Where ’tis that he can hope and fear no more.”
There they lay buried, the good people of St. Katherine’s Precinct. They belonged to all trades, but chiefly to those which necessitate going down to the sea in ships. On the list of names are those of half a dozen captains, one of them captain of H.M.S. Monmouth, who died in the year 1706, aged 31 years; there are the names of lieutenants; there are those of sail-makers and gunners; there is a sergeant of Admiralty, a moneyer of the Tower, a weaver, a citizen and stationer, a Dutchman, who fell overboard and was drowned, a surveyor and collector—all the trades and callings that would gather together in this little riverside district separated and cut off from the rest of London. Among the people who lived here were the descendants of them who came away with the English on the taking of Calais, Guisnes, and Hames. They settled in a street called Hames and Guisnes Lane, corrupted into Hangman’s Gains. A census taken in the reign of Queen Elizabeth showed that of those resident in the Precinct 328 were Dutch; 8 were Danes; 5 were Polanders; 69 were French—all hat-makers—2 Spanish, 1 Italian, and 12 Scotch. Verstegen, the antiquary, was born here, and here lived Raymond Lully. During the last century the Precinct came to be inhabited almost entirely by sailors, belonging to every nation and every religion under the sun.
This was the place which it was permitted to certain promoters of a Dock Company to destroy utterly. A place with a history of seven hundred years; which might, had its ecclesiastical character been preserved and developed, have been converted into a cathedral for East London; or, if its secular character had been maintained, might have become a noble centre of all kinds of useful work for the great chaotic city of East London. They suffered it to be destroyed. It has been destroyed for sixty years. As for calling the place in Regent’s Park St. Katherine’s Hospital, that, I repeat, is absurd. There is no longer a St. Katherine’s Hospital.
[CHAPTER XXI]
CRUTCHED FRIARS
The Order of Crutched, or Crossed, Friars—“Brethren Crucifer”—was instituted in the twelfth century. Some came over to England towards the end of the thirteenth century. Two London citizens, Ralph Hoster and William Sabernes, being greatly attracted by the sanctity of the Friars, took for them three tenements at an annual rent of 13s. 4d. of the Holy Trinity Priory, and for themselves either entered the Order or took up the Fraternity of the Order. Twenty years later, the Community had obtained enough money to enable them to buy other houses of the same Priory and to build a convent for themselves. The site was a piece of ground lying east of Seething Lane. The Friars carried in their hands a cross, and were also distinguished by wearing a cross of red cloth on their backs. The House, unlike other Friaries, seems to have held certain lands in Suffolk and certain Houses in the City: perhaps lands and houses were only endowments of an obit or an annual remembrance for the donor and his family. Like all the Friaries, this House was always poor: at the surrender it was valued at no more than £52: 13: 4. Stow cannot enumerate more than twenty worthies of London who were buried here. Of these the most important was Sir John Milbourne, who founded almshouses in the year 1521 for thirteen bedesmen, who were bound every day to attend the eight o’clock mass at Our Lady’s Altar, founded by Sir John Milbourne, there to pray for their benefactor’s soul. The will of the founder illustrates the change which had fallen upon men’s minds. Milbourne had not got beyond the belief in masses and prayers for the dead; but he had got beyond the belief in the perfunctory service of a chantry priest; he would keep poor men past work from want; this would be a more meritorious work than the endowment of a priest who should have nothing in the world to do except to say a daily mass; the prayers of a bedesman ought to be at least as efficacious as those of a paid chantry priest.
The Crutched Friars surrendered in 1539. Their house and estates were valued at £52: 13: 4, as stated above. The church and buildings were pulled down; a carpenter’s shop with a tennis-court and other places were built upon its site. The hall was turned into a glass-house, and thirty-five years after the Dissolution, was burned down. There were thus no remains or ruins of the House left at all; unless it were vaults or crypts.
On its site were erected later on the Navy House,—Pepys’s Navy House—and at the present day an open court, once, probably, the site of the cloister of the Brethren Crucifer, may still be seen. It now belongs to some Railway Company. First, a cloister of Friars, then a glass-house and tennis-court, next a Navy Office, and lastly, Receiving House for a Railway—here is a sequence of uses which Sir John Milbourne would hardly be able to foresee. After the Dissolution, the place appears to have attracted many persons as a residence, presumably from the quiet that still lingered about the Precinct. Here Dr. Turner had his Botanical Garden, one cannot doubt—on the site of the Monastic Garden. He dedicated his book, The New Herbal, 1568, to Queen Elizabeth, from “my house at London in the Crossed Fryers.” Dr. White Kennett, Minister of St. Botolph, Aldgate, 1699-1728, lived in “Crutchet Fryers,” and Pepys’s Diary is, of course, filled with references to the Navy Office, Crutched Friars.