MY CHURCH TURNS 900 this month. Nine hundred years is a lot. You feel the transience of your time very strongly when your institution celebrates its nonacentennial. Even my long-reigning predecessor, Rector Abbiss, who finished his 65-year incumbency in 1884 still wearing the ecclesiastical periwig, barely served for seven per cent of the church’s life.
And what a lot has gone on in St Bartholomew the Great in those nine hundred years. The church has been an Augustianian Friary, a home for Sir Richard Rich, a Dominican
