Anyone now visiting the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, after a lapse of fifty years, would scarcely recognize in the present stately building the woe-begone and neglected place of his recollections. In the apse and the transepts, in the lofty screen to the west of the stalls, suggesting a hidden nave beyond, and in the glimpses of the Lady Chapel across the eastern ambulatory, he would see the completed choir of some collegiate church, of which the principal architectural features suggested an ancient foundation. It is true that, in the church of fifty years ago, the Norman details were still very distinct, though the round arches of the arcades had been parodied by the Georgian windows of the east end, and by the plastered romanesque reredos; but gloom and darkness overspread the whole place, encroachments of the most incongruous kinds had invaded the most sacred portions, and to the casual observer it seemed impossible that the church could ever be rescued from the ruin with which it was threatened, or reclaimed from the squalor by which it was surrounded.
To understand the difficulties which lay before the restorers, who, in 1863, commenced the task of saving the building from annihilation, and to properly appreciate what they have achieved, as well as what they only aimed at accomplishing, it is necessary to give some account of the state of the fabric in that year, and, without repeating at undue length the oft-told tale of its foundation, to give a history of the church during the eight hundred years of its existence.
The founder, both of the priory and of the hospital, was one Rahere, of whom but little is certainly known. Some assume that he was that same Rahere who assisted Hereward in his stand against the Norman invaders of the Cambridgeshire fens, but if so, this did not prevent him, later on, from attaching himself to the court of the Conqueror's son. He is generally described as having been jester to Henry I., and it has been assumed that the nature of his engagement involved a course of life calling for repentance and a pilgrimage. But whatever the reason may have been, he apparently went to Rome in 1120, though the journey at that particular juncture was a very unsafe proceeding. He may, perhaps, have joined himself to the train of Pope Calixtus II., who had just been elected at Cluny, in succession to the fugitive Gelasius II., and who made his journey to Rome in the spring of that year. If so, he arrived in Rome at the very worst season, and like many others who visit the city in the summer, he contracted the usual fever. During his illness, or after his recovery, St. Bartholomew appeared to him in a vision, and directed him, on his return to London, to found a church in his honour, outside the walls, at a place called Smithfield. Although visions and their causes are not always explicable, the association of St. Bartholomew with this dream of Rahere's may, perhaps, be accounted for. The church of S. Bartolommeo all'Isola had been built, a century before Rahere's visit, within the ruined walls of the Temple of Æsculapius, on the island of the Tiber, and Saint had succeeded, in some measure, to the traditional healing-power of the God. In classic times, those who flocked to the shrine generally stayed there for one or two nights, when the healer appeared to them in a vision, and gave them directions for their cure. So, in mediæval times, his successor and supplanter followed the same course, but provided cures for the soul rather than for the body.
Rahere can have lost but little time in hastening home and obtaining from the King a grant of the prescribed land, for we find that within three years of his visit to Rome the church of his new convent was sufficiently advanced for consecration, and presumably the convent itself was ready for occupation. The new priory was designed for the reception of Canons Regular of the Order of St. Augustine, and the reason for the founder's adoption of this Order, apart from the fact that it was somewhat fashionable at this period, may have been partly because his former occupation had particularly fitted him for public speaking, and partly because two, at least, of the men with whom he had been closely associated at Henry's court were themselves members of this order. And it is necessary to bear these facts in mind in considering the never-to-be-determined question of whether the apse of St. Bartholomew's was ever completed by Rahere.
These two friends of the founder's were Richard de Belmeis, Bishop of London, and William de Corbeil, or Corboyle, Archbishop of Canterbury, and they were not only themselves Austin Canons, but were actively engaged in spreading the influence of that order. The Bishop had then recently built the Priory of St. Osyth, in Essex, of which the Archbishop, who had previously been connected with the Priory of Merton, had been the first prior. Moreover, Corbeil, soon after he had received the pallium, obtained permission to suppress the monastery of St. Martin-le-Grand—for monasteries were suppressed in the reign of the first Henry, as well as in the reign of the last—and devote its revenues to building a new priory for Austin Canons, outside the walls of Dover. This priory, known as St. Martin New-work, of which considerable portions remain to this day, presents what may be regarded as a model plan of a church of this order, and consisted of a small square-ended choir, shallow transepts, and a large nave with aisles. From this it is evident that Rahere's building differed most essentially from the recognized type, and the question is, did his friends point out to him his deviation from the almost invariable rule of the Austin Canons to give their churches a square east end in time to enable him to modify his design, or were they able to induce him, after he had completed his apse, to remove the two easternmost piers, and to insert in place of them a square-ended chapel? But to this question no answer has ever been discovered.
Fig. 1—Norman Capital.
Discovered in 1863.
