IN the second quarter of the thirteenth century groups of Tuscan hermits were forming, a generation after St Francis’ band of poor itinerant preachers and St Dominic's group of anti-heretical preachers. Agreeing to follow the rule of St Augustine, the hermits came together and became a new mendicant order of friars in 1256, the Order of Augustinian Hermits. With this background, the interests and the inclinations of the brothers faced in different directions: the hermit tradition demanded isolation and favoured rural settings; the newer mendicant movement emphasised preaching and therefore lived more happily in towns. The hermits had reached England before their formal unification, probably establishing their first English house on the edge of the small Suffolk wool town of Clare by 1249. From this base the order spread to numerous English towns in the second half of the century, and the order and its houses became known as the Augustinian or Austin friars.

The Augustinian friars probably established their London house in the 1260s, slightly later than the date of 1253 given by the Tudor historian John Stow. Significantly, the Augustine friars – unlike the other mendicant orders – are not included in a list of recipients of royal alms given in Lent 1260. The first definite mention of this order of friars in London comes in 1271. Stow names Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and Essex, as the founder of the friary and de Bohun also made substantial gifts of land to other religious houses in England and Wales. Perhaps he founded the London house in or soon after 1265 when he was the royalist keeper of the city of London, guarding against a potential attack by Simon de Montfort (another friary founder!) and the barons.

The friary housed about sixty friars by the end of the thirteenth century. Although fluctuating and temporarily declining as a result of the Black Death, the numbers were broadly maintained throughout the fourteenth century but then fell in the fifteenth century. The friary was probably reasonably financially stable, having a rental income of nearly £60 by the sixteenth century, and receiving good support in the bequests given by Londoners in their wills.

TRADITIONAL monks and nuns lived a static and enclosed life in their convents, following St Benedict's rule of stabilitas loci; friars certainly had elements of this lifestyle but had a dual focus, looking inwards at the community and outwards at the town. The friars’ liturgy and in-house schools represent the inward aspect (Chapter 16: Spiritual Life and Education in the London Friaries), but other aspects of the friars’ lives were outward looking: they regularly stepped outside their precincts, going out into the city and supplying what might be termed spiritual services to Londoners, whether native, foreign or alien. These same Londoners increasingly came into the friars’ convents (in life and in death) to ‘consume’ spiritual services and to use the spaces of the convents in a number of other ways; a comparison can be drawn between the thriving mercantile economy of London and the developing ‘salvation market’ of debits (sin) and credits (intercession and good works). The relations between friars and Londoners were therefore quite extensive and surprisingly varied. It is notable that the surviving place-names relating to the London friaries nearly all derive from the way that Londoners saw or talked about the friars outside the friaries: ‘Blackfriars’ describes the black cloak the Dominicans wore in the street, not the white tunic and scapular they wore in church and cloister; ‘Whitefriars’ the white cloak of the Carmelites rather than their undyed wool tunic. And the modern street of Crutched Friars takes its name from the way that Londoners pronounced the Latin name for the Crossed friars: cruciferi (presumably ‘crutchy-furry’).

The friars’ patrons

Ordinary Londoners had begun to act as founders of religious institutions in the late twelfth century when the mercer Walter Brown (Brunus) and his wife Rosia endowed the hospital and priory of St Mary Spital. However, to found a religious house, especially one in London, was an expensive business and the founders of most houses were higher ranking landowners and nobility. The priory of the Sack friars was founded directly by Henry III and his daughter-in-law Eleanor of Castile, and the king was certainly a prominent supporter of many English monastic houses.

THE Castilian priest Dominic of Caleruega (sometimes referred to with his probably aristocratic name of de Guzmán) founded a new religious order in the second decade of the thirteenth century. Dominic was an Augustinian canon and his new order grew out of his band of priests (which also included Cistercian monks) who were combating the Cathar heresy in the Languedoc. Dominic's way of dealing with the heresy was through itinerant, straightforward and organised preaching. This Dominican order of friars shared many characteristics with St Francis’ new order founded in the same decade in Italy. The Dominicans quickly began to expand their order throughout Europe, moving from Toulouse to Paris and to Spain. They came to England in 1221 and the first friar to arrive in London was Gilbert de Fresnay in August. He began to look for a suitable site for a new priory, which was to be the second friary in England after the Oxford house. De Fresnay quickly found a powerful supporter. Hubert de Burgh, earl of Kent, was the royal justiciar – senior minister to Henry III, who was still a minor. De Burgh purchased and then gave to the friars a parcel of land in suburban Holborn, just by the bridge over the Fleet river. The donation was confirmed with a quitclaim, datable to the mayoral term of October 1223 to October 1224, although the grant itself may well have been slightly earlier. Although this was not a city-centre location, the site occupied a prominent position on the main approach to London from the west, and was only 320m from the Newgate entrance into the city (Figure 3, Figure 4). Furthermore, the proximity to the bridge over the Fleet gave the friars a good opportunity to provide spiritual services to travellers and, potentially, receive alms in return.

