THIS book takes one of the largest cities in northern Europe as its subject and examines in detail some of its most important medieval churches and landmarks: the friaries. The friars were a new religious group of the early thirteenth century. The young merchant Giovanni di Bernardone (better known as St Francis of Assisi) formed a band of poor lay preachers in Tuscany in the first decade of the century. At almost exactly the same time, the Castilian priest Domingo de Guzmán (later St Dominic) established a more organised group of anti-heretical preachers in the towns of southern France. These small groups were quickly embraced by the Church hierarchy who saw their potential as religious recruits to help spread the word of God in the ever-growing towns of Europe.

One can, perhaps, judge the size and significance of a medieval town or city by the number of its friaries: small towns in southern England like Ware or Maldon had a single friary, large regional centres such as Bristol had four friaries and the major administrative and mercantile centre of Norwich had five. London had a record-breaking seven friaries in the thirteenth century, nearly as many as the greatest city of the north, Paris, which had the full range of nine mendicant houses.

Successive chapters of the book will consider the evidence for these London priories: Dominican, Franciscan, Carmelite, Augustinian, Crossed, Sack and Pied (Table 1; Figure 1). From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, medieval Londoners poured investment into these institutions in return for the spiritual services that the friars offered. The seven London friaries were reduced to five by the fourteenth century, once two orders – the Sack Friars and the Pied Friars – were closed down as part of the tidying up of the mendicant orders that followed the church council known as the Second Council of Lyon in 1274. Two and a half centuries later, English friars, like their religious colleagues the monks, nuns and (most) canons, had to ‘change [their] coats’ and seek work as ordinary secular priests with the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the late 1530s (Chapter 19: Dissolution). A brief revival of a single London friary under Mary in 1556 lasted less than three years (Chapter 3: The Third Black Friars at St Bartholomew's).