St Margaret's Church, Leicester

St Margaret's Church, Leicester, known more formally as the Prebendal Church of St Margaret's, is a large late medieval Anglican parish church raised on Anglo-Saxon foundations in the inner city of Leicester, England. One of the five surviving medieval parish churches of Leicester Old Town, it was venerated throughout the Middle Ages as the mother church of the borough, its oldest place of Christian worship, with a tradition reaching back perhaps to 679. It is the only one of the town's ancient churches to stand extramurally, outside the line of the now vanished Roman walls, and its vast parish once covered the whole of the Bishops Fee, the great estate of the Bishop of Lincoln. From 1199 until 1879 the parish was a prebendal peculiar of Lincoln, and the church keeps the title of prebendal church by courtesy to this day. The antiquarians John Leyland and John Nichols both called it the fairest parish church in Leicester, while Nikolaus Pevsner noted that its vaulted double-height south porch and the castellated stair turret of its tower are unique in Leicestershire. With its monumental Perpendicular tower rising opposite the city's busiest bus station, it remains one of Leicester's most recognisable historic buildings, famed across the East Midlands for its peal of fourteen bells, ten of which have hung in the tower since the seventeenth century. It is a Grade I listed building and a member of the Major Churches Network.

The site itself is far older than any surviving masonry. St Margaret's stands just outside the northernmost corner of the walls of Ratae Corieltauvorum, the Roman predecessor of Leicester, in ground that served as a Roman cemetery. The track skirting the north wall opposite the church became Sanvey Gate, a name derived from Sacra Via, the Holy Way, and for centuries the town's principal processional route. Medieval tradition held that St Margaret's had been the cathedral of the ancient Anglo-Saxon bishops of Leicester, whose see was created for Cuthwine in 679 and endured until Bishop Ceobred fled before the Vikings in 874. Leyland repeated the claim in his Itineraries of 1538, and Nichols quoted it in 1795. Modern scholarship is more cautious, generally preferring St Nicholas as the town's earliest surviving place of worship, but other theories flourish. One holds that the church rose over the grave of a venerated Romano-British Christian, a pattern of origin shared with St Albans Abbey. The most widely accepted view today is that St Margaret's was built to serve the Norse-speaking population that settled Leicester's northern and eastern suburbs after the Great Heathen Army arrived in the 870s, when Leicester became one of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw. The street names of the old parish, Church Gate, Belgrave Gate, Humberstone Gate, Gallowtree Gate and Sanvey Gate, all preserve the Old Norse word gata, meaning street, and speak plainly of that Viking presence. Whatever the truth, the church certainly predates the Norman Conquest: excavation in the eastern part of the nave uncovered Saxon foundation stones, cautiously dated to around 1010 and now visible through a glass panel in the floor, marking out a building comparable to St Peter-on-the-Wall in Essex or St Laurence's at Bradford-on-Avon.

The dedication to Margaret of Antioch, a virgin martyr and one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, is ancient and perhaps original. Margaret was often depicted tending sheep, spinning yarn and weaving wool, and the choice of patron suited a church that united the sheep farmers of the Bishops Fee, two thousand acres given over mostly to sheep, with the wool merchants of the suburbs, wool being the principal source of medieval Leicester's wealth.

After the Conquest, the diocesan seat moved from Dorchester to Lincoln in 1072, and the first certain documentary reference to the church appears in 1110. While the advowsons of all the churches within the walls passed to Hugh de Grandmesnil, first Sheriff of Leicester, St Margaret's alone remained in the hands of the Bishop of Lincoln, together with its dependent chapelry at Knighton, now the parish church of St Mary Magdalene. The parish covered 2,650 acres, an enormous territory beside the cramped intramural parishes of two or three acres each, and the church stood as the symbol of Lincoln's authority in a town otherwise dominated by its own abbey. The first recorded rector, Ranulph, appointed in 1092, was also the first Archdeacon of Leicester. A longstanding tradition credits Robert le Bossu, second Earl of Leicester, with commissioning a complete reconstruction in the twelfth century, probably before his death in 1168, and fragments of that cruciform building survive in the masonry of the easternmost arcade of the nave and south aisle.

