Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral: Formerly the Collegiate Church of St. Saviour, Otherwise St. Mary Overie. A Short History and Description of the Fabric, with Some Account of the College and the SeeWorley, George
History
Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral: Formerly the Collegiate Church of St. Saviour, Otherwise St. Mary Overie. A Short History and Description of the Fabric, with Some Account of the College and the See
Worley, George
Southwark Cathedral (London, England)
St. Mary Overy now enters on a new phase of existence. We have seen
that it had become a double church, by union with the church, or
chapel, of St. Mary Magdalene, the one a conventual, the other a
public, place of worship. In the immediate neighbourhood there was a
third church, dedicated to St. Margaret, which had been founded by
Bishop Giffard in 1107, and granted to the fraternity at St. Mary's by
charter of Henry I. By an Act of 1540, the year of Linstede's
surrender, the whole were united into a single parish, under the title
of St. Saviour's, thenceforward the official designation of the
Collegiate Church and surrounding district. The new dedication was
suggested by, and intended to perpetuate the memory of, the convent of
that name in Bermondsey (founded by Alwin Child, a London citizen, in
1082), which shared the fate of its companions at the Dissolution.
Soon after the amalgamation, St. Margaret's Church was secularized,
and divided into three portions for use respectively as a Sessions'
Court, a Court of Admiralty, and a prison. It stood on the ground
where the old Southwark Town Hall was afterwards built, itself a
perpetuation of the secular uses to which the deconsecrated church was
put before it was destroyed. A relic of St. Margaret's survives in the
shape of a monumental slab to Aleyn Ferthing, five times Member for
Southwark, about the middle of the fourteenth century. The stone was
discovered in 1833 during some excavations on the site of the old
church, and transferred to St. Saviour's, where it is imbedded in the
pavement of the retro-choir. From 1540 the Priory Church and Rectory
were leased to the parishioners by the Crown, at a rental of about L50
per annum, till 1614, when the church was purchased right out from
James I for the sum of L800.
The Corporation into whose hands the newly constituted parish of St.
Saviour's passed in 1540 consisted of thirty vestrymen, of whom six
were churchwardens.[5]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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