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St Michael's stands on the exact site of the Roman basilica where, tradition holds, Alban himself was tried and sentenced to death. Centuries later, Francis Bacon chose to be buried here.
The area known as St Michael, on the western edge of St Albans, takes its name from one of three churches founded, according to the 13th-century chronicler Matthew Paris, by Abbot Wulsin of St Albans Abbey in AD 948. St Michael's, St Peter's, and St Stephen's were each built along one of the three main roads into town, purpose-built to receive and prepare pilgrims travelling to venerate the shrine of Saint Alban within the Abbey itself.
What makes St Michael's genuinely extraordinary, though, is what it was built on top of. The church sits on the site of the Roman basilica of Verulamium, the vast administrative building at the heart of the Roman city that once stood here. And according to tradition, that basilica was almost certainly the very place where Alban was tried and sentenced to death for being a Christian, the act of martyrdom that gave St Albans its name and its Abbey its founding purpose.
Most churches are built to honour a story that happened somewhere else. This one was built on the actual floor where the story happened.
St Michael's itself dates from the late 10th or early 11th century, and it's recognised as the most significant surviving Anglo-Saxon building anywhere in Hertfordshire. Standing inside it means standing inside genuinely rare architecture, a building that predates the Norman Conquest and has survived, in recognisable form, for over a thousand years.
The parish's other great claim to fame arrived centuries later. At the Reformation, the right to appoint St Michael's vicar passed from the Abbey to the Bacon family, owners of the neighbouring Gorhambury estate. That family connection would eventually tie the church to one of the great minds of the English Renaissance: Sir Francis Bacon, philosopher, statesman, and pioneer of the modern scientific method, retired to Gorhambury in his final years to devote himself to study.
When Bacon died in 1626, he was buried in St Michael's Church. Shortly afterward, his friend Sir Thomas Meauty paid for a memorial in his honour: a large statue depicting Bacon seated, which still stands in the church today, a genuinely moving tribute from one friend to another, placed inside a building that was already six centuries old by the time Bacon was laid to rest there.
Few parish churches anywhere in England can claim quite this layered a history: a Roman courtroom beneath the floor, Anglo-Saxon stonework holding up the walls, and the buried remains of a man who helped invent modern science. Visit St Michael's, and you're walking through nearly two thousand years of continuous human history in a single, unassuming building.
The Social Martini is proud to connect the people and stories that make St Michael special. 🍸