I do not think that Bow Church is mentioned in any of the London hand-books. There is yet another and a much more important and interesting Foundation which, I believe, is not recommended by any guide-book to the visitor. Yet Waltham Abbey Church is a place of the greatest interest. It may almost be ranked with Winchester, Westminster, Canterbury, Caen, and Fontevrault as regards historic interest. Moreover, it is at this day a place of singular beauty, and is approached, by one who is well advised and can give up to the visit a whole afternoon and evening, by a most beautiful walk. The name Waltham has been explained as the place of the wall. In that case, here was a "waste chester," a fortified enclosure found by the East Saxons when they overran the country, and left by them, as they left so many other places, to fall into decay. It seems most likely, however, that the name is Wealdham, the place of the forest.
The history of Waltham begins with a famous wedding feast. It is that of Tofig, the Royal Standard-bearer, and it caused the death of a king, because Hardeknut at this feast drank himself to death. The great Danish Thane built here a hunting lodge, the place being built in the midst of a mighty forest, of which vestiges remain to this day at Hampstead, Hornsey, and Epping. Now, Tofig held lands in Somersetshire as well as in Middlesex. And at a place called Lutgarsbury, which is now Montacute (mons acutus), a singular peaked hill, there lived a smith, who was moved in a dream to dig for a certain cross which, it was revealed to him, lay buried underground. He did so, and was rewarded by finding a splendid cross of black marble covered with silver and set with precious stones. When he had found it, he naturally thought it his duty to convey it to the nearest great monastery. In these days quite another course would suggest itself to the fortunate rustic. This smith of Lutgarsbury, therefore, placed the cross on the cart, and informed the oxen that he was going to drive them to Glastonbury, that holy House sacred to the memory of Joseph of Arimathea himself, and illustrious for its thorn flowering in midwinter. Miracle! The oxen refused to move. The parish priest, called in to advise, suggested Canterbury, only second to Glastonbury in sanctity. Still these inspired animals refused to move. Perhaps Winchester might be tried. There they had the bones of St. Swithin. No, not even to Winchester would they carry the cross. "Then," said the priest, "let them carry the cross to your master, Tofig, at Waltham." Strange to say, though Waltham had no special sanctity, the intelligent creatures immediately set off with the greatest alacrity in the direction of Waltham, a hundred and fifty miles away, and reached it after a ten days' journey, bearing the cross safely.
The story is preserved in a tract, De Inventione Sanctæ Crucis Walthamensis, and must be believed by all the faithful. Thane Tofig showed his sense of what was due to a miracle by building a church for the reception of the cross, and appointing two canons to serve the church. It is also said that at least sixty persons were cured by means of this miraculous cross, and that many of them continued to live near the church in order to testify to its powers. When, a few years later, Harold obtained possession of the estate, he built a larger and more splendid church on the site, and placed twelve instead of two canons in it, with a dean and school-master. The church was consecrated in the year 1060, in the presence of King Edward and Edith his Queen. On his way south to meet William, Harold stopped to pray before the cross. While he prayed, the head on the cross, which had before looked upward, bent forward, and so remained downcast. On the field of Senlac, Harold's cry was "The Holy Cross."
The body of the dead King was brought to the church and buried in the chancel. Only the nave remains, but there still stretches to the east a green space which was once the chancel, and somewhere under this green lawn lies the body of the last Saxon king.
William the Conqueror spared the Foundation. Henry II. replaced Harold's canons by monks of Rule. He is said to have rebuilt the church, but this is doubted. Probably some of the existing part, the nave, contains Harold's work, which was already Norman in character. When, in 1307, the body of Edward I. was brought from the north to be buried in Westminster, it lay for seventeen days in the Abbey Church of Waltham. And the place is full of historical memories, not only of kings, but of worthies. Cranmer here advised Henry VIII. concerning his divorce. Thomas Fuller here wrote his Church History. Foxe here wrote his Book of the Martyrs. The church now stands on the north side of a small and rather mean town; it is in the midst of a large church-yard planted with yew-trees, and set with benches for the old to sit among the tombs. The grave of King Harold, somewhere under the turf, has over it the circled firmament instead of the lofty arch; instead of the monkish litanies it hears the song of the lark and thrush; instead of the whisper and the hushed footfall of the priests there is the voice of the children playing in the town and the multitudinous sound of work in the streets hard by. A happy exchange!