The Dominicans in England have long been known as Black friars, the colour referring to the cloak they wore outside the friary. The numbers of these London Black friars quickly increased in the period when the Holborn friary was being constructed and used. By 1243 there were about eighty Dominicans in London, although in 1278 numbers were down to sixty. When the Black friars left their Holborn friary in the 1280s, there may have been sixty-seven friars.

IF the prime purpose of every monastic order was prayer – with the additional component of preaching in the case of the friars – there had to be an economic infrastructure to support this. Even St Francis could not pray and preach on an empty stomach with no shelter for the night; this latter aspect was even more important in late medieval England than on a warm night in thirteenth-century Umbria.

If we were studying a Benedictine monastic house we would naturally seek records of the monastic officers who administered the kitchen, the church or the guest wing. These obedientiaries’ accounts are particularly well preserved at Benedictine houses that were also cathedrals, such as Norwich or Durham, or in monasteries that converted to a cathedral after the Dissolution, such as Peterborough or Westminster. Unfortunately no such records survive from English friaries; indeed, it is uncertain to what extent friaries even had such officers. However, the rather scattered sources certainly do make mention of friars with administrative roles, even if the structure was not quite as formally organised as at a large Benedictine institution. At Grey Friars, for example, there were friars who served as a physician (Eric de Vedica, specified as an ‘obediencer’ of the priory), a gardener (Walter Roben) and a butler (Geoffrey Turner), as well as an almoner and an infirmarer.

Reconstructing the finances of Austin Friars

Given the lack of any surviving obedientiaries’ rolls for English friaries – if indeed this sort of record was kept – one must make do with the sources that do survive. The starting point chosen here is the chance survival of a summary account showing money paid by the English province of the Austin Friars to the order's headquarters in Rome. The document of 1522 records money paid by the prior of the London Austin Friars, Edmund Bellond, to an Italian agent, Raphael Maruffus, for transfer to the papal Curia at Rome. The financial transfer seems to have been the result of a special fundraising exercise by Bellond, who had obtained a papal indulgence in order to raise money for a building project (probably not at the London house).

THE seven London friaries were much more than churches: at the very least the friars required food and accommodation to sustain their duties of prayer and preaching. As the numbers of friars increased (along with the ambitions of priors), they came to need other buildings: libraries and schools for study, cloisters for traditional monastic contemplation, service wings to supply the kitchen, and gardens for horticulture and leisure. And both friars and lay people required accommodation after death in cemeteries. The size and layout of these priories thus developed over time, as needs changed and as the sponsorship of Londoners and others permitted.

The early friaries in the thirteenth century

The needs of the thirteenth-century friars of London were relatively simple: a plot on which to build a church and an accommodation wing, with space for a small cemetery. The location and basic shape of the early friary precincts were to a large extent a matter of chance – the result of accepting the foundation bequest of a patron, usually in the form of a parcel of land not a purse of money. The Dominicans, Carmelites and Pied friars were given their friary plots outside the old Roman wall that defined London; the Franciscans, Austin, Sack and Crossed friars were given intramural urban plots for their priories (Figure 69). This urban/suburban distinction explains the varying size of the early friaries: the Black, White and Pied friars were given fields or closes (over 3 acres in the case of the White friars) whereas the others had smaller urban messuages (a tenth of an acre for the Sack friars: Figure 69). The varying origins of the friaries also created differences in the priors’ ability to enlarge and adapt their friaries. So, during the two decades after they established their London house, the Crossed friars only managed to add one neighbouring messuage to their precinct (Figure 53; Table 11) but in the same period the Black friars acquired six additional suburban plots or closes (Figure 4; Table 3).

Although the documentary and archaeological evidence is generally lacking in detail for this early period in the friars’ history, the Grey Friars Register and the account of the early Franciscan Thomas of Eccleston suggest that the early guardians concentrated on building a small chapel followed by a single accommodation wing.

