Gone Medieval - London's Oldest Parish Church: Great St. Barts

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Once connected to a busy and thriving hospital, Great St Bart's Church in Smithfield is not only a survivor of the Great Fire of London, but also has a fascinating foundation story.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis goes to get a closer look at London’s oldest surviving parish church with Father Marcus Walker.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Ella Blaxill. The Producer is Rob Weinberg, the Senior Producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. A survivor of the Great Fire of London, you might be forgiven for being fooled by the beautiful but deceptively unassuming entranceway to great St Bart's Church in Smithfield. Once connected to a busy and thriving hospital, it has a fascinating foundation story that just might involve a famous name. and it's seen many uses that have left marks on the building. Over 800 years old, Great St Bartz is the oldest surviving parish church in London. And to find out more about it, I went to meet Father Marcus Walker, the rector,

to get a closer look at this incredible space. We're in St Bartholomew's The Great. It's proudly the oldest parish church still standing in London. When was it founded and who? And I know I'm cheating this question slightly because we're standing in front of the two the guy who founded it. Yes, that's right. Well, it was founded by a man called Rahir in 1123, on March the 25th, Lady Day, which was also New Year's Day, back in the old calendar. And Rahir was a courtier of King Henry I. The Book of the Foundation, which was produced

not very long after his death, talks about him being, well, a bit of a creep and a social climber. possibly the court jester. It talks about him using japes and jests to win people's affections and sewing pillows on his elbows and things like that. So it's thought that he was the court jester in the court of Henry I. It's a very interesting background for a man who founded a church that's still here 900 years later. Well, it seems as if something happened to him with him for his faith, perhaps around the time of the white ship disaster when Henry I's son and heir William Aethling drowned on the journey back to England

from Normandy that said that after that Henry I never laughed again so possibly there was less need for a jester in the court he almost certainly was a friend of many of the people who drowned in that disaster and so he went on pilgrimage to Rome and whilst there was taken ill with malaria and was taken to hospital

and it's most likely given what happened that that hospital is the hospital which has a successor still there on Tiber Island attached to the church of San Bartolomeo on Tiber Island and it built on the Temple of Asclepius the ancient Roman god of medicine and whilst he was there he had a vision

slash a nightmare and then afterwards had a vision of St. Bartholomew, a dream of St. Bartholomew, who told him to come back to London and to build a church and a hospital like he saw there. And he said that he had identified some land on the smooth field of London where this should be built, which must have looked good on the planning application. How common were hospitals in the medieval world at this point. Not very common at all. They were just really starting out, particularly in the northern part of Europe. It seems as though one of the reasons why you start getting this flowering of hospitals in London and in England, St. Bartholomew's, Thomas's and so on, was because of the Norman conquest of

Sicily and southern Italy and their control of Salerno, the medical school down there, and the value given to medicine in Italy flowed back through Norman links to Norman-controlled England. It was fascinating. So the Norman presence in Sicily around that kind of Islamic teaching and more interest in medicine and science than we had, that connection of Norman, Sicily and Norman Southern Italy to Norman England. That had a direct impact on the quality of life of the Saxon citizens of London. Maybe a side effect of 1066 that's slightly nicer than we normally think. Exactly. It's rather curious. And of course, the hospital that was founded here was from the very start, you could say founded on NHS principles of free at the point of delivery, free at the point of demand. Nobody was turned away. So it was a really important foundation.

And why was this place in Smithfield? Is this the smooth field? This is the smooth field. Smithfield has nothing to do with Smiths at all. It's just a corruption of the old smooth field. And it was the meat market, and still is for now. The land was granted. by the king. He had to amend the charter that gave all of this land to the butchers and instead carved out a portion for the church and hospital. And the land was clearly absolutely revolting. Described as being a marsh, a stinking, fetid marsh. It was a place where criminals were executed. They continued to be executed here for hundreds and hundreds of years. And the king granted him the land but didn't give Rahir any money. So it seems, again according to the book of the foundation, as though he embarked on something that probably wouldn't go down well with modern safeguarding policies for the Church of England,

where he rounded up local children and got them to clear the land for him, and in return did magic tricks and games and jokes with them. So it seems though he put his skills as a jester to good use. And it's interesting to reflect that one of the children, aged about eight of the time, playing around not very far away, living in Cheatside, would have been a very far away, young Thomas Beckett. So it's not implausible that if he was looking for something to do,

five minutes away was a sight with this jester, he might have been here clearing the ground. A fascinating thought, particularly when you think about Thomas Beckett's later flair for performance. Absolutely. It's interesting to wonder whether he saw what Rahir was doing here. And thought, that's a way to get people to do what you want. That's a way to get attention. Absolutely. I was going to say it sounds like Rahir's connections at court came in handy, but maybe not if he was just given a stinking mask.