In the Old Jewry there was established by Henry III. – a Jewish synagogue being their first house – a branch of a very singular order – the Fratres de Penitentiâ Jesu or Fratres de Saccâ. They were mendicants of the Franciscan Rule, and were dressed in sackcloth to denote their poverty and their penitence. It was another and one of the last endeavors after a return to the early zeal and the first poverty of the Order. For a time the new brotherhood enjoyed considerable popularity; Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I., took them under her protection and endowed the synagogue, which was all they had, with lands and houses. Unhappily the Council of Lyons, 1274, ordered that there should be recognized no other mendicant friars except the Dominicans, the Minorites, the Carmelites, and the Augustines. So one supposes that these Brothers, just as they were getting comfortable in their synagogue, and beginning to reap the fruits of their austerities, had to turn out again, because no one was allowed to give them anything, and so went back to the common Orders, who would not allow even the wearing of the sackcloth. One is sorry for the poor men so proud of their sackcloth and with such encouraging recognition already won.
Again, there is not much in the modern Church of St. Giles in the Fields to suggest the past – a large stone church with a church-yard, standing in a miserable district, which for two hundred years has been the haunt of criminals and vagabonds. Yet here was one of the very earliest Houses of piety and charity. Here was perhaps the earliest hospital founded in this land of Britain. It was instituted by Queen Maud, wife of Henry I., as a lazar-house for lepers and other poor sick men. What became of the lepers when there was no house for them? They crept into empty hovels; they perished miserably, outcast, neglected. So long as they were strong enough to creep out they begged their bread; when they could no longer crawl, they lay down and died. Thanks to the good Queen, some of them, at least, were cared for in their last days. A sweet fragrance of thanksgiving lingers still about the slums of St. Giles. The poor lepers who lie buried in that squalid church-yard still uplift a voice of praise for those who remember the sick and all that are desolate and sore oppressed.
Nor is there at Charing Cross much to remind the visitor of the past. Yet here was a Foundation somewhat unusual of its kind. It was an "alien" House. The Chapel, Hospital, or House of St. Mary Rounceval was founded by William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, who gave certain tenements to the Prior of Rounceval, or de Roscida Valle, in the Diocese of Pampeluna, Navarre. It was a House for eleven brethren. Henry IV. suppressed all alien priories, this among the rest, but it was restored by Edward IV. as a Fraternity. After the Dissolution the site of the House was used by the Earl of Northampton for the palace which, under the name of Northumberland House, stood until the other day, the last of the river-side palaces.
Other great Houses are sometimes reckoned as London Houses, such as those of Barking, Wimbledon, Merton, and Chertsey; but these are outside our limits. Nor can I touch here upon any of the religious Foundations of Westminster.
We have seen that when we lay down the monastic establishments upon the map, they occupy a very considerable part of the area within the walls. But when we consider, in addition, the great number of smaller Foundations, the colleges, hospitals, and fraternities with Houses, the parish churches and the church-yards, we shall begin to understand that the space required for ecclesiastical buildings alone in the confined area of a mediæval town gives a very fair idea of the power and authority of the Church.
After the Monasteries come the Colleges, so called, by which we must not understand seats of learning, but colleges of priests. There were several of these:
First, that of St. Thomas of Acon. The college was founded by Agnes, sister of Thomas à Becket. She endowed it with her father's property in London. It stood on the site of the present Mercers' Chapel, and was built on the spot where the new saint was born. The Mercers' Chapel, however, occupies only a portion of the splendid church which was destroyed in the Great Fire. The Foundation received many endowments, and at the Dissolution its income was nearly £300 a year, equal to twenty times as much of modern money. The City, naturally proud of its saint, observed a curious annual function in connection with this college. On the afternoon of the day when he was sworn at the Exchequer, the new Lord Mayor, with the Aldermen, met at this chapel and thence proceeded to St. Paul's, where first they prayed for the soul of Bishop William – who had been Bishop of London in the time of William the Conqueror. This done, they repaired to the tomb of Gilbert à Becket, in Pardon Church-yard, and there prayed for all faithful souls departed. Then they returned to St. Thomas Acon and made an offering. Nothing is said about the evening, but one hopes that the day was concluded in the cheerful manner common at all times with London citizens.
Next, the College of Whittington.
This noble and wealthy merchant rebuilt the Church of St. Michael, called Paternoster in the Royal, and attached to it a College of St. Spirit and St. Mary for a master, from fellows, clerks, conducts, and choristers, together with an almshouse for thirteen poor men. They were all bound to pray for the soul of Sir Richard Whittington and his wife, Dame Alice; also for those of Sir William Whittington and Dame Joan, his wife, the parents of the founder. The college was swept away at the Dissolution; the almshouse remained and was rebuilt after the Fire. They are now removed to Highgate, but a conventual feeling still lingers about the buildings at the back of the church.
Then follows St. Michael's College, Crooked Lane.
