Patrick Comerford
When I was in Dunstable last week, I particularly wanted to see the Priory Church of Saint Peter, which has been called one of the finest examples of Norman ecclesiastical architecture in England.
The west front of the Priory Church is magnificent, with a huge entry consisting of four arches above a later 15th-century doorway. The entry is highly decorated, with diaper pattern and stiff-leaf moulding providing relief for a profusion of small arches.
Saint Peter’s Church as it stands today is only the nave of what remains of the originally much larger Augustinian priory church. The extent of the former monastic buildings is traced out in the church grounds and once included cloisters, a dormitory, an infirmary, stables, workshops, and a bakehouse, brewhouse and buttery.
Dunstable Priory was founded in 1132 by Henry I soon after he had founded the town ca 1109 and had built himself a house or hunting lodge, Kingsbury. The priory was initially a daughter house of Holy Trinity, an Augustinian priory in Aldgate, London, and its foundation completed Henry I’s plans for Dunstable.
The priory was endowed with a quarry at Totternhoe and the lordship of the town with all the privileges the king had when he held Dunstable himself. The prior became the lord of the manor and was responsible for collecting taxes. These privileges later caused bitter quarrels between the Prior and the people of the town, although most of the taxes collected went to the Exchequer to pay for the king’s wars in France and Wales.
The priory church was built in the shape of a cross with a great tower at the crossing and with two smaller towers at the west end. Work was slow and it took 70 to 80 years before the church was complete.
The first prior of Dunstable, Bernard, and his brother Norman – a later Prior of Saint Botolph, Colchester – were involved in introducing the Augustinians to England. The church and monastic buildings were built under Bernard’s rule and his two immediate successors as prior, Cuthbert and Thomas. About this time, Alexander Nequam became master of the school and later became Abbot of Cirencester.
Richard de Morins, a canon of Merton Priory, became the fourth prior in 1202, through the influence of King John. He had considerable influence and ruled the priory for 40 years that were the most prosperous period in the history of the priory. He was commissioned by the Pope to preach the Crusade in 1212, he attended the Lateran Council in 1215, and he commenced the Annales de Dunstaplia, a chronicle of the priors and the priory, of the town and its people, as seen from the cloisters.
Dunstable stood on one of the main roads to London, and so the priory gained importance and grew in prosperity. The priory attracted pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Saint Alban to the south, and pilgrim numbers increased when the bones of Saint Fremund were moved from Cropredy in Oxfordshire to Dunstable.
The priory church had side altars dedicated to Saint Mary the Virgin, Saint Fremund, Saint Nicholas and Saint James, and the priory had farms, churches and granges as far away as the Peak District, with the income from the huge flocks of sheep supporting the priory and its work with pilgrims and the poor.
Bishop Hugh II of Lincoln, whose diocese stretched from the Humber almost to the Thames, visited Dunstable on 18 October 1213, when he dedicated the priory church. But the roof of the presbytery fell in June 1222, and in December 1222 a violent storm brought down the two western towers. The fall of the north tower ruined the west front, while the south tower brought down the prior’s house
The west front was immediately rebuilt without towers. The upper portion was designed with beautiful arcading and niches for statuary, and the whole west façade formed a screen front with heavily buttressed turrets at the angles.
A chapel dedicated to Saint Martin was founded in 1227 and by 1228 there was an infirmary chapel. The Lady Chapel was built at the far east end of the church in the canons’ burial plot and its altar was dedicated in 1231. The canons built the inner gate within the court in 1250 and placed ten tons of lead on the refectory roof. The dormitory was rebuilt in 1251, and the great stable and new workshops were built in 1252.
The vault of the north aisle was rebuilt and restored in 1273, two large bells were hung in 1277, followed by three more, and a clock was installed 1283 – it had no hands but struck the times of the daily offices.
There were riots in the town in 1228 over the taxes, and the bishop came to Dunstable and solemnly excommunicated 10 of the chief burgesses. They declared they would rather go to hell than pay the tax and asked the lord of Eaton Bray to give them 40 acres of land to build another town. At length, peace was restored, but when de Morins died in 1242 the prosperity of the Priory came to an end. He was succeeded by Geoffrey of Barton whose 20 years as prior were marked by many problems.
The prior’s sheep in the Peak District died in large numbers in a severe winter in 1243. A succession of bad seasons and crop failures led to great scarcity and the priory began to fall into debt. The canons’ rations were cut, staff numbers were cut too, and priors resigned or were deposed. Royal visitors added to the demands on the priory’s finances.
