St Bartholomew-the-Great

The Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great, often shortened to St Barts the Great, is London's oldest parish church, a medieval Augustinian priory church in Smithfield within the City of London, founded in 1123 together with the adjoining St Bartholomew's Hospital, which still cares for the sick nine centuries on. Its name distinguishes it from the smaller St Bartholomew the Less, founded at the same time and now a chapel of ease within the same parish; the Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman, who took a flat overlooking the church in Cloth Fair, considered it to have the finest Norman interior in London.

The founder was Rahere, a prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral and Augustinian canon regular, whose story begins with a vision. While in Rome, Rahere dreamed that a winged beast carried him to a high place, where a message from "the High Trinity and the court of Heaven" commanded him to build a church in London's Smithfield. Returning to London, he found the site of his vision, then a small cemetery, was royal property, but Henry I, hearing of the divine message, granted him the land. Rahere began building with servants and child labourers gathering stones from across London, and the priory soon gained a reputation for curative powers, its aisles filling with the sick, especially on St Bartholomew's Day, 24 August. Miracles were claimed from the very foundation, including "a light sent from heaven", and above all miraculous healings, many of them worked at the church's hospital, the St Bartholomew's that endures today as one of the world's oldest hospitals. Rahere died in 1144; the splendid monument north of the high altar, a painted effigy beneath an elaborate canopy mixing Decorated and Perpendicular Gothic, was made some two hundred and fifty years later, and it remains unclear whether his bones lie within it. His ghost is reputed to keep its own calendar: when his tomb was opened during nineteenth-century repairs a sandal was removed and returned, but not, the story goes, his foot, and a shadowy cowled figure is claimed to emerge from the vestry each year on the morning of the first of July.

The last Prior, Robert Fuller, Abbot of Waltham Holy Cross and a favourite of Henry VIII who attended Prince Edward's christening, acquiesced in the dissolution of his house. About half the great church was ransacked for building materials and demolished in 1543, the nave pulled down to its last bay, but the lofty Norman crossing arches and choir survived largely intact and were converted to parish use, while the priory's southern and eastern buildings were granted in 1546 to the newly refounded royal hospital. Queen Mary briefly installed Dominican friars in 1556-59, and the fragmentary west entrance on West Smithfield, a thirteenth-century stone archway crowned by a half-timbered Tudor frontage of the late sixteenth century, still marks where the lost nave began, the modern entrance path following the line of the demolished south aisle. Inside, the early sixteenth-century oriel window installed by Prior William Bolton, allegedly so he could keep an eye on his monks, bears his rebus, a crossbow bolt through a tun, a pun that the antiquary William Camden gently mocked.

Having escaped the Great Fire of 1666, the surviving church drifted into centuries of strange uses. The Lady Chapel, "newly built" in 1336, was divided after the Dissolution into workshops and houses, and it was there in the early 1720s that the young Benjamin Franklin, future American polymath and patriot, worked for a year as a journeyman printer at the suggestion of Sir William Keith, Governor of Pennsylvania. The north transept served as a blacksmith's forge and was occupied by squatters in the eighteenth century. Rescue came from 1889, when Sir Aston Webb directed an extensive restoration, recovering the Lady Chapel to something close to its medieval appearance, restoring the south transept fragments and building a new flint-faced north transept to stabilise the crossing and mask the scars of the lost nave; the rededications of the early 1890s drew the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Canon Edwin Savage's further restoration in the 1920s cost more than £60,000. Three bays of the fifteenth-century cloister were restored and extended by five replica bays in the 1920s as a war memorial, and the cloister quadrangle's footprint was recreated in grass when adjoining buildings were redeveloped in 2019. The church escaped major damage in the Blitz and was listed Grade I on 4 January 1950.

The brick clock tower at the south-west corner, built in 1628 with a small timber cupola, houses a ring of pre-Reformation bells cast between 1500 and 1514, among the oldest in the country. Among the burials and monuments are Sir Walter Mildmay, Elizabeth I's Chancellor of the Exchequer and founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Sir Rice Mansel and the alchemist-physician Francis Anthony, while the registers record the baptism of the painter William Hogarth; the cricketer W. G. Grace worshipped here, the future eleventh Duke of Devonshire married the Hon. Deborah Mitford here in wartime 1941, and in 2005 a memorial service marked the 700th anniversary of the execution of Sir William Wallace in nearby Smithfield. An older charity persists: distributions in the churchyard on Good Friday continue a bequest by which twenty-one sixpences were laid on a widow's gravestone for twenty-one poor widows in perpetuity, hot cross buns now given to widows and others alike. The raised churchyard garden on Cloth Fair was laid out in 1885 by Fanny Wilkinson, landscape gardener of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association.

The church is the adopted guild church of a remarkable spread of City livery companies, from the ancient Butchers, Founders, Haberdashers, Fletchers and Farriers to the modern Information Technologists, Hackney Carriage Drivers and Tax Advisers, and served as chapel of the Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor until 2005. Its sublime Norman interior has made it one of the most filmed churches in Britain: the fourth wedding in Four Weddings and a Funeral was shot here, along with scenes from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Shakespeare in Love, The End of the Affair, Amazing Grace, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Other Boleyn Girl, Sherlock Holmes, The Hollow Crown, Snow White and the Huntsman, Testament of Youth, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Transformers: The Last Knight. Unusually for a parish church its choir is professional, directed by Rupert Gough, with the amateur Rahere Singers for some services; BBC Radio 3's Choral Evensong was broadcast from the church for the 900th anniversary of the foundation in 2023, and principal services have been streamed since 2021. The historic organ, descended from instruments of 1715 and 1731 and the Hill rebuild of the St Stephen Walbrook organ in 1886, is now unplayable, and a new instrument was commissioned in March 2025 from Eule Orgelbau of Bautzen in Saxony, with inauguration planned for 2028. In 2012-15 the parishes of the Great and the Less were united as the benefice of Great St Bartholomew, a lively and growing parish worshipping in both buildings, so that Rahere's vision of nine hundred years ago is still being kept, daily, beside the meat market in Smithfield.