Sir William Walworth, the valiant Mayor who killed Wat Tyler, founded a college of one master and nine chaplains to say mass in St. Michael's Church, the choir and the aisles of which he rebuilt.
And there was also Jesus Commons.
This Foundation seems to have resembled that of All-Souls, Oxford, in that its fellows had no duties to perform except the services of their chapel. It is described as a fair house in Dowgate (no doubt built round a small quadrangle), well furnished with everything and containing a good library, all for the use of those who lived there – a peaceful, quiet place, without any history. One thinks of the day when it had to be dissolved, and the poor old priests, who had lived so long in the house, were driven forth into the streets. Not even submission to the king's supremacy could save the tenants of Jesus Commons. The house itself was pulled down and tenements built in its place.
A somewhat similar House was a small and very interesting Foundation called the Papey. It was a college for poor and aged priests. In any old map the church called St. Augustine Papey may be seen at the north end of St. Mary Axe nestled under the wall, with a piece of ground adjoining, which may have been a garden and may have been a burial-ground. We find the poor old priests taking part in funerals, and, I daresay, in any other function by which their slender provision might be augmented.
Next to the Colleges come the Hospitals. St. Bartholomew's, most ancient and richest, belongs to Norman London.
One who walks along the street called London Wall will chance upon a church-yard, on the north side of which still stands a fragment of the old wall. This church-yard, narrow and small, is surrounded on three sides by warehouses; on the fourth side it looks upon the street. On the other side of the street is a large block of warehouses, the monument of a most disgraceful and shameful act of vandalism. On this spot stood Elsing Spital. It was founded in the year 1329 as a priory and hospital for the maintenance of a hundred blind men by one William Elsing, its first Prior. On the dissolution of the religious houses, Elsing's Spital surrendered with the rest, and was dissolved. What became of the blind men is not known. Then they took the fine Priory Church, and having pulled down the north aisle – on the site of which houses were built – they converted the rest of the church into the parish church of St. Alphege, which had previously stood in Cripplegate. The site of the old church was turned into a carpenter's yard. The porch of St. Alphege remains of the ancient buildings. Of Sion College, which in course of time succeeded Elsing's Spital, we will speak in another place.
That splendid Foundation which rears its wards on the south of the Thames, over against the Houses of Parliament, St. Thomas's Hospital, was founded in 1313 as an almery, or house of alms for converts and poor children; but two years later the House was refounded on a much larger scale. After the Dissolution, its site, then in Southwark, was purchased by the citizens of London. To sum up, London was as well provided with hospitals in the fourteenth century as it was with convents and religious houses. They were St. Bartholomew's, Elsing Spital, St. Giles Cripplegate, St. Mary Spital, St. Mary of Bethlehem, St. Thomas Southwark, and the Lazar House of Southwark.
These hospitals, it must be borne in mind, were all religious Foundations governed by brethren of some Order. Religion ruled all. From the birth of the child to the death of the man religion, the forms, duties, and obedience due to religion, attended every one. No one thought it possible that it could be otherwise. The emancipation of mankind from the thrall of the Church, incomplete to the present day, had then hardly yet begun. All learning, all science, all the arts, all the professions, were in the hands of the Church. It is very easy to congratulate ourselves upon the removal of these chains. Yet they were certainly a necessary part of human development. Order, love of law, respect for human life, education in the power of self-government, such material advance as prepared the way – all these things had to be taught. No one could teach them or enforce them but the priest, by the authority and in the wisdom of the Church. On the whole, he did his best. At the darkest time the Church was always a little in advance of the people; the Church at the lowest preserved some standard of morals, and of conduct; and even if the standard was low, why, it was higher than that of the laity.
When we see the Franciscans preaching to the people; the Carthusians cowering silent and gloomy in their cells; the Dominicans insisting on the letter of the Faith; kings and queens and great lords trying to get buried in the holy soil of a monastery church – let us recognize that, out of this discipline emerged the Londoner of Queen Bess, eager for adventure and for enterprise; the Londoner who was so stout for liberty that he drove out one king and then another king, and set aside a dynasty for the sacred cause; the Londoner of our own time, who is no whit inferior to his forefathers.
One other form of religious society must be mentioned – that of the Fraternity. There were Fraternities attached to every church. Those of the same trade in a parish – those of the same trade in many parishes – united together in a Fraternity – of the Blessed Virgin, of the Holy Trinity, of the Corpus Christi, of Saint this or that. All the Danes in London joined together to make a Fraternity – or all the Dutch. All the fish-mongers, or all the pepperers; they formed Fraternities – not yet trades-unions or companies – which had masses sung for the souls of their brethren; met in the churches on their Saint's Day; had solemn service and a procession and a feast. It is only by such a bond as this that any calling or trade can become dignified, self-respecting, and independent. The Fraternities were founded, for the most part, before the Companies. These could not have existed at all but for the impetus to union given by the Fraternities. Common action – the most important discovery ever made for the common welfare – was made possible, among those who would otherwise have been torn asunder by rivalries and trade jealousies, by the Fraternities.
