Church of St Mary, Bridgwater

The Church of St Mary, Bridgwater, is the principal Church of England parish church of the Somerset town of Bridgwater and its great landmark, its slender spire rising 174 feet above the rooftops, the tallest medieval spire in a county famous instead for its towers. Founded well before the Norman Conquest, the present building dates mainly from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a Grade I listed building recognised by the Church of England as a Major Parish Church, and the keeper of one of the most unexpected treasures in any English parish church: a vast seventeenth-century altarpiece of the Descent from the Cross, attributed by rival scholars to Murillo or to Carracci. Nikolaus Pevsner called the spire exceedingly elegant, and from its tower the Duke of Monmouth surveyed the king's army on the eve of the last battle fought on English soil.

A church at Bridgwater is recorded at the Conquest in 1066, though its site is unknown. The earliest record on the present site comes from 1107, when the church's revenue was granted to Bath Priory by the widow of Walter de Douai, a grant confirmed by his son Robert of Bampton and, in 1156, by the only English pope, Adrian IV. Walter's grandson Fulk Pagnell gave the church to the abbey of Marmoutiers near Tours in 1180, and the first vicar is recorded in 1187; in 1203 the new lord, William Brewer, reversed the French grant and restored the church to Bath in exchange for an annual hundred shillings, and from 1209 he rebuilt the church in the Early English style. In 1214 Bath, by then a cathedral priory, surrendered its remaining rights to Brewer's newly founded Hospital of St John in Bridgwater for a pension paid until the Dissolution.

The fourteenth century gave the church its silhouette. The building was extended westward, aisles added, and the west tower finished by 1318, when a great bell was hung. On 28 June 1367 work began on the spire, designed by Nicholas Whaleys and paid for by the townspeople through wills and donations, with help from neighbouring villages; massive corner buttresses were added between 1383 and 1385 to carry it, and the whole cost £137, a fortune in its day. Unusually for the West Country, the octagonal spire is almost without external ornament, its elegance lying in pure line. Around it the church was renewed in waves: the chancel rebuilt in Decorated style between 1395 and 1420, with its panelled barrel vault on outstretched-winged angels and seventy carved bosses of ferns, unicorns and sacred symbols dating from 1385 to 1416; the rood screen carved between 1414 and 1420; the nave rebuilt from 1420 to 1430; and the Lady Chapel remodelled in 1447-48. The churchwardens were already paying for organ bellows in 1448, the earliest record of music in the building.

The Reformation arrived during the forty-three-year incumbency of Thomas Strete, vicar from 1528, who began under a Catholic church ablaze with colour and light, with perhaps ten altars served by chantry priests, and ended as the first Protestant vicar of St Mary's, having weathered Henry VIII, Edward VI's suppression of the chantries, Mary's restoration and Elizabeth's settlement until his death in 1571. The age's terror touched Bridgwater directly: after the Abbot of Glastonbury was executed for refusing the royal supremacy, part of his body was displayed over the town's East Gate. War followed religion. During the Siege of Bridgwater on 21 July 1645 the church was damaged in an artillery duel between the Royalist defenders under Edmund Wyndham and Fairfax's Parliamentarians, and on 5 July 1685 the Duke of Monmouth climbed the church tower to observe James II's army assembling at Westonzoyland before the Battle of Sedgemoor, the defeat that sent him to the block eleven days later.

The modern centuries have alternated calamity and care. Lightning split the spire in 1814, and the local builder Thomas Hitchings repaired it the following year with great difficulty, lashing poles and ladders up the cone to replace the shattered capstone and threading a lightning conductor down to the belfry. William H. Brakespear, the Manchester architect who had worked with Pugin on the rebuilt Houses of Parliament, restored the church between 1848 and 1857 for some £4,000 to £5,000, renewing the nave roofs, clearing the galleries, keeping the Tudor pulpit, and splitting the medieval rood screen in two, its halves still standing behind the choir stalls with their ten mysterious carved monograms; the Jacobean Corporation Screen, made for the town councillors' chapel in the south transept, also survives with its seventeen carved heads. A further restoration of 1878 retiled the floors and cleaned the stonework. The twentieth century brought the St George's Chapel of 1920 in the old Sealy Chapel, consecrated on Armistice Day by Bishop George Kennion as the town's war memorial chapel, its carved reredos showing the Crucifixion flanked by St George and St Louis, with panels naming the dead of two world wars, Korea and the Falklands; and the reordering of 1937, which lowered the east end floor and blocked the east window to give full prominence to the great painting.

That painting remains the church's most debated possession. Given in 1780 by Lord Anne Poulet, who acquired it when the ship carrying it docked at Plymouth, the Descent from the Cross is some thirteen feet tall and eight wide, showing Christ at the foot of the cross with St John bending over him, Mary Magdalene, and the fainting Virgin. Its painter has never been established: nineteenth-century opinion favoured Murillo on the evidence of the brushwork, the Somerset Archaeological Society named Annibale Carracci of Bologna, and the Victoria County History settles for an unknown Bolognese hand. Among the church's other treasures are a rare fourteenth-century octagonal desk with Decorated tracery, returned from a cemetery chapel in 1930 and remade as a credence table, two Early English grave slabs incised with Greek crosses, and the alabaster monument of Sir Francis Kingsmill of about 1620.

The most sweeping renewal in the church's history came in the twenty-first century. Closed on 6 June 2016 for a £1 million, thirteen-month restoration designed by Mark Richmond Architects and executed by Ellis and Company, the church yielded surprises at once, the lifted Victorian floor exposing the tops of burial vaults and adding £130,000 to the bill. The great nave hammerbeam roof, resting on painted angel corbels, was blast-cleaned with soda to strip generations of wax and grime; underfloor heating was laid; and eight hundred slabs of blue lias stone from a Somerton quarry repaved the entire church, restoring the material the Victorians had stripped out in 1878. The pews were reduced, restored and set on movable frames, and the church reopened to critical acclaim in July 2017. The bells followed: a ring whose oldest voice, the treble of 1615 by George and William Purdue, is the only surviving bell in the British Isles cast by the two founders together, grew through centuries of recastings by Austen, Rudhall, the Bridgwater founder Thomas Bayley and John Taylor of Loughborough, and in 2019-20, with Heritage Lottery support, was augmented from eight to a diatonic twelve with a flat sixth, thirteen bells in all. Delayed by the pandemic, the full twelve rang together for the first time on 17 August 2021, were rededicated by Bishop Ruth Worsley of Taunton in June 2022, and received their first full peal, three hours and twenty-two minutes of Grandsire Cinques, in March 2023. The organ, descended through instruments of 1700 and the Father Willis organ of 1871, rebuilt by Vowles, Willis and Percy Daniels across the twentieth century, still leads worship in a church where a choir of sixty men and boys once sang the cathedral repertoire of the Oxford Movement revival. Tallest spire in Somerset, watchtower of a doomed rebellion, gallery of an unsolved old master: St Mary's gathers the whole history of its town beneath one exceedingly elegant point of stone.