XV. THE FRIARS AS BUILDERS.

THE LONDON HOUSES OF BLACKFRIARS AND WHITEFRIARS.

The mendicant orders as a factor in the history and development of English Gothic have not only never received the recognition they deserve, but their building activity has been left in the almost complete oblivion to which the iconoclasts of the Reformation did their best to consign it. The general interest in the friars has been centred entirely in their history, in the eventful lives of their founders, and in the vast influence which they exercised upon the main currents of mediæval life. Consequently, while the general reader is well acquainted with the figures of St. Francis or St. Dominic, he is often entirely unaware of any connection between them and their followers on the one hand, and the course of English architecture upon the other.

The nature and aims of the mendicant orders rendered it almost essential for their convents to be placed either in or near the great towns, and the presence of so many quarries of worked stone was a circumstance unlikely to be long neglected by the townsmen of Tudor and Stuart times, whose utilitarianism was no whit less developed than that of the present day. Consequently the continued existence (with one or two exceptions) of any fragment of friars’ architecture is as purely fortuitous as the survival of any fragment of domestic architecture of the same date.

As a whole the mendicants present so marked a divergence from the older orders of monks and canons that their buildings are stamped with a very definite and striking individuality. These divergences were, indeed, so intimate as to make the study of them essential to the proper understanding of the architecture they produced.

In sharp distinction to the Benedictines or Cistercians, who were continually adding “house to house and field to field,” the friars were forbidden by their rule to own any property. As their name “mendicants” implies, they were to be beggars, receiving alms only in the form of food, shelter, or clothing, the rule of St. Francis expressly prohibiting the acceptance of money or land, and thus in its original simplicity reducing their architectural opportunities to a minimum, or, rather, rendering them non-existent. The severities of the rule were, however, early evaded, the later practice being for the convent and precinct to be vested in some outside authority, such as the Corporation of the town or the Bishop of the diocese, to hold in trust for the friars in perpetuity, thus keeping the letter while breaking the spirit of the rule. How slight a check it was eventually to prove upon their building activities was early evinced by the magnificent convent of San Francesco at Assisi, which rose around the tomb of the founder under the supervision of his immediate successor. Nevertheless, the general system of non-endowment remained largely in force until the end, and in Henry VIII.’s Visitation the majority of friaries returned the estimated annual value of their convent site and buildings as their sole possession.

Considering the fact that at the Dissolution of the Monasteries the friars numbered over two hundred houses in England and Wales, their architectural remains are neither important nor impressive, and in most cases require searching for; but while they in no case display the massive and imposing memorials of the earlier orders, they are nevertheless of no mean interest to the student of mediæval architecture.

Preaching, while pre-eminently the characteristic of the Dominicans, nevertheless figured largely amongst the duties of the other three orders, and was undoubtedly responsible for the imposing dimensions to which many of their churches ultimately attained.

The mendicant orders being primarily preachers, the first building to be erected (especially in England, where the climatic conditions were inimical to regular open-air preaching) was the church built in the main for that object, and consequently as near as possible to the main street. Proximity to the chief thoroughfare bordering their site will be found almost invariably to determine the position of the friars’ church. This is well exemplified in the convents of the London friars: thus the Franciscan church adjoined Newgate Street with the cloister on the north, the Carmelite was approached from Fleet Street with the domestic buildings on the south, and the Austin Friars fronted Broad Street with the cloister again upon the north. It will be seen that the time-honoured custom of placing the cloister and domestic buildings on the south of the nave for protection from the wind is no longer the governing feature of the plan.

In the churches of the English friars a marked peculiarity is at once apparent in the general absence of the transept—a large aisled nave, an aisleless choir with a belfry between, is the usual and typical form. In a few cases, such as the Austin Friars, Warrington, and the Franciscans at Richmond (Yorkshire), a transept is added on the side opposite the domestic buildings, but the presence of both arms of the cross is very rare. In the Irish friaries the one-armed transept is more the rule than the exception, but here again the complete cross is almost unknown.