Among the thirty-one who formed the goodly company which pilgrimized to Canterbury with Chaucer, twelve belonged to the Church. Was this proportion accidental? I think not. Chaucer placed in his company such a proportion of ecclesiastics as would be expected on such an occasion. The portraits of Chaucer are taken from the life: he saw them in the streets of London; in the houses; in the churches. It helps us to understand the City, only to read those portraits over again. Are they so well known that it is superfluous to do more than refer to them? Perhaps not. Let us take them briefly. There is the Prioress, who has with her a nun for chaplain and three priests. She is a gentlewoman, smiling, coy, dainty in her habits and in her dress; she is tender-hearted and fond of pets; the nun's wimple is plaited; on her arm she wears beads with a gold brooch —
On whiche was first y-written a crowned A,
And after Amor vincit omnia.
She is lively, affectionate, and amiable, but she affects dignity as a Prioress should. Clearly the superior of an Order whose vows are not too strict, and whose austerities respect the weakness of the sex. Who does not know, at the present day, hundreds of gentle maiden ladies who might sit for the portrait of the Prioress?
Then comes the Limitour, one who held the Bishop's license to hear confessions, and to officiate within a certain district. This fellow is everybody's friend so long as he gets paid: the country gentlemen like him, and the good wives like him, because he hears confessions sweetly, and enjoins easy penance; he could sing and play; he could drink; he knew all the taverns; he was to appearance a merry, careless toper; in reality, he was courteous only to the rich, and thought continually about his gains. He kept his district to himself, buying off those who tried to practise within his limits. A natural product, the Limitour, of a time when outward forms make up all the religion that is demanded.
The Oxford Clerk has no benefice because he has no interest. All the money that he got he spent in books; his horse was lean; he himself was lean and hollow. He travels to foreign universities in order to converse with scholars.
The Monk was a big, brawny man, bald-headed, and his robe was trimmed with fur; a great hunter who kept greyhounds and had many horses. He was fat and in good point; he loved a fat swan best of any roast; he wore a gold pin with a love knot. Obedience to the Rules of his Order is not, it seems, ever expected of such a man.
The Town Parson, of low origin, a learned man who loved his people, and was content with poverty, and gave all to the poor, and was ever at their service in all weathers. The picture of the good clergyman might serve for to-day. His parish was wide, but he went about
Upon his feet, and in his hand a staf.
This noble ensaumple unto his scheep he yaf,
That first he wrought, and after that he taughte
Out of the gospel he the wordes caughte,
And this figùre he added yet thereto,
That if gold rustë, what scholde yren do?
The Sompnour, or Summoner, an officer of the Ecclesiastical courts, is only half an ecclesiastic. His portrait is pure farce.
Lastly, there is the Pardoner. He is the hypocrite. He carried sham relics about with him, and sold pigs' bones for precious and holy remains warranted to heal sheep and cattle, to bring good harvests, to prolong life, to bring increase of sowing.
Of avarice and of swiche cursednesse
Is al my preching, for to make hem free
To yeve hir pense, and namely unto me.
…
I wol non of the Apostles counterfete,
I wol have money, wollë, chese, and whete.
Al were it yeven of the pourest page,
Or of the pourest widewe in a village,
Al schulde hire children sterven for famine.
If such pictures as these could be drawn and freely circulated, the first step was taken towards the Reformation. Only the first step. Before Reformation comes there must be more than the clear eyes of the prophets able to see and to proclaim the truth. The eyes of the people must be washed so that they, too, can discern the truth behind these splendid vestments and this gorgeous structure of authority.
Such, so great, was the power and the wealth of the Church from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Every street had its parish church with charities and Fraternities and endowments; colleges, Houses for priests, almeries, hospitals, were scattered all about the City; within and without the wall there were fifteen great Houses, whose splendor can only be understood by the ruins of Tintern, Glastonbury, Fountains, or Whitby. Every House was possessed of rich manors and broad lands; every House had its treasury filled with title-deeds as well as with heaps of gold and silver plate; every House had its church crowded with marble monuments, adorned with rich shrines and blazing altars and painted glass, such as we can no longer make. Outside, the humblest parish church showed on its frescoed walls the warnings of Death and Judgment, the certainty of Heaven and Hell. And they thought – priest and people alike – that it was all going to last forever. Humanity had no other earthly hope than a continuance of the bells of l'Ile Sonnante.