AT the heart of each friary was the church, whose east end framed the two spiritual nodes, the high altar and the choir stalls. The friary churches were not, however, static: priors and lay sponsors added to the buildings over the three centuries of mendicant life in the capital. The most important distinction is between the friars’ early churches of the thirteenth century and those they began to build in the following century; this distinction must surely correspond to a change in emphasis about the role and function of the friars and their priories.

Thirteenth-century churches

We lack precise evidence for the dimensions, layout and architectural detail of the seven thirteenth-century churches but, in nearly every case, there is some indication of size and shape – whether from archaeological excavation, documentary measurements or from cartographic information on adjacent streets and buildings. The early priors of the thirteenth century must have had in mind a model for the friary church: in nearly every case they built a relatively small, single-aisled chapel of three to six bays (Figure 64). These churches were never more than about a hundred feet long, often less, and in the case of Sack Friars, half that length. They would have had plain timber roofs, three to six windows on the long sides (presumably simple lancets or pairs of lights in an Early English style), a door at the west end and a grander window (perhaps three lancets?) at the east end. The eastern bay may have been vaulted above the high altar to mark its higher status, like the surviving mid-thirteenth-century Franciscan church in Cortona (Italy). Unfortunately, no architectural fragments of these early London churches have so far been identified in archaeological excavations, although the surviving window arch of the late thirteenthcentury chapter house undercroft at the (second) Black Friars gives an indication of the plain architectural taste of the early mendicants (Figure 65). Documentary evidence gives us occasional glimpses of the early chapels of the London friaries; for example, Edward I spent over 10 marks on Purbeck marble to finish off the Carmelites’ church in 1273, for use in the high altar.

THE Friars of the Penitence of Jesus Christ, popularly known as the Sack Friars, were a mendicant movement formed in Provence in the 1240s, inspired by the teaching of Franciscans. Their official name hints at their connection to penitential groups of lay people such as Beguines, while their unofficial name in the vernacular must refer to the sack-like cloth they wore, and reveals the emphasis the friars placed on humility and poverty. In 1251 they received official approval from the pope and adopted a Dominican version of the monastic Rule of St Augustine. The movement spread rapidly and won high-ranking backers including Louis IX of France and Henry III of England. By the third quarter of the thirteenth century they were the third largest order of friars, behind the Dominicans and Franciscans, of course, but often more numerous in members and more popular with lay people than the Carmelites and Augustine friars. The Sack friars planned their move into England in 1256 and they arrived the following year.

They set up their first English house in London, initially based in the parish of St Lawrence Jewry. They soon moved to a larger site just outside the city walls to the north, probably before 1259, funded by a donation of 100 marks (£66 13s 4d) from Henry III. This first priory was in the parish of St Botolph Aldersgate, although its precise location is not known. In the 1260s the friars received continuing support from the king in the form of grants of food and fuel and, in 1266 and 1268, of timber for building projects and repairs. They received a donation of land in St Botolph from a lay benefactor with which to enlarge their priory and they owned at least one property in another parish. However, by the end of the decade the friars had chosen to move to another site within the walls, perhaps because the Aldersgate friary was too close to the Grey Friars, or because they wanted a more central and prestigious location. The Sack friars received a royal licence to sell their Aldersgate friary in February 1270, presumably having acquired (and begun work on?) a new site in Colechurch Street, later known as Old Jewry (Figure 58).

IN the second half of the twelfth century several English monastic houses installed their own water supply systems. The spread of the idea and the technology was done by Benedictine houses such as Christchurch Canterbury and by the newer offshoot order, the Cistercians, for example at Fountains Abbey. Identifying and enclosing freshwater springs was not, of course, a new idea; the technological novelty was the construction of a conduit-head near the spring or springs to provide a constant head of water, and the ability to cast and shape lead into long, narrow-bore pipes to transport the water from conduit-head to abbey. In the developing monastic tradition, monks required sweet and clean water at regular intervals for spiritual and physical cleansing – before celebrating the services of the Divine Office – as well as for drinking. In the second quarter of the thirteenth century, several such piped water supplies were being developed in and around London. The Augustinian canons at Waltham Abbey were planning and installing one in the 1220s and ‘30s and the City authorities were installing a civic system between the 1230s and 1250s. The London Franciscans and Dominicans planned and installed their systems around this time too, beginning with the Franciscans in the 1240s and the Dominicans a decade later. It seems very likely that there was some cooperation and shared technical expertise in the creation of these four systems in and around London.

