All Hallows Honey Lane

All Hallows, Honey Lane was a medieval parish church of the City of London, destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and never rebuilt — a church whose tiny parish nevertheless played an outsized role in two chapters of London's story: the rise of the medieval mercery trade and the dangerous early years of the English Reformation.

The church stood at the north end of Honey Lane, a narrow lane running north from Cheapside in Cheap Ward, about two hundred feet from the great market street. It was surrounded on three sides by its churchyard and hemmed in by private houses — a thoroughly urban church serving one of the smallest parishes in the City, scarcely an acre in extent even after enlargement in the early thirteenth century. The church may have begun as a private chapel attached to a nearby property, though none has ever been identified. Its earliest historical trace is a deed of between 1191 and 1212 mentioning "Helias presbyter de Hunilane" — Elias, priest of Honey Lane — and early records call it "parochia Omnium Sanctorum de Hunilane" (1204–1215) and, in a single curious instance of 1216–22, "St. Elfegi de Hunilane", the only appearance of an apparent alternative dedication to St Alphege.

In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the parish became one of the City's first centres of mercery — the trade in silk and other fine cloths not produced locally — with several small shops and "selds", or covered markets, specialising in the business. The church's earliest known patron was Henry de Wokyndon in the mid-thirteenth century; the advowson then passed through various private hands until 1446, when it was willed to the Grocers' Company, which held it until the Great Fire. The Grocers made a custom of appointing learned men as rectors, and in the mid-sixteenth century chose graduates of Oxford and Cambridge in what appears to have been strict alternation.

It was under the Grocers' patronage that All Hallows earned its place in Reformation history, becoming known for its Lutheran sympathies at a time when such sympathies could be fatal. Dr Robert Forman, rector from 1525 until his death in 1528 and simultaneously president of Queens' College, Cambridge, was a celebrated early reformer, famous for his sermons and his interest in Lutheran books and doctrines. His curate Thomas Gerrard (or Garret) was bolder still in spreading Lutheran teaching, and was himself appointed rector in 1537 — but in 1540 he was found guilty of heresy and burnt at the stake at Smithfield with other Protestants. In 1543 further members of the parish were examined for holding allegedly "heretical" doctrines.

The building itself seems to have been modest, perhaps the original church little altered: in the mid-sixteenth century it was a simple rectangular structure about sixty feet long and twenty-three wide, with a south door near the west end opposite Honey Lane and a chancel door also on the south. A chapel of St Mary is mentioned in a will of 1380, and in 1545 there were altars to Our Lady and to St Thomas the Martyr besides the high altar. By the 1550s the church had a gallery reached by stairs, several pews and a font, and churchwardens' accounts from 1618 indicate two or more bells, probably hung in a belfry with a steeple. Oddly for so narrow a building, part of it was called the "south aisle", where several sixteenth-century burials took place. The cellar beneath the church was separately owned from the early fourteenth century until 1611, when the parish bought it as "a more convenient place of burial for any of the inhabitants" — the first burial in the cellar, called the "cloister" in the register, following in 1613. John Stow, surveying London in 1603, was unimpressed by its monuments: "there be no monumentes in this church worth the noting. I find that John Norman, Draper, Mayor 1453, was buried there."

The Great Fire of 1666 ended the church's five-century life. The parish — which had resisted a suggested union with St Mary le Bow in 1658 — was united with that parish after all, its name surviving as a ward precinct. The site, together with that of the adjoining church of St Mary Magdalen Milk Street and several houses, was acquired by the City, cleared, and laid out as Honey Lane Market, with the old church under its north-west corner. Part of the market closed in 1835, when the Corporation built the first City of London School there; excavations for its foundations, dug more than fifteen feet down, turned up tiles, pavement and vaults of a church described as "Anglo-Norman", and a contemporary pencil sketch titled "part of old church discovered in Honey Lane" shows masonry walls with three pointed arches over blocked openings. Two "Norman" capitals were found, along with the capital of a "Saxon" column carved with twisted serpents — one of the serpent capitals, now dated to the twelfth century, is in the British Museum, though the remains might equally have belonged to the neighbouring church or nearby houses. Excavations in 1954–55 at the former 111 Cheapside uncovered medieval burials, probably from an early churchyard later encroached upon by private building.

The Second World War's bombs destroyed much of the area, which was comprehensively redeveloped; the present Honey Lane walkway runs about 140 feet east of the original lane, and the site of the church itself is now occupied by a shop at 114 Cheapside. Of the little church of the mercers and the martyrs, only the name on a walkway and a serpent-twined capital in the British Museum remain.