St Giles-in-the-Fields: The History of a London Parish

By Rebecca Preston

St Giles-in-the-Fields: History of a London Parish resurrects a neglected area of Central London, rich in history and incident. St Giles is at the centre of one of the greatest cities in the world – but you’ve probably never heard of it. But it is an area with a dense and tangled history that tells us a great deal about the experience of living in London across the span of time from the twelfth century to today. This history has rarely been glamorous, but it is packed with the stories of lives touched by many of the most momentous events in British history.
St Giles began as a mediaeval leper hospital. After the Reformation it grew into one of London’s largest parishes, stretching east to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and north to Bedford Square and Bloomsbury. Aristocrats, poets, musicians, artists and lawyers lived here. St Giles was notorious too for its slums – notably the Rookery where Centre Point now stands. Its streets also boasted a hive of industry, printing, brewing and crafts. Later came music shops in Charing Cross Road and Denmark Street. As its population dwindled, St Giles lost heart. But vitality returned from the 1970s, with the renaissance of nearby Covent Garden and the boom of office employment. Far more than a fringe part of Covent Garden, Soho or Bloomsbury, this book re-establishes the individuality of St Giles, centred on its noble and enduring Georgian parish church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brown Dog Books
• Release date: May 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839527463

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Acknowledgements

This history was initiated in March 2019 by the Rev. Alan Carr, then the Rector of St Giles-in-the-Fields. It has been supported throughout by the Parochial Church Council. We should specially like to thank Alan Carr and his successor, the Rev. Tom Sander; the Ven. Dr William Jacob, who has read all the drafts and offered us scholarly advice and constant encouragement; and most of all, Wil James, who has been our first point of contact and our ally throughout, and given us regular feedback and advice. Lesley Goddard, the parish administrator at St Giles, has also given us much help.

We wish to stress that though this work was commissioned by St Giles and reflects those origins, the views expressed are the authors’ own. It has been understood from the beginning that the history was to be about the parish as a whole, not the church alone.

Many people have helped us along the way. David Western drew the special maps which adorn the book’s end papers. Chris Redgrave took a number of special photographs. Others we wish to thank include Susie Barson, Sue Bjorkegren, Roger Bowdler, the late Geoff Brandwood, Neil Burton, Andrew Byrne, Ian Campbell, Bridget Cherry, Gillian Darley, Christian Dettlaff, Edward Diestelkamp, James Edgar, Oliver Flory, Alec Forshaw, Peter Guillery, Jane Hamlett, Tanya Harrod, Carrie Boyd Harte, Malcolm Holmes, Peter Howell, Rebecca John, Derek Kendall, Matthew Lloyd, Louisa Macdonald, Ian Mackintosh, James Nye, Susan Palmer, Carole Rawcliffe, Henry Sainty, Jeremy Smith, Joanna Smith and Christine Wagg.

We are also indebted to numerous archives for their help and for their permission to use pictures, including among others the Bishopsgate Institute, the British Library, the British Museum, the Church of England Records Centre, Camden Local Studies and Archives, Harvard University, the Historic England Archive, the London Metropolitan Archives, the National Archives, the National Portrait Gallery, the Wellcome Institute and Yale University. Every effort has been made to identify copyright holders.

REBECCA PRESTON

ANDREW SAINT

Abbreviations

Preface

More arresting even than workmen unearthing a dozen skulls while digging up a section of St Giles High Street one day in 2013 – the past is within touching distance around here – was a proud remark some years later of N (an Almshouse resident) that she had been born and bred in the parish, that she ‘came from’ St Giles. It was the more arresting because I had not heard that from anyone else before then or since – and perhaps there cannot be many others. And personally more arresting because with that comment I realised that I had become the Rector of a parish which, apart from time-worn ecclesiastical formalities, was no longer a place to come from, the name ‘St Giles’, once so weighty in the affairs of the city, having been compressed over the years into the narrow confines of the boundaries of the Church and its churchyard by the stronger presences of Soho to the west, Covent Garden to the south and Bloomsbury to the north. Only property developers, it seems, looking for a quick and easy identity, lay claim to the name of St Giles-in-the-Fields any longer, even in the very act of fencing it in with high walls of glass and steel.

The work of the historian will always be necessary when a place’s past is obscured in the headlong rush of the present, as with St Giles. The very words, once so significant and instrumental (as the reader will discover) now slip through the net of our contemporary lexicon: parish, fields, high street, church, parishioner, resident, parochial, vestry, rector. ‘Is this a church?’ was not an uncommon question put to me during my time at St Giles; and even, ‘Is this a Christian church?’

Good fortune has brought to our aid the two fine historians whose work this is, seeking by it to reclaim for us a dense and tangled social history at the heart of the metropolis that has been overshadowed by our modernity; and, in reclaiming it, to bring to our minds times when grandeur and squalor lived on either side of the same street, as they still do. The walks through the lanes and thoroughfares of the parish of St Giles will no longer be the same for those who read this account, nor should they be. We are reminded that in the midst of so much fresh destruction and construction, people have lived and still live on. A church best discovers its vocation when the truth of the older relationship between parish and people remains fresh in the minds of those privileged to worship in, and to serve, such a church and in such an extraordinary place.