The nave of the average canons’ or monks’ church is divided into two unequal parts by a solid screen or pulpitum, against which, on the east, stood the choir stalls, occupying two, three, or more bays of the structural nave, the rest being used for processions, chapels, and as a general burial-place for the lesser patrons of the establishment. In the friars’ churches all the available floor-space was required for the congregation, and consequently the stalls were removed into the structural choir, and in place of the solid stone screens of the older orders a steeple was built pierced by two narrow openings at the base, practically shutting the stalls off from the nave.

The finest remaining examples of the English preaching nave are the Austin Friars, London (153 ft. by 83 ft.), and the Dominican Church, Norwich, now St. Andrew’s Hall (124 ft. by 64 ft.). Both are distinguished by great space and openness, the former being amongst the broadest churches in the country.

In the centre of the typical English friars’ church stood the belfry, which formed its most original and distinctive feature. The friars’ tower was apparently a spontaneous innovation amongst the English mendicants, for there is no evidence that it was either borrowed from Continental sources or copied from other orders at home.

It appears to have been customary for each house of friars to have but one great bell, for though there are instances of two being hung in the steeple, yet the friaries of London, according to Stow, had only one each, and it is evident that this peculiarity was largely instrumental in deciding the unusual form which the steeple assumed.

Situated between the choir and the nave, the steeple rested on two parallel walls which ran north and south across the church, and were pierced by two main arches opposite one another opening respectively into the nave and choir; these walls were placed close together, generally some ten feet apart, thus forming an oblong space under the crossing. Between them and high above the arches before mentioned two lesser arches were thrown across the open space (sometimes dying away into the walls and sometimes resting upon corbels projecting from them) to carry the north and south walls of the tower above.

The building in most cases was so arranged that the outside faces of the north and south tower walls were in a line with the inside faces of the piers of the two arches opening into the nave and choir, the lower voussoirs of which thus supported the whole weight of the cross walls above them. The oblong thus became a square, and by this arrangement it was possible to raise a small stone tower in the centre of the church, while at the same time retaining the two arched openings between the nave and the choir.

Upon this base a light stone or brick lantern was raised, which in England was generally octagonal in form, but in Ireland invariably square, the additional number of worked quoin stones required for the former plan being probably the reason for its rejection in the poorer country. Occasionally the tower was finished with a stone spire, but as a rule any addition in that direction was of timber only. A good example, however, occurs at Coventry in the central tower of the Franciscan Church (the sole remnant of that house), and as now incorporated in the modern Christ Church, it forms one of the trio of spires for which the City of Coventry is famous. The Grey Friars’ tower at Lynn Regis, Norfolk, is again the sole remnant of the convent of which it formed a part, and is a brick and stone building of Perpendicular date, octagonal, and finished with a battlemented parapet. This town is also singular in having formerly possessed two parish churches, with octagonal central towers. Now, though octagonal upper stages are comparatively common, especially in the eastern counties, instances of the whole tower of this shape are very rare; and since the Lynn examples were probably copied from one or other of the four friaries of the town, it is not extravagant to surmise that it was the mendicants who first introduced the octagonal form into England. At Richmond, Yorkshire, stands the only other friars’ tower which has survived; this, however, is of a more ordinary type. It is a beautifully proportioned square structure, with belfry windows, and a pierced parapet of Perpendicular work, and was evidently only just completed at the Reformation, when the whole church was in course of reconstruction.

Dunbar contains the only example of a typical friars’ steeple in Scotland, the Carmelite tower of South Street, Queensferry, being of the more ordinary type; but in Ireland a remarkable series is still standing, including among its numbers the celebrated ruins of Quinn, Ennis, Clare, Galway, Rosserk, Drogheda, and Athenry.

The space beneath the tower was commonly continued in the form of a passage right across the church, and served as the chief means of communication between the cloister and the outside world.

