Shrewsbury Abbey, the Abbey Church of the Holy Cross, was founded in 1083 as a Benedictine monastery by Roger de Montgomery, the Norman Earl of Shrewsbury. He gave the church to his clerk Odelerius of Orléans in 1071, for the benefit of his soul. Regular monastic life began around 1087 under the first abbot, Fulchred of Sées. The red sandstone building is Romanesque and Gothic, with short thick piers in the eastern half of the nave and the west end rebuilt in the fourteenth century.
The abbey was dissolved on January 24, 1540, and the nave survived as a parish church. John Loughborough Pearson redesigned the east end in the nineteenth century, and the restoration of 1886 to 1894 was dedicated in May 1894.
It is the setting of Ellis Peters' Cadfael Chronicles. It is Grade I listed.
Comments