Besides the magnificent churches forming part of the monastic
establishments, examples of which fortunately remain to us in the churches
of St. Bartholomew, Smithfield, St. Saviour's, Southwark, and the Dutch
Church, Austin Friars, the parish churches of the old city were numerous
and important. From the inventories of their possessions prepared at the
Dissolution, and preserved among the records of the Augmentation Office,
it would seem that in the number of their chantries and the richness and
extent of their vestments and service books, some of the larger parish
churches could almost vie with the Cathedral itself. Although shorn of
their magnificence by the legislation of the Reformation period, and the
cruel devastation of the Great Fire, the few buildings which escaped the
latter catastrophe bear evidence of their former grandeur. The most
interesting of them are St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, with its fine monuments;
All Hallows, Barking; St. Olave, Hart Street; and St. Giles, Cripplegate.
The large number of the city churches is accounted for by the obligation
of each parishioner not only to regularly attend the services at his own
parish church, but to ensure the attendance also of his wife and
household, apprentices and journeymen. A corresponding obligation rested
upon the parish officers to provide a pew or other accommodation for each
parishioner in his own parish church. In the smaller parishes situated in
the heart of the city this was easy enough, but in border parishes like
those of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, and St. Giles, Cripplegate, it must
always have been a difficulty to provide for the large populations which
such parishes contained.
There is one very important building of which we have scarcely as yet made
mention, for it lies outside London City, the residence of the Archbishop
of Canterbury at Lambeth. We call it now "Lambeth Palace," but the title
is of recent date--not older, indeed, than the earlier part of the
nineteenth century. Up to that date its occupants dated their letters from
"Lambeth House" or "Lambeth Manor." In old times the title Palace was only
given to a bishop's residence within his own cathedral city. The Bishop
of London's Palace was in St. Paul's Churchyard; his residence at Fulham
was his "house."
Lambeth (== Loamhythe, _i.e._, "muddy bank") had been in Saxon days a
royal manor. Edward the Confessor's sister gave it to the See of
Rochester; it came back for a short time to the Crown after the Conquest,
but was restored to the Prior and Convent of Rochester by Rufus, and was
transferred to Canterbury under the following circumstances.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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