Turning now to the choir of the friars’ churches: they were usually aisleless parallelograms, and almost always square ended. Their chief feature will be found to be the magnificent proportions of the windows. The choir of the Dominicans at Norwich has a magnificent Decorated east window of seven lights; the Franciscans of Chichester another, with five graduated lancets under one hood; and even a small house like the Austin Friars at Rye had an east window (now built up) of imposing dimensions.

The apsidal termination usual on the Continent has one example in this country in the Grey Friars at Winchelsea, a fourteenth-century structure, and a very graceful example of Decorated work. A wide chancel arch, with banded sideshafts, opened from the nave (which has now gone), into the choir of four bays, with a three-sided apse, each face of which is pierced with a tall Decorated window. A Scotch example of very similar type exists in the Dominicans at St. Andrews, but in this instance the apse belonged to a side chapel and is much smaller in all its dimensions. The stone vault remains in part, and, like its Sussex counterpart, it is the sole remaining fragment of the church. In both these instances the use of the apsidal end may be ascribed to French influence, which was particularly strong in the Cinque Ports at this time, owing to the French wars of Edward III.

Adjoining the church, in some instances, lay an open yard provided with an outside pulpit either for overflow meetings or for more general use in the heat of the summer. The space outside the Dominican Church at Norwich was long known as the “Preaching Yard,” and the beautiful octagonal stone pulpit cross formerly outside the west front of the church of the same order at Hereford remains intact. It is, now, perhaps, the only remaining example of such a structure in England—an existing counterpart to the rich cross “y-tight with tabernacles” of Pierce Ploughman’s Creed.

Two unusual features distinguish the planning of the domestic buildings of a friary—the first an emphasis upon the secular nature of most of the church, the second the result of a necessity for economy.

The cloister of a friary was placed without any general rule, but most generally it partly adjoined the nave with a portion overlapping the choir, and when the whole or any part adjoined the nave it was not unusual to introduce a narrow open court between the church wall and the cloister walk. The Cistercians had a somewhat similar arrangement in the “lane” which, in many of their houses, separated the buildings of the monks from those of the “conversi,” and, in the case of the mendicant orders the court served to separate the domestic portion of the house from their public preaching-place. In England this feature, which occurs in the Black Friars at Norwich, the Franciscan houses at London and Cardiff and elsewhere, is almost confined to the mendicant orders, the only other existing example outside their ranks being the secular cathedral of Salisbury, and here, as in the friars’ houses, a short corridor communicates between the cloister and the church.

The second noticeable feature in the planning of the domestic buildings is found in the general practice of building the first-floor apartments over one, two, or more walks of the cloister, effecting by this means an economy both in wall masonry and in the flat lead roofing of the cloister alleys. Examples of this treatment are very numerous, and occur in all parts of the country. Thus, at Hulne, Northumberland, two alleys were built over—the east and west. At Norwich Black Friars and Dunwich Grey Friars one or more walks are similarly treated, while the Walsingham Franciscans apparently built their frater half over the south walk of the great cloister and half over the north walk of the little cloister. That lack of funds was the chief cause of this somewhat niggardly arrangement is rendered more certain by the fact that the only other order in which it occurs—the Gilbertine—was the most poorly endowed of all the older communities.

Turning now from the subject of the actual structure and arrangement of the friars’ houses the larger question arises: What influence, if any, had all this mass of building upon the outside world, and upon the architecture practised among the people at large? It may be safely postulated at the outset that the influence exercised by the friars will be found, firstly and most definitely, in the structure of the parish church and, in its earliest manifestations, in the parish church of the towns, for not only were they the nearest ecclesiastical neighbours, but the objects served by each class of buildings were, within certain limits, identical.

