GREY FRIARS
[Illustration: ARMS OF SIR R. WHITTINGTON, GREY FRIARS, NOW CHRIST’S
HOSPITAL]
[Illustration: CHRIST’S HOSPITAL, FROM THE CLOISTERS]
In the year 1224, being the eighth year of King Henry the Third, there
arrived at Dover a small company of nine Religious, being Brethren
of the Fratres Minores, the Franciscan Order, not yet known in this
country. Five of these were priests, the remaining four were laymen.
They pushed on without delay as far as Canterbury, where they halted
and begged permission to begin their missionary work in that city. They
were allotted a room in which they slept at night, and in the daytime
they used it as a school. After a little it was resolved to attempt
the foundation of a branch in London. Therefore, while the priests
remained at Canterbury, the laymen were sent to London to look about
them. They first lodged for a fortnight with the Preaching Friars in
Holborn. They then hired a house in Cornhill, of John Travers, one of
the Sheriffs, where they built—presumably in the garden—rude cells
of wattle and clay, and began their preaching and ministration among
the poor of the City. Very quickly it became noised abroad that a
new and saintly Order of Religion had arrived in the country; that
its followers were absolutely unlike all other Religious; that their
austerity, the strictness of their Rule, their earnestness, their
eloquence, their poverty—for they owned nothing—absolutely nothing—not
even church furniture, and lived on alms, simply on whatever was
bestowed upon them by the charitable—were things never before known
among men; and that their lives were spent not in prayers and Litanies,
but in work among the dregs of the people; that none were too base,
too low, too degraded, too loathsome by disease for the offices of
these good friars. The impression produced by this phenomenon was only
strengthened when John Ewen, Mercer, bought a piece of ground in
the parish of St. Nicholas Shambles and gave it to the brethren for
their use, on which they might build a house and church. Then all the
citizens began to vie with each other in making splendid gifts to the
church of these Franciscans—for themselves they took nothing, save, as
before, the broken victuals and crusts given them by the charitable.
William Joyner, Mayor, built the Choir; Henry Waleys, Mayor, built the
Nave; Walter Potter, Alderman, built the Chapter House; Thomas Filcham
built the Vestry House; Gregory Rokesley, Mayor, built the Dormitories
and furnished them; Bartholomew of the Castle built the Refectory;
Peter de Heyland built the study; Richard Whittington, Mayor, founded
the Library. Nor was the support of the Franciscans limited to the
citizens. Queens, Princesses, and great lords helped to endow the House
and to make these poor mendicants rich. Queen Margaret, Queen Isabel,
Queen Philippa; the Earls of Gloucester, Richmond, and Pembroke; the
Countesses of Pembroke and Norfolk, all gave money, plate, lands, or
buildings to the Friars. One Queen thought the choir ought to be more
splendid, and rebuilt it; another thought the nave ought to be more
splendid, and rebuilt it; no gift could be too lavish, no buildings too
costly for religious men so truly and unfeignedly religious. In our
eyes it is pathetic to observe the hope and confidence always ready
to be renewed, always doomed to disappointment, with which the people
turned from one professedly ascetic order which—alas!—had fallen from
its first profession and had now become rich, fat, and lazy, to another
beginning with the best intentions, itself destined before long to fall
off from the early zeal and the first austerities. Who could retain
the pristine austerity when all these gifts came pouring in? When the
broken victuals became a steady shower of all the good things that the
earth had to give? And the despised and poverty-stricken brothers,
lean, hungry, hollow-eyed, filled with the fever of faith and zeal, had
become transformed into the sleek and comfortable Friars of whom all
men spoke well?
Their church was 300 feet long, 89 feet wide, and 64 feet 2 inches
high. It contained an immense number of monuments, because the ground
was supposed to be the holiest in all London. Here were buried
Margaret, daughter of Philip, King of France, and second wife of
Edward the First; Isabel, daughter of Philip le Bel of France, and
wife of Edward the Second—with her, the heart of the husband whom
she had betrayed; Joan of the Tower, daughter of Edward the Second,
and wife of Edward Bruce, King of Scotland; Lady Isabel Fitzwarren,
Isabel, Countess of Bedford, daughter of Edward the Third; Eleanor,
Duchess of Brittany; Beatrice, Duchess of Brittany; Eleanor, Duchess
of Buckingham; Lady de Lisle; the Countess of Devon; Margaret, Duchess
of Norfolk; Eleanor, Duchess of Northumberland; and an immense number
of great and noble persons. Had the church with all its monuments
survived, there would have been no church in the country, or,
perhaps, in any other country, more crowded with names of personal
and historical interest. Of London worthies, we find the gallant John
Philpot once Mayor; Nicholas Brembre also Mayor, who finished his
career with a traitor’s death; John Gisors sometime Mayor; many of
the Blunts—Lords Mountjoy, who married into London families—the wife
of Edward Blunt, Lord Mountjoy, was the widow of one Mayor and the
daughter of another; William Blunt, Lord Mountjoy, married the daughter
of Henry Keble, mercer. There were a vast number besides, some of whom
are enumerated by Stow, who tells us that the church had ten great
tombs of alabaster and marble—he means tombs with chapels and carved
work. Of less costly tombs there were some score. In the Dissolution
all the glorious marble and alabaster work was sold for fifty pounds or
thereabouts by Sir Martin Bower, Goldsmith. The revenue of the House
was no more than £32: 10s.
