St. Bartholomew
established as a priory, with donations of property being received from wealthy ‘foreigners’ (people from outside the City of London). The number of bequests that St Barts received increased and, by 1291, St Barts’ properties extended to Essex, Suffolk and Middlesex. St Bartholomew’s Fair also proved to be a strong source of income for the church, starting out as a horse and livestock market, later becoming an important location for the selling of cloth, one of England’s most valuable commodities. By 1379 St Barts had an annual income of 40 marks, just over £200,000 in today’s economy, offering a small insight into the wealth and power of an English priory during the height of religion in medieval England. 2 Yet this prosperity also brought the priory into conflict with the crown. The Statutes of Mortmain, enacted in the late 13 th century and meant to generate an income for the crown by deterring the granting of land through complicated legal arrangements, may reveal an increasingly greedy crown. These tensions offer another window into medieval England, suggesting that while the Church remained immensely wealthy, its position was no longer uncontested, as royal power and competing institutions such as hospitals and other religious orders began to challenge its dominance, possibly exhibiting the beginnings of reformist aspects in society. Furthermore, these reformist aspects can be reinforced through the experience of the priory during the Black Death, during which there were the deaths of four subsequent priors in the space of just 15 years, leaving a lack of spiritual guidance in St Barts. The troubles experienced by St Barts were mirrored at the centre of Catholicism: the Papal Schism from 1378 to 1417 saw three men claim the title of Pope simultaneously, exacerbating the already growing resentment and mistrust within the Christian community. The reformation transformed St Barts from a thriving priory into a modest parish church, offering a ‘window’ into how Tudor politics and religious reform reshaped both sacred spaces and parish life. In the years before and during the reformation, powerful figures with close connections to St Barts reflect wider English society, the intertwined history of these people and the church can provide a unique window into the early reforms and ideas as well as the ruthlessness required to survive the half a century of reform. In the case of John Eyton, prior of St Barts from 1391 to 1404, a strongly Catholic period in England, one can see the beginnings of reformist thoughts. Eyton, a friend and sympathizer of leading Lollard, John Wycliffe, indicated support for some of Wycliffe’s more conservative ideologies, publishing a series of sermons, Sermones super euangelia dominicalia ( Sermons on the Sunday Gospels ) and later, a work called Tractatus de usura ( Treatise on Usury ). 3 Although more focused on eradicating corruption in the Church, a less radical proposition compared to the Lollard idea of rejecting the supremacy of the Pope, Eyton’s ideas and work suggest that less radical reformist ideas may have been more prominent than commonly believed in the early 15 th century. Such undercurrents of discontent foreshadowed the upheavals of the 1530s, when men like Richard Rich enforced the crown’s will with merciless efficiency, while maintaining his personal power during the ‘mid-Tudor crisis’. Rich, the Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, offers a snapshot into society during the full force of the reformation. After purchasing St Barts in May 1544 at a ludicrously cheap price due to an exploit gained from his position in the Court of Augmentations, Rich would go onto demolish large parts of St Barts beyond repair, all for personal gain. Over the course of just two months the Court of Augmentations (led by Rich), destroyed six of the ten bays of the priory nave, the medieval parish chapel and the choir eventually selecting the eastern half of the priory as the main part of his mansion, going on to transform much of St Barts into his London townhouse. Rich reflects a society in which the
2 Webb, Records , II. 3 Webb, Records , II.
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