The great towns of England during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were split up into a very large number of parishes, each with its church, and as the town enlarged its borders or multiplied its population, additional churches were built to supply its increased needs. London, even in the time of Fitzstephen (temp. Henry II.), had 120 parish churches; Norwich, at a little later date, had over forty; Lincoln twenty or more; Winchester a dozen; and a small town like St. Albans five. The practice was evidently at this period to meet the demand for increased accommodation, not by enlarging existing churches but by building new ones. The average town church of the Norman period was, comparatively speaking, of small dimensions and limited accommodation, and in London, with hardly an exception, they remained to the end architecturally insignificant, solely because their numbers were such as to meet all possible demands that could be made upon them.

Fig. 102.—PLAN OF AUSTIN FRIARS, LONDON.

Drawn by

A. W. Clapham.

The period of the greatest architectural activity of the friars may be dated to the last quarter of the thirteenth and the first quarter of the fourteenth centuries, or, roughly, to the reigns of the first two Edwards, and by about the middle of this period they had evolved a type of church which for its purpose was as nearly perfect as experience and experiment could make it. The comfort of the largest congregation was secured by an ample floor-space, while the heavy piers of the older buildings had given way to the lofty and slender columns of the Austin Friars at London, only just large enough for structural stability and leaving an almost uninterrupted view of the preacher from all parts of the church.

The culmination and final expression of their views of what a congregational church should be took form in the great Franciscan church begun in Newgate Street, London, in 1306, and probably the largest friars’ church in England. This building, with its 300 ft. of length, its slender piers, its long range of clerestory, aisle, and end windows, is a type which is without a parallel of its own date and outside its own order as the expression of a new and original idea in church building, departing equally from the insignificant dimensions of the contemporary parish church and the massive and cavernous construction of the monastic nave.

It is at this precise point that a radical alteration is observable in the planning of the parish church, an alteration which, in view of its ultimate results, was almost revolutionary.

The old idea of the multiplication of the small town churches is suddenly and for no apparent reason abandoned, and the single church of huge dimensions takes its place. It is not asserted that, previous to this date, there were no large buildings of this class, but such as already existed were almost entirely in country districts, and with their cruciform shape and central tower they were evidently inspired by the monastic churches of the older orders.

An examination of the plan of one of the towns which rose into prominence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries will reveal a remarkable and striking contrast when compared with that of one of the older towns. In the former case one or two parishes embrace the whole city, while in the latter it is subdivided into ten, twenty, thirty, or more, and while the one has perhaps a single parish fane which dominates the town, the other has towers and spires rising on every hand.

Fig. 103.—PLAN OF GREYFRIARS, LONDON.

Fig. 104.—PREACHING CROSS, BLACKFRIARS, HEREFORD.

The outset of the new regime may perhaps be definitely dated to the foundation by Edward I. of several new towns, of which Hull in the north, and Winchelsea in the south, are the best-known examples, and in each of these places a single great church is deemed sufficient for the needs of the whole town.

It would be easy to multiply examples. The great port of Boston or the trading centre of Newark, whose prosperity dates from the fourteenth century, each built for themselves a single church on an almost cathedral scale, and in the same sequence are ranged most of the great churches of East Anglia.

The new type of church is one having the great open nave, the long ranges of windows, and the slender piers which became so general in the Perpendicular period. They are, in fact, copies of the great friars’ churches which immediately preceded them. The friars originated and perfected the type which in the fulness of time was accepted and adopted by the parish church builder as the best and most suitable structure for his purpose which had yet been evolved.

The church of the Holy Trinity, Hull, the forerunner of the new movement, provides an additional element of probability to the theory. Founded by Edward I., and built under the auspices of his son, it had in both its royal parents a close relationship to the great Franciscan church of London, erected through the bounty of the wife of the one and the step-mother of the other, and it is not improbable that the personal element was brought to bear on the design of the later building with far-reaching results.

Once the new idea had taken root under royal patronage it rapidly spread over England, and in the next century some even of the old town churches were rebuilt in the then prevailing style, and it is perhaps not too much to say that the great Perpendicular parish church, of which there are so many noble examples, is the direct outcome and lineal descendant of the friars’ buildings, which have unfortunately so nearly disappeared.

