The old town of Southampton, a town within a town, is a fascinating study, the interest of its gates and old walls is inexhaustible, but apart from these it has little architectural beauty to boast of.  For all that it is amusing to linger there, if only to solve the problems that time has contrived for us.  Among these not the least is that of the first site of the town.  Not one of the churches in Southampton is of any great beauty or interest, but it is astonishing to find that the mother church is not in the town at all, but at least half a mile outside it upon the north.  Leland, as I have already said, was told, when he was in Southampton in 1546, that the first town did not occupy the site of that we see but was further to the north, where St Mary’s stands.  The fact that St Mary’s is the mother church would seen to confirm this.  Moreover, there is no mention in the Domesday Survey of any church at all within the borough of “Hantune,” and though we may think that the church of St John then existed, St John’s was never the mother church; this was St Mary’s which possessed all the tithes of the town.  In the time of Henry II. we find the King granting to the Priory of St Denys, founded in 1124 by Henry I., a Priory of Austin Canons, his “chapels” of St Michael, the Holy Rood, St Laurence and All Saints, that is all the churches save St John’s already granted to the Abbey of St Mary of Lire, in Southampton.  But that these chapels had some relation to the mother church of St Mary might seem certain.  Indeed the rector of St Mary’s was continually in controversy with the canons as to his rights, and eventually, in the thirteenth century, he won the day.  In any case the mother church of Southampton was St Mary’s, outside the walls of the town.  That a Saxon church stood upon this site is certain, and this was possibly represented in Leland’s time by the chapel of St Nicholas, “a poor and small thing,” which then stood to the East of “the great church of Our Lady,” which he saw and which probably dated from the time of Henry I. This church was, alas, destroyed by the town only a few years later because its spire was said to guide the French cruisers into Southampton Water, and the stones were used to mend the roads.  It may be that the chancel escaped, or it may be that a new and much smaller church was erected in 1579.  This, whichever it was, was much neglected till in 1711 a nave was built on to it.  Then in 1723 the chancel was destroyed, and a new one built.  In 1833 this was rebuilt, and then in 1878 a new church was built, in place of the old which was pulled down, by Street.  Thus in St Mary’s church, the mother church of Southampton to-day, we have only a lifeless modern building.

Much the same fate has befallen the churches within the walls of Southampton.  The oldest, that of St John, was pulled down in the seventeenth century, that of Holy Rood, in the High Street, was rebuilt about fifty years ago, so was St Laurence, while All Saints was destroyed in the eighteenth century.  The only ancient church remaining is that of St Michael, which, though not destroyed, was ruined in 1826.  It remains, however, in part, a Norman building, with an interesting font of the twelfth century, a lectern of the fifteenth century, and a fine tomb with the effigy of a priest in mass vestments.