Church of St Mary de Castro, Leicester

St Mary de Castro is a medieval Grade I listed church standing within the bailey of Leicester Castle, a Church of England parish church in the Diocese of Leicester whose history reaches back to the age of Alfred the Great's children. Its Latin name means "St Mary of the Castle", given to distinguish it from the nearby St Mary de Pratis — "St Mary of the Meadows" — and few parish churches in England can match the royal drama that has unfolded beneath its roof: an infant king knighted at its altar, and, by long tradition, the wedding of Geoffrey Chaucer, father of English poetry.

The first church on the site was founded in 918, in the wake of the reconquest of Danish-occupied Leicester by Anglo-Saxon forces under Ethelfleda, Lady of the Mercians, and her brother Edward the Elder, both children of Alfred the Great. Along with rebuilding the town walls and restoring the church of St Nicholas, they raised the first church on what would become the site of Leicester Castle. After the Norman Conquest the church entered its great age. By 1107, after Henry I granted the lands and castle to Robert de Beaumont, it had become a collegiate church — though the chronicler Henry Knighton implies that an Anglo-Saxon college of St Mary already existed and that Robert merely refurbished it. Robert established the college within the castle bailey, served by a dean and twelve canons, in honour of the Virgin Mary and All Souls, and as a chantry chapel for the souls of himself, his family and the first three Norman kings, endowing it and four other churches with six pounds of his income and land in and near the city. In 1143 his son, Robert de Beaumont, 2nd Earl of Leicester, transferred these endowments to his own new Augustinian foundation of Leicester Abbey, but the collegiate church kept — or had restored to it — a dean, six clerks and a chaplain, together with the founder's grant of twenty shillings for lamps, its parish offerings and most of its tithes. The college endured for four centuries more, until it was disbanded in 1548 under the Chantry Act of Edward VI.

The building tells its architectural story layer by layer. The early twelfth-century church had no aisles, and stretches of those original walls survive. A major expansion around 1160 added a north aisle, doorways to north and west, and an extension to the chancel: the two doorways carry external Norman zigzag decoration, but the glory of this phase is the sedilia and piscina in the chancel extension, which Nikolaus Pevsner judged "the finest piece of Norman decoration in the county". Thirteenth-century alterations culminated in a sweeping reworking of the transepts and south aisle that left the aisle wider than the nave itself, creating far more room for the parishioners of the growing town, and the large geometrical traceried east window of the south aisle followed around 1300. The tower was built inside the south aisle — apparently as an afterthought — rising to a quatrefoil frieze, four decorated pinnacles and a recessed parapet spire climbing from behind the battlements. That fourteenth-century octagonal spire, rebuilt in 1783 with its crockets and three tiers of lucarnes retained, defined Leicester's western skyline for centuries. The interior was heavily restored by George Gilbert Scott through the 1860s, when much of the stonework and the furnishings were replaced.

The church's roll of notable events is extraordinary for a parish church. Around 1366, it is rumoured, Geoffrey Chaucer married Philippa de Roet here — a lady-in-waiting to Edward III's queen, Philippa of Hainault, and sister of Katherine Swynford, who in about 1396 became the third wife of Chaucer's friend and patron, John of Gaunt, lord of Leicester Castle. Sixty years later, at Whitsuntide 1426, while the famous "Parliament of Bats" met at the castle, the infant king Henry VI was knighted in the church by his uncle John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France; the five-year-old king then proceeded to dub a further forty-four knights on the same occasion, the first of them Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York — the man whose claim to the throne would one day ignite the Wars of the Roses against Henry himself. In gentler centuries, William Bickerstaffe, a charitable local schoolmaster and antiquarian, was baptised and buried at the church and served a seven-year curacy here. The church even has a modern distinction: photographed in August 2012, it is believed to have been the first church in the United Kingdom viewable online through Google Street View.

Recent years have brought the church its greatest modern trial. In September 2013 the spire was found to have developed cracks six metres long in four of its faces, and after inspection by structural engineers it was deemed at risk of collapse. The church had already closed to the public in 2011 over the spire's safety, and in 2014 the spire was demolished at an estimated cost of £200,000. The building reopened in 2015, but the tower has stood spireless ever since: although more than £358,000 has been raised since 2011, funds remain insufficient to repair the tower and rebuild the spire, and the restoration of Leicester's lost landmark awaits a benefactor.

Inside, the church keeps a three-manual pipe organ originally installed in 1860 by Forster and Andrews and modified and restored by Joshua Porritt in 1880 and R. J. Winn in 1960. Its organists have included Henry Bramley Ellis, who served from 1878 to 1910; the composer Benjamin Burrows; and William Edward Snow — father of the novelist C. P. Snow — who presided from 1930 to 1953; John M. Bence then held the post for nearly six decades, from 1962 to 2020, succeeded by Andrew Green. Standing beside the castle hall where parliaments once met, within sight of Leicester Cathedral where Richard III now lies, St Mary de Castro remains a working parish church and one of the most historically resonant buildings in the East Midlands — eleven centuries old, royal to its bones, and still waiting for its spire.