Fig. 105.—BLACKFRIARS, LONDON.

Plan by

A. W. Clapham.

BLACKFRIARS, LONDON.

Blackfriars to the modern Londoner is as familiar a title as that of any part in the City, and to all frequenters of Fleet Street the district of Whitefriars must be little less familiar. Yet the homes of the Dominicans and the Carmelites, their churches and the numerous buildings within their precincts, have disappeared so completely that it is doubtful if the majority of people who daily use their names have any intelligent idea of the origin of the terms. And even for those who have given thought to the subject there has been no definite description of the buildings such as would enable them to reconstruct in their minds the great monastic establishments of the two orders. It is possible, however, from various sources to draw out with tolerable accuracy the plans of the houses of the Blackfriars and the Whitefriars and to ascertain the accurate position of all their principal apartments. The arrangements of the Blackfriars has an additional interest in that the Guest House is still exactly defined by the Hall of the Apothecaries’ Company, and the Upper Frater which lay across the entrance to Printing House Square served not only as the Parliament House in the reign of Henry VIII. but was later converted into the celebrated Blackfriars Theatre.

The priory of the Dominican or Black Friars in London was founded in 1221 on a site to the south of Holborn and east of Chancery Lane. In 1274, however, a new site was given them on the north bank of the Thames, just east of the Fleet ditch. This necessitated the pulling down of that part of the city wall south of Ludgate, and a new wall was built running eastwards from the gate and turning south to the river within the Fleet. It appears that the church was not begun until 1279.

Although there is little documentary information regarding the buildings before the Dissolution, it is some evidence of their importance that the meetings of Privy Councils were held here during the first part of Henry VI.’s reign, and that three Parliaments met here in 1450, 1523–4, and 1529. The Emperor Charles V. lodged in the Guest House in 1522, and a gallery was built by Henry VIII. to connect his apartments with Bridewell Palace, where his train was accommodated. In 1529 the King’s divorce from Catherine of Arragon was tried in the “Parliament Chamber,” Henry VIII. and his queen being in residence in Bridewell.

In an anonymous fourteenth-century Wickliffite lampoon upon the friars, entitled Pierce the Ploughman’s Creed , there is a long passage which refers almost certainly to the London house of the Blackfriars, since, whenever the details can be tested, they are found to be accurate. As the lines are not only of peculiar interest from their remarkably vivid description of a great friary in its architectural prime, but also from their containing the most graphic purely architectural description in the whole range of English mediæval literature, a free rendering of them is quoted below:⁠—

Apart from the general description contained in these lines, the sources of our information regarding the buildings of the Blackfriars date from after the Dissolution and are contained in certain grants of property, and some surveys of the time of Edward VI., the latter preserved at Loseley, near Guildford. From these it is possible to reconstruct the greater part of the Friary, an outline of which is given below.

The position of the Church is determined by the Cloister, the east walk of which is now marked by the passage called Church Entry, and its western range of buildings by the Apothecaries’ Hall. The name “Church Entry” points fairly conclusively to the usual passage between the nave and chancel—passing north and south beneath the steeple—that has been already referred to as characteristic of the friars’ plans. The nave with its two aisles measured some 114 feet by 60 feet internally, and alongside its northern aisle at the west end was the Lady Chapel, which increased the width of the west front to 90 feet externally. There is a record of this chapel as early as 1437; but from the will of Robert Castell we gather that it had been rebuilt by Lady Ingoldsthorpe, who died in 1494, sister of John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester (“the Butcher”), who was executed in 1470. The occasion of the rebuilding may have been the interment of his body, and beside him was later buried the headless body of James Touchet, Lord Audley, who suffered death at the hands of the executioner in 1497.

The steeple between the nave and choir, called in the grant to Sir Thomas Cawarden (1550) “the Campanile,” is shown in the view of London by Van der Wyngaerde. Polygonal in form, and with pinnacled parapet and spire, it obviously followed the same model as those still to be seen at Coventry and Lynn.

