St Mary Magdalene's Church, Battlefield

St Mary Magdalene's Church at Battlefield, on the northern edge of Shrewsbury in Shropshire, is among the most unusual churches in England, for it was built as a war memorial in the truest medieval sense: a chantry raised on the field of the Battle of Shrewsbury, fought on 21 July 1403 between Henry IV and the rebel Henry "Hotspur" Percy, and almost certainly standing over a mass burial pit of the slain. Originally a collegiate church staffed by a small community of chaplains whose chief duty was a daily liturgy for the dead, it later served as a parish church, decayed, was controversially restored by the Victorians, and is today a redundant Anglican church, designated Grade II* and cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust, where an annual service still commemorates the battle-dead.

For centuries the king himself was credited with the foundation. In a grant of 27 May 1410 Henry IV presented himself as founder of the memorial chapel, and antiquarians from David Parkes in 1792 to Richard Brooke in 1857 took him at his word, Brooke writing that the king raised the church in gratitude for his victory and dedicated it to Mary Magdalene because the battle had been fought on the eve of her feast. The Georgian historian John Brickdale Blakeway had already disentangled the truth, though his notes were not published until 1889, and the Victorian antiquarian W. G. D. Fletcher was sometimes credited with the discovery: the initiative was local. The true founder was Roger Ive, rector of Albright Hussey, supported by Richard Hussey, lord of the manor. On 28 October 1406 the king licensed Hussey to grant two acres in Hateley Field to Ive, to be held in frankalmoin, free of all secular service, as the site of a chantry chapel where masses would be sung for the souls of the king, his ancestors and those killed in the battle. Ive, presented to Albright Hussey in 1398 and to the nearby rectory of Fitz a few months later, was a pluralist of modest means but a forceful personality who dominated Battlefield until his retirement in 1447. Hussey was a middling Shropshire landowner whose family had once held the great collegiate church of Penkridge in Staffordshire and still nursed memories of grander days.

The negotiations of 1406 to 1410 drew the king into ever closer partnership. On 17 March 1409, as Duke of Lancaster, Henry incorporated the chapel as a perpetual chantry dedicated to Mary Magdalene with eight chaplains, granting it the advowson and tithes of St Michael's on Wyre in Lancashire, and that August he ordered lead for the roof from Tutbury Castle, proof the building was still unfinished. Late in 1409 Ive surrendered the land to the king, and on 27 May 1410 the chapel was re-founded by royal charter as a community of five chaplains under a master, an office Ive and his successors as rector would hold, praying daily for the king, for Richard Hussey and his wife Isolda, and for the battle-dead. The endowments now included the advowsons and tithes of St Michael's chapel in Shrewsbury Castle, St Julian's in Shrewsbury and St Andrew's at Shifnal, together with the right to hold an annual fair on the patronal feast of 22 July. Historians have noted that it suited everyone for the foundation to wear royal colours: a monument on a rebel battlefield was safest assimilated into an official programme of memorialisation by a king who had, after all, taken the crown by force. Papal confirmation came on 30 October 1410 from John XXIII, the Pisan claimant later reckoned an antipope, whose bull was the first document to call Battlefield a college of priests.

The chaplains lived a disciplined common life that is unusually well documented thanks to Roger Ive's will of 30 October 1444. They shared a single manse with a common buttery and kitchen, ate dinner and supper together with the master at one large table with two benches, and were forbidden to leave the college without permission on pain of a fine of 3s 4d; keeping a wife or concubine meant permanent expulsion. Their days revolved around the Liturgy of the Hours according to the Use of Sarum, with a Placebo and Dirige daily for the souls of Henry IV and Henry V as founders, the Hussey family, the deceased chaplains and all those killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury, together with two daily masses. Ive's will inventories the college's treasures: three silver-gilt chalices, a silver-gilt pax board, breviaries, missals, graduals and processionals, vestments of red velvet and white silk, and three brass bells in the belfry. He decreed a pay rise from eight to ten marks for the chaplains, conditional on prayers for his own soul, though on the eve of dissolution they were still drawing the old eight marks; Blakeway calculated that a chaplain's net income, after board, was barely £4 12s a year for unremitting daily duty. The college seems also to have kept a school, remembered by a witness in 1581 who had gone to school at Battlefield around 1526, and a surviving school book from the college is now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge; an almshouse for the poor was intended, though no spending on either appears in later records. Battlefield drew pilgrims as well as scholars, encouraged by indulgences: forty days from the Bishop of Hereford in 1418, five years and five quarantines from Pope Martin V in 1423, extended to seven years by Eugenius IV in 1443 at the request of Henry VI. Edward IV later authorised fund-raising proctors to tour Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Warwickshire, and as late as 1525 Henry VIII licensed the college's collectors.