As the priory faced increasing poverty, the Dominicans or Black Friars settled in the town in 1259 with the permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury and King Henry III, diverting alms and financial support the priory might have expected.
The funeral of Queen Eleanor arrived in Dunstable in December 1290, with her husband Edward I following her cortege on the way to burial at Westminster Abbey. The canons met the funeral cortege at the Market Place and brought the bier to the priory church where her body was kept before the high altar throughout the night before moving on to St Albans.
The Lady Chapel at the east end was rebuilt in 1324, and over the next 100 years most of the Norman work of the quire, transepts and central tower was overlaid or replaced by Decorated Gothic. None of this work remains apart from a pier from the second half of the 14th century attached to the east wall of the present church. When the rebuilding were completed, the canons’ stalls were moved from beneath the central tower into the east end and the old pulpiturn was converted into a rood screen.
Dunstable was a venue for many tournaments in the 13th and 14th centuries, and when Edward III attended the great tournaments in 1329 and 1341 with many of the nobility, the cost of providing hospitality brought the canons close to breaking point.
The people of Dunstable were allowed to use the nave as a parish church from 1392. Two doorways were formed in the space between the nave and the crossing, and can still be seen in what is now the east wall.
The leading citizens and merchants of Dunstable founded a guild or fraternity dedicated to Saint John the Baptist in 1441. When the upper storey of the nave fell into ruins, they removed it altogether and inserted windows in the triforium, converting it into a clerestory. They gave the roof a flatter pitch, and they built a tower over the west bay of the north aisle. The 14 roof figures in the priory church are images of fraternity members.
Richard Charnock, who was the prior from 1473 to 1500, knew the humanist scholars Erasmus and John Colet. The last Prior of Dunstable, Gervase Markham, was elected in 1525.
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and the bishops of Winchester, London, Bath and Lincoln came to Dunstable in 1533 to annul the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Dunstable was chosen because Queen Catherine was then residing at Ampthill. The court sat in the Lady Chapel on 10 May, with the Prior, Gervase Markham, taking part in the proceedings. Catherine did not appear, but on 23 May 1533, Cranmer pronounced the annulment had been annulled, and the king was free to marry Anne Boleyn.
Gervase Markham and the 12 canons acknowledged the Royal Supremacy in 1535, the deed of surrender was signed on 31 December 1539, the priory was dissolved in January 1540, and the prior and the 12 canons were granted pensions, with dispensations to serve as secular priests.
The great church and the monastic buildings remained standing for some few years, and in a plan to create new dioceses a new see at Dunstable was proposed with the Priory Church as its cathedral. But the scheme fell through, and the church – with the exception of the parochial nave – and the monastic buildings were plundered.
All that was valuable was purloined and the ruins became a quarry. A wall was built up from the rood screen and the nave and its aisles sealed off for the use of the parish. During Edward VI’s reign, the reformers despoiled the church yet further, although some order was restored during the reign of Mary Tudor.
Several of the canons moved to local parishes, while others moved farther away. Two who married were deprived of their parishes when Mary Tudor became queen, but one forsook his wife and promptly found another parish. Having lived quietly in the town on his pension, Markham died in Dunstable in 1561. He still possessed his chalice, vestments and ‘ornaments and implements for a chapel’, which he left to his cousin. He was buried in the church on 23 September 1561.
At the visitation of Cardinal Pole in 1556, the churchwardens of Dunstable complained that the town was populous, but neither rector nor perpetual curate was found there, and ‘he that was hired could not preach’.
The Puritans were very active in South Bedfordshire by the end of Elizabeth I’s reign. John Richardson, the rector, was accused of Puritan practices and refusing to wear the surplice in 1603, but he later conformed. The next rector, Edward Alport, faced opposition from Puritans and Anabaptists who obstructed his ministry and tried to form a Presbyterian congregation. His successor, Zachary Symmes was an extreme Puritan who resigned in 1634 and joined the Puritans in Massachusetts in 1635.
William Pedder, who became the rector in 1634, was a royalist of moderate churchmanship. He was replaced by parliament replaced in 1642 with a group of 18 ‘lecturers’ who preached in the church on Sundays and weekdays.
