There was a table in the south aisle of the church with the names of the benefactors, amongst whom were: John Sanderson, donor of £150, and Elizabeth Underwood, donor of £70.
Richard Layton (d. 1544), Dean of York, was rector here.
St. Gregory by St. Paul’s was situated on the south side of St. Paul’s, near the west end, in the ward of Castle Baynard. The date of its foundation is not known, but it is said that the body of Edmund, King of the East Angles, who was put to death by the Danes in 870, rested here for three years. It was burnt down by the Great Fire and not rebuilt, its parish being annexed to that of St. Mary Magdalene, Old Fish Street. The earliest date of an incumbent is 1181.
It was a Rectory in the gift of the Prebendary of St. Pancras and formed part of the manor of that prebendary. It was appropriated in 1445 to the minor canons of St. Paul’s, and so continued until the church was annexed to St. Mary Magdalene, Old Fish Street, in 1666.
Houseling people in 1548 were 600.
A chantry was founded here by Robert Rosamonde, whose endowment fetched £13 : 18s. in 1548, when Peter Jacksonne was priest, aged thirty-nine years, “a teacher for children, and hath, for that he was a religious person, a pension of £5 : 6 : 8 over and besides this his stipend of £6 : 13 : 4.”
No monuments of any special note are recorded in this church by Stow.
There was a school in this parish for thirty boys and twenty girls, purchased at the expense of Alderman Barber; and one almshouse, upon Lambeth Hill.
John Hewitt, tried by Cromwell’s High Court of Justice and beheaded in 1658, was rector here, and was buried in this church.
In St. Paul’s Churchyard the chapter-house first attracts our attention, a square, plain, red-brick building, with a modern office for the cathedral architect on one side; the top story was added in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. These additions are not so noticeable as might be supposed, but are wonderfully harmonised by smoke and weather already. The building is finished with Portland stone, and the two semicircular projecting pediments over the two front doorways are of the same material. In each of these there is a curious niche or recess, which was evidently designed to receive a coat-of-arms, but no coat-of-arms has ever been placed there. The age of the chapter-house is indefinite. Mr. Penrose, the cathedral architect, judges it to have been built shortly after the year 1700. There is negative evidence to show that it did not exist before that date, for in a design of Wren’s, showing the limits of old St. Paul’s, the frontage of houses to the street is incompatible with the position of the chapter-house, and the buildings are also marked as ordinary dwelling-houses. But this plan is not altogether trustworthy, for it does not give the cathedral foundations correctly, and may therefore be inaccurate in other particulars. It is supposed, on account of this inaccuracy, to have been one of the later plans, probably made about 1700, when the old foundations had been built over and forgotten. It bears no date, and the evidence must be taken for what it is worth. Knight, in his London, gives a print dated 1701, and says that Wren repaired and restored the chapter-house after the Fire, which is obviously incorrect.