In the year 1070, Pope Alexander II ordered the Normans to do penance for killing so many people during their conquest of England. In response, William the Conqueror vowed to build an abbey where the Battle of Hastings had taken place on Saturday 14 October 1066, with the high altar of its church on the supposed spot where King Harold had fallen. He dedicated the abbey to St. Martin, sometimes known as 'the Apostle of the Gauls', and ruled that the church of St Martin of Battle was to be exempted from all episcopal jurisdiction, putting it on the level of Canterbury.
The church was finished in about 1094, but the Conqueror never lived to see its completion; he died in 1087.
The abbey was remodelled in the late 13th century, but virtually destroyed in 1538 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries under King Henry VIII.
© Haydn Thompson 2017