IN the church of St. Peter, Cornhill, there has been from time immemorial a tablet bearing a very remarkable inscription, and which, if trustworthy in the chief matter to which it refers, not only points out to us the locality of the oldest of metropolitan Christian churches, but the very first edifice of the kind raised in Great Britain. The tablet was "fast chained" in the church in Stow's time, and although written by what authority he knew not, was certainly then "of no late hand." Thus runs it: "Be it known unto all men that the year of our Lord God C.lxxix. Lucius, the first Christian king of this land, then called Britain, founded the first church in London, that is to say, the church of St. Peter, upon Cornhill; and he founded there an archbishop's see, and made that church the metropolitan and chief church of this kingdom; and so [it] endured the space of CCCC. years, unto the coming of St. Austin [Augustine], the Apostle of England, the which was sent into this land by St. Gregory, the Doctor of the VOL. V. M church in the time of King Ethelbert. And then was the archbishop's see and pall removed from the aforesaid church of St. Peter, upon Cornhill, unto ‘Derebernaum,' that now is called Canterbury, and there remaineth to this day. And Millet [Mellitus], monk, the which came into the land with St. Austin, was made the first bishop of London, and his see was made in Paul's church." The tablet then goes on to inform us how many years after Brute Lucius reigned, M.C.C.xlv. (the precision of these old chroniclers is admirable), how long his reign lasted no less than seventy-seven years; and that he was, according to one chronicle, buried in London, whilst another set him down at Gloucester, "in that place where the order of St. Francis standeth now." But this is by no means the entire extent of our information as to these very ambitious claims of St. Peter's, Cornhill. Stow also gives us, on the authority of Joceline of Furneis,' the names of both the first and second archbishops, Thean and Elvanus, as well as of their fourteen successors; and informs us that whilst the first, aided by King Lucius's butler, Ciran, erected the church, the second added a library, and "converted many of the Druids, learned men in the Pagan law, to Christianity." He adds, evidently with a lingering belief in the story, "True it is, that a library there was pertaining to the parish church of old time builded of stone.' It also appears a school was held there from some very early, but unknown, period. Altogether, the story forms so delightful a piece of antiquarian gossip, that we wish it was in our power to assert its undeniable truth. Turning to a more general view of our subject, and to matter of a less romantic, but more trustworthy nature, it may be observed that the first (in time) of our metropolitan topographers, Fitz-Stephen, amongst his notices of the temperateness of the air and the strength of the place, the honour of its citizens, and the chastity of its matrons, its schools, its customs, and its sports, does not, of course, exclude a view of the provision of the religious demands of his favourite city; and brief and unadorned as is the single sentence with which he dismisses the subject, the facts he gives us derive considerable interest as well as value from the antiquity of the period referred to. It is something to be able to lift off the dark mist that hangs over the London of the middle ages, even though it be but to learn that "there are in London and in the suburbs 13 churches belonging to convents, besides 126 lesser parish churches." And a very striking illustration the statement forms of the wealth and zeal of the inhabitants of London, as well as of their great numbers during the period in question, and makes it probable that there is no error, after all, as to the 20,000 armed men who, according to the same writer (himself probably an eye-witness), went out to a muster in the neighbourhood "in the fatal wars under King Stephen." Nay, it should seem, if we may judge of the increase of the population by the increase of churches, that that population had been stationary for some centuries after Fitz-Stephen's time, for when Stow wrote, the entire number of churches in and about London within four miles' compass was but 139: the exact number mentioned by Fitz-Stephen, if we add the conventual to the parish churches, as Stow does in his list with regard to all that were still preserved. And thus, no doubt, they remained down to 1666, when the great fire destroyed at once 89 of their Stow, ed. 1633, p. 211. number, many of them never again to rise from their ruins. Fitz-Stephen gives us no enumeration of the buildings he mentions, but this is of little importance, for Stow does; and it is tolerably clear that the buildings he refers to are almost identical with the buildings mentioned by Fitz-Stephen. So that however much older than the twelfth century may have been the churches of London generally that existed before the fire, it is evident that their foundation must be referred to at least that early period. Eleven of the thirteen "belonging to convents" may be traced with precision. We find on examination that there were in existence in Fitz-Stephen's time, Trinity Priory, Aldgate, founded in 1108 by good Queen Maud, wife of Henry I., for Regular Canons of the rule of St. Augustine, by whose influence "was the number of those that praised God day and night so much increased, that the whole city was much delighted with the sight of it;"* St. Bartholomew's, already fully treated of in our pages; Bermondsey, the same; St. James Priory, Clerkenwell, founded for Black nuns about 1100, near the famous well from which it derived its name; the Priory of St. John the Baptist, near another well of still higher repute— Holywell, Shoreditch; St. Katharine's Hospital, founded by Matilda, Stephen's queen, of which the building in Regent's Park is the legitimate descendant; St. Thomas Acon, founded in honour of Fitz-Stephen's master, Beckett, by the ambitious churchman's sister and her husband, within a few years after his murder, and on the site of their father's house, in which Beckett himself was born; St. John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell, the house of the Hospitallers; and the Temple, the house of their rivals; St. Mary Overies, noticed in our first volume; and, lastly, St. Martin's-le-Grand, which, both from its antiquity and its magnificence, was appropriately named: it was founded in 700, by a king of Kent, Wythred; rebuilt, and a great increase made to its endowments, about 1056, by two noble Saxon brothers; confirmed in all its rights, privileges, and possessions by the Conqueror, who made it not merely independent of his own or the kingly jurisdiction, but of the Papal also, and which, among