The choir, in all probability aisleless, measured 90 feet from east to west, making six bays. The great cloister (110 feet square) lay to the south of the Church, and, unlike the general practice among the friars, its walks were roofed and not built over. The description in Pierce the Ploughman’s Creed is borne out by the surveys at Loseley, and there is little doubt that the poet’s admiration was well founded. Some curious particulars of burials in the cloister are preserved. In the will of Sir Robert Southwell, Knight, dated 1514, is a desire to be buried “in the Cloister of the Friars Preachers in the city of London, under or near the Lavatory there nigh to the picture of the holy Crucifix there set.” In his further directions he says: “I will that that friar of the same place, appointed daily for the work to say there the mass of the Trinity, by the space of xx years next after my decease say every day a special collect in his mass for my soul, also de profundis with a pater and ave and crede for my said soul ... at the said lavatory immediately when the convent of the same place or the most part of them shall go to dinner. Item I will that that friar being a priest that first happen to come any day during the said xx years, in the morning first to the said lavatory to wash his hands and then and there to say de profundis for the souls before said, have for his so doing 1d.” Besides this, he desires the prior and sub-prior to say “God have mercy on my soul every day after dinner,” and awards them 13s. 4d. a year for the purpose.

Another curious legacy is that of William Stalworth, a citizen and merchant-tailor, who was also buried in the Cloister, and in his will, dated 1519, says: “I will that there shall be distributed to the Friars Preachers every Lent for ten years a barrel of white herrings, and to the young friars of the same house for the same time a frayle of fygges.”

The extensive buildings of the Friary lay round the Great Cloister, and considerably to the south and east. The Chapter House stood in the centre of the eastern range, and over its vestibule and various rooms on the ground floor stretched the dorter (or dormitory), which is described as having a stairway down into the Church. Behind the northern part of the dorter was the Prior’s lodging,⁠[39] and leading eastwards from its southern part was a second or south dorter, built over a vaulted undercroft, remains of which were discovered in 1900. This last-named appears to have been the Provincial’s lodging, and the whole building formed the northern range of the Infirmary or Inner Cloister. The infirmary on the west, the upper and lower libraries on the east, and the bakehouse and brewhouse on the south completed the enclosure.

Of the Great Cloister the southern range was occupied by the Frater (or dining hall), and on the east was the Guest House, which, even before the Dissolution, was let out to tenants. This was the lodging prepared for Charles V. in 1522, and the porter’s lodge behind marks the point at which commenced the gallery built by Henry VIII. for the Emperor’s convenience, between the Guest House and Bridewell. A window appears to have been formed between the nave of the Church and the Guest rooms, occupying much the same position as that to be seen at Westminster Abbey. South of this range and communicating with the Frater were the Buttery and Kitchen. The Guest House ultimately passed into the hands of the Apothecaries’ Company (1632), who rebuilt it after the Great Fire. In size and position, therefore, the present building follows precisely that which gave shelter to the Emperor Charles V. To the south of the Kitchen and Buttery was the Chapel of St. Anne, which, though not a parish church, was no doubt erected for the benefit of the various lay inhabitants of the precinct. Its site is now occupied by The Times printing office, and considerable remains came to light in the course of rebuilding in 1872.

Regarding the “Upper Frater,” which stands still farther south, I will quote from my contribution to Archæologia (vol. lxiii.):⁠—“The only buildings now remaining to be noticed formed a block of considerable size lying to the south-west of the cloister, and quite separate from the ranges flanking it. The main structure of the group was a building of such unusual size and obscure designation that it will be necessary to consider it at some length. Hugh Losse describes it as ‘One house called the upper frater containeth in length 107 ft. by 52 ft., abutting south and east to the Lady Kingston’s house and garden, north to a hall where the King’s revels lieth at this present and west toward the Duchy chamber and Mr. Portinary’s house. A void room being an entry towards the little kitchen and a coal house containing in length 30 ft. and in breadth 17 ft. One chamber called the Duchy chamber, with a dark lodging thereunder containing in length 50 ft. and in breadth 16 ft., abutting against the north end of the said frater and abutting west upon Mr. Portinary’s parlour.’

