Vic Keegan’s Lost London 81: Blackfriars monastery

OnLondon ^ | 19th March 2019 | Victor Keegan

[Cronos]

The recently completed £1 billion European headquarters of Goldman Sachs in Farringdon Street is situated on the exact footprint of the first medieval Blackfriars monastery. It was built for mendicant Dominican friars in 1224. They moved 50 years later to their main home near today’s Blackfriars station, a few hundred yards down the same street on the opposite side of the River Fleet.

The Dominicans established a priory in Holborn, London in 1223, and dedicated the church to Our Lady and St John the Evangelist. In 1276, Edward I gave them permission to move to a site between the River Thames and Ludgate Hill. Until its dissolution in 1538, the Blackfriars – as the Dominicans came to be called – had their great priory on this site, which is still called after them. The medieval Blackfriars of London was used for great occasions of state, including meetings of Parliament and the Privy Council. In 1529, the divorce trial of Queen Catherine of Aragon and King Henry VIII was heard there. ‘Blackfriars’ persists as a placename to this day in the City of London.

Nothing remains of the original monastery and there are only scattered remnants of the second one, which occupied a vast eight-acre walled estate stretching to the Thames from Ludgate Hill. Fragments found in dozens of archaeological digs were destroyed or left buried under new buildings.

The only bits of the original building still visible form part of a wall along Ireland Lane (see main picture) and the remains of a window preserved behind glass in one of the office blocks, which you need permission to see. Otherwise, apart from a window arch in the garden of the Selsdon Park hotel and a column at St Dominic’s church up in Haverstock Hill, nothing is left of this historic 13th century monastery, which once had close links with the Crown.

Its great hall was once used to host meetings of parliament, which was convenient for Henry VII whose main London palace, Bridewell, was a few yards away on the other side of the Fleet. Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII was once staged in the very hall where that monarch’s divorce petition against Catherine of Aragon had been debated decades earlier. It included some of the actual words used during the original trial.

From 1536, after the dissolution of the monasteries, Blackfriars became a highly desirable residential neighbourhood where aristocrats and cronies of the monarch, as well as the likes of Ben Jonson, lived in relative tranquility until that man Shakespeare arrived – of which more next week.

The Reformation and Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries led to the destruction of every single Dominican house. Fr Bede Jarrett summarises the situation: “The English Province, as a whole, surrendered each of its houses, but did not accept the religious innovation of the king [Henry VIII]… The friars, set between their local and central leaders [in the wider international Order] generally did nothing, but escaped if they were able to, either overseas to France, or the Low Countries, or Spain, or went north to Scotland or west to Ireland.”

---

TOPICS: Catholic; General Discusssion; History
KEYWORDS: