Medieval cloisters, originally spaces linking monastic buildings, are miraculous survivors of Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. English cathedral communities recognised the practicalities of cloisters and experimented with cutting-edge architecture to build, improve and embellish them....

Many of you will be aware that Victorian elements are present in almost every church in Britain, but did you realise that this applies to the twentieth century too? Did you know that as many new churches were built in the 1960s as in the 1860s at the height of the Gothic revival? In this lecture ...

The church by law established in England calls itself 'the Church of England', and everyone seems happy with that title. Perhaps, this lecture will suggest, they shouldn't be. The title - and its Latin predecessor, ecclesia Anglicana - is a slippery one, with at least four different meanings, mea...

Explore the history of the internment of kings, queens regnant and lords protector in England – from the Sutton Hoo ship burial in the 7th century down to the burial of the former Edward VIII at Windsor in 1972. This will take us not only to the great royal chapels at Westminster and Windsor, but...

Today under Cadw stewardship, the Pillar of Eliseg is a fragment of an early 9th -century cross-shaft set in its original base upon a prehistoric burial mound near the ruins of the later medieval Cistercian house of Valle Crucis, Denbighshire, Wales. The cross-shaft bears a now-eligible Latin ins...

What we often refer to as the Reformation actually began far before Henry VIII came into the picture. In 1517, German theologian Martin Luther compiled his Ninety-Five Theses and embarked on a dramatic overhaul of the Catholic Church. But what happened on this side of the Continent? We know that ...

Ecclesiastical buildings (or their remains) are present in our contemporary environment in many different shapes, sizes and guises, and this talk will explore a variety of buildings: from parish churches across London and Kent, to urban cathedrals and archbishops' palaces. We will look at a range...

The first half of the fourteenth century witnessed an extraordinary flowering of architecture, art and sculpture in Herefordshire and the central Welsh Marches. Much of Hereford Cathedral was rebuilt in these years, three exceptional parish churches were almost completely rebuilt, and gloriously ...

Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, painted between 1303 and 1305, constitute one of the most beautiful, most coherent and most complete decorative schemes to have survived the ravages of time, the changes of taste, and the vagaries of flood, fire and other ‘Acts of God’. Telling ...

The talk will cover the importance of the date of the Annunciation in the Christian Calendar, the development of devotion to the Mystery of the Annunciation and its expression in the art and imagery of medieval parish churches in England. It will look at the origin of the legends surrounding the ...

This talk will be a tour of some of the truly bizarre objects found in Britain's churches and churchyards, ranging from pyramid tombs to devils' stones, from the skulls of saints said to have cupped the waters of holy wells to golden orbs set on steeples by occultist aristocrats. Our journey will...

In this talk we will explore some of the different ways you might come across Vikings while visiting English medieval churches. Today we might think of the Vikings mostly as raiders and pillagers of churches, but the real story is more complex than that: there are also churches across England whi...

Consecration crosses can be seen in a number of medieval places of worship, including those belonging to the Churches Conservation Trust. Usually painted on the interior walls of a church, these white discs with a red cross in the centre signified to the congregation that the building was a sacre...

Over the past thirty years, Andrew Ziminski has worked as a stonemason-conservator as a partner of Minerva Stone Conservation.

From repairs to a megalithic burial chamber and the reconstruction of a Roman temple façade to an Anglo-Saxon shrine and Salisbury's medieval cathedral Andrew's craft sk...

The bishops of medieval England wielded great power, and their residences were often as splendid as those built for royalty. At one time, these palaces were scattered liberally throughout the country but now only a handful remain occupied by bishops, while the rest have been destroyed or taken on...

The Arts & Crafts church was an eccentric notion – new churches built around 1900, when Britain was no longer a church-going nation, and belief in God was no longer obligatory. And yet the aesthetic urge remained in architects, and spiritual searching still drove their clients. This talk sets the...

Join us on a historical tour exploring how and why Rood Screens came to be built that separated the congregation from the priests in parish churches. Through illustrated examples, some of the care and attention devoted to embellishing these screens by the parish congregations will be revealed. Fi...

King Oswald was a Christian king of Northumbria who died in battle in 642, and was soon recognised as a saint. He was slain by the Mercian king Penda, who cut off Oswald's head and impaled it on a stake on the battlefield as a sign of his victory. By the end of the Middle Ages 4 different religio...

Old parish churches are wonderful ways of experiencing the ways in which architectural tastes changed over many centuries. As well as being rewarding in their own right, these ever-shifting styles can be used to help put a date on the parts of a building as it develops. They also help make it a ‘...

After decades of neglect, Blythburgh church, a grand fifteenth-century building in a small Suffolk village, was ‘mouldering into ruin’. In 1881 the church was closed as unsafe. Although the church was re-opened in 1884, proposals for restoration precipitated a twenty-five year long rancorous conf...

From AD 402 to 751 the small city of Ravenna, on the NE coast of Italy, became the capital of the Roman Empire in the West, then the centre of a Gothic kingdom and finally the western outpost of Byzantine government from Constantinople. During these centuries the construction of many early Christ...

On 29 December 1170, four knights, believing the king wanted a turbulent Priest dealt with, confronted and murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. Becket’s murder sent shockwaves across Europe and led to the establishment of one of Europe’s most popular and miraculous Cults and...

We are all haunted by the ghost of Christmas as-it-never-was…Nick Page ditches the festive fake news!

“If the story of Christmas tells us one thing, it’s that human beings are always inventing ‘ancient’ traditions…”. So says Nick Page, who rummages (on our behalf) through a sleigh-full of festiv...

'In a 2016 poll, one in 10 Britons claimed to have experienced the presence of an angel, while one in three remain convinced that they have a guardian angel. These are huge numbers and mean that, on some counts, angels are doing better than God.’

In his latest book which launches on 3rd December...