The Story of London

by Henry B. Wheatley

The tenements which the prior and friars held in the street ‘called Colcherdistrete’ were in the parishes of St. Olave in the Jewry and of St. Margaret de Lothebury.

The friars of the Order of St. Mary de Areno were settled at Westminster at a house near Charing Cross, given to them by Sir William de Arnaud or Amand, 51 Henry III., and here the small house remained until the death of Hugh de Ebor, the last friar, 10 Edw. II.

Bishop Stubbs refers to a cemetery near St. Clement’s Danes, which once belonged to the Pied Friars, a small order of mendicants which had been suppressed in 1278.

In the revised edition of Dugdale’s Monasticon, by Caley, Ellis and Bandinel, there is a notice of the house of the Fratres de Pica or Pied Friars at Norwich, from Blomefield’s History of Norfolk, but no mention is made of any house in London. Tanner says that there is no mention of these friars in any public record, and Taylor, in his Index Monasticus, gives no new information concerning them. Blomefield says that the friars were called from their outward garment, which was black and white like a magpie.

At Hounslow there was a House of Trinitarian or Maturine Friars for the Redemption of Captives. The earliest record known of this priory is a charter dated 1296.

Besides the religious houses, there were during the Middle Ages many hermitages over the country, and several of these were to be found in London. One was in Monkwell Street, Cripplegate, which was founded by the widow of Sir Eymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, who was killed in a tournament in 1324. This was Mary de Castillon, daughter of Guy, Count of St. Pol, third wife of the earl, and the foundress of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, who established the hermitage for the good of the soul of her husband.

London was so full of religious houses, both within and without the walls, that when the great dissolution took place in Henry VIII.’s reign, large portions of the town were left desolate. Doubtless the time had come for this great revolution, or, otherwise, even that King could never have carried it through.

The popular feeling which held these great establishments in disfavour had gradually grown. Still the number of those who were dependent upon the religious houses was very considerable, and great evils followed the dissolution. Multitudes were thrown out of their regular employment, and the poor who were dependent upon the alms bestowed upon them at the gates of the monasteries had to be considered and provided for in some other way. The difficulties of this position certainly formed one of the causes of the institution of the Poor Law in the reign of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth.

Most of the relics of the various religious houses which occupied so large a portion of London and its environs have been entirely swept away.

In the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries many remains existed. There were then vestiges of St. Helen’s Priory, and the old hall of the Nunnery was not pulled down until 1799. Relics of Bermondsey Abbey were standing in 1807.