The next great House following the wall westward was that of St. Martin's le Grand, of which I have already spoken. It was a House of Augustine Canons. It formed a Precinct with its own Liberty. William of Wykeham was its most famous Dean. In the sanctuary Miles Forrest, one of the murderers of the two Princes in the Tower, died – "rotted away piecemeal." The Liberty survived long after the Dissolution.
Adjoining St. Martin's was the great Foundation of the Grey Friars.
They were Franciscans. Who does not know the story of St. Francis and the foundation of his great order? They were the Preachers of the poor. The first Franciscans, like the Buddhist priests, lived upon alms; they had no money, no endowments, no books, no learning, no great houses. Those who came to England – it was in the year 1224 – nine in number, of whom only one was a priest, were penniless. They first halted in Canterbury, where they were permitted to sleep at night in a room used by day as a school. Four of them presently moved on to London, where they hired a piece of ground on Cornhill, and built upon it rude cells of wattle and clay with their own hands. Already the Dominicans, their rivals – Preachers of the learned and the rich – had obtained a settlement in Oxford. The Franciscans stayed a very short time on Cornhill. In the year 1225 one John Ewin bought and presented to them a piece of ground north of Newgate Street, whither they removed. Their austerity, their poverty, their earnestness, their eloquence drew all hearts towards them. And, as always happens, their very popularity proved their ruin. Kings and queens, great lords and ladies, strove and vied with each other to show their love and admiration for the men who had given up all that the world can offer for the sake of Christ and for pity of their brothers and sisters. They showed this love in the manner common with the world. They forced upon the friars a portion of their wealth; they made them receive and enjoy the very things they had renounced. It is a wonderful record. First, the citizens began. One Lord Mayor built a new choir for their church, with a splendor worthy of the order and of the City; another built the nave to equal the choir; a third built the dormitories – no more wattle and daub for the dear friars; other citizens built Chapter House, Vestry House, Infirmary, and Refectory. Their Library was given by Dick Whittington, thrice Mayor of London. Then came the turn of the great people. Queen Margaret thought the choir of the church should be still more splendid, and added to it or rebuilt it. Queen Isabel and Queen Philippa thought that the nave should be more splendid, and with the help of the Earl and Countess of Richmond, the Earl of Gloucester and his sisters, Lord Lisle and others, built a new nave, 300 feet long, 89 feet broad, and 64 feet high. Here were buried, as in ground far more sacred than that of St. Paul's or any acre of ordinary consecration, Margaret, wife of Edward I.; Isabel, wife of Edward II.; Joan of the Tower, Queen of Scots, daughter of Edward II.; Isabel, daughter of Edward III.; Beatrice, daughter of Henry III.; and an extraordinary number of persons great and honorable in their day. What became of their monuments and of the church itself belongs to Tudor London.
All those who visit London are recommended by the guide-books to see the famous Blue-coat School. The main entrance is at the end of a narrow lane leading north from Newgate Street. On the right hand of the lane stands a great ugly pile built by Wren twenty years after the Great Fire. This is Christ Church, and it stands on part of the site of the old church of the Grey Friars. At the Dissolution, Henry VIII. made their church into a parish church, assigning to it the two parishes of St. Nicolas Shambles and St. Ewin, together with the ground occupied by the Monastery. The church within is as ugly as it is without. One shudders to think of the change from the great and splendid monastic church. On the other side of the lane is an open space, a church-yard now disused. The old church covered both this open space and the area of the modern church. Behind it stood the cloisters, the burial-ground, and the monastic buildings of the House, covering a great extent of ground. Those who go through the gate find themselves in a large quadrangle asphalted. This is now part of the boys' play-ground; their feet run every day over the old tombs and graves of the Grey Friars' burial-ground; the soil, though not accounted so sacred as that within the church itself, was considered greatly superior to that of any common church-yard. Most of the dead were buried in the habit of the Grey Friars, as if to cheat Peter into a belief of their sanctity. On the south of the quadrangle two or three arches may be observed. These are the only fragments remaining of the cloisters. The view of Christ's Hospital after the Great Fire of 1666 shows the old courts of the Abbey. The church formerly extended over the whole front of the picture; the buildings now seen are wholly modern; the cloistered square was the church-yard; the Hall stood across the north side of the first court; beyond were the courts appropriated to the service of the monks; the cells, libraries, etc., were round the great court and the small courts on the right. The Franciscan House is gone; the Friars are gone. Let us not think, however, that their work is gone. On the contrary, all that was good in it remains. That is the quality and the test of good work. It is imperishable. If you ask what is this work and where it may be found, look about you. In the prosperity of the City; in the energy, the industry, the courage, the soberness of its people; in whatever virtues they possess, the Franciscans have their share; the Grey Friars, who went straight at the people – the rough, common, ignorant people – and saved them from the destruction of those virtues which built up this realm of Britain. The old ideas change; what is to-day faith becomes to-morrow superstition; but the new order is built upon the old. It was a part of the training necessary for the English people that they should pass under the teaching of the Friars.