A group of Royalist soldiers attacked the church during a Sunday service in June 1644. The congregation barricaded themselves in, but the soldiers forced the doors, shooting a ‘case of pistols’ at the minister in the pulpit and wounding several people. The west doors still show the marks of the shots.
Ten years later, the parishioners petitioned Cromwell for a minister after 14 years of being without a rector. Isaac Bringhurst became the rector in 1656. He undertook not to use the Book of Common Prayer and may not have been episcopally ordained.
After the Puritan era, some order returned after the Caroline restoration in 1660. A three-decker pulpit was fixed overlooking the box pews, the altar became secondary in importance to the pulpit, and the Eucharist was only celebrated at festivals. The church has a number of monuments dating from the early 18th century.
Bedfordshire, including Dunstable, became part of the Diocese of Ely in the 1830s.
The next major changes to the building came in separate phases in the 19th century: by the architect George Somers Leigh Clarke (1822-1882) in 1848-1878; and by the Gothic Revival architects George Frederick Bodley (1827-1907) and Thomas Garner (1839-1906) in 1890-1903.
Clarke rebuilt the 12th century south aisle in 1852, and in 1876 he rebuilt the 15th century north aisle and added a new seventh bay at the north-east corner to form the vestry. While the north aisle was being rebuilt, Clarke discovered and restored a 12th century doorway. The roof is a sympathetic restoration dating from 1871 of the Perpendicular original.
Bodley and Garner carried out restoration work to the east end in 1890-1891, which included revealing two 14th century doorways and two niches in the east wall and returning the rood screen to its original position. Bodley restored the west front in 1903 and installed an internal buttress to support the tower.
A new organ by Norman and Beard was installed in 1913 to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the Priory’s dedication. A year later, Bedfordshire, including Dunstable, became part of the Diocese of St Albans in 1914.
The tower and south-west buttress were repaired in 1930 under the direction of the architect Sir Albert Richardson (1880-1964.
The east end wall, formerly the division between the nave and the crossing, was mostly rebuilt in 1962, to designs by the architect Felix James Lander (1897-1960) and carried out after his death by his son Sean Lander. The upper part of the wall was rebuilt and pierced with two round-arched windows, a new niche with a tall spired canopy was inserted to replace a central feature destroyed in the 16th century, and gilded statues were placed in the niches.
The stained glass in the church is from the 20th century. The oldest is a 1920s window in the south aisle showing the Madonna and Child, and designed by Archibald John Davies of the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts. The other glass is by Christopher Webb (1886-1966) and John Hayward (1929-2007).
Webb designed the two three-light windows in the chancel (1962): the north-side window shows Saint John the Baptist, Saint Peter and Saint Martin of Tours; the south-side window depicts Saint Fremund, Saint James the Great and Saint Nicholas.
Hayward designed 11 windows for three separate commissions: two windows at the west end depict the royal and church history of Dunstable Priory (1972); three windows in the Lady Chapel depict the Annunciation, Visitation and Nativity (1984); three windows in the south aisle depict scenes in the life of Saint Peter (1989); and three windows in the north aisle depict Baptism, the Eucharist and the Fayrey Pall (1989).
The ‘Madonna of the Magnificat’ is a sculpture by Laurence Broderick (1935-2024), best-known for ‘The Bull’ (2003) in the Bull Ring, Birmingham. The work was given to the Priory Church by the Gibbard family to celebrate the wedding of Ruth Gibbard and Roger Bowles. The Feast of the Visitation is celebrated on 31 May, although because this year it falls not only on a Sunday but on Trinity Sunday it has been transferred to tomorrow (Monday 1 June 2026).
The 15th-century gateway south-west of the church is a reminder of the former priory. At the dissolution, the priory guesthouse became a private house in1545. One of the earliest owners was the Crawley family who used part of the building as an early hospital. In 1743, the original stone vaulted hall was incorporated into a much larger house with the Georgian façade. The Town Council has converted the building into a Heritage and Tourist Information Centre and a café.
A Local Ecumenical Partnership (LEP) formed in Dunstable in 1997 links the Anglican Team Ministry with Saint Katherine’s United Reformed Church. The parish is vacant at present and is seeking to appoint a new Team Vicar. The Eucharist is celebrated on Sunday mornings at 8 am and 9:30 am and at 10 am on Thursdays.
Additional Reading:
FA Fowler, The Priory Church of Saint Peter Dunstable – A Brief History.
‘The Priory of Dunstable’, in The Victoria History of the County of Bedford, Volume 1 (1904).
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