THE REVEREND ALAN CARR

Associate Rector of St Giles, 2010–15, Rector, 2015–19

1. The Church of St Giles-in-the-Fields on a winter afternoon, 2023. (Chris Redgrave)

Introduction: Reclaiming an Identity

Memory has not been kind to St Giles-in-the-Fields. But its history has been exceptional. Starting out as the most prestigious of London’s leper hospitals, remote from the city, it emerged after the Reformation as a great suburban parish, covering the territory of two manors. In its seventeenth-century heyday it stretched (in modern terms) nearly from Long Acre to Torrington Place and its eastward continuation as Tavistock Place, running from south to north, and from Lincoln’s Inn and Southampton Row to Soho and Tottenham Court Road from east to west.

In 1730 the parish, part urban and part still semi-rural, split into two when under the Fifty New Churches Act the sumptuous St George’s, Bloomsbury, sprang into being. In compensation St Giles also acquired a new church at one-third the cost – and a very handsome one at that (ill. 1). But it lost half its territory, including Bloomsbury, as yet only an embryo of the large and prosperous quarter for the professional classes that it became. St Giles now entered upon a gradual decline. By 1800 its densely thronged streets, courts and alleys connoted slums, criminality and disease. Its better-off residents began to identify with Bloomsbury, Soho, Holborn or Covent Garden – anything rather than St Giles. The misidentification persists to this day.

Often that is plain wrong. Gracious Bedford Square, for instance, has always been in the parish, as was august Lincoln’s Inn Fields until parish boundaries were adjusted in 1977. Yet they are seldom associated with St Giles. Latterly Covent Garden, with which it never shared a border (St Martin’s-in-the-Fields comes in between) has advanced northwards in the public mind, gobbling up places like Seven Dials and Monmouth Street. The culmination of this indignity came after Central St Giles, the colourful office development across from the parish church, opened in 2010, and a reviewer referred to St Giles as ‘a tiny, bizarrely obscure district in the heart of central London … renowned for making only two unfortunate contributions to popular culture: leprosy and alcoholism’.

This book seeks to reclaim St Giles as a jigsaw piece of London unique in history and character. History-readers these days are as partial to the everyday as the exceptional, and to the record of the poor as much as the rich. So although remarkable personalities, places and activities feature in the following pages, they do not dominate. If it is variety and colour that is sought, St Giles over the centuries has had something of everything: festering and unruly slums with fearful rates of mortality; slum-smashing ‘improvements’ in the guise of new streets and reformed housing; makers of beautiful and clever things; consumers of much more, from old clothes to whole foods, eco-perfumes and amplifiers; crafts industries and ironworks; mighty breweries and temperance coffee rooms; raucous dives (ill. 2), jostling street life (ill. 3), scruffy pubs, early gin palaces and grand restaurants; music halls and theatres; painters, engravers and printers; bird dealers, piano makers, music publishers, guitar sellers and car salesmen; warehouses for market traders and stores for their stalls and barrows; persecuted Catholics and enterprising Huguenot Protestants; judges, lawyers and malefactors; Milton and Marvell in contrast to the doggerel-ballad-mongers of Seven Dials; embassy chapels and humble mission stations; workhouses, clinics and hospitals; ragged schools, correspondence colleges and the City Lit; overflowing burial grounds recast as amenable public gardens. All feature in the pages that follow.

2. ‘Tom and Jerry masquerading it among the cadgers in the black slums, in the Holy Land.’ Print by George and Isaac Robert Cruikshank from Pierce Egan’s Life in London, 1821. The scene is supposed to show the Noah’s Ark, Dyott Street, one of the dives in the St Giles Rookery, alias the Holy Land. (BM, 1864,0611.408)

Most of St Giles has been rebuilt, often several times over. The one constant over the centuries has been the parish church. The present one is the third on the old hospital site. It has confronted, withstood and striven to come to terms with drastic changes all round it. Yet it has itself undergone amazingly few visible changes since Henry Flitcroft completed it in 1733. Since the church supplies St Giles with its name and its core of identity, its history is recounted and duly celebrated in the pages that follow. But it is the parish, not the church or its architecture, which is at the book’s centre.

3. Noon, from The Four Times of Day by Hogarth, 1736–8. The scene is supposed to be in Hog Lane, otherwise Crown Street, the ancestor of Charing Cross Road, with the congregation exiting from the Huguenot Church in Soho. The new-built steeple of St Giles stands up in the background. (Victoria and Albert Museum)

Some explanation of its arrangement is warranted. Chronology plays an overarching part. St Giles took its name and origins from the leper hospital established out in the fields around 1117–18. Integral to the book is the unfolding of the parish’s development from those obscure times to its seventeenth-century limelight and then through centuries of decline and depopulation to a partial renaissance, as we have called it, since the 1970s. Topography plays a lesser role. Strict topography, we felt, would be a mistake in view of the excellent Streets of St Giles volume published by the Camden History Society (2000). But some places seemed to call out for topographical treatment, notably Lincoln’s Inn Fields with its precious open space; Bedford Square and its immediate environs; and the planned development of Seven Dials with the happily restored pillar at its centre. These come towards the end once the history of the parish has been fully laid out, with a few short vignettes of life in St Giles today added as a coda. Before that, the book is governed mainly by typologies and activities, dealt with where it seemed most natural to place them.