A little bit of a stinking marshal. It's interesting that Rehier was a thing. is the only medieval tomb that still remains in the church. He still lies in the church that he founded 900 years ago. Is there a reason that his is the only surviving medieval monument here? It's a real sadness that it is. We know that academics have dug into the old roles. We've discovered at least 80 people requested to be buried here. And we know from heraldic accounts, we know of 40 tombs that were here. It's quite clear that in the various remodeling of the church. Medieval tombs were removed. At least one priors tomb got sold to the British

Museum in the 19th century, but the rest have really just disappeared with time. It's also interesting to reflect on the fact that the floor level that we're on right now where we're standing is not the floor level of the church for most of its time. As we walk around, you'll see various doors sort of going out into the rest of the world that are about three feet above the floor level. This is the floor level of the original church, and then dust, grime, dirt and everything else came in, so the floor level was a lot higher, which meant that a reasonable number of the tombs and memorials just had to be removed as the floor level went back to its original level.

But it's incredible to think of that just as a symptom of its use over 900 years in various guises, but always remaining as a place of worship over the centuries. Absolutely, although quite astonishing to think of what this place of worship would have been like after the Reformation, particularly in the 18th century. At the Reformation, the church was handed over to Sir Richard Rich by Sir Richard Rich, as he was Chancellor of the Court of Augmentation. Funny how things like that happen. It's funny old world, you know, and I grant this prairie to me. Yes, he'd handed this over, and slowly but surely different bits of it were carved out, cut off and destroyed. So you have two-thirds of the church that was knocked down at the Reformation,

leaving only the Chancellor, which is quite big. You can get a good 600 in here for a carol service, but that's only one-third of the old church. You have the North transept that was turned into an ironmonger's, and you can see the blackened walls from the fires. The Lady Chapel was hived off and turned into commercial premises, most of which were printers workshops, where, in fact, Benjamin Franklin worked when he came over here as an apprentice, aged 17. The North Triforium was a non-conformist school. The cloister was eventually turned into a stable block. So I have no idea how any prayer took place in here during the day

with the neighing and the braying and the smashing and the clanging and the children shouting and everything else. It's been absolutely chaotic place to be. It's been an absolute nightmare. How important was the foundation of the children? the Priory here and the hospital. Did they complement each other? Did they always work well together? No. Yes, they complimented each other. No, they didn't always work well together. The two were founded together. They were a joint foundation. The earliest record of anything to do with either is a charter

issued by Pryorahir here, granting independence to one of our neighbouring parishes, St. Sepulchus by Newgate, but obviously had the living of it. That was carved out separately. But he uses two seals, one for the Priory and one for the hospital, which suggests, in fact, really it states that they were, even within 15 years, they had two separate legal identities, but they were under the same man. They were always under the prior.

And over the years, you had various different spats as those working in the hospital wanted more independence from the Priory. The priory seeing the hospital as a bit of a cash cow, both fighting over access to clean water. So they clashed, but in the end they were one family. And they were essentially each the cause of the other's existence. So they were symbiotic.

Yeah, it's a bit like hating your brother. Yes, exactly, exactly. A sibling rivalry between them. What can you tell us about the visitation by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1250? Because I was reading a little bit about that, and it sounds like it really kicked off. It really kicked off. It was great fun. From what you can tell, Boniface was the Archbishop of Canterbury.

He was an Italian who was put in and was really short of cash. Not unknown for clerics of the Middle Ages. He was short of cash and decided to see how he could transfer as many institutions under his direct authority so that they would be paying him rather than other people and tried to go around collecting cash from people that he thought he could extract it from, one of which was the Priory of St. Bartholomey the Great,

where he was convinced that this should fall under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury and not the Bishop of London. He first of all went to St Paul's to try and extract money from them, was told to push off by the cannons of St Paul's. So he came down here, arrived. They were expecting him and decided to put on a full liturgical procession for him to welcome him in, and in he came, and the monks were there. The prior had made good his excuses and was not there,

leaving the poor sub-prior to welcome him. It's all described in Matthew Paris's manuscript. And it seemed like it turned into a complete frargo. Because about halfway through the procession, the Archbishop Canterrey got bored and decided he didn't want a procession anymore. What he really wanted was the money. So demanded that they immediately make good the money that should be gained to him and not to the Bishop of London.

And the monk said, no, I'm terribly sorry, we're under the Bishop of London. We're in this diocese, said, thank you very much. And the Archbishop of Canterbury ended up punching the sub-prior, who was an older man, which led to absolute outrage. There was a full-scale fight at which it was revealed that the Archbishop of Canterbury was wearing chain mail under his vestments. He'd not come ready for a liturgical procession. He'd come ready for a fight. He had come ready for a fight. And then basically both sides scampered straight off to the king to demand satisfaction and restitution.

And there was a basic compromise got thrashed out by the king of kind of give him some money but you stay under the Bishop of London. And his punishment was to launch a visitation and investigate. the prairie in which he wasn't able to find anything that they were doing wrong, apart from possibly eating a little too well. That must have annoyed him a lot. I think that was probably even more annoying. Sounds like an incredible day, though. I mean, it's not very often you get the Archbishop of Canterbury come in,

launch a punch-up, wearing armour in the middle of a church. Quite right. Yes, mercifully, relations with the Archbishop of Canterbury are better these days. And what do we know about the fair that used to take place in St. Bart's as well? Was that key to its prosperity? Yes, it was its primary form of fundraising. So, Balth's Fair was set up, I think, in 1133. So pretty hard on the heels of the foundation of the church itself.

And it was originally a cloth fair, which is where the name of the street that the church is on, cloth fair, comes from. And it began really just being the cloth market of London, at least for a blast of time, around August the 24th, St. Bartholomew's Day. It's actually the reason why there is a bank holiday at the end of August, because the Bart's Fair became so big, and it was London's big fair, so they decided it was worth, since people were going to take it off anyway, they might as well make it a bank holiday. So the Barth's Fair was set up 1133, and it very quickly grew to be considerably bigger than just a cloth fair. And it took over the whole of Smithfield. It's parodied by Ben Johnson in his play, Bart's Fair, Priggish Puritans. fighting against all the vice. And the vice became the thing for which it was best known, such that the Victorians weren't having any of it and shut it down

in order to quell the vice towards the end of the Victorian era. But it was a huge source of revenue for the church and for the hospital. And it was opened, the eve of the Bart's Fair, saw it opening with the Lord Mayor arriving in state and cutting a piece of cloth. on cloth fare, which was, in fact, the origin of ribbon cutting to open fares. The fact that it was this big bit of cloth on cloth fair opening the cloth fair is how the whole practice of ribbon cutting developed.

And this was immediately followed by a public disputation, which was a sort of a theological debate, which took place either inside or outside, whether dependent, where a wise magister would supervise theologians discussing abstruse points. of angels on piddheads and so on. And this developed into a sort of schools debate over the years. And Thomas Moore won the Bart's disputation when he was a child at the Charter House. And in fact, we restored it this year with a public debate.

This House believes that the love of money is the root of the nation's evils. And we had Michael Gave here and Aaron Bastani and Eddie Dempsey and it was all great fun. So it was interesting. It was a big fare, and it was a huge revenue maker, but it began with a theological debate, tied together the institutions again. And that must have contributed to raising St. Bart's profile and importance again, also connecting it with the wider community around London,

making it a much more important place. It's an interesting one about how important it was. So it was a Royal Foundation which gave it a status. Clearly when it was built, they were using the most modern technique. and if you look up, you can see the transformation of the church from the Romanesque up to the Gothic. It starts Romanesque at the bottom with big, thick columns, and it moves up to thin little Gothic windows. And the same was true as it went west. It moved from Romanesque to Gothic. We have some interesting Westminster tiles, which came from a nearby tile maker on the Farringdon Road,

