Patrick Comerford
St Albans, the cathedral city in Hertfordshire, is known as one of the most beautiful small cities in England and the Sunday Times has named it among the best places to live in the south-east of England. It is 50 km (30 miles) south-east of Milton Keynes and 32 km (20 miles) north-west of London, and lies within the London commuter belt and the Greater London Built-up Area.
For visitors and tourists, it is best known for St Albans Cathedral, formerly St Albans Abbey, and for the ruins of the Roman city of Verulamium. The abbey and the areas around Fishpool Street provided locations in the 1960s television comedy All Gas and Gaiters and some places in St Albans substituted for locations in Oxford in some episodes of Inspector Morse.
But St Albans has a rich heritage of mediaeval, Tudor and Georgian buildings. Many of these buildings are former inns and taverns that benefitted from the steady flow of pilgrims visiting St Albans. Others are reminders that St Albans was also a turbulent place during the Peasants Revolt in the 14th century and the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century.
A plaque on the former town hall, now St Albans Museum and Gallery, recalls how John Ball (1338-1381), a priest who played a prominent role in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, was tried before Richard II in St Albans and executed on 15 July 1381.
Although Ball is often associated with John Wycliffe and the Lollards, he was active at least a decade before Wycliffe. He trained as a priest in York and then moved to Norwich and Colchester. He became a roving preacher without any parish link and his sermons insisting on social equality brought him into conflict with Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury.
When the Peasants’ Revolt began, Ball was freed from prison by the Kentish rebels. He preached to them at Blackheath in an open-air sermon in which he asked: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.’
Ball was taken prisoner at Coventry, tried in St Albans in the presence of Richard II and was hanged, drawn and quartered on 15 July 1381. His head was placed on a pike on London Bridge, and the quarters of his body were displayed in four different towns.
Ball later became a hero for radicals, revolutionaries, socialists and communists and he is a recurring figure in literature. In Hamlet (Act V Scene 1), Shakespeare has the Gravedigger discuss the line ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?’ but in a reversed sense: in Adam’s time there were none but gentlemen, as through Scripture was being quoted.
William Morris wrote a short story, A Dream of John Ball, that was serialised in the Commonweal in 1886-1887 and published as a book in 1888. Sydney Carter wrote a song about John Ball, and the question, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?’ is also the epigraph to Zadie Smith’s novel NW (2012).
St Albans Town Hall was built between 1829 and 1831 and served as the council meeting place until the 1960s, when the council moved to new premises at the City Hall. The town hall was commissioned to replace the Moot Hall in the Market Place which was completed in 1570. The new building was designed in the neoclassical style by George Smith was completed in 1826.
St Albans Museum and Gallery is a newly created state-of-the-art gallery set over three floors in the former town hall. The displays include local, national and world treasures, from priceless 2,000-year-old pieces to contemporary artworks, with regularly changing exhibitions and cutting edge art installations and programmes.
The museum is housed in the former town hall, with its restored assembly room, octagonal courtroom and subterranean cells. Several new spaces have also been created: glazed links added to the first floor provide rooftop views; a new basement gallery houses the museum’s flagship exhibitions; and the ground floor has a new learning studio, gift shop and café.
The assembly room, originally a venue for balls, galas and concerts, has been fully restored to its former glory with Georgian architectural flourishes, ornate chandeliers, lustrous gold leaf and a double height ceiling and large windows that flood the room with light.
The courtroom and cells tell the stories of law and order in St Albans. The subterranean cells, where defendants were once held, lead up directly to the dock in the courtroom.
St Albans Clock Tower is a symbol of civic pride in the cathedral city. It is the only surviving mediaeval town belfry in England.
The people of St Albans built the tower, which was completed by 1405 as a symbol of their resistance against the power of the Abbot of St Albans. The tower allowed the town to sound its own hours and, until 1863, the curfew.
Thomas Wolvey was employed to build the clock tower in the Market Place. The original bell, named for the Archangel Gabriel, sounds F-natural and weighs one ton. Gabriel sounded each morning at 4 am and in the evening at 8 or 9 pm for the curfew.