“The mention of Mr. Portinary’s parlour fixes the position of the whole block, and shows that the Duchy chamber flanked the kitchen yard (mentioned above) on the south side, for the same parlour is mentioned as the southern boundary of the yard.

“Setting it out on these lines we find that the eastern wall of the upper frater must have been the western building line of Printing House Square, while its southern end is represented approximately by Huish Court.

“A second description of this building is to be found in a rather unexpected quarter. In 1597 Sir William More, of Loseley, as executor to Sir T. Cawarden, sold to James Burbidge a certain great building with yards and subsidiary structures adjoining, of which the description in the deed of sale leaves no doubt that it was the upper frater and its adjoining buildings of the earlier survey.⁠[40] If any further proof were needed beyond the similarity in description it is found in the fact that the upper frater is the only available building once belonging to Sir Thomas Cawarden that his executor could have sold. The description in the deed is too lengthy and involved to be quoted in full, but it describes a building three storeys high, the top floor being formerly one great room with staircases leading up to it, bounded on the north by the Pipe office and its yard (formerly the kitchen yard). This was the structure that James Burbidge transformed into the celebrated Blackfriars Theatre, and a document recently discovered by Dr. Wallace gives its internal dimensions as 66 ft. by 46 ft.⁠[41] It will be at once seen that the width 46 ft. internal agrees admirably with the external width of the upper frater, 52 ft., allowing some 3 ft. for each side wall. The difference in length is accounted for by the fact that Burbidge did not make use of the whole building, but divided off the northern part into ante-rooms and apartments for the children of the chapel, &c., leaving 66 ft. out of 107 ft. for the theatre itself.⁠[42]

“With regard to the monastic use of this building it was obviously not the common frater of the friars, which here flanked the cloister. There is, however, one mediæval building, of the existence of which there is documentary evidence—‘the Parliament Chamber’—which in all probability is the structure in question. It was the great apartment used for the sittings of two parliaments of Henry VIII., and which also witnessed the trial for the divorce of Catherine of Arragon and Henry VIII. before Cardinals Campeggio and Wolsey.

“The writ of summons for this trial describes it as the ‘Parliament Chamber near the Friars Preachers.’ The fact that this name is used is sufficient proof that the great frater of the priory is not referred to, while the term ‘near’ implies that it was not one of the main block of the priory buildings grouped round the cloister, but lay somewhere within the precinct.

“The upper frater will be found to satisfy all the conditions required. It was the largest hall in the precinct, and a large apartment would be essential both for the ceremonial of the trial and for the sittings of Parliament. Secondly, it was situated on the outskirts of the priory buildings, suiting admirably the description. Thirdly, there is no record of the existence of any other hall of sufficient dimensions in a similar situation; and lastly, the small structure adjoining it was called the Duchy chamber, which argues an official use at some time of these apartments.

“All things considered, then, there is every likelihood of the identity of the ‘Parliament Chamber’ with the house called the upper frater and the Blackfriars Theatre of later times, and we may conclude that when Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. was played at Blackfriars the celebrated trial scene was acted within the actual walls that witnessed the real drama that ruined the fortunes of the great cardinal and put an unhappy termination to Queen Catherine’s married life.”

WHITEFRIARS, LONDON.

The London house of the Carmelites or the White Friars lay between Fleet Street and the River Thames, their precinct being bounded on the west by the Inner Temple—the present houses of King’s Bench Walk—and on the east, roughly by the present Whitefriars Street. Bouverie Street runs across the nave of their Church and traverses the site of the west walk of the cloister.

Fig. 106.—WHITEFRIARS, LONDON.

