the warm honey-coloured ham stone — quarried from nearby Ham Hill — that gives the whole village its mellow glow, it sits at the heart of a settlement that is itself a treasure of vernacular architecture, and it continues to gather the people of Montacute for worship as it has done for some eight centuries.

The church stands in the centre of the village of Montacute, in south Somerset near the town of Yeovil. Beside it rises the great Elizabethan splendour of Montacute House, one of the finest houses of its age in England, now in the care of the National Trust, with its long gallery, its formal gardens and its collection of Tudor and Jacobean portraits. St Michael's Hill, crowned by its eighteenth-century tower and the site of the Holy Rood's discovery, rises above the village; the ancient quarries and country park of Ham Hill, with its Iron Age hillfort, lie nearby; and the wider landscape of south Somerset, with its golden-stone villages and the towns of Yeovil and Sherborne, is all within easy reach.

From the discovery of the Holy Rood in 1035 and the legend that links Montacute to Waltham Abbey and the Battle of Hastings, through the founding of the Cluniac priory and the building of the church, its survival of the Dissolution to become the parish church, and the monuments of the Phelips family of Montacute House, the Church of St Catherine gathers nearly a thousand years of Somerset history into one ham-stone building. A Grade II* listed church at the heart of one of England's most beautiful villages, it remains the living parish church of Montacute — a place where Anglo-Saxon legend, monastic history and Elizabethan grandeur meet beneath the steep hill that gave the village its name.