A concluding word about the historiography of St Giles. The first parish history, by the Vestry Clerk, John Parton, was completed posthumously by William Herbert (1822). Rowland Dobie, a local Radical, supplied an alternative in 1829 because he felt that his native Bloomsbury had been poorly served by Parton, whose account upheld the rights and traditions of St Giles’ unelected Select Vestry. The little-known story of the rebellion against the old St Giles’ Vestry, in which Cobbett, Orator Hunt and the medical reformer Thomas Wakley played walk-on parts, is told in Chapter 6.

Victorian journalists like John Timbs, Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford all helped enrich the chronicle of St Giles. But their anecdotes seldom rival the immediacy of Dickens, whose early Sketches by Boz (1833–9), factual and fictional, include fond descriptions of the parish’s street sellers, hangers-on and petit-bourgeoisie. A few amateur historians followed on, notably Walter Blott, George Clinch and C. W. Heckethorn. Not until the Survey of London tackled St Giles in two volumes of 1912 and 1914 does one encounter professional standards of research. These, the earliest of the Survey’s endeavours undertaken by the London County Council, were linked to the LCC’s Kingsway-Aldwych improvements. The research and writing were entrusted to an obscure LCC officer, W. W. Braines, who made an extraordinarily fine job of it. Braines’ accounts of the early histories of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, of the Holborn frontage of St Giles and of the church itself remain unsurpassed over a hundred years later. It is just a pity that his efforts stop short in the eighteenth century.

Since then St Giles has been neglected, efforts by the Camden History Society apart. Despite its position on the fringe of the West End, it has yet to earn the scrutiny devoted to the seventeenth-century Westminster parishes of St Margaret’s, St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, and St Paul’s, Covent Garden by Julia Merritt and others. Only the ‘Bloomsbury corridor’ has been illuminated by the various studies of the Bedford Estate, not least Andrew Byrne’s fine history of Bedford Square (1990). The parish is however vividly spotlighted in Peter Ackroyd’s London, The Biography (2000), a book which has won new readers to the depths and melodramas of urban history, at the cost of foregrounding the dark side of St Giles and hinting that it had never shaken off the taint of leprosy and sin. It is part of the present book’s aim to demonstrate the incompleteness of that tempting picture.

NOTES

¹ Building, 21 May 2010.

² Donovan Dawe and E. W. Padwick, William Herbert (1772–1851): Actor, Antiquary and the first Librarian of Guildhall Library, 1997, p. 61.

³ George Clinch, Bloomsbury and St Giles, 1890; Walter Blott, The Chronicle of Blemundsbury, 1892; C. W. Heckethorn, Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Localities adjacent, 1896.

PART 1

Early Years

The exceptional story of St Giles-in-the-Fields begins with outcasts, and with a leper hospital founded in 1117–8 by Queen Matilda to serve London, then some considerable distance away. This unique institution grew into England’s most important leper hospital, with permanent buildings, a chapel, a surrounding precinct and endowments to dignify its status. But it was seldom free from controversy and interference, as the opening chapter relates. By the fifteenth century the lepers had been largely ousted in favour of better-off citizens. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the various properties within the precinct of St Giles were divided between noble claimants, while the chapel was turned into a parish church.

CHAPTER 1

The Hospital of St Giles-in-the-Fields

St Giles-in-the-Fields takes its name from an early leper hospital, which stood upon a site close to the present church. The hospital was probably founded in 1117 or 1118 – not 1101 as has often been stated – by Matilda (otherwise Maud), Queen Consort of Henry I of England and daughter of Malcolm, King of Scotland.¹ The first leper hospital to be built in medieval London, it remained the most important and imposing foundation of its kind and notwithstanding its troubled history, one of the most significant in England as a whole.² According to the Tudor antiquary John Leland it was established by Matilda towards the end of her life, named the Hospital of St Giles, and consisted of a house for the maintenance of lepers with an ‘oratorio’ (or chapel) and offices.³

Hospitals came to England with the Normans. In medieval Europe the term ‘hospitalis’ encompassed a range of welfare and social provision. Most provided shelter and spiritual care as much as medical treatment; they operated as almshouses for the aged and for lepers, the sick and the poor, but they also took in travellers and pilgrims. Some 400 had been set up across England by 1200, at which time ‘the typical English person would have been as familiar with the hospital as they were with the monastery’⁴ – all the more so since they were situated on the busiest roads and open to all. By 1350 at least 300 leprosaria had been founded in England, amounting to perhaps a quarter or even a third of the total number of hospitals then in existence.⁵ London meanwhile had grown greatly in importance, its population quadrupling by 1300 from a starting point of perhaps 20,000 in 1100. By the end of the Middle Ages, it could boast up to ten leper hospitals, many of which like St Giles’ were either established or soon taken over by the City.⁶

At her death in 1118, Matilda gave the hospital all the ‘soke’ (or juridical district) of St Giles, probably removing the southern part from the jurisdiction of the abbot of Westminster. She endowed the institution with 60s per year raised from the customs duty of Queenhithe and granted powers of supervision to the citizens of London, who had given substantial annual rents and other donations for the maintenance of lepers from the City and suburbs.⁷

