The trade of London ceased for a time; there were no shops, the merchants had lost their goods, the warehouses were gutted, all records of debts and commercial transactions were destroyed, there were no schools, no almshouses.
Yet in four short years the English, with the same dogged energy that they were putting recently into the making of trenches and dugouts, had practically rebuilt their capital city. The churches, of course, took a long time to finish; the beautiful and numerous halls of the City Companies were not replaced in a day, but nearly 10,000 houses were up, and since those seventeenth-century workmen were just Englishmen, with no foreigners at hand to tell them to “ca’ canny,” everything was in a fair way to completion.
As for Sir Christopher Wren, that amazing architect who stamped the impress of his genius on the great city as we know it, who shall give him enough honour? He designed and erected over forty public buildings, amongst them the lovely and unique cluster of churches that lie around St. Paul’s, yet for this work he was rewarded by the miserable salary of £100 a year, with £200 a year for the rebuilding of the great cathedral.
St. Bartholomew the Great
“The citye of London that is to me so dere and sweete.”
Chaucer.
Opposite St. Bartholomew’s Hospital is Smithfield, new and blatant, and smelling hideously of raw meat. Take courage and go on northwards, for in a few minutes you will come to the most wonderful old church in London—older than any other except the chapel in the White Tower. There is something about the almost primitive simplicity of its massive stone pillars that carries one back more directly to the times of the Norman conquerors than a thousand long descriptions gathered from history books.
What you see is only the choir and transept of a much larger church built for the Priory of St. Bartholomew by the founder Rahere in or about the year 1102. His tomb is on the left as you enter, and high up on the right is the lovely oriel window where Prior Bolton, who died in 1532, could sit or kneel at his ease, without even the trouble of coming downstairs from his house, and look down into the church he did so much to rebuild and restore.
RAHERE’S TOMB IN ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S CHURCH
St. Bartholomew’s has had a turbulent history. There is the dramatic story of Archbishop Boniface of Lambeth Palace, a Savoyard who took it into his crafty head that he would like to annex the offertory of St. Bartholomew’s. On a certain Sunday morning he set out from Lambeth, with a train of attendants with mail armour under their robes. The description of what happened is delicious in Matthew Paris’s words, as quoted by Stowe: