St. Michael's Church, Southampton

St Michael the Archangel Church is the oldest building still in use in the city of Southampton — founded in 1070 — and the only one still active of the five churches of the medieval walled town. A Grade I listed building, it stands on the east side of St Michael's Square off Bugle Street in the heart of the Old Town, opposite the Tudor House Museum, on ground where the medieval Fish Market once traded beside the Westgate.

The church was born of the Norman Conquest. After 1066 the town of Southampton moved west from the original Saxon settlement of Hamwic, clustered around the older St Mary's Church, to higher ground nearer the River Test, and archaeological evidence dates the new church's foundation to 1070. It was dedicated to St Michael, patron saint of Normandy — the conquerors' own protector. The original building was cruciform, and the earliest parts of the present church are the lower storeys of the central tower. The first documentary record comes in 1160, when Henry II granted the chapels of St Michael, Holyrood, St Lawrence and All Saints to the monks of St Denys, who kept the patronage until the Dissolution in 1537, when St Michael's passed to the Crown.

As Southampton prospered into one of England's most important medieval ports, the church at its heart grew with it: chapels were added on both sides of the chancel in the thirteenth century. Disaster struck in October 1338, when French raiders badly damaged the church by fire and completely destroyed the wooden buildings attached to it — the raids of the Hundred Years' War and the Black Death together breaking the town's prosperity until the wine trade revived at the end of the fourteenth century, leaving its evidence in the wine vaults that still honeycomb the old town streets. The north aisle was widened in the late fourteenth century, the south aisle and the west door rebuilt in the fifteenth, bringing the church to its present almost rectangular shape; the first spire rose in the fifteenth century, and by the early sixteenth a chantry chapel projected from the south chapel. Then decline set in: as the port's importance waned from the later sixteenth century, the church was so neglected that the chantry chapel was shut off and let as a dwelling house — even as a barber's shop — until it was pulled down around 1880.

The rescue began in 1836, when the newly arrived vicar, the Reverend T. L. Shapcott, embarked on a major reconstruction: new pews, a raised floor, heightened aisles, the north aisle extended westward, the roof rebuilt to a lower pitch bringing the whole under one gable, new galleries to the designs of Francis Goodwin, and the medieval nave arcades replaced by stuccoed brick and cast-iron pillars — a slim, elegant contrast to the rough early stonework — all for £2,390. The Goodwin galleries proved a mixed blessing and were removed in 1872 for damaging the fabric. The spire, first built in the fifteenth century and reconstructed in 1732, gained a further nine feet in 1887 to make it a better landmark for shipping, reaching its present graceful 165 feet, topped by a gilded weathercock of 1733 measuring three feet three inches from beak to tail. That landmark role may have saved the church's life: in the Second World War, when the Southampton Blitz destroyed the neighbouring town-centre churches of Holyrood and All Saints in 1940, St Michael's escaped with only minor damage — allegedly because German pilots used the spire as a navigation landmark and were ordered not to hit it. The whole church was restored in the 1960s at a cost of £36,000, completed in time for its 900th anniversary in 1970.

The fabric is a palimpsest of nine centuries. The west wall keeps an original Norman pilaster buttress, a fifteenth-century doorway and the marks of the old gabled roof line; the south wall contains pieces of the round Norman pillars removed in 1828; the east wall is twelfth-century in its lower parts, with the external south-east angle of the Norman chancel still projecting. Inside, walls nearly four feet thick are pierced by semi-circular Norman arches of a single square order. The chancel, twenty-two and a half feet square, has a triple-arch piscina with double basin of about 1260 and a fifteenth-century single piscina. The north chapel was originally the Mayor's or Corporation Chapel, where until 1835 Southampton's mayors were sworn in — from 1677 without a sermon, after the mayor and councillors took exception to being abused from the pulpit by the vicar, the Reverend Thomas Butler. In the jamb of its north window is a merchant's mark of the Woolstaplers' Guild. The east window depicts the five churches of medieval Southampton — St John's (pulled down in 1708), St Lawrence (demolished between the wars), St Michael's itself, and Holyrood and All Saints', both destroyed by bombing in 1940 — while the west window shows St Michael slaying the dragon. Across the Atlantic, St George's Episcopal Memorial Church in the United States has a window containing glass shards collected from St Michael's after its wartime damage.

The furnishings are remarkable. The font, made about 1170 from a single block of black Tournai marble on Purbeck Marble pillars, is one of only four such fonts in Hampshire and seven in all England. Of the two brass eagle lecterns, one — rescued from Holyrood Church during the 1940 Blitz — is among the oldest and finest in the country, of the fourteenth or early fifteenth century, with a beautifully tapering body and separated wing feathers; the other, of about 1450, has lost its claws and jewelled eyes. The most famous tomb is that of Sir Richard Lyster (c.1480–1554), Chief Baron of the Exchequer and later Lord Chief Justice, erected in 1567 in the north-east corner — a delightful early Elizabethan composition of fluted columns and classical detail. By the tower is part of a twelfth-century Purbeck Marble gravestone carved with a bishop in mass vestments holding a crozier, and high on the south wall hangs the memorial to Bennet Langton with Samuel Johnson's epitaph to his close friend.

Music thrives at St Michael's. The choir, Cantores Michaelis — choral scholars from the University of Southampton funded by the Friends of St Michael's, founded in 2000 by director Keith Davis — sings every Sunday and feast day in the academic year, specialising in unaccompanied liturgical repertoire. The original organ of 1880 by H. C. Sims, enlarged by J. W. Walker in 1950 and rebuilt in 1986 and 1995, was replaced in December 2016 by a four-manual digital replica of Hereford Cathedral's famous Willis organ, sampled by Hauptwerk and installed by Romsey Organ Works. The tower carries ten bells — one of only six ten-bell towers in the Diocese of Winchester — their history tracing the city's own: six seventeenth-century bells from the Salisbury foundry, two trebles added by John Warner & Sons in 1878, the peal recast by Gillett & Johnston in 1923 in a new iron frame, and two final bells cast by John Taylor & Co. in 1947 from bell metal salvaged from the ruins of Holyrood Church — the bombed sister church ringing on in the survivor's tower.