A good many references to this House belong to the period immediately following the Dissolution. There is the petition of St. Peter-le-Poor against the destruction of the flèche. (L. and Midd., i., ii., 17.)
On the surrender of Austin Friars its revenues were valued at £57: 0: 4. The brethren, of whom there were no more than thirteen, subscribed to the acknowledgment of the Royal Supremacy in 1534. They were finally dispersed on the 12th of November 1549. Although the revenues of the House were then esteemed at so small a sum, we must remember that the Friars did not profess to hold property; they were supposed to live on the alms of the people. George Brown, one of those who signed the Acknowledgment, was made Archbishop of Dublin; the rest received small pensions. The site was granted in portions to Sir Thomas Wriothesley; to Sir W. Paulett, afterwards Marquis of Winchester; and to Sir Richard Rich. On the site of the House and the Cloister, Winchester House was built; the splendid monuments of the church were broken up, and the materials sold and carried away in cartloads for the sum of £100 in all. The lovely spire was taken down in spite of the vehement protests of the Mayor; the chancel and the transepts were destroyed, and only the nave was left, and, in part, stands to this day. Some thirty years ago this fragment was greatly injured by fire, but was restored after a fashion, and at the present day, with its scanty congregation of Dutch, by which congregation it has been used ever since the suppression, it allows the visitor to understand of how large and spacious a church it formed a portion.
In Wyngaerde’s map, and in Agas’s map (see end of London in the Time of the Tudors), there is a rude sketch of this House as it stood before the suppression, or immediately afterwards. In both there is a manifest indication for the position of the cloisters. They stood on the north of the church, the transept and the north wall of the nave serving for two sides. The transept has long since gone—and on the site stand modern houses. In the wall of one of these was found some years ago a stone arch. This was noted by some antiquary, but nothing more was done. In February 1896, however, during the demolition of this House, the arch was found again, and before it was taken down its place was marked and it was photographed, together with certain carved stones lying in the ground. There is very little doubt from its position that this arch was an entrance, perhaps from the Prior’s House, to the eastern cloister.
[CHAPTER XXIII]
GREY FRIARS
ARMS OF SIR R. WHITTINGTON, GREY FRIARS, NOW CHRIST’S HOSPITAL
In the year 1224, being the eighth year of King Henry the Third, there arrived at Dover a small company of nine Religious, being Brethren of the Fratres Minores, the Franciscan Order, not yet known in this country. Five of these were priests, the remaining four were laymen. They pushed on without delay as far as Canterbury, where they halted and begged permission to begin their missionary work in that city. They were allotted a room in which they slept at night, and in the daytime they used it as a school. After a little it was resolved to attempt the foundation of a branch in London. Therefore, while the priests remained at Canterbury, the laymen were sent to London to look about them. They first lodged for a fortnight with the Preaching Friars in Holborn. They then hired a house in Cornhill, of John Travers, one of the Sheriffs, where they built—presumably in the garden—rude cells of wattle and clay, and began their preaching and ministration among the poor of the City. Very quickly it became noised abroad that a new and saintly Order of Religion had arrived in the country; that its followers were absolutely unlike all other Religious; that their austerity, the strictness of their Rule, their earnestness, their eloquence, their poverty—for they owned nothing—absolutely nothing—not even church furniture, and lived on alms, simply on whatever was bestowed upon them by the charitable—were things never before known among men; and that their lives were spent not in prayers and Litanies, but in work among the dregs of the people; that none were too base, too low, too degraded, too loathsome by disease for the offices of these good friars. The impression produced by this phenomenon was only strengthened when John Ewen, Mercer, bought a piece of ground in the parish of St. Nicholas Shambles and gave it to the brethren for their use, on which they might build a house and church. Then all the citizens began to vie with each other in making splendid gifts to the church of these Franciscans—for themselves they took nothing, save, as before, the broken victuals and crusts given them by the charitable. William Joyner, Mayor, built the Choir; Henry Waleys, Mayor, built the Nave; Walter Potter, Alderman, built the Chapter House; Thomas Filcham built the Vestry House; Gregory Rokesley, Mayor, built the Dormitories and furnished them; Bartholomew of the Castle built the Refectory; Peter de Heyland built the study; Richard Whittington, Mayor, founded the Library. Nor was the support of the Franciscans limited to the citizens. Queens, Princesses, and great lords helped to endow the House and to make these poor mendicants rich. Queen Margaret, Queen Isabel, Queen Philippa; the Earls of Gloucester, Richmond, and Pembroke; the Countesses of Pembroke and Norfolk, all gave money, plate, lands, or buildings to the Friars. One Queen thought the choir ought to be more splendid, and rebuilt it; another thought the nave ought to be more splendid, and rebuilt it; no gift could be too lavish, no buildings too costly for religious men so truly and unfeignedly religious. In our eyes it is pathetic to observe the hope and confidence always ready to be renewed, always doomed to disappointment, with which the people turned from one professedly ascetic order which—alas!—had fallen from its first profession and had now become rich, fat, and lazy, to another beginning with the best intentions, itself destined before long to fall off from the early zeal and the first austerities. Who could retain the pristine austerity when all these gifts came pouring in? When the broken victuals became a steady shower of all the good things that the earth had to give? And the despised and poverty-stricken brothers, lean, hungry, hollow-eyed, filled with the fever of faith and zeal, had become transformed into the sleek and comfortable Friars of whom all men spoke well?