In the south-western corner of the City Wall were lodged the Dominicans or Black Friars.
These, the Preaching Friars, came to England two years before their rivals, the Franciscans. Their first settlement was in the country lane which now we call Chancery Lane. After a residence there of fifty years they removed to this corner of the town, which was, so to speak, made for them – that is, the City Wall which formerly ran straight from Ludgate to the river was pulled down and rebuilt farther west along the bank of the Fleet. Within the piece of ground thus added the Black Friars settled down, and because the ground had not formerly belonged to the City, it now became a Precinct of its own, enclosed by its own wall, with its four gates not amenable to the City and pretending to a right of Sanctuary. Edward I. and his Queen Eleanor were great benefactors to the Dominicans. Of the church and the stately buildings of the proud order not a trace remains. In the Guildhall Museum may be seen a drawing of some ruined vaults belonging to the Abbey, which were discovered on enlarging the premises of the Times some years ago. There is nothing above-ground. The Dominicans, however, never succeeded in winning the affections of the people to the same extent as the Franciscans. They were learned; they insisted strongly on doctrine; but they were harder of heart than the Grey Friars. It was the Dominicans who encouraged the planting of the Inquisition.
All these Houses were within the walls. Without were others, as rich and as splendid. South of Fleet Street, between Bridewell Palace and the Temple, was the House of the Carmelites, called the White Friars. These also were an Order of Mendicants. The Fratres Beatæ Mariæ de Monte Carmelo sprang from the hermits who settled in numbers on the slopes of Mount Carmel. They were formed into an order by Almeric, Bishop of Antioch, and were first introduced into Europe about the year 1216, by Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem. They got their house in London from Edward I.; but their chief benefactor was Hugh Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire. They, too, had their Sanctuary, afterwards called Alsatia. This privilege was not abolished till the year 1697.
Beyond the Carmelites were the Templars, but the suppression of the Order removed them from the scene in the year 1310.
The Priories of St. Bartholomew and of St. John belong to Norman London. On the north of Bartholomew's, however, stood the house of the Carthusians. The Carthusian Order was a branch of the Benedictine Rule, to which the Cluniacs and Cistercians also belonged.
The house of the Salutation of the Mother of God – which was its full title – was founded in the year 1371 by Sir Walter Manny. Those who know their Froissart know that gallant Knight well and can testify to his achievements; how he entreated King Edward for the citizens of Calais; how he rescued the Countess of Montfort besieged in the castle of Hennebont, and, for his reward, was kissed – he and his companions – not once, but two or three times, by that brave lady; these and many other things can be told of this noble Knight. Not the least of his feats was the foundation of this House of Religion.
When we speak of the Plague of London we generally mean that of 1664-65. But this was only the last, and perhaps not the worst, of the many plagues which had visited the City. Thirteen great pestilences fell upon the City between the years 1094 and 1625 – in the last year 35,000 died. That is to say, one plague happened about every forty years, so that there never was a time when a recent plague was not in the minds of men. Always they remembered the last visitation, the suddenness and swiftness of destruction, the desolation of houses, the striking down of young and old, the loss of the tender children, the sweet maidens, the gallant youth. Life is brief and uncertain at the best; but when the plague is added to the diseases which men expect, its uncertainty is forced upon the minds of the people of every condition with a persistence and a conviction unknown in quiet times when each man hopes to live out his three score years and ten.
