Wenlock Abbey is not, in reality an abbey and nor, of course, was it built as a secular country house. What today constitutes the L-plan residential mansion of a former landed estate was, until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, in fact the infirmary range and Prior’s Lodge of the great Cluniac priory.

A monastic community had been established at Much Wenlock on a Roman site in the seventh century by Merewald, King of Mercia, and his daughter, Milburge, was established as abbess. After the Norman Conquest, Roger de Montgomery then re-founded the site as a Cluniac priory in circa 1079–82. Monks were brought to Shropshire from La Charité sur Loire to govern it. Their work, and that of their successors, created the church and its ancillary buildings; the ruins of these structures stand to the north of what survives as the present house.

This, an L-plan range, was but two sides of a quadrangle that was completed by the lost dormitory range. The remaining structure comprises the twelfth-century infirmary range at the northern end connecting, at its north-east corner, with the fifteenth-century Prior’s Lodge. This latter is roofed with Harnage slates, its high roof sweeping down to a lower wall-head than that of the adjacent infirmary range, presenting a mossy sea of stone slates to the visitor approaching from the west. The Prior’s Lodge is fronted by a grid-like wall of mottled purple and yellow sandstone; vertical buttresses divide the wall along its length whilst, between the buttresses, pairs of windows at the ground and second floor light corridors that serve each level. Originally these were unglazed. Behind the corridors, at ground level, were the apothecary’s rooms and kitchen, whilst above, to the northern end, was the three-bay Prior’s great hall with a soaring open roof raised above an embattled wall-plate and with supporting posts that descend the upper walls to stone brackets. The hall, in the nineteenth century, still had traces of a wall painting at the dais end, showing knightly figures in armour – which is now thought to represent the Nine Worthies, a secular subject – whilst it was originally warmed by a central fire raised on a stone column in the floor.