The Grey Friars water supply

The four larger London friaries – Grey Friars, Black Friars, White Friars and Austin Friars – established their own water systems, of which by far the best documented is the Franciscan system. Here, a rare combination of archaeological excavation, medieval documents and a surviving medieval conduit-head building allow us to reconstruct the water supply network. Taking the accounts of the donation and the course of the water supply given in the sixteenth-century Grey Friars Register, the early twentieth-century archaeologist Philip Norman carried out a remarkable investigation, mapping the probable course of the underground pipe network and discovering the remains of the two conduit-heads that fed the piped system.

In the second quarter of the thirteenth century, probably in the 1240s, William Taylour granted the Franciscans a spring in rural Bloomsbury, nearly a mile to the north-west of the friary.

IN the Introduction to this book I stated its purpose: to reconstruct the urban landscape of the seven medieval friaries of London, and to understand something of the experience of the friars and visitors who used them. Using the available evidence (800 or so documents, nearly one hundred archaeological excavations and a handful of maps: Table 2), the authors have attempted to describe and analyse these medieval friaries. Focusing for a moment on the numbers, one can note that by the sixteenth century the friars’ precinct walls enclosed 20 acres of valuable urban land, about 5% of the whole walled city of London (8.1ha out of 143ha; 20 out of 353 acres), and the suburban White Friars accounted for another 5 acres (2.1ha). This simple numerical expression of the friars’ footprint in the city shows just how important the friars were to the Londoners and other patrons who had paid for the friaries. The 160 or so friars living in the five friaries in the fifteenth century constituted less than 0.5% of the population of the city; put another way, this elite group of religious men had about twenty times as much space as the average Londoner.

Turning to the methodology of studying these friaries (and other urban monastic houses), the present study continues the interdisciplinary academic tradition of monastic studies pioneered by late nineteenth-century archaeologist-historians such as William St John Hope. If historians studying British monastic sites lack the art-historical material available to colleagues working in, say, northern Italy (think of Assisi with its surviving medieval basilica complete with Giotto's late thirteenth-century fresco cycle), we have to make the most of the evidence we have. The strand of evidence that has perhaps been undervalued, but which lies behind most of the maps and plans in this book, is the use of historic maps and map regression (Introduction, ‘The approach of this book’; Figure 2). By working backwards in time from modern maps to sixteenth-century maps, the size and some of the internal patterns of the monastic precincts can be understood.

IN the first decade of the thirteenth century a young man in his twenties called Giovanni, the son of a wealthy Italian silk merchant, Pietro di Bernardone, renounced military service, his friends, his family and even his inheritance. Under his family name of Francesco and with a toponymic surname recording the Umbrian town of his upbringing, Francis of Assisi began a career of simple popular preaching. Recognised by Pope Innocent III in 1210 and in 1215, and with a Rule approved by Honorius III in 1223, Francis’ informal group of poor itinerant preachers quickly grew into an international religious order. Francis termed his preachers fratres minores, lesser brothers, with the term ‘minor’ alluding to an exhortation to poverty and humility in the Rule: et sint minores – ‘let [the friars] be the lowest’. The first Franciscans – a party of nine – arrived in England in September 1224, during the lifetime of their founder. Four of them quickly made their way to London, staying initially with the newly established Dominicans and then at a house in Cornhill. The following year they moved to newly granted premises in the parish of St Nicholas Shambles, near Newgate in the west of the city. In England the friars quickly became known as Grey friars, a reference to the colour of their hooded woollen habits or cowls.

The numbers of London Franciscans quickly increased from that first group of the 1220s, reaching a peak of about ninety in the early fourteenth century. After this, numbers seem to have declined for the rest of the house's existence, with fewer than fifty residents by the late fourteenth century and thirty-five in 1460 (including the guardian and provincial prior). Twenty-seven friars remained in 1538 to sign the dissolution agreement. Of all the London mendicants, the Franciscans had the least secure finances and the greatest reliance on alms: they had a church and buildings second only to the Dominicans in terms of grandeur and extent, but they lacked their counterparts’ regular royal income and large rental portfolio. They would have struggled to meet the annual living costs of some £50, just for feeding the friars, let alone paying for servants, repairs and the house's contribution to the province and prior general in Rome.