‘The Rector presents his compliments’: Worship, Fabric, and Furnishings of the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield, 1828-1938

Abstract

For nearly 900 years the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great has functioned as an expression of wider religious moods, movements, and aspirations. Founded in 1123 by Rahere, a courtier of Henry I, at a time when the Augustinian Canons gained a brief ascendancy over older forms of religious life, it represents the last flowering of English Romanesque architecture. The Priory was dissolved by Henry VIII, became a house of Dominicans under Mary, and saw the flames that consumed the Smithfield martyrs. Since Elizabeth’s reign it has been a parish church serving a small and poor but populous area within the City of London but outside the walls. Its history is fairly well documented. Richard Rich lived in the former Lady Chapel. Walter Mildmay worshipped, and was buried, there. John Wesley preached there. Hogarth was baptized there. Parts of the church had been turned over to secular use. There was a blacksmith’s forge in the north transept beyond the bricked-up arch of the crossing and the smoke from the forge often filled the building. A school occupied the north triforium gallery. The Lady Chapel was further divided, and early in the eighteenth century Samuel Palmer, a printer, had his letter foundry there. The young Benjamin Franklin worked there for a year in 172 s and recorded the experience in his autobiography. The church, surrounded by houses, taverns, schools, chapels, stables, and warehouses, was a shadow of its medieval glory; but between 1828 and 1897 it changed internally and externally almost beyond recognition. The process of change continued over the next forty years and indeed continues still. These changes in architecture and furnishings were closely linked to a changed attitude to medieval buildings, to issues of churchmanship, and to liturgical developments.