Beverley St Mary's Zoom: Cardinal Wolsey and the church collapse

St Mary’s Church in Beverley collapsed in 1520 killing people inside and took 11 years to rebuild. It's fascinating history will be told in a special Yorkshire Historical Churches Trust talk.

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Professor Barbara English will host the Zoom lecture Ruined and Rebuilt, St Mary’s Church, Beverley, 1520-1531 on Thursday, February 2 at 7pm.

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St Mary's Beverley as it looks today (Image: Yorkshire Historical Churches Trust)

Prof English said: “At first sight, St Mary’s looks like a typical Gothic building of the 1400s. But during a Sunday service in 1520 the church ‘fell down’, in the words of contemporaries and the tower, the nave and part of the chancel aisle lay in ruins. 55 worshippers were killed.

“Eleven years later, the church had been rebuilt. The records of the rebuilding are fragmentary and scattered, but we know the names of the organisers, some of the donors, and something of the process. Here is Tudor work, closely dated, and accomplished just before the Reformation changed everything.

“What is especially interesting about this remarkable story is that some of the main characters of the first part of Henry VIII’s reign, notably Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Sir Thomas More, are involved. Cardinal Wolsey was the Lord of the Manor at Beverley and, equally significantly, was the most powerful man – apart from the King - in the country in 1520.

“So he definitely played a key role in the renaissance of St Mary’s, instructing his most senior civil servant Sir Richard Rokeby to oversee the rebuilding programme and to partly fund it. The names of other generous donors are recorded in the church.

“Sir Thomas More, meanwhile, was apparently less sympathetic to the plight of St Mary’s, making light of the death of 55 churchgoers in a letter to a family member – which seems strangely at odds with his kind public persona.”

Cardinal Wolsey was the Lord of the Manor at Beverley (Image: Newsquest)

This lecture is one of the highlights of the Yorkshire Historical Churches Trust’s popular season of Zoom talks this year.

Others include: Thursday, February 16: Pious, Pathetic & Pompous, a tour of some 17th -18th century Funerary Monuments in Yorkshire Churches. Talk by Moira Fulton. 

Thursday, March 16: Some North Yorkshire Churches in Pevsner. A talk by Jane Grenville, who has revised revise Pevsner’s North Riding volume.

If you have a request for Jane, please contact Moira Fulton on mfulton58@gmail.com and she will pass it on.

• Please visit www.yhct.org.uk to find specific details of how to join these lectures by Zoom. The lectures will be subsequently available to watch via YouTube.