very similar to tiles that you can see in Westminster Abbey, and which you can see in Westminster Abbey, and which shows that this was a place that had by the time that it really got going enough money to be in reasonable shape. But it's also clear that revenue raising was not its primary skill set, because there are a good number of occasions when the prior was hauled before the court of the king's bench for allowing the roof to leak. And that's interesting itself. It's a royal foundation, so it was actually an offence to the king to allow one of his churches to get into that state. but being a royal foundation did not, it seemed, come with enough money to keep the roof dry. And interesting as well that all of that fare and everything else that's going on

isn't raising enough to keep the roof in good repair. Well, most of it was being spent on the hospital. The real chalism of the medieval monastery was the sick of London. I think it probably speaks well that they spent the money on that rather than the roof, or they're keeping the roof on, it's always been important. Yeah, it's a fair point. So, Marcus, we've moved over to the startling Damien Hurst, sculpture that you've got installed here and just nestled to the side of that almost

missable i think if you weren't looking for it is st bart's font why is this so important this is important because it's one of only two surviving pre-reformation fonts in the city of london and it was put in in 1405 as part of a slight remodeling of the church when the church was well it was almost 300 years old by that stage and it needed refreshing and sprucing up and one of the things that got put put in the church was well it was almost 300 years old by that stage and it needed refreshing and sprucing up. And one of the things that got put in was, in some ways, it looked quite plain. It's an octagonal font. It's just one great big piece of stone. There aren't any reliefs or drawings on it. But it's a thing itself of sort of remarkable historical standing, remarkable antiquity and place for only people of being christened, including made famously

William Hogarth, who was born in the parish. His father set up that coffee shop where you had to speak Latin. Remarkably was an financial success. No coffee for me. It is striking. And things like this always amaze me that when you look at that, you wouldn't think there was much to it. But when you think that for 600 and more years, people have been christened in that font, you know, how many thousands and thousands and thousands of journeys of life started right here? Absolutely. And it's crowned with a nice little Jacobian hood that sits on top of it. And it is. It's just a remarkable survival. And that's 14. sprucing up of the church was when the prior, prior Rahir gets dug up. He was just lying under a slab,

they think, in front of the altar. Now he's put into this elaborate Gothic tomb that we see today. It was when the church had its slightly awkward Trump moment, when basically, as you can see now, and as you could have seen then, there's this wonderful vista in the church, this curved arch at the back, this curved apse, rather, at the back with these wonderful Romanesque arches. And the people of 1405 thought this was far too French. And the war with France, a hundred years war, was going so badly. They didn't want to see a nasty French curved apse. They wanted to see something nice in English, you know, something perpendicular.

So they just built a wall. And immediately behind the altar, there was this wall that was there from 1405 to about 1880. And you can still see, if you look, carefully at the side of the walls, the little discoloration of the stones from where the wall was taken out. It's quite lucky because it means we've got one of the most beautiful views of London back. It's incredible to think about that moment in 4005. People are so concerned that this place looks too French and we just want to do away with that because stuff's not going great with France at the moment.

We're definitely being English at the moment. Yep. So we're on an English church. English church for English people. Thank you very much. So we're going to build a wall. St. Bartholomey be great and St. Bartholomey the lesser are now kind of joined together. and known as Great St. Bart's. How and why and when did that happen?

So the two churches, St. Bartholomew the Great and St. Bartholomew the Less, are the two churches that survive of the seven churches and chapels that existed within the St. Bartholomew's Priory Complex during the Middle Ages. And St. Bartholomew the Less was in fact known as the Chapel of the Holy Rood, of the Holy Cross, it ministered particularly to patients at the hospital. After the Reformation, when the hospital was refounded by Henry the 7th, that remained, and it sort of has played the role of the hospital chapel ever since. Except instead of being a chapel, it was its own standalone parish, whose parish boundaries were coterminous with the boundaries of the hospital.

