CHAPTER XXIII

GREY FRIARS

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.

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.