[Illustration: “YE PLAT OF YE GRAYE FRIERS” A.D. 1617.
from an unpublished drawing preserved at S^t. Bartholomew’s Hospital.]
An examination of those London Wills (Sharpe’s _Calendar of Wills_)
which contain any mention of the Grey Friars shows that out of
fifty-three nearly all are bequests of money “for a trental of masses”;
for a Dirige and a Placebo in the church; for “masses”; for prayers;
in some cases a charity is founded; in many the testator wishes to be
buried in the church; in a great many cases money is left to all the
orders of friars in the City, which are sometimes named, but generally
not. I have elsewhere called attention to the remarkable fact that
the stream of bequests and legacies to the Religious Houses becomes
narrowed early in the fifteenth century and dries up altogether before
the end.
The extent of the Grey Friars’ monastery can be traced by considering
the present site of Christ’s Hospital. The school, unable to extend
itself on the east, west, or north, spread out beyond the wall, which
was at this point taken down soon after the foundation of the school.
The monastery, therefore, was bounded on the north side by the wall;
on the east by King Edward Street, formerly Butcher’s Hall Lane, and
by old Stinking Lane; on the west by the wall and Newgate; and on the
south by Newgate Street. It occupied, that is to say, a corner of the
city of irregular shape, being 600 feet from east to west; 300 feet at
its greatest breadth from north to south; and 80 feet, or perhaps 100,
at its least breadth; an area, that is, of about 45,000 square feet.
The Cloisters, in which lie buried a considerable multitude of London
citizens, were asphalted and used for the boys’ playing field; some
fragments of the old building still remain. As for the old monastery,
it has entirely perished—church—cloisters—everything in the Fire of
1666. The monuments, we know, had gone long before.
While I write, the place itself is doomed. The spirit of barbarous
vandalism has seized upon the school. Before long the school which, for
three hundred years, has been the object of so much pride and affection
among the citizens, will exist no longer. Another school—a new school,
not the same—will be called by the name, and will be found somewhere
in the country, and the Bluecoat school, with all its memories of
Grecians, and of the young King Edward, and of the Grey Friars, will be
swept away and blotted out. It is pitiful; it is wonderful that such
things should be possible.
A plan of Grey Friars in the year 1617, when the old buildings were
not yet all destroyed, and the plan of the House could still be made
out, is preserved in Bartholomew’s Hospital, and has been reproduced
by the _London and Midd. Archæological Society_, vol. v. p. 420. It
shows that the north side of Newgate Street consisted of a row of
tenements belonging to the Goldsmiths’ Company: the Bridge house and
St. Bartholomew’s; behind the tenements and south of the wall lay the
Precinct of Grey Friars. The church, with its middle and two side
aisles, its great west window, its high roof and its Clere-story, might
be re-drawn from the sketch in the plan; the Great and Little Cloisters
are still standing with the old courts and gardens, the Brewhouse and
the Bakehouse, the Mill and the great and small gates; the wall running
along the north side is pierced by a gate connecting the Precinct with
Smithfield, and the wall of the Precinct running along the east side is
Stinking Lane.
There is not much that is important in the MS. notes referring to
this House. In 1340 a great storm battered to the ground part of the
church, especially the west end. In 1360 we find certain persons after
murdering the Porter of Newgate Prison, taking sanctuary in the Grey
Friars’ Church. This points to flight and pursuit, since the Sanctuary
of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, a much safer place, was only a few minutes’
run down the street.
At the time of the Dissolution, as has already been stated, the
condition and reputation of the Friars were as bad as they could be;
their buildings were falling into ruin; they were selling their gold
and silver vessels and the lead off their roofs; the Franciscans of
London had dwindled down to fifteen only when the House surrendered.
The Head of the House alone of his Order received a pension.
For a time the place served as a storehouse for all kinds of things,
especially merchandise taken from the French. In the first year of
Edward the Sixth all the tombs, altars, stalls, walks of the choir,
and altars in the church were pulled up and sold—of course as so much
marble and stone in the rough.
When the House was given to the City there are enumerated the Fratry,
the Library, the Dorter, the Chapter House, the Great Cloister, the
Little Cloister, and the chambers and buildings which had been in the
recent occupancy of certain persons named.
Some of the buildings which escaped the Great Fire were still standing
at the end of the eighteenth century. The south side of the Cloisters
was not yet swept away; on the north side some of the walls and windows
of Whittington’s Library were standing. The western walk of the
Cloister was under the Great Hall, which, with Whittington’s Buildings,
were pulled down in 1827.