A Brief History of Ipswich Minster, St Mary-le-Tower

Ipswich’s newly minted Minster isn’t ‘new’ in anything but name. The first St-Mary-le-Tower church, probably built of wood and endowed with 26 acres, is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 and its unique name likely comes from its proximity to a tower on the town’s walls just to the north. The original Saxon structure was replaced with a Romanesque stone church sometime in the 12th century.

For some 360 years, from 1177 when Holy Trinity Priory was founded in what is now Christchurch Park, its Augustinian canons, cocooned in their black habits, served the Tower as they did other neighbouring churches. On 29th June 1200 in the burial ground of Sancta Maria ad Turrim – ‘St Mary at the Tower’ – the burgesses gathered to receive the town’s first charter which, fifteen years before the Magna Carta, essentially gave its citizens independence. Clearly the town’s most important building then, the Tower has remained its civic church ever since. 

The leaders of the town would have wanted their sons to be well educated, and the clergy would have been the best teachers. Before the building of schools, a church was the obvious place to teach, and the Tower’s south aisle (also the Archdeacon’s Court) served as the schoolroom for, amongst others, the young Thomas Wolsey. This was the beginning of the town’s grammar school that evolved over some 600 years to become Ipswich School.

In the 15th century the Romanesque church badly needed rebuilding. The north and south nave aisles were constructed, and a spire added to the existing tower base. The dissolution of the monasteries saw the loss of the town’s religious houses, and with it their money. When Elizabeth I visited Ipswich in 1561, she found the ministers inferior to those of the priories that her father had abolished, so perhaps it is no surprise that ten years later she gave the town powers to raise funds to pay for a minister and to care for the church.

Ipswich was a Puritan stronghold in a county noted for its opposition to Catholicism, so when King James I, and later Charles I, endeavoured to impose royal control, it proved a hotbed of resistance. Plenty found the religious climate intolerable and many emigrated to America – of the 20,000 or so immigrants to New England between 1620 and 1640, over half were from East Anglia. 

Discontent was brewing nationwide, and in 1642 civil war broke out. When the infamous William ‘Smasher’ Dowsing arrived at the Tower in January 1644 to cleanse it of superstition, his friend, the Puritan churchwarden Jacob Caley, had ensured that its stained-glass saints had already been replaced with clear windows. With the town firmly on the side of Parliament, the Restoration in 1660 saw both Charles II and later James II attempt to control Ipswich by introducing new charters. 

On 18th February 1661, a day that came to be known (with typical British understatement) as ‘windy Tuesday’, the church spire collapsed in a great storm. It crashed through the porch and nave roof causing considerable damage, with the weathervane impaled some feet into the ground outside. 

In the mid 1800s the Diocese of Norwich engaged the architect Richard Phipson to transform the dreary church. The clerestory was raised, the chancel and nave re-roofed, and aisles added (though the nave and south chancel arcades were retained). The box pews were replaced with benches, some bearing emblems from the Ipswich Borough arms and crest. 

For 1,000 years St Mary-le-Tower has contributed to the life of the town. As it looks to the future, it is fitting that it will now do so as a Minster.

Richard Edgar-Wilson