In the years 1166–89, Matilda’s grandson Henry II confirmed the gift of the hospital site and granted 90s extra annually for clothes and lighting. The original annuity of 60s was also guaranteed by a royal charter of 1208. In the reign of Edward III (1327–77) an agreement was made between the City and the warden of the hospital, probably following the original custom, that fourteen lepers from the City and suburbs or from the County of Middlesex should be presented by the Mayor and Commonalty to the hospital. In the event of further gifts, the number of lepers could be increased. In its early period St Giles’ Hospital was therefore ‘a peculiarly London institution, and very closely connected with the governing body of the City’.⁸

The complement of fourteen lepers seems to have been established early on, though in some years there were five or fewer in the hospital. Parton, the first historian of St Giles, gave a figure of forty, a number often repeated later, but that is apparently due to an error by a medieval scribe. The inmates were supported by the voluntary contributions of citizens collected by a proctor. The Third Lateran Council of 1179 stipulated that leprosaria must have their own chapels and their own independent priest. From a bull of Pope Alexander IV (1254–61) to this effect, Marjorie Honeybourne surmised that St Giles’ lepers were trying to live as a religious community.

Wealthy Londoners did bestow further gifts including land, tenements and market stalls, and by the early sixteenth century the hospital’s stake in City parishes had more than doubled. It also held property in Holborn and Westminster, large estates at Heston, Feltham, Isleworth, and a close called St Giles’ Wood in Edmonton. The parish of St Giles was in existence from at least 1222, when its southern perimeter, corresponding with the historical boundary used for this study, was fixed by decree.⁹ Though the hospital precinct occupied only a small portion of this parish, the warden was master of the whole. The buildings and rents contributed to the maintenance of the hospital and its inmates.¹⁰

Saint Giles of the Lepers

The hospital was dedicated to St Giles, the patron saint of cripples and therefore of lepers. What little is known of Giles is that he was born in the seventh century and founded a monastery in the Gard district of southern France, later called Saint-Gilles. The town of that name which grew up near his grave became a place of pilgrimage in its own right and en route to Compostela and the Holy Land. Tenth-century legends about St Giles, embodied in the Vita S. Aegidii (Aegidius was his Latin name) inspired a sustained literary and iconographic tradition. In one of these stories, he saves a hind. In another, the saint as a child gives away his tunic to a sick beggar. He became venerated for his intercessory powers, invoked especially in times of plague and epidemic, a tradition maintained after the Reformation.¹¹

By various routes, Giles became the patron saint of lepers, cripples and nursing mothers. The cult had spread through Europe by the eleventh century and soon crossed the Channel. He became one of the most widely venerated saints in England, where he was sometimes known as St Giles of the Lepers. He is usually represented as a simple abbot with a staff. A common seal showing him thus was in use by St Giles’ Hospital by 1284–5. An enlarged facsimile, now in the vestry, depicts its patron with an alms box in his right hand and a crozier in his left (ill. 4).

4. Facsimile of the seal of St Giles’ Hospital, with figure of St Giles, said to be of the twelfth century. The original appears to be lost. (SoL, vol. 5)

In England some 160 churches were dedicated to St Giles, often on the outskirts of towns and at road junctions. There were additionally around twenty-five medieval hospitals dedicated to the saint. Just three existing English parishes seem to have grown up around leper hospitals: St Mary Magdalene, Colchester; St Giles, Shrewsbury; and St Giles-in-the-Fields.¹²

The hospital was initially known as the Hospital of St Giles without London, or St Giles without Temple Bar. But by the early 1400s the general area began to be identified as ‘agrum Divi Egidii’ or ‘in campo Sancti Egidii’ and ‘in rure Egidii … prope londinium’. In a fifteenth-century petition to admit a leper to the hospital Queen Margaret of Anjou addressed the master of ‘Seint Giles in the feld besid the Cite of London’. The designation ‘in the field’ or ‘fields’ thereafter remained standard and must have arisen from a need to distinguish it from the older church of St Giles-without-Cripplegate, which stood against the north side of London’s walls, where Matilda is said to have founded a brotherhood dedicated to St Mary and St Giles.¹³

Leprosy and leper hospitals in medieval society

Leprosy – now technically known as Hansen’s disease – is an infectious bacterial disease which spread northwards from Italy with the Roman Empire’s expansion. The period 1050–1300 marked a particularly active phase of the disease, which broadly corresponds with the peak era of European hospital building. From that peak, this scourge of medieval society began to retreat. Symptoms were diverse and the extreme disfigurement associated with the worst cases could take decades to appear. Many cases were invisible or concealed by heavy clothing. But the most infectious form, lepromatous leprosy, was progressive and could lead to blindness and to loss of voice as nasal passages, larynx and palate were destroyed by the bacilli. Ultimately, the weakening and absorption of bones resulted in the loss of extremities, while death from sepsis could result if sores went untreated.¹⁴

In medieval England, however, ‘lepra’ covered a range of skin diseases, some probably venereal in origin, while others were caused by poor diet and insanitary living conditions. Understanding of lepra and of the risk of transmission improved between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, as medical knowledge derived from Muslim centres of learning slowly influenced English practice. This led to fewer diagnoses and admittances to leprosaria.