In the year 1347 there happened a dreadful plague. It began in Dorsetshire and spread over the whole of the south country, reaching London last. After a while the church-yards were not large enough to hold the dead, and they were forced to enclose ground outside the walls. The Bishop of London, therefore, bought a piece of ground north of Bartholomew's, called No Man's Ground, which he enclosed and consecrated, building thereon a "fair chapel." This place was called the Pardon Church-yard. It stood, as those who know London will be interested to know, beyond the north wall of the present Charter House.
Two years later, the plague still continuing, Sir Walter Manny bought a plot of thirteen acres close to this church-yard, and built a chapel upon it – it stood somewhere in the middle of the present Charterhouse Square – and gave it for an additional church-yard. More than fifty thousand persons were buried here in one year, according to Stow; but the number is impossible, unless the whole of London died in that year. There used to be a stone cross standing in the church-yard with the following inscription:
Anno Domini 1349, regnante magna pestilentia, consecratum fuit hoc coemiterium in quo et infra septa presentis monasterii sepulta fuerunt mortuorum corpora plus quam quinquaginta millia praeter alia multa abhinc usque ad presens: quorum animabus propitietur Deus. Amen.
The old Pardon Church-yard afterwards became the burial-place of suicides and executed criminals. To this sad place the bodies of such were carried in a cart belonging to St. John's Hospital; the vehicle was hung over with black, but with a St. John's Cross in front, and within it hung a bell which rang with the jolting and the shaking of the cart – a mournful sight to see and a doleful sound to hear.
Twenty-two years later, when there had been upward of a hundred thousand persons buried in the new church-yard, Sir Walter Manny, now grown old and near his end, bought ten acres more, which he gave to the ground, and established here a House of Carthusians, called the Salutation. At first he thought of making a college for a warden, a dean, and twelve secular priests. On the advice, however, of Simon Sudbury, Bishop of London, he abandoned that project and established a House of Carthusians.
The Cistercian Order was founded by one Stephen Harding, originally a monk of Sherborne. He is said by William of Malmesbury to have left his convent and to have gone into France, where he practised "the Liberal arts" until he fell into repentance, and was received into the monastery of Molesmes, in Burgundy. Here he found a little company of the brethren who were not content with the Rule of the House, but desired instruction and a rule more in accordance with their Founder's intention. They seceded, therefore, and established themselves at Citeaux, then entirely covered with woods. This is their manner of life set forth by the Chronicler:
Certainly many of their regulations seem severe, and more particularly these: they wear nothing made with furs or linen, nor even that finely spun linen garment which we call Staminium;8 neither breeches, unless when sent on a journey, which at their return they wash and restore. They have two tunics with cowls, but no additional garment in winter, though, if they think fit, in summer they may lighten their garb. They sleep clad and girded, and never after matins return to their beds; but they so order the time of matins that it shall be light ere the lauds9 begin; so intent are they on their rule, that they think no jot or tittle of it should be disregarded. Directly after these hymns they sing the prime, after which they go out to work for stated hours. They complete whatever labor or service they have to perform by day without any other light. No one is ever absent from the daily services, or from complines, except the sick. The cellarer and hospitaller, after complines, wait upon the guests, yet observing the strictest silence. The abbat allows himself no indulgence beyond the others – everywhere present – everywhere attending to his flock; except that he does not eat with the rest, because his table is with the strangers and the poor. Nevertheless, be he where he may, he is equally sparing of food and speech; for never more than two dishes are served either to him or to his company; lard and meat never but to the sick. From the Ides of September till Easter, through regard for whatever festival, they do not take more than one meal a day, except on Sunday. They never leave the cloister but for purpose of labor, nor do they ever speak, either there or elsewhere, save only to the abbat or prior. They pay unwearied attention to the canonical10 services, making no addition to them except for the defunct. They use in their divine service the Ambrosian chants11 and hymns, as far as they were able to learn them at Milan. While they bestow care on the stranger and the sick, they inflict intolerable mortifications on their own bodies, for the health of their souls.
