During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the House flourished and obtained considerable additions to its estates, so that it became the richest of all the London Houses. Its good fortune, however, did not continue. Its property decreased in value; much of it was sold; the decay continued; in the year 1532 the Prior and the Canons held a Chapter in which they recognised that their House was not only sunken and decayed in its rents and emoluments, but that it was entirely reduced and laden with debt. They therefore surrendered their House and remaining lands to the King.
The site was given with all the buildings to Sir Thomas Audley, afterwards Lord Chancellor. Audley offered the great church, just as it stood, with its peal of bells, to the adjacent parish of St. Catherine, meaning that they should pull down the latter and build upon the site. Unhappily, the parishioners were afraid to accept the offer, “having doubts in their heads,” says Stow, “of afterclaps.” If they had accepted, another fine Monastic Church would have been preserved, together with those of St. Mary Overies and St. Bartholomew the Great.
Whereupon Audley pulled down the Church himself with a great deal of expense and labour. On the death of Audley, his daughter and heiress, Margaret, became the second wife of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. The Duke was executed for high treason in 1572; the mansion went to his son, by Margaret, who sold it in 1592 to the Mayor and Corporation of the City.
Some remains of the buildings were standing until recently. The place itself seems to have been occupied by the Jews on their return under Oliver Cromwell. For nearly two hundred years it was almost entirely the Jews’ Quarter in London. Every year they held a kind of Fair on the Feast of Purim in Duke’s Place. The Feast, which falls in the month of Adar, i.e. partly in February and partly in March, commemorates the execution of Haman and the deliverance of the Hebrews. The Fair was held without any authority until early in the nineteenth century, when it was licensed for three days, generally extended to six, the square of Duke’s Place being let for shows. It was found to be a public nuisance, and was suppressed a few years later.
For many years after the destruction of the Priory Church, the inhabitants of the Precinct had no parish church of their own. In 1622, however, St. James’s was built as a parish church for the Precinct. The church became notorious for the irregular marriages without banns or license which were solemnised here. In 1874 the curacy of St. James’s was united with that of St. Catherine Cree, and the former church was pulled down.
The Precinct was privileged, and though within the City, persons not freemen of the City were permitted to trade within its limits.
PRIORY OF HOLY TRINITY AND CHURCH OF ST. KATHERINE CREE
These plans were made by a surveyor named J. Symans in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. From the mention of Sir Thomas Heneage’s garden, their date is probably before 1595, when Sir Thomas, who was Keeper of the Tower Records, died. The first shows the ground floor of the buildings then standing. The original monastery extended from the street, now called Leadenhall Street, northward and eastward to the old Wall. Two semicircular bastions and a third which formed one tower of Aldgate are seen on the plans, which also, among items otherwise unknown hitherto to London topographers, give us the canon’s church as well as that of the parishioners of St. Katherine Cree. Both these buildings have now disappeared. The conventual church in Symans’ plan had already been in part removed by Lord Chancellor Audley, in favour of the “Ivye Chamber.” The “Charncell” is still intact and “owre Ladychapell”; but there is notice of “the north end where the great tower fell Downe” and “the south end now teniment.” By “end,” Symans meant transept. The cloister and the chapter house, one portion of which is labelled “This was the chapell,” the body of the church and a south porch are clearly denoted; while, of the domestic buildings, we distinguish the gatehouse labelled “The way owte of Allgat Streat into Creechurch monastary”: the Dorter, or sleeping quarters of the monks, which open from the cloister; more than one extensive garden; the “Greate Cowrte,” and a number of apartments or separate small holdings, let to various tenants, whose names, Awnsell, Bayle, and Kirwin, for example, occur in several places on the plans. At the north side of “the Great Garden adioyning the Dorter” and close to the city wall, is “A Foundation for new buildings uppon the wall”; this seems to be let to Awnsell, who has also a lease of the garden. The north chancel aisle is let in “new Teniments.” Some relics of the vaults, or “Favlts,” are occasionally disclosed in Leadenhall Street; some Norman arches are figured by Malcolm and there are others in Pennant’s London, 1793, and many other books; but no Tudor plan of the buildings has hitherto been published.