In the nineteenth century leprosy usually prompted a combination of terror and disgust. To the parish historian Rowland Dobie, for instance, both the disease and the hospital inmates appeared ‘loathsome’.¹⁵ The medieval leper became a figure of fear and was understood as a cruelly mistreated outcast, a victim rather than the regular recipient of Christian charity, or even a representative of Christ on earth. But although English medieval leper hospitals typically stood outside the city walls, they were neither isolation hospitals nor prisons but civic institutions of which their cities were proud. They were often near the gates, where they were ideally placed for the collection of alms and offerings given as thanks for a safe journey. Land beyond the city walls was cheaper and also allowed for the creation of communities that were at least partly self-supporting in food and fuel. London’s ten or so leprosaria were located in a ring on its approach roads. Admittance was voluntary, and inmates and visitors were free to come and go. Carole Rawcliffe describes them as establishing ‘a spiritual cordon of prayer around the city’, whereby hospitalised lepers, whose prayers were deemed to be particularly effective, and the wider community were bound in mutual obligation.¹⁶ Lepers were not excluded from the Christian community, nor were they prevented from passing through the city gates to beg for alms or to visit pilgrim centres.

Prior to the outbreak of the Black Death, those suffering from lepra did not necessarily elicit revulsion or fear, and healthy people came frequently into contact with the afflicted. Contemporaries did however follow Mosaic law, which decreed that anyone displaying symptoms of lepra should live apart. The Old Testament Book of Leviticus included the ruling that suspected victims of a condition called ‘tsara’ath’ or ‘tsaara-at’ should be inspected by a priest and, if necessary, obliged to dwell outside the camp until they recovered. From this ritual prohibition evolved the notion that lepra, possibly a different and more serious but less contagious disease than that encompassed by the Hebrew term, was sometimes God’s punishment for sin. Laws and canons issued across Europe echoed the Mosaic command, for instance, a decree of the 1179 Third Lateran Council, ruled that lepers could not dwell among the healthy. Meanwhile, legislation aimed at stemming contagion (rather than the ritual defilement described in Leviticus) began to target those believed to have lepra, as medical concerns about the spread of diseases through bad air became widespread.

The concept of exclusion in the interests of public health was embedded in the customs of London by the late thirteenth century. The Assizes of London proclaimed in 1276 that ‘no leper shall be in the city, nor make any stay there’. Just before the Black Death, during a crack-down on rising levels of disorder and vagrancy, Edward III supplemented existing local orders with measures for London and Middlesex, commanding the leprous to quit the highways and fieldways between the City and Westminster and to leave London within fifteen days.¹⁷ Inevitably, the arrival of plague, which broke out at regular intervals until 1665, made matters worse for suspect lepers, however few in number.

Changes after 1300

The fourteenth century saw big changes in the status and use of the hospital. In part these reflected the dramatic fall of the English population as a result of famine and plague. The Black Death reached London in 1348 and ravaged many hospitals including St Giles (lepers may have been particularly susceptible to plague). At the Hospital of St James, Westminster, for instance, the few remaining leprous women perished along with the warden and most of the brothers and sisters. St Giles at this time was unable to accommodate even fourteen inmates because the hospital lands lay uncultivated and the rented property unlet, due to debt, fire and ‘the horrible mortality’. Fortunately, however, leprosy went into unexplained decline during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Perhaps only two dozen new leper hospitals were built during this period, while many existing ones became general hospitals or were converted to other welfare uses, notably for the elderly poor. At Harbledown near Canterbury, England’s first documented leper hospital, the buildings became almshouses which remain in use today.¹⁸

St Giles’ Hospital continued to provide for at least some lepers until about 1500. Probably most were elderly, but there is some evidence that they were mixed in age.¹⁹ Margaret of Anjou’s appeal to the master, for instance, was on behalf of a seventeen-year-old (Robert Upholme, late chorister at Winchester), who had ‘noon other socour ne lyvelode to lyve upon but oonly of aulmesse of cristen peuple’.²⁰ In 1500 widow Joane Frowyk of Ealing bequeathed 4d each ‘to any lazour, be it man or woman being at time of my decease in the lazerhouse of St Giles beside Holborn, Newenton Greene, the Loke beyond St George’s bar, Hammersmith and Knightsbridge for to pray for my soul’. Yet towards the end of its life the hospital is thought to have housed only one or two leprous individuals at most. By 1535–6, the inmates were described simply as ‘paupers’. The Hospital of St Giles had in effect become a chantry chapel with a modest almshouse attached.²¹

The reasons for this change are partly attributable to the hospital’s conspicuous position, close to London’s main centres of power and influence – the City to the east, and the Crown and Church in Westminster to the south. Increasingly it became caught up in a fractious power struggle between them and, from 1299, another organisation, the Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem. As a result, St Giles was frequently a troubled and contested institution up until the time of its dissolution in 1535–6.

