Priory Church of St Mary, Abergavenny

The Priory Church of St Mary stands at the centre of the market town of Abergavenny, in Monmouthshire, in south-east Wales. One of the most remarkable churches in the country, it has been called "the Westminster Abbey of Wales" on account of its great size and the extraordinary collection of high-status tombs and medieval effigies that it contains. A Grade I listed building, originally the church of a Benedictine priory, it is famous above all for the Jesse Tree — a magnificent medieval wooden sculpture that is one of the greatest treasures of Welsh art. With its long history, its monuments and its masterpieces of carving, St Mary's is a building of national importance.

The site is an ancient one: although the Norman church was built around 1070, archaeological finds of Roman pottery suggest earlier occupation, and a "church of the Holy Rood" is known to have existed in the town before the Conquest. The present church was founded as the church of a Benedictine priory, established by Hamelin de Balun, the first Norman Lord of Abergavenny, in the years around 1090. The priory was a cell of the Abbey of Saint-Vincent at Le Mans in France, and over the following centuries it was supported and endowed by the successive Lords of Abergavenny, among them the powerful Marcher families of de Braose, Hastings and Herbert. Its history was not always edifying: in 1320 Lord Hastings appealed to the Pope to investigate the priory, where the monks were accused of failing to keep the Benedictine Rule, and the prior, Fulk Gaston, fled to the mother abbey in France taking the church silver with him. By the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries the priory had dwindled to a prior and just four monks; but because of the close connections between the Lords of Abergavenny and the Tudor dynasty, the priory church was spared and became the parish church of the town.

The church is cruciform in plan and impressively large, with a chancel and nave together some 172 feet in length, and a central tower holding a ring of ten bells. Its greatest glory is the series of monuments in the choir and the Herbert Chapel — a magnificent collection of medieval and Tudor tombs, with life-size effigies of knights and ladies of the great families of the Welsh Marches, including Sir William ap Thomas, the "Blue Knight of Gwent", and members of the Herbert family. So fine and numerous are these monuments that they give the church its nickname as the Westminster Abbey of Wales.

The most precious treasure of all is the Jesse Tree: a huge medieval carving in oak of the recumbent figure of Jesse, the father of King David, from whose body the genealogical "Tree of Jesse" — the ancestry of Christ — would once have sprung in a great sculptural composition. The figure of Jesse, lying asleep, is among the finest and largest surviving medieval wooden sculptures in Britain, a rare survival of the great carved imagery that the Reformation swept away elsewhere, and it has become the emblem of the church.

Today the Priory Church of St Mary continues as a thriving church of the Church in Wales, in the Diocese of Monmouth, the parish church of Abergavenny. Carefully restored and cared for, with a tithe barn beside it now serving as a heritage and food centre, it welcomes worshippers and visitors who come to admire its tombs, its Jesse figure and its long history. It remains the spiritual and historic heart of the town.

The church stands in the centre of Abergavenny, the "Gateway to Wales", in the valley of the River Usk in Monmouthshire. The town, famous for its food festival and its market, lies all around, with the dramatic hills that surround it — the Sugar Loaf, the Blorenge and the Skirrid — rising close by, along with the ruins of Abergavenny Castle, the Brecon Beacons (Bannau Brycheiniog) National Park, the Black Mountains, and the wider countryside of the Welsh Marches, all within easy reach.

From the Benedictine priory founded by Hamelin de Balun around 1090, through its turbulent medieval history and its survival at the Dissolution as the parish church, to its incomparable collection of tombs and the great Jesse figure, the Priory Church of St Mary gathers many centuries of Welsh history and art into one building. A Grade I listed church known as "the Westminster Abbey of Wales", it remains the living parish church of Abergavenny — one of the most treasure-filled churches in the land.