When we consider this death in life, this, suppression of everything which makes life, this annihilation of aims, ambitions, and natural affections, this destruction of love, emotion, and passion, this mere monotony of breathing, this wearisome futility and vanity, this endless iteration of Litanies; when we remember that hundreds of thousands in every Christian country, men and women, voluntarily entered upon this life, knowing beforehand what it was, and that they patiently endured it, we can in some measure realize the intensity and the reality of the torments which they believed to be provided for the vast majority of mankind. There grew up, in the course of years, rich monks and luxurious monks; but in the early days of each order there was the austerity of the Rule. And though here and there we find a brother who rises to a spiritual level far above the letter of his Order, the religion of the ordinary brother was little more than the fear of Hell, with a sense of gratitude to the Saints for snatching him out of the flames.
Most of the brethren, again, of the new and more austere Orders, until they became rich, were simple and illiterate. They wanted a rule of life which should give them no chance of committing sin; like women, they desired to be ruled in everything, even the most trivial. At dinner, for instance, they were enjoined to drink with both hands, and to incline the head when served; in church they were not to clinch their hands or to stretch out their legs; the whole day was mapped out for them as it is for boys at school. From primes (the daybreak service) till tierce, spiritual exercises; from tierce till sext, and from nones till vespers, manual labors; once every day private prayer at the altar; silence in the cell; to ask for what was wanted after nones; no conversation in the chapter, the cloisters, or the church; from November till Easter conversation on the customs of the Order; afterwards on the Gospels, and so on. The effect on the common nature would be to produce a breathing machine, incapable of thought, of action, of judgment, with no affections, emotions, or passions. The holy brotherhood becomes a troop of slaves engaged upon a round of trivial duties, kept at a low stage of vitality by scanty food and short sleep. They cease after a while to desire any change; they go on in meekness and submission to the end, their piety measured by their regularity. Now and then among them is found one who frets under the yoke. Either he wants new austerities, like Stephen Harding, or he rises in mad revolt, and before he can be suppressed commits such dreadful sins of rebellion and blasphemy as leave little doubt that after all his pains and privations his chances in the next world are no better than those of the foul-mouthed ruffler outside, whose life has been one long sin, whose death will be caused by a knife in a drunken fray, whose body will be carried in the black cart with the bell to Pardon Church-yard, and whose soul, most certainly, will be borne to its own place by the hands of the Devil to whom it belongs.
There must have been in every convent such times of madness and revolt, even though the vital powers were kept low with poor and scanty food. It is not every man who can be thus changed into a slave and a praying-machine. The noblest souls must break out from time to time; only the ignoble sink contentedly day by day into lethargic, passive, mechanical discharge of the rules; their mouths mechanically mumble the litanies; the sacredness falls out of the most holy acts and words by reason of their familiarity; they drop into second childhood in the vigor and strength of manhood. If the walls of the convent could speak, what tales would they tell of madness and despair and vain rage and drivelling idiocy! One thing, however, came to the relief of these poor men in every order; it was the gradual relaxation of the Rule, until, by the Dissolution, the laws of the Founder had passed into forms and words, and the House, enriched by benefactions, had become a pleasant club, consisting of none but gentlemen, where certain light duties removed the tedium of an idle life.
For two hundred years this House of the Salutation continued. There remains no record of that long period; no record at all. There is no history of those poor souls who lived their dreary lives within its walls. The monks obeyed the Rule and died and were forgotten. Nay, they had been forgotten since the day when they assumed the hood. The end of the Carthusians came in blood and prison and torture; but that belongs to Tudor London.
The accompanying view of the Charter House after the Dissolution, and when Sutton had altered it for his new Foundation, is useful in showing the arrangement of the older monastic buildings. Chapel, cloisters, courts, bowling green, kitchen garden, and "wilderness" are all exactly as the monks left them, though most of the buildings are of later date. The founder, Sir Walter, lived to see only the commencement of his work. He died the year after his House was established, and was buried in the chapel, he and his wife Margaret, and many other gallant knights and gracious ladies, who thus acknowledged, when they chose to be laid among the dust and ashes of the poor folk who had died of the plague and those who had died by the gibbet, their brotherhood with the poorest and the humblest and the most unfortunate.
