Church of St Mary and St Hardulph, Breedon on the Hill

The Priory Church of St Mary and St Hardulph — also known as Breedon Priory — is the Church of England parish church of Breedon on the Hill in Leicestershire, and one of the most extraordinary churches in England. It stands alone on the summit of Breedon Hill, within the ramparts of an Iron Age hill fort called The Bulwarks, with the village's four hundred houses spread below to the south and Breedon Quarry biting into the hill from the east. A Grade I listed building of exceptional interest, it contains the largest collection — and some of the finest examples — of Anglo-Saxon sculpture in the country, together with a remarkable suite of Renaissance monuments to the Shirley family, the grandest of which features a life-sized alabaster skeleton carved more than twenty years before its subject's death.

Christian Breedon began in about 675, when a minster — an Anglo-Saxon monastery — was founded on the hill fort site with the consent of King Æthelred of Mercia, third son of the great pagan king Penda. The land was given by the princeps Frithuric, on condition that Hædda be made abbot — and Hædda went on to become Bishop of Lichfield, while the minster later trained Tatwine, famed for his rhyming riddles, who rose to be Archbishop of Canterbury from 731 until his death in 734. The Peterborough Chronicle of Hugh Candidus records that four saints were buried at Breedon: St Ærdulf, said in that document to be a king, and the monks St Cotta, St Benna and St Fretheric — this last perhaps Frithuric the founder himself. The identity of St Hardulf, the church's patron, has long intrigued historians: a twelfth-century Peterborough list of saints' burial places calls him "Ærdulfus rex" — Ærdulf the king — buried at Breedon, and several historians have identified him with King Eardwulf of Northumbria, though others link him instead to a holy man of Breedon connected with St Modwenna of Burton on Trent, as recorded by the early twelfth-century Abbot Geoffrey. The site of the Anglo-Saxon church, buildings and cemetery has never been fully determined, and has probably been lost to twentieth-century quarrying. By Domesday in 1086 most of the minster's lands had passed away, the surrounding manors given by William the Conqueror to the de Ferrers family, later Earls of Derby, with Henry de Ferrers as tenant-in-chief.

What survives of the minster is its sculpture — and it is breathtaking. The church contains a series of important Saxon relief carvings from the original Anglo-Saxon abbey church, some possibly among the earliest to survive in England, dated to the ninth century: Celtic patterns, lions, human figures, cocks and other birds pecking at vines. Many are set into the interior walls as if they were building stones, yet wrapped in lead sheet — a sign they were never meant to be structural, but treasured. (They are not even the hill's earliest artefacts; Neolithic finds have also been made here.)

The second monastic age began around 1120, when an Augustinian priory was founded on the hilltop as a cell of Nostell Priory in Yorkshire, usually housing three to five canons, generally sent from Nostell, which also chose the priors. One prior, Gervase, attempted to win independence from Nostell, failed, and resigned in 1244. By 1441 a visitation from William Alnwick, Bishop of Lincoln — Leicestershire then lay in the Diocese of Lincoln — found the monastery dilapidated and in debt; by 1535 only the prior remained in residence, and the Valor Ecclesiasticus recorded an annual income, after expenses, of just £24 10s 4d. The priory was surrendered for dissolution in November 1539, and the eastern part of the church with its formerly central tower was retained for parish use, the nave and other buildings later demolished.

The manor was bought by Francis Shirley, head of the local family — recusants who held to the old faith — and the Shirleys filled the church with their dead. Two substantial tomb chests of Chellaston alabaster, both by Richard and Gabriel Royley of Burton upon Trent, commemorate Francis Shirley and his wife (1571), with carved mourners arranged in pairs around the chest, and John Shirley and his wife (1585). Sir Francis's tomb yielded one of the church's strangest stories: when his great-grandson Thomas Shirley repaired it sixty years on, he recorded that Francis's body was still well preserved, with only a black mark on one toe and no sign of rot, and the body was re-wrapped and returned to its tomb. Grandest of all is the monument to Sir George Shirley, made in 1598 — more than two decades before his death in 1622 — a three-storey structure of great alabaster blocks that dominates the church. On the bottom storey lies a realistic life-sized skeleton carved in alabaster, an unusual memento mori for its time, proclaiming the mortality of those portrayed above; the second storey, on six pillars, holds two arched bays — Sir George kneeling in prayer with his two sons behind him, all in brightly painted period dress detailed in gold, facing his wife, daughter and two babies, the Latin inscription recording that his wife died in 1595, aged twenty-nine, in childbirth; and the third storey rises on six more pillars to a stone canopy with a great carved coat of arms. The monument was rebuilt in the nineteenth century by the stonemason Thomas Allt, who added his signature to the work.

The Shirley family pew, carved in 1627, now stands to the left of the great monument in the vaulted north aisle — fittingly, since that entire aisle remained in the family's separate ownership until the 1950s — while the rest of the box pews date from the eighteenth century. The churchyard holds one war grave, of a soldier of the Machine Gun Corps of the First World War.

The church has been Grade I listed since 1962. Breedon parish lies in the Deanery of North West Leicestershire, the Diocese of Leicester and the Province of Canterbury, as part of the Ashby and Breedon Team Ministry, now renamed the Flagstaff Family of Churches, alongside St Mary the Virgin and St John's Chapel at Coleorton, St Matthew's at Worthington, St Helen's and Holy Trinity at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and All Saints at Isley Walton. Thirteen centuries after Frithuric's grant, the hilltop church still keeps its saints, its Saxon beasts and vines, and its skeleton in painted alabaster — a parish church like no other in England.