10 Chain Street

9 St Mary's Butts

St Mary's Butts is the heart of Reading. It is a Minster Church, which means that it covered a wide area both in the town and beyond. The first Church on this site was probably a nunnery founded by Queen Elfrida sometime after 978. Then nunnery was built by the Queen as a penance for organising the murder of her stepson so that her own son, Ethelred the Unready, could become King. She built the nunnery to try and make up for her wrong doing. This nunnery was destroyed, probably in a Danish raid in 1006.

In Middle times every town had to have an archery butts so that every adult male could practice. The long bow which the archers used was the deadly weapon of the English army at that time. It could be fired far more quickly than crossbows and the arrowheads could go through even thick armour.

St Mary's Butts still has several buildings that are 400 years old (The Horn). In the last century their has been many changes here, as St Mary's Butts used to be much narrower at the Broad Street end and a line of houses once stood between the churchyard and the street.

Although the church yard of St Mary's is now open to the road on two sides, this was not always so. Once there were houses between St Mary's and both Gunn Street and St Mary's Butts. The houses between the churchyard and Gunn Street were taken down in 1816 and the ones on St Mary's in 1886. This meant that the graveyard could be made bigger, but even so it was soon full to overcrowding, with bodies being buried on top of one another. It was rumoured that the gravedigger after he had dug a grave, carried away any bones he had found in his barrow.