Sir Richard Rich was made a baron in 1547. Queen Mary revoked the grant in his favour, and placed here a convent of Preaching Friars, who under Father Person began to rebuild the nave of the church, but they were turned out when Elizabeth came to the throne, and the following year there was a fresh grant to the purchaser, by the title of Richard Lord Rich, and his heirs, ‘in free socage.’ The monastery with its precincts had been enclosed by a wall which contained, besides the numerous monastic offices, a large garden and court, fifty-one tenements, a mulberry garden (one of the first planted in this country), and the famous churchyard wherein had been held, since the time of Henry I., the great annual gathering for clothiers and drapers. This began to fall off, as a cloth fair,[63] towards the end of the sixteenth century, but continued to be more or less of a London carnival, and in some sort lingered on as late as the year 1855. The first Lord Rich died in 1560; during his lifetime little building seems to have taken place, for in Ralph Aggas’s map, which is considered to be of about this date, the space north of the church has no houses upon it, and the priory wall abutting on Long Lane still exists. Very soon, however, the land was turned to more profitable account, and we find Stow[64] writing at the end of the century: ‘Now notwithstanding all proclamations of the prince, and also the Act of Parliament, in place of booths within this churchyard (only let out in the fair time, and closed up all the year after), be many large houses built, and the north wall towards Long Lane taken down, a number of tenements are there erected for such as will give great rents.’ The houses in the street now called Cloth Fair probably followed the old line of booths. The first Lord Rich’s grandson Robert, who made such an ill-assorted marriage with Lady Penelope Devereux, Sidney’s ‘Stella,’ was raised to the dignity of Earl of Warwick in 1618. His second son Henry was created Baron Kensington and Earl of Holland. The titles were merged in the next generation, and became extinct in the year 1759, when the tolls of the fair descended to the Edwardes family, cousins of the Riches, in whose favour the Kensington title was revived. Lord Kensington sold these tolls to the Corporation of London in 1839.