The patronage of St Giles had always been subject to dispute. As we have seen, although founded by Queen Matilda, the hospital had been placed under the supervision of the City, from which the majority of its inmates was to be drawn. In the mid-1200s the Crown began to show greater interest, appointing for life two wardens or keepers who alone had custody of the hospital property. This claim to appoint was confirmed by Edward I in 1287 on the ground that the hospital had been founded by his ancestors, but it led to a clash with the civic authorities. Quarrels with the bishops of London over rights of visitation also followed. In 1293 Edward asserted that the hospital was a royal free chapel, that its advowson had always belonged to the Crown, and that the master could exercise spiritual jurisdiction in the parish of St Giles and the hospital precinct ‘without any intermeddling’ by the bishop. Of all the hospital’s property, only the church of Feltham was subject to the bishop, while the king alone had the right to visit St Giles.²²

In 1299, after ten years of acrimonious negotiations, St Giles with its revenues and administration was formally granted to the Order of St Lazarus in place of an annual pension of forty marks (£26 13s 4d) previously received by the order from the king, which was now in arrears. So long as the new owners looked after the essential needs of the inmates, any additional revenues were theirs. The serving warden was ordered to hand over the hospital. In response, London’s citizens protested to King Edward that the hospital had been sold in direct contravention of the terms set out in its charters and bulls, and ‘even the provision of the Magna Carta’. In 1303, probably because of this conflict, some of the inmates broke the locks off the hospital gates and allowed the Archbishop of Canterbury to enter in an official capacity as visitor.²³

The Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem, known also as the Leper Brothers or the Lazarists, had been founded in Jerusalem by crusaders in the early twelfth century and named after Lazarus of Bethany. After the loss of the last mainland crusader territories in 1291, the order concentrated on its charitable and hospitaller activities and began to call its preceptories (the headquarters of chapters associated with military orders) ‘hospitals’. It founded its chief preceptory in England at Burton (later Burton Lazars) in Leicestershire around 1150, for a master, eight sound brethren of the Augustinian order and an unknown number of lepers. Several other hospitals were allotted to the Lazarists, but the grant of alms and the gift of St Giles was ‘the most generous and the most troublesome’.²⁴ St Giles became the principal location where the Order of St Lazarus ‘managed to maintain a certain visibility and justification for existence’ to the local authorities and to the Crown.²⁵ It may well have eclipsed the Leicestershire foundation in importance, since it was more central and had a far more distinguished history than isolated Burton.²⁶

Soon after this transfer of authority, the hospital was staffed by a warden (or master), two secular chaplains and three brethren and two sisters of the Order of St Lazarus. Other staff included a clerk and a messenger and, as endowments increased, more clerics. Deeds distinguished between the ‘fratres sani’ – the unafflicted brothers and women working as nurses and matrons – and the infirm.²⁷

The transfer to the Lazarists was not the end of the matter. The Crown continued to interfere, exploiting its rights of patronage by granting subsidised accommodation to servants from the royal court. The master successfully petitioned Parliament for redress in 1315 on the grounds that such individuals should not be lodged alongside lepers. Soon, it appeared that the master was himself departing from the charitable traditions of the knights, having ‘ousted the lepers and put in brethren and sisters of his Order who were not diseased’. A petition, probably of 1354, from the Mayor and Commonalty of London claimed, without evidence, that the hospital was not a royal foundation at all but had been established by a citizen of London suffering from leprosy, specifically for the benefit of other citizens. This dispute came at the low point in the hospital’s fortunes following the Black Death. An agreement was made whereby the master would honour his order’s obligation to maintain fourteen lepers from the City and suburbs. Further inquiries revealed ongoing corruption and the hospital limped on, in debt and depressed.²⁸

Conflict between Church and Crown again erupted in 1391, when the Bishop of London forced entry with an armed band. Having previously taken the hospital under his special protection, and appointed a royal clerk as master, Richard II caused further upheavals by annexing the hospital to the Abbey of St Mary Graces, Tower Hill, which had been founded by his grandfather. Not long after, the resident lepers petitioned him in Parliament to complain of ‘want of maintenance’. The document requested ‘remedy as the current master of the hospital, the abbot of St Mary Graces, has withdrawn the alms and hospitality that they are assigned and does not wish to receive further sick into the hospital to bring it up to its full total’.²⁹ Demonstrating a greater sense of responsibility for the fate of these unfortunates, Richard’s successor, Henry IV, issued a writ to the mayor, bidding him collect 100s from the hospital’s tenants in the City for the immediate support of five male lepers.³⁰ He also returned custody of the hospital to Burton Lazars. Thereafter the master and brethren of the hospital belonged to the Order of St Lazarus until the hospital’s dissolution.

During this period, not for the first time, the care of lepers had been neglected in favour of accommodating fee-paying inmates or cronies, a practice for which St Giles, along with several other English hospitals, had become notorious. For example, in 1375 Nicholas de Exton, a rich City fishmonger, paid £40 for the use for life of a house and garden in the precinct for himself, his wife and his brother. The hospital and its precinct were evidently considered as a desirable place in which to live.³¹

St Giles is one of the few English leprosaria whose deeds survive in any quantity, copied into a handsome cartulary made in 1402 now in the British Library. Disputes between the houses of St Giles and St Lazarus most likely prompted its compilation. The Lazarists at Burton proceeded to draw up a cartulary of their own, so that the scattered lands and other property of both hospitals were recorded. The cartulary of St Giles shows that, where previously Londoners had lavished gifts of land and rent upon the hospital, after takeover and mismanagement by the Lazarists they ‘vote[d] with their feet and set up other institutions which would admit patients free of charge’. The City nonetheless sought to ensure that it still made full use of its right to nominate and oversee patients at St Giles.³²

At no point in the hospital’s history is it clear whether it mainly accommodated the sick poor or served the City’s better-off citizens. That royal servants, Lazarist brethren and other ‘sound’ individuals of like status were resident there latterly does, however, suggest that the inmates were not paupers, unless the accommodation was socially stratified.

