The Jews had a troubled time in London, as in other parts of the country, being exposed to constant extortion by the Sovereign and his ministers. Their principal quarter was in the neighbourhood of the present churches of St. Olave and St. Lawrence Jewry. The thoroughfare of the Old Jewry appears from Mr. Joseph Jacob’s investigations to have been deserted by them prior even to their expulsion from the realm by Edward I. in the year 1291.
Besides the magnificent churches forming part of the monastic establishments, examples of which fortunately remain to us in the churches of St. Bartholomew, Smithfield, St. Saviour’s, Southwark, and the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, the parish churches of the old city were numerous and important. From the inventories of their possessions prepared at the Dissolution, and preserved among the records of the Augmentation Office, it would seem that in the number of their chantries and the richness and extent of their vestments and service books, some of the larger parish churches could almost vie with the Cathedral itself. Although shorn of their magnificence by the legislation of the Reformation period, and the cruel devastation of the Great Fire, the few buildings which escaped the latter catastrophe bear evidence of their former grandeur. The most interesting of them are St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, with its fine monuments; All Hallows, Barking; St. Olave, Hart Street; and St. Giles, Cripplegate. The large number of the city churches is accounted for by the obligation of each parishioner not only to regularly attend the services at his own parish church, but to ensure the attendance also of his wife and household, apprentices and journeymen. A corresponding obligation rested upon the parish officers to provide a pew or other accommodation for each parishioner in his own parish church. In the smaller parishes situated in the heart of the city this was easy enough, but in border parishes like those of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, and St. Giles, Cripplegate, it must always have been a difficulty to provide for the large populations which such parishes contained.
There is one very important building of which we have scarcely as yet made mention, for it lies outside London City, the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth. We call it now “Lambeth Palace,” but the title is of recent date—not older, indeed, than the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Up to that date its occupants dated their letters from “Lambeth House” or “Lambeth Manor.” In old times the title Palace was only given to a bishop’s residence within his own cathedral city. The Bishop of London’s Palace was in St. Paul’s Churchyard; his residence at Fulham was his “house.”
Lambeth (== Loamhythe, i.e., “muddy bank”) had been in Saxon days a royal manor. Edward the Confessor’s sister gave it to the See of Rochester; it came back for a short time to the Crown after the Conquest, but was restored to the Prior and Convent of Rochester by Rufus, and was transferred to Canterbury under the following circumstances.
There had been continual rivalry between the Cathedral Church of Canterbury and the Monastery of St. Augustine. The latter had asserted high rights, and had more than once claimed that of electing the Primate. More than one Archbishop, chafing at all this, determined to have a Chapter of secular canons of his own, and so be independent of the Monks. But the latter so steadfastly resisted this that it was not until 1197 that Archbishop Hubert Walter carried his point by exchanging the Manor of Darenth which he held for that of Lambeth. Darenth was nearer Rochester, and therefore more convenient for that See. Situated, as Lambeth was, immediately opposite the Royal Palace of Westminster, the Archbishop became at once the stay of the Court, and also a check upon any attempt at tyranny—a position which was strongly recognised on more than one occasion. This was really the establishment in fact, of what had been little more than theory before, the Primacy of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Of the early buildings little is known. The oldest part now existing is the crypt, but this is not older than the early part of the thirteenth century. The present beautiful chapel was built over it by the roystering young Archbishop Boniface, uncle of King Henry the Third’s wife, Eleanor. He had roused the wrath of the Londoners by forcing his way into St. Paul’s Cathedral and claiming all sorts of uncanonical authority over the clergy there, winding up by beating the Prior of St. Bartholomew’s unmercifully with his fists. In the result he built the Chapel of Lambeth as an amend, and it is certainly one of the most beautiful examples of Early English architecture in England. Lambeth House has undergone a vast number of changes. The great entrance gateway was built by Cardinal Morton (1486), the two northern towers by Cranmer, and the long corridor by Cardinal Pole. Later than the period with which we are concerned, Juxon built the present library, and Archbishop Howley almost rebuilt the garden front.
The so-called Lollards’ tower is a misnomer. The building bearing that name in Lollard days was at St. Paul’s, though it is probable enough that some of them were confined at Lambeth. But the deeply interesting inscriptions which may be read on the Lambeth walls were mostly, if not all, cut by prisoners confined here during the Puritan wars. There is one strangely pathetic memorial, immediately opposite the door in the picture. It consists of a number of holes pricked in the wainscot beside a window looking north. Minute examination reveals that some poor creature occupied his lonely hours by pricking out a rough plan of the Great Bear and the surrounding constellations as he saw them from the window.