Plan by

A. W. Clapham.

Although little has been hitherto known concerning the buildings, it is possible, with the assistance of a plan of seventeenth century date, of documentary evidence of the period of the Suppression, and of the evidence of remains discovered on the site, to present a very fair idea of the general arrangements of the Priory of Our Lady of Mount Carmel before its destruction.

The house of the White Friars in London was founded by Sir Ralph Gray in 1241, and Stow tells us that in the fourteenth century their Church was rebuilt by Hugh Courtenay, Earl of Devon, whose house adjoined the precinct. Various additions were made to their property about this time. Courtenay was succeeded as patron by Sir Robert Knolles, and the choir, presbytery, and steeple were rebuilt by Robert Marshall, Bishop of Hereford, in 1404–16. The precinct was extended to the Thames by the year 1396.

The position of the cloister is accurately shown on the seventeenth century plan already referred to. The Church lay to the north of it, and the north-east angle of the nave was discovered incorporated in some old buildings in Bouverie Street. It was a massive structure of fourteenth or fifteenth century date, built of chalk and ragstone with quoins of Godstone stone. The wall returned at right angles at the east end of the yard at the back of the house, and apparently continued westward right under Bouverie Street, the south having been the internal face. Within the angle was a vault containing the remains perhaps of Sir John Paston, who in his will, dated 1477, bequeaths “my body if I die in the city of London [to the church] of our Lady in the White Friars there, at the north-east corner of the body of the Church, and there to be made an oratory ... to the value of xx ls.”

The height of the wall makes it almost certain that the aisle was lighted by lofty windows similar to those to be seen at Austin Friars, and that the clerestory was omitted, as indeed is distinctly shown on Wyngaerde’s view of London. If this were so, it would have been necessary to leave an open court between the cloister and the Church to light the south aisle precisely as was done at the Grey Friars. The nave would thus be some 80 ft. wide and apparently some 150 ft. or 9 bays long.

From the list of burials and other sources we learn that there was the usual “walk between the choir and the church,” or passage way beneath the steeple. The fifteenth century choir was almost certainly aisleless, and to the south of it, separated by an open space, was the “old quire” of Sir Ralph Gray’s thirteenth century building, which had been left standing while the new church was in process of construction.

From particulars of the grants made at the Dissolution, and with the help of the sixteenth century plan in the Print Room of the British Museum, it is possible to extract the following information. The cloister measured 97 ft. 6 in. from east to west and 91 ft. from north to south, including the walks which were built over in accordance with the general practice of the friars. The eastern range held the dorter on the first floor and the southern range the frater, while the western buildings perhaps contained the library (which is mentioned in connection with the cloister), since the Guest Hall must almost certainly be assigned to a long building shown on the plan extending westwards from this side parallel with the nave of the Church. The Chapter House was built out from the eastern range, and south of it was the prior’s lodging, probably on the spot where still lies a small vaulted crypt beneath the pavement of Britton’s Court—the sole remaining relic of the Carmelite Priory. This vault, some 12 ft. 6 in. square, has a small door at the north end of the west wall, and is of a curious domed form with diagonal and intermediate ribs meeting at a carved boss in the centre, which apparently represents a full-length figure within a large Tudor rose.

Beyond this our information is uncertain; it is impossible to locate the infirmary, and such names as “the Court Place,” “the Brewhouse,” and the “Mill House” can only be approximately referred to any given locality. It is to be feared that little further information is likely to come to light unless some extensive rebuilding takes place upon the site. With the means at our disposal, however, the main buildings have been identified, although the little vaulted cellar under the prior’s house and the nameless grave in the nave now filled with concrete are the only existing relics of the great convent that stood for three hundred years upon the Strand of the Thames between Temple Garden and St. Bride’s Church.

—A. W. C.

QUEENBOROUGH CASTLE

Fig. 107.—QUEENBOROUGH CASTLE.

From a Drawing by

Hollar.