The modern visitor to London, when he has seen great St. Bartholomew's, is taken up a street hard by. Here, amid mean houses and shops of the lower class, he sees standing across the road St. John's Gate, a place already as well known to him and as frequently figured as St. Paul's itself. This is the gate – and it is nearly all that is left – of the great Priory of St. John of Jerusalem.
It was founded in the year 1100, and therefore belongs to Norman London. Its founder was Jordan Briset, a Baron of the Realm, and Muriel, his wife. They had already founded a priory for nuns close by Clerkenwell. A church of some kind was certainly built at the beginning, but the great Priory Church, one of the most splendid in London, was not dedicated till the year 1185, and then by no less a person than by Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, then in England in quest of aid and money for another Crusade.
In its Foundation the brethren took the vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty. They were to have a right to nothing but bread, water, and clothes. They begged their food; on Wednesdays and Fridays they fasted; a breach of their first vow was punished by public flogging and penance; no women were to do any offices at all for them; they were to be silent, never to go about alone; they were to be the servants of the sick and poor; they were valiantly to defend the Cross. "Receive," says the ritual of admission, "the yoke of the Lord: it is easy and light, and thou shalt find rest for thy soul. We promise thee nothing but bread and water, a simple habit of little worth. We give thee, thy parents and relations, a share in the good works performed by our Order and by our brethren, both now and hereafter, throughout the world. We place, O brother, this cross upon thy breast, that thou mayest love it with all thy heart, and may thy right hand ever fight in its defence! Should it happen that in fighting against the enemies of the faith thou shouldest desert the standard of the Cross and take to flight, thou wilt be stripped of the holy sign according to the statutes and customs of the Order, as having broken its vows, and thou wilt be cut off from our body."
This poor, valiant, and ascetic society became in two hundred years enormously rich and luxurious. By its pride and its tyranny it had incurred the most deadly hatred of the common people, as is shown by their behavior during the insurrection of Wat Tyler and John Bull. The first step of the rebels in Essex was to destroy a fair manor-house belonging to the Knights Hospitallers, and to devour and waste the stores of food, wine, and clothes contained in it. On their way to London they destroyed another manor belonging to the Knights, that of Highbury. After they had burned and pillaged Lambeth and the Savoy, they went in a body to St. John's Priory and destroyed the whole of the buildings, church and all. And they seized and beheaded the Grand Prior, who was also Treasurer of the Realm. The church soon rose again, and the monastic buildings were replaced with more than the ancient splendor, and the luxury of the Knights was in no way diminished by this disaster. The Gate itself, part of the later buildings, now belongs to the English Knights of St. John, who have established an ambulance station close beside it and maintain a hospital at Jerusalem. The very beautiful crypt of the church still stands and may be visited. Part of the walls of the mean modern church also belongs to the old church.
On the north side of the Priory and adjacent to it lay the twin Foundation of Briset, the Priory of Black Nuns. Its church, at the Dissolution, became the Parish Church of St. James Clerkenwell. Jordan Briset and his wife were buried in this church.
The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem was situated at first outside Bishopsgate, close to St. Botolph's Church. This ancient Foundation, of which our Bethlehem Hospital is the grandchild, was endowed by one Simon Fitz Mary, Sheriff in the year 1247. It was designed for a convent, the monks being obliged to receive and entertain the Bishop of Bethlehem or his nuncio whenever either should be in London. It is said to have become a hospital within a few years of its foundation. In the year 1347 the brethren were all engaged in collecting alms. This was one of the lesser Houses, though it survived the rest and became the great and splendid Foundation which still exists. A little farther north, and on the opposite side of Bishopsgate Street, stood the great House of St. Mary Spital – Domus Dei et Beatæ Virginis – founded in the year 1197 by Walter Brune and Rosia his wife. It was originally a Priory of Canons Regular. At some time in its history, I know not when, it was converted into a hospital, like its neighbor of Bethlehem. It would be interesting to learn when this change became even possible. It must have been long after its foundation, when the old prayer-machine theory had lost something of its earliest authority, and, in the face of the mass of human suffering, men began to ask whether the machinery engaged in iterating litanies might not be made more useful in the alleviation of suffering. For whatever cause, the House of God and the Blessed Virgin became St. Mary Spital, and at the time of the Dissolution there were no fewer than one hundred and eighty beds in the House. Near St. Mary Spital was Holywell Nunnery. On the south side of Aldgate, outside the wall, stood the famous Abbey of St. Clare, called the Minories, founded by Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, in the year 1293, for the reception of certain nuns brought over by his wife, Blanche, Queen of Navarre, who were professed to serve God, the Blessed Virgin, and St. Francis.