Now, this, of course, made sense when you had nurses living on site, surgeons living on site. You actually had a whole community living permanently within the hospital grounds. As styles of being a hospital have changed in recent years, that's no longer the case. Nurses, doctors and everybody else have their own homes elsewhere and very happy they are there too, but it's slightly made having an independent parish redundant. So in 2015, the two St. Bartholomew churches of the area were merged together into a super-pastrophe. I suppose, a big parish, but it's a tiny parish in national terms. So the parish is great St. Bartholomew, within which you have St. Bartholomew the Great

and St. Bartholomew the less. It's fascinating that that history is still there, though, connecting all of that after 900 years. We've come up to the Lady Chapel. What is your favourite part of St. Bartz? My favourite part of St. Bartz has to be standing in front of the high altar and looking at the wonderful sight of the... and the columns and there's nothing like that space, all that French stuff. Exactly.

I'm a great fan of French architecture and indeed of the French. But absolutely fascinating and unique historically has to be the Lady Chapel. Because the Lady Chapel is the site of the only apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in London. And she came here, allegedly, before 1180 when the book of the foundation was written, and appeared in front of one of the canons of the church, Canon Hubert, and told him off, really. She's still in really quite a bad mood and told him that he and his fellow monks,

but particularly his fellow monks, it seems like he slightly avoided criticism, at least the way he told it, that they were not praying anywhere they're hard enough. They used to pray, they used to offer a mass to her son and pray to her, and now their ardor has cooled and their affections waned, as you basically come along to say you've got to buck up your act or there'll be trouble.

On the back of which, the lady chapel, which is, I think, the largest lady chapel in London, of it certainly of a parish church, gets extended with previously just a small little curved chapel. And then it becomes this very large, almost church-sized chapel. Clearly there was an attempt to make this into a pilgrimage site, probably to raise money, probably for the roof that kept leaking. clearly it didn't work because the prior kept getting hauled in to be told off and to face trial

for allowing that to happen. Probably because if you're looking for successful shrines to the Blessed Virgin Mary, generally places where the Virgin Mary's come along and said, I'll help make you pregnant. If I'm not, I'm going to tell you off. Yeah, it's not a qualifying miracle just to say, tell the monks to pray harder.

Exactly. So it never really took off, but at the Reformation, the site of the only recorded visit of the Blessed Virgin Mary It made it a little bit of a focus point, and it gets sold off pretty sharply and turned into commercial premises. And it was part of the whole printer's colony that operated around St Paul's Cathedral. And so it was mostly printers workshops.

And therefore, in 1724, when Benjamin Franklin comes over to London to buy a printing press and discovers to his horror, he also has to pay for it, He's living just around the corner in the street called Little Britain and he works in a shop called Palmer's Prince which was within what had been before and would be again the Lady Chapel which makes this probably the only place in the world that has recorded visits of both the Blessed Virgin Mary and Benjamin Franklin. President of the United States. Signatory of the Declaration of Independence.

Yeah, absolutely incredible. I mean, this is such an amazing space. I hadn't been here before. I'm not a Londoner, so I hadn't been in to St. Barts before and I'm absolutely blown away by the space and the architecture. That curved apps, you're right, is amazing. Stuffed the 405 people. That's right. They did not know what they were doing. They knew not what they did.

And it's incredible to think that you can come here 900 years later after Rahia's vision and his founding of this place, we can still come here 900 years later and view it in all of its splendor and use it as a place of worship and that you have events in here. Yes, we enjoy having carol services from various different traditions. We've got a German Carol Service, an American Carol Service. Charles Dickens, he was Secretary of Arvestri,

secretary of the Parochial Church Councils, they'd become known. Interestingly, 10 years after St. Bartholomew the Great closed down its workhouse. Sort of wonder whether the stories that he heard about the workhouse might have found their way into Oliver Twist. But we also have a medieval carol service, purely medieval music, plus readings from the Wycliffe Bible. and it's, yes, remembering that portion of our past. We might have a French carol service next year.

Just to annoy the people of 4005. That's incredible. I mean, I thoroughly recommend a visit to St Bart's to anybody who's in the area. And thank you so much for your time, showing us around Mark. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you. Not at all. Great to meet you. I hope you enjoyed our tour of Great St Bartz.

If you're ever in Smithfield, it's well worth a visit. And hopefully, Father Marcus has offered some great information to help find some of the key. key stories this building has to tell. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts and tell your friends and family that you've Gone Medieval. You can listen and follow on Spotify, where you can find Gone Medieval's entire back catalogue. If you have a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us

anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.