Open every day
of the year

Daily prayer service
at noon

St Margaret's Chapel

and the Magdalene Almshouses

More about the chapel

When the current chapel was built in 1444, its predecessor, built around the 1070s, had been there 350 years. Little is known about this earliest period - many records were probably destroyed in the great abbey fire of 1184 or during the dissolution of the monasteries. The chapel had been endowed by St Margaret of Scotland and built during the Abbey expansion under the first Norman abbot, Thurstan, during the 1070s-80s.

The rebuilding of 1444 took place under the abbacy of Nicholas Frome, also responsible for the Abbot's Kitchen and the walls around the Abbey, and part of a general expansion of the Abbey at the time. Since then the building was restored in 1640, 1740 and 1960, and plans are afoot for further repairs in the coming years.

The hospital ('almshouses') may have been built around 1264 during the abbacy of Robert of Petherton, to serve as a men's hospital for the Abbey. It took the form of a hall with alcoves. The monks ministered to patients by day and kept vigil in the chapel by night. After the closure of the Abbey in 1539 the hospital was divided into rooms, to be used as almshouses for the poor. People lived in these rooms up to the early 1960s.

Only half of the almshouses behind the chapel now exist - the other half was located in what is now the garden. It was demolished by the local authority, which had gained ownership in the 1960s, while the remaining half was patched up. What used to be the hospital garden, beyond the gate at the bottom of the garden, was sold, and old people's accommodation was built on it.

From 1993 the complex was run by the Quest Community, and now it has passed to the Friends of St Margaret's Chapel, a trust dedicated to caring for the place, working under the auspices of the St Benedict's parochial church council and the Anglican diocese of Bath and Wells. The chapel has no dedicated minister and does not offer regular church services, but it is open all day, every day, for prayer, spiritual activities and gatherings.

St Margaret's Chapel and Almshouses