By the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 the college's gross income stood at £56 1s 4d, more than half of it from the leased rectory of St Michael's on Wyre, with the master John Hussey drawing the lion's share and five chaplains £4 each. The Dissolution of Colleges Acts of 1545 and 1547 sealed its fate. The certificates of 1546 and 1548 record the last community, among them John Parson, aged ninety-two, and Edward Shord, who served the cure; the college closed early in 1548, Hussey received a pension of twenty marks, and the church became the parish church of Albright Hussey, with Shord retained as curate at £5 a year. The properties were sold off through the Court of Augmentations, much of the Shropshire estate going in 1549 to the speculators John Cupper and Richard Trevor as part of a deal worth over £2,050, while the Hussey family in time bought back their own land and held it until 1638, when church and estate passed to the Corbets.

The college buildings were soon demolished, their fabric carted away, and only depressions south of the church, thought to be the college fishponds, and slight foundations beside the chancel now mark them. The church itself sank slowly into ruin as the population dwindled. The roof was mended in 1749, but the nave roof later collapsed entirely and was abandoned, while the chancel was refitted in the late eighteenth century in neoclassical style with four Doric columns. When Richard Brooke visited in 1856 he found a handsome but roofless and moss-grown nave and pleaded eloquently against over-zealous restoration, warning that renovators might destroy an authentic relic of the reign of Henry IV. His warning went unheeded. Lady Annabella Brinckman, née Corbet, who inherited the estate in 1859, commissioned the Shrewsbury architect Samuel Pountney Smith to restore the church and add a mortuary chapel, work carried out between 1860 and 1862. The restoration saved the building but divided opinion ever after: Pountney Smith kept the medieval west tower and virtually rebuilt the rest, adding parapets, pinnacles, the screen, the seats and the celebrated hammerbeam roof, which, as the historian Philip Morgan put it, may be called fussy, handsome or magnificent, but is not medieval.

The church that survives is a limestone rectangle of a five-bay chancel and four-bay nave of equal width, with a two-stage west tower bearing the inscribed name of Master Adam Grafton, the great pluralist who headed the college from 1478 to about 1518, and the arms of the Earl of Shrewsbury. A statue of Henry IV stands in a niche above the five-light Perpendicular east window, and gargoyles of mythical beasts and soldiers, almost all Victorian, ring the walls. Inside, the hammerbeam roof rests on original stone corbels, one carved with a Green Man, and carries shields bearing the arms of knights who fought in the battle; the floor is paved with encaustic tiles by Maw of Ironbridge. The chancel keeps its medieval triple sedilia and the remains of a piscina, with a blocked doorway that once led from the chaplains' quarters. The greatest treasure is the oak pietà on the north side of the chancel, a hollowed figure of Our Lady of Pity about 1.15 metres high, dating from around the 1440s and very probably original to the college, the embodiment, as Thomas Auden wrote, of all that is tender towards human sorrow in a church built for the commemoration of the dead. The vestry preserves fifteenth-century glass from the church and early sixteenth-century French glass from Normandy, while the body of the church holds windows of 1861 to 1863 by Lavers and Barraud, with Mary Magdalene in the east window. Declared redundant in 1982 and vested in the Churches Conservation Trust, with tower and nave repaired in 1984, Battlefield church remains what Roger Ive made it six centuries ago: a quiet place of intercession above the graves of the men who fell in Hateley Field.