The site and buildings of the hospital

The hospital precinct probably included the whole of the heart-shaped island now bounded by St Giles High Street, Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue. The bull or charter of Pope Alexander IV states that the site included gardens and eight acres of land adjoining the hospital on the north and south. The main gatehouse was in St Giles High Street or Strata Sci Egidij.³³

The hospital lay towards the north-east side of the precinct, its surrounding land in use as the gardens, orchards and meadow ground of the home farm. By the late fourteenth century St Giles appears to have recovered from its slump after the Black Death to run a thriving farm wherewith to sustain inmates, or at least the hospital coffers. Livestock sequestered by the abbot of St Mary Graces in 1391 included eight horses, twelve oxen, two cows, four boars, twelve sows, 140 piglets, 60 geese, six cockerels, 40 hens, 40 capons and 100 pullets. Grain, and quantities of brushwood, hay and straw, harvested from the precinct and the hospital meadows, were also taken.³⁴ These, and the furniture, kitchen utensils, books, vestments and ecclesiastical ornaments that he carried off, allegedly amounted in value to more than £1,000, suggesting a well-endowed institution.³⁵ The land adjacent to the chapel, encompassed by the present churchyard, no doubt served as the burial ground.³⁶

Leper hospitals did not conform to a particular design or plan, other than in their location on the edge of towns. In some cases chapels doubled as infirmaries, in others the infirmary and chapel were separate. Whether there was a dedicated infirmary at St Giles is not known. Parton reasonably supposed that the hospital expanded over time. The first buildings at Harbledown are known to have been of timber, and there is similar evidence from other sites. Generally, however, the larger and better-endowed leper hospitals became substantial and by the twelfth century timber buildings were being replaced with stone.³⁷

Since the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields was in existence by 1222 it seems likely that the church was employed by then for parochial as well as hospital purposes. By 1259 there was an additional chapel dedicated to St Michael, with its own chaplain, and by 1321 a separate chapter house. There may never have been internal dormitories and the master and inmates were certainly housed in separate quarters at the time of the Dissolution. The master’s house (later the mansion house) lay to the west of the hospital. The spital houses and their gardens and orchards seem to have stood in the High Street to the east of the church, where they appear to have occupied four of the five dwellings, the westernmost probably being on the site of the present Angel pub.³⁸

Archaeology has turned up little more, except for a fragment of wall foundation, a hearth and four floor tiles which may belong to the master’s house; and remnants of a substantial ragstone wall to the north part of the precinct along St Giles High Street, dating to the late thirteenth or fourteenth century and several times rebuilt.³⁹

Maps and illustrations are indicative rather than definitive. The English chronicler Matthew Paris left the earliest known sketch of the hospital of St Giles on the margin of a manuscript of his Great Chronicle, noting its foundation by Queen Matilda.⁴⁰ It shows a tower at its east end and a smaller turret above the west porch. The drawing is at least suggestive of the hospital’s importance as a landmark.

A sense of its prominence can also be gleaned from a view made in the reign of Mary Tudor, by Anton Wijngaerde (ill. 5). Here the hospital, now solely a parish church and with a south-western tower, stands just clear of the local marshes with other small structures clustered amidst the trees nearby. Other sixteenth-century maps show the elliptical precinct well, but the configuration of the church is ambiguous.

5. Detail from Anthonis van den Wijngaerde’s panorama of London as seen from Southwark, 1554. The hospital and church of St Giles are shown in the centre behind some of the riverside or Strand palaces, with Charing Cross to the left. (Ashmolean Museum, WA1950.206.1)

6. St Giles’ Church in context, with surrounding houses and roads, 1585. Detail from a survey probably by Ralph Treswell the elder, made in connection with a law case. (TNA, MPB 1/1)

Better evidence comes from a survey of 1585 made for legal purposes by the cartographer Ralph Treswell in connection with a lawsuit (ill. 6). This depicts a stone building with a steeple and a squat tower at the east end, located to the north east of the precinct, from which it is partly separated by a row of brick buildings on its west side and by wooden palings to the south. The whole appears to be bounded by stone walls, other than the north-west perimeter which is fenced.⁴¹ The first historian to make use of the reliable Treswell plan was Charles Lethbridge Kingsford in 1925. Previously, nineteenth-century drawings of the hospital and precinct were mostly based on a fanciful recreation for Parton’s history derived from the so-called Agas map, and cannot be trusted. As the painter and antiquarian John Thomas Smith pointed out, the Parton plan ‘does not represent anything that can ever have existed’.⁴²

The Dissolution and after

In 1536 Henry VIII exchanged property in Leicestershire with the Master of Burton Lazars in return for the extensive lands of the Hospital of St Giles. Thomas Ratcliffe, the master of Burton, was the warden of St Giles at this time. As Parton observed, the transfer of so large a portion of the hospital property could only be considered as a preparatory step to its dissolution and thus to have anticipated the fate that awaited so many religious and charitable establishments. Shortly afterwards, Sir Thomas Legh (or Leigh, d. 1545), notorious visitor of the monasteries, succeeded in gaining possession of the Hospital of Burton Lazars and all its possessions. St Giles and its manors in Feltham and Heston all reverted to the Crown.⁴³