its other noticeable features, included within its precincts a sanctuary, that seems to have been the Alsatia of an earlier day. For a certain class of persons, those who had occasion to pass to and fro between Newgate and Guildhall on business of a more indispensable than agreeable nature, this sanctuary was most conveniently situated, and the advantages it offered were fully appreciated. Thus, in 1439, when a soldier for some crime was pursuing the route mentioned, five men rushing out suddenly from Panyer Alley rescued him, and the whole fled into St. Martin's. The Sheriffs in their irritation were incautious enough to follow them into the church, seize them, and send them to Newgate; but the authorities soon compelled them to replace the offenders in the sacred building. If the great fire of London was calculated to beget in the minds of contemporaries the deepest awe and astonishment at the amount of the mischief consummated within so small a space, those feelings were not likely to be lessened by the peculiar severity of the visitation as it regarded the churches of London. In the following list is shown in alphabetical order the churches as they stood in the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the central portion of London must *Stow, p. 951. have appeared one forest of steeples.* If the reader, after glancing over this list, will then mark how many of them have an asterisk prefixed, he will see those which remained: surely no other single feature of the conflagration furnishes us with so startling a notion of its effects as this: CHURCHES OF LONDON AND THE SUBURBS BEFORE THE FIRE. Albans, Wood Street, W. *Allhallows, Staining *Andrew, Holborn, W. Augustine, W. *Bartholomew the Great *Bartholomew the Less Bartholomew, Exchange, W. *Battersea Bennet Fink, W. Bennet, Paul's Wharf, W. Christ Church, W. Clement Danes, W. *Deptford Dionis, Back Church, W. Edmund, Lombard Street, W. Gabriel, Fenchurch *Giles, Cripplegate Gregory, by St. Paul *James, Clerkenwell Katherine Coleman Lawrence, Jewry, W. Magnus, W. Martin, Ludgate, W. Mary Colechurch Mary Magdalen, Milk Mary Magdalen, Old W. Michael, Queenhithe, W. The W affixed to many of the above names show the churches rebuilt by Wren; consequently those without either that mark or the asterisk are the buildings that have been entirely lost to us. Among all these it would have been difficult to have found one uninteresting structure, whilst many of them were, no doubt, exquisite specimens of their respective architectural styles, and they all belonged to one long period in the history of Christian architecture, when none but beautiful buildings were erected, and the only differences were as to their relative degrees of beauty. In their origin, names, customs-in the monuments and inscriptions they contained-in their wealth and decorative splendour, one might find materials for a pleasant and instructive volume; thus, to refer to the first point only-the name :-there is, to explain how St. Martin, Ironmonger's Lane, came to be called also Pomary, "supposed to be of apples growing where now houses are lately builded;"† St. Mary Woolchurch, from the beam placed in the churchyard for the weighing of wool; St. Michael at the Quern, corruptly 6 For a picturesque general view of these buildings in old times, see Something about London Churches at the Close of the Fourteenth Century,' in vol. iv. p. 209, No. LXXXIX. + Stow. from Corne, on account of the neighbouring ancient corn-market by Paternoster Row; Fen Church, from the fenny or moorish ground on which it was built, through which ran the once sweet and beautiful waters of Langbourn; St. Bennet Sherehog—a ludicrous popular misunderstanding of the right appellation: “St. Syth," writes Stow, "hath also an addition of Bennet Shorne or Shrog, or Shorehog (for by all these names have I read it), but the ancientest is Shorne: whereof it seemeth to take that name of one Benedict Shorne, some time a citizen and stock-fishmonger of London, a new builder, repairer, or benefactor thereof”* in the time of Edward II.: and so on. Many of them, again, were very rich in memorials of the dead, from the most magnificent structures that art and munificence could raise to their memory, down to the single stone with its "Pray for the soul of —;" from the gloomy, and pathetic, and elaborate, and, we must add, frequently fearfully long-winded, inscriptions, down to the humorous or fanciful, or simply gay and cheerful; in some cases so full of the exhibition of animal spirits, that one would almost suppose the writer-not to say it irreverently-thought death only a capital joke. Here is one, the jingle of which we cannot get rid of, inscribed in St. Leonard's, Foster Lane, a church built by one of the deans of St. Martin's-le-Grand, about 1236, for the use of the inhabitants of the sanctuary :— "When the bells be merrily rung And the mass devoutly sung And the meate merrily eaten, Then shall Robert Traps-his wife-and children be forgotten." Passing, as our space compels us to do, with this brief mention, the extinct churches, and reserving those rebuilt by Wren for our next paper, let us now once more glance over the list on the preceding page. Of those marked with the asterisk, we need not concern ourselves with the more distant, as Greenwich on one side or Kensington on another; but as to the remainder, an interesting question suggests itself-are any of those which fortunately escaped the fire, or were altogether beyond its range, still preserved to us in their architectural integrity? in other words, do any of the churches of London before the fire still exist essentially as they were? It is pleasant to find that, though few in number, there are such existing; churches that not only have been spared the fire, but the worse fate of architectural degradation that has befallen those which have grown too old for any merely-repairing processes. The church of Allhallows, Barking, where the headless bodies of the poet Surrey, Bishops Fisher (More's friend) and Laud, were deposited after their respective executions on the neighbouring Hill, is still preserved to us; so is Allhallows, Staining, where Elizabeth, on leaving the Tower, by Mary's permission, for a less severe imprisonment in Woodstock, full of thankfulness, hastened to offer up her grateful acknowledgments to God; St. Andrew, Undershaft, that altar, as it might almost be called, for the worship of the old "Spring-time in London," and where rest the honoured ashes of him whose heart was as open to all the freshness and loveliness of the present, as his mind was earnest and sagacious in inquiring into the past-(a church we could as ill have spared for Stow's sake as for its own); St. Katherine Cree, where Laud displayed those superstitious tendencies which sub*Stow, p. 276. |