The ground floor of the tower was a shop until the 20th century. The first-floor and second-floor rooms were designed as living space. The shop and the first floor were connected by a spiral stairs. Another flight rises the whole height of the tower by 93 narrow steps and gave access to the living chamber, the clock and the bell without disturbing the tenants of the shop.
The Clock Tower bell rang out for the first Battle of St Albans during the Wars of the Roses in 1455. Today, the tower, with its 600-year-old bell, still stands facing the abbey’s tower and offers views across over St Albans and across the countryside of Hertfordshire.
The Clock Tower was closed on the two occasions I visited St Albans this month, but it opens again from Good Friday, 29 March 2024, on weekends and bank holidays. It is run by volunteers from St Albans Civic Society and St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society.
Near the clock tower once stood the Eleanor Cross, where Queen Eleanors’s rested in St Albans for one night on her funeral journey from Harby to Westminster on 13 December 1290.
Facing the clock tower, the Boot on High Street is one of the smallest inns in St Albans. The mediaeval tannery and leather market was nearby, and may have given the Boot its name.
During the War of the Roses, the Battle of St Albans was fought outside the doors of the Boot in 1455, which explains why it is the first pub in England to be adopted by the Battlefields Trust.
But 600 years ago it was two buildings housing several shops. It had been knocked into one building by the 17th century, with an outside chimney and attic rooms. It did not become a licenced inn until 1719.
George Street was known as Church Street originally and was once lined with inns and taverns, including the George which gave the street its name. The inns and hostelries on the north side of George Street included the White Horse, the Bear, also known as the Bull, the Tabard, later known as the Antelope, and the Valiant Trooper, also known as the White Bear.
The Thai restaurant in Nos 26-28 at the top of George Street, near the corner with Verulam Street, is a black-and-white timber-framed building that has been on the site since the 1400s, and it is one of the oldest buildings in St Albans.
Originally it was two different inns – the Swan and the George. The oldest part, dating from ca 1400, fronts onto Verulam Road. The inn known as the George is known as early as 1401, when it belonged to the Nunnery of Saint Mary’s, Sopwell. Its full name seems to have been the George and Dragon. The cellars of the building include an arched passageway said to run across the street towards the Abbey.
The abbot granted a licence to the proprietor in 1484 for the celebration of Mass for the convenience of ‘great men and others’ lodging at the inn. It was an inn until to 1932. Since then it has been a pub and a restaurant of various types and is still known to many local people as the Tudor Tavern.
The Swan became the King’s Head in the 1600s and continued until ca 1790. Later, the building became houses and shops and from 1906 it was Mayle’s antique shop. It was taken into council ownership in the 1960s to preserve it and keep it open to the public. When it became a Thai restaurant, it was a condition that it continues to allow public access.
No 37 and 39 Holywell Hill, on the corner with Sopwell Lane, is one of the oldest and best-preserved mediaeval buildings in St Albans. It was built in the late 15th century as a hostel for visitors to the abbey. At the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, it became the Crane, then the Chequers and finally the Crown and Anchor, always providing food, drink and bed for travellers.
Over 70 coaches a day came up Sopwell Lane in the early 1800s. But the inn lost business when London Road was built and the railway arrived in St Albans. It became a pub and a grocery shop.
It was an antique shop in the late 20th century, then an estate agent’s and is now a private residence. It is believed most of the original features are still intact after 500 years.
On the facing corner stood Holywell House. It passed from Sir Ralph Rowlett in the late 16th century through the Jennings family and then to Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, who was born there in 1660. She later bought the house outright and she and her husband, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, often stayed there.
Holywell House was demolished in 1837, and the name is now used by another house, No 40 Holywell Hill. But a blue plaque on the walls of Torrington House marks the spot where the former Holywell House stood.
Torrington Hall was built by the Longmire family in 1882. The house was planned as the retirement home for John Chapple, Mayor of St Albans, but he did not live long enough to enjoy it.
Later, it was the home of Eleanor Ormerod (1828-1901), the scientist who pioneered studies into the negative impact insects have on animals and crops. Although she worked at a time when women were not encouraged to pursue academic careers, she was the first woman to receive an honorary from Edinburgh University for her contributions to science in 1900, the year before her death.
+Henry+Martin.jpg)