Following the Dissolution, the chapel and its burial ground became the parish church and churchyard of St Giles-in-the-Fields. Their history is covered in subsequent chapters. The remainder of the hospital property in the precinct (as distinct from the wider manor and its lands beyond the parish) was divided in 1544 between Lord Lisle – John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland, virtual ruler of England during the minority of King Edward VI – and Thomas Legh. Although the Crown owned the hospital property, Legh continued to occupy it after 1539. A dispute then arose between Legh and Lord Lisle as to the title of the land. Eventually an agreement was reached between Lisle and Sir Thomas’s daughter, Katherine Legh, regarding its division – the capital mansion (the former master’s house) being taken by Lisle. Through a series of transactions by the two parties and their descendants, the manor of St Giles’ Hospital came to the courtier Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton in the early seventeenth century. The earl already owned Bloomsbury and thus the two manors became united in the same family.⁴⁴

The property which fell to Katherine Legh included the spital houses and their gardens and orchards; we do not know how long the houses continued to stand. The almshouses and washhouse (here) built in Broad St Giles on the north-east side of the church in 1656 must not have been intended wholly as their replacement, for they catered solely for elderly women.

NOTES

¹ SoL vol. 5, pp. 117–26, notes that the 1101 date given by Parton and repeated in later accounts is probably incorrect, as does Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum, new edn., ed. John Caley, Henry Ellis and Bulkeley Bandinel, vol. VI, Pt II, 1846, pp. 635–6.

² This assessment of the hospital’s importance comes from Professor Emeritus Carol Rawcliffe.

³ John Leland, Collectanea, 1774 edn, vol. 2, p. 418.

⁴ Sethina Watson, ‘The Origins of the English Hospital’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 16, 2006, p. 75.

⁵ Watson, pp. 75–6; Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England, 2006, pp. 106–7; Nicholas Orme and Margaret Webster, The English Hospital 1070–1570, 1995.

⁶ Rawcliffe, Leprosy, p. 347; Marjorie B. Honeybourne, ‘The Leper Hospitals of the London Area’, Transactions of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, vol. 21, 1967, pp. 20–31.

⁷ Honeybourne, p. 20 and note 8; in note 9, she states that the soke seems to have been coterminous with the parish.

⁸ SoL vol. 5, p. 118.

⁹ Ibid, p. 1.

¹⁰ Carole Rawcliffe, ‘The Lost Hospitals of London: Leprosaria’, Gresham College lecture, 5 March 2012, transcript, p. 8; David Marcombe, Leper Knights: The Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem in England, c.1150–1544, 2003, pp. 52–3; SoL vol. 5, pp. 127–40.

¹¹ David Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 2011 edn; Carmela Vircillo Franklin, ‘The Reception of the Latin Life of St Giles in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 42, 2013, pp. 63–145; ‘Religious Houses: Hospitals’, in VCH Middlesex, vol. 1, 1969, pp. 204–12.

¹² Farmer, op. cit.; Franklin, op. cit.; Rotha Mary Clay, The Medieval Hospitals of England, 1909, p. 270.

¹³ See deeds in the Augmentation Office, 1100–1522, TNA, E 326; Memorials of Henry V, King of England, ed. Charles Augustus Cole, 1858; John Capgrave, Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages, 1858, p. 113; Letters of Queen Margaret of Anjou and Bishop Beckington and others written in the reigns of Henry V and Henry VI, ed. Cecil Monro, 1864, p. 95; George Godwin and John Britton, The Churches of London, 1839.

¹⁴ Rawcliffe, Leprosy; Elma Brenner and François-Olivier Touati (eds), Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages: from England to the Mediterranean, 2021; Simon Roffey, ‘Sanctity and Suffering: The Sacred World of the Medieval Leprosarium: a Perspective from St Mary Magdalen, Winchester’, in Alexander James Langlands and Ryan Lavelle (eds), The Land of the English Kin, Brill’s Series on the Early Middle Ages, vol. 26, 2020.

¹⁵ Dobie, pp. 4, 9.

¹⁶ Rawcliffe, Leprosy, p. 347; Honeybourne, p. 7.

¹⁷ Rawcliffe, Leprosy, pp. 22, 93; Honeybourne, pp. 20–31; Clay, Medieval Hospitals, pp. 148–9.

¹⁸ Rawcliffe, Leprosy, pp. 110–12, 349; Simon Roffey, ‘Medieval Leper Hospitals in England: an Archaeological Perspective’, Medieval Archaeology, vol. 56, 2012, pp. 204, 213–15.

¹⁹ Rawcliffe, Leprosy, pp. 4, 347, 351.

²⁰ Letters of Queen Margaret of Anjou and Bishop Beckington, p. 95; Jock Haswell, The Ardent Queen: Margaret of Anjou and the Lancastrian Heritage, 1976, p. 71.

²¹ TNA, PROB 11/12/74; Honeybourne, p. 14; Rawcliffe, Leprosy, p. 343; ‘Religious Houses: Hospitals’, in VCH Middlesex, vol. 1, pp. 204–12.

²² SoL vol. 5, p. 117; Honeybourne, p. 22; VCH Middlesex, vol. 1, pp. 204–12.

²³ SoL vol. 5, p. 118; Helen J. Nicholson, On the Margins of Crusading: The Military Orders, the Papacy and the Christian World, 2013, p. 183;