In 1199 the parish was made a prebend, its principal cleric a prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral exempt from all ordinary diocesan authority. This peculiar status brought the church its own prebendal court, which survived in some form until the 1950s, and attracted a remarkable succession of churchmen. William of Blois, the first recorded prebendary, became Bishop of Lincoln. Jocelin of Wells held the prebend in 1205 before his elevation to Bath and Wells and a place among the names of Magna Carta. Greatest of all was Robert Grosseteste, vicar from 1225 and prebendary from 1229 to 1235, when he too became Bishop of Lincoln. One of the most significant scholars and theologians of the Middle Ages, Grosseteste composed his pioneering scientific treatises on light, colour, the rainbow and the tides during the very years he drew his stipend from St Margaret's, and the reconstruction of the 1230s, which widened the aisles to their present breadth and created the south door with its sanctuary knocker, may have been undertaken at his instigation. The naturalistic carvings of lilies and roses on the south arcade, emblems of the Virgin Mary, date from this campaign and mark the south aisle's long service as a Lady Chapel. A shallow builders' well of the same period, filled with broken early thirteenth-century tiles, has been excavated at the east end of the north aisle and left exposed beneath the floor.

The fourteenth century brought catastrophe. The Black Death struck in 1349, and Henry of Knighton, chronicler of neighbouring Leicester Abbey, recorded seven hundred deaths in St Margaret's parish alone. Recovery came through the parish guilds, above all the Guild of St Mary and St Katherine, founded in 1355, which grew wealthy enough to maintain an altar in the church, a guild hall on Church Gate and two full-time chaplains; its great wooden chest, bearing the wheel emblem of Katherine of Alexandria, still stands in the building, and a patronal Guild of St Margaret is recorded from 1392. In the 1380s the parish became a centre of Lollardy, the reforming movement inspired by John Wycliffe, based at the hospital chapel on Belgrave Gate within the Bishops Fee. The Lollard preacher William Swinderby drew crowds in 1382, and in 1389 Archbishop William Courtenay conducted a full inquisition, excommunicating eight burghers on All Souls' Day and placing the town under interdict for a fortnight until the culprits recanted.

The church as it stands today is chiefly the fruit of the great rebuilding begun in 1444, funded by the smoke farthing, a hearth tax levied by Bishop William Alnwick of Lincoln on the households of the Bishops Fee. Over some sixty-four years the masons raised the thirty-three-metre tower with its great processional west door, the magnificent vaulted south porch, the clerestories, the broad four-bay chancel and the octagonal font. The chancel niches carry some of the finest fifteenth-century carving in the city, including the sleeping figure of Olybrius, the Roman governor of Margaret's legend, while green man figures cluster around the sedilia. Completion was apparently celebrated around 1508, when Thomas Wolsey, then Dean of Lincoln, came with many servants and horsemen to preach at the church amid the ringing of bells. The alabaster effigy of John Penny, Abbot of Leicester and successively Bishop of Bangor and Carlisle, rests beside the high altar; he chose burial here near his father, a former mayor of Leicester, rather than in either of his cathedral churches. As mother church, St Margaret's was the destination of the borough's great Whit Monday procession, when the parishes of Leicester converged along Sanvey Gate and entered through the west door beneath the Holy Ghost hole in the tower vault.

The Reformation fell heavily on the church. The Bishops Fee was confiscated from the Diocese of Lincoln in 1547, processions were banned, and the stone altars were torn down in 1552. A vivid Marian restoration, meticulously itemised in the parish accounts of 1553, proved brief; in 1556 the prebendal court sitting in St Margaret's passed sentence on Thomas More, a local man burned at the stake that June for denying the Real Presence, Leicester's only Marian martyr. Under Elizabeth the prebendary John Lounde stripped the rood loft and remaining statues in the 1560s. The Civil War brought the pillaging of the suburbs during the Siege of Leicester in May 1645, and the Great Ejection of 1662 cost the parish its Puritan vicar. The nineteenth century transformed the surroundings entirely: the giant hosiery works of N. Corah and Sons rose beside the churchyard from 1855, daughter parishes such as St George's and St Peter's were carved from the old territory, and the prebend itself was abolished in 1879 on the death of its last incumbent. Successive restorations by George Gilbert Scott in the 1860s and George Edmund Street in 1880 to 1882 renewed the fabric, and a reredos by George Frederick Bodley followed in 1899. In 1926 the parish passed to the revived Diocese of Leicester, narrowly losing the contest for cathedral status to St Martin's. Though the 1960s ring road and slum clearances stripped away its resident population, St Margaret's endures as a Grade I listed landmark, its fourteen bells the pride of the city's ringers and its choir still wearing the blue cassocks of Lincoln in memory of Our Lady of Lincoln and seven centuries of prebendal history.