There is a church, one of the meanest and smallest of all the London churches, standing in the ugliest and dreariest part of the City, called the Church of the Holy Trinity, Minories, which is often visited by Americans because the arms of Washington are to be seen here; and by antiquaries, because the head of the Duke of Suffolk, executed on Tower Hill, is preserved here. The north wall of this church is part of the wall of the Clare Sisters' Church, and is all that remains in that squalid place of the noble Foundation.
Sir Walter Manny's Carthusian House was not the only Foundation arising out of the great Plague of 1348. On the north-east of the Tower arose at the same time a very stately House, dedicated to the Honor of God and the Lady of Grace. It began exactly in the same way as the Carthusians', by the purchase of a piece of ground in which to bury those who died of the plague. John Corey, Clerk, first bought the ground, calling it the Church-yard of the Holy Trinity. One Robert Elsing gave five pounds, and other citizens contributing, the place was enclosed and a chapel built on it. Then Edward III., remembering a certain vow made during a certain tempest at sea, in which he was only saved by the miraculous interposition of the Virgin Mary herself, built here a monastery which he called the House and King's Free Chapel of the Blessed Virgin of Grace – "in memoriam Gratiarum." The House obtained the Manor of Gravesend and other rich benefactions. There is little history that I have discovered belonging to it. The people commonly called it either New Abbey or Eastminster, and when it was surrendered its yearly value was £546, equivalent to about £10,000 a year as prices now obtain.
On the south side of Thames, besides St. Mary Overies already noticed, there were two great Houses.
The first of these, St. Thomas's Hospital, was founded in the year 1213 by Richard, Prior of Bermondsey, for converts and poor children. He called it the Almery. Two years afterwards the Bishop of Winchester, Peter de Rupibus, now founded the place for Canons Regular. After the Dissolution it was purchased by the City of London for a hospital for the sick and poor.
The second, Bermondsey Abbey, though founded as early as 1081 by one Alwyn Childe, Citizen, and probably one of Fitz Stephen's thirteen conventual churches, and a most interesting House from many points of view, hardly comes within our limits. Portions of the Abbey were standing until the beginning of this century. All the then existing remains were figured by Wilkinson; I have not been able to find a fragment of it now remaining above-ground. Underground, vaults, arches, and crypts undoubtedly remain, and will be discovered from time to time as excavations are made for new buildings. These great Houses, all richly endowed with broad manors, devoured a good part of the whole country. Their schools, their learning, and their charities are matters of sentiment if not of history. For the time came when the school should become free of the monastery, and when the vast estates formed for the benefit of the monks should pass into the hands of the community. Charity to the poor is a thing beautiful in itself; better than to relieve the poor is to lessen the necessity of poverty.
But this long list of great Houses by no means exhausts the list. Besides these of the City, within it or else around it, were many others, not so rich, yet well endowed. He, for instance, who walks along the broad highway of Whitechapel and Mile End, if he continues his walk, presently arrives at a most interesting and venerable church. It is quite small, with a low tower; it stands in the middle of the road, and has a long, narrow church-yard, cigar-shaped, before and behind it. This is the Church of St. Mary, or Bow Church. It was formerly the Church of a nunnery founded at Stratford-le-Bow by William the Conqueror; it was augmented by Stephen, enriched by Henry II. and Richard I., and it lasted till the Dissolution. Let us remember that every new endowment of a monastic House meant the sequestration of so many acres of land; they were taken from the country and given to the Church; they could never be sold; the tenants could never acquire property or rise in the world; all the lands owned by convents, churches, or colleges were lands withdrawn forever (as it seemed) from the healthy change and chance of private property.