St Mark's Church, Bristol

St Mark's Church on the north-east side of College Green, Bristol, is one of the most singular churches in England: better known to medieval and Tudor historians as the Gaunt's Chapel, and known within Bristol since 1722 as the Lord Mayor's Chapel, it is one of only two churches in the country privately owned and used for worship by a city corporation — the other being St Lawrence Jewry in London. Built around 1230, it faces Bristol Cathedral (St Augustine's Abbey until 1542) across College Green, the abbey's former burial ground, and though later buildings have enclosed everything but its west front and tower, the Grade I listed church preserves fine late Gothic work and a celebrated collection of continental stained glass.

The church began as the chapel of a medieval charity. In 1220 Maurice de Gaunt — grandson of Robert Fitzharding, first feudal baron of Berkeley and founder of St Augustine's Abbey — established a hospital next to his grandfather's abbey to relieve the sick and poor: the Hospital of St Mark of Billeswyke-by-Bristol, housed at first in the abbey's almonry. On Maurice's death in 1230 his nephew Robert de Gournay enlarged the endowment, made the hospital independent of the abbey, and placed it under Maurice's brother Henry de Gaunt — hence its informal names, St Mark's or Gaunt's Hospital. The church built for the inmates around 1230 is the only part of the hospital buildings that survives. (Maurice de Gaunt was a serial founder: he also established Bristol's Blackfriars around 1227–29, whose cloisters are now Quakers Friars.)

The architecture spans three centuries of Gothic. The nave of about 1230 and south aisle of 1270–80 are early Decorated; the rest is Perpendicular, including the tower over the east end, completed in 1487. Miles Salley, Bishop of Llandaff from 1500, rebuilt the chancel, south aisle chapel and reredos around 1500, and his chest tomb with effigy stands in the chancel south of the altar; the nave roof and another side chapel are early sixteenth-century. The west front, with its geometric twelve-petalled rose window, was a fifteenth-century design rebuilt about 1830 — the original front was bought by Henry Brooke of Henbury Hill House, where it still stands as a folly ruin — and John Loughborough Pearson created a new Gothic west entrance in 1889. The jewel is the Poyntz Chapel, or Chapel of Jesus, added beyond the tower at the east end of the south aisle around 1523 as a chantry by Sir Robert Poyntz of Iron Acton, a noted supporter of Henry VII at Bosworth: fan-vaulted, with two niches of unknown purpose on its north wall, its floor covered with contemporary coloured Spanish tiles, probably from Seville.

The Dissolution reached the Gaunts with brutal efficiency. Dr Richard Layton's letter to Thomas Cromwell, written at four in the morning on St Bartholomew's Day 1535 from "Sainte Austines withoute Bristowe", reported his intention "this day to dispache bothe this howse here, beyng but xiiii chanons, and also the Gawntes, wheras be iiii or v". After the suppression, Sir Edward Carne — who had turned Ewenny Priory into his private house — obtained the lease of Gaunt's Hospital in 1539, its revenues directed to support his wife Anne Denys while he went abroad to help arrange Henry VIII's ill-fated marriage to Anne of Cleves. Bristol Corporation objected, and in 1540 purchased the church outright — beginning a civic ownership now approaching five centuries. From 1590 to 1767 Queen Elizabeth's Hospital school occupied the former hospital buildings and used the church as its chapel; from 1687 to 1722 the Corporation lent the chapel to Huguenot refugees fled from France; and in 1722 it became the official church of the Mayor and Corporation of Bristol, the role it holds to this day.

The monuments gather Bristol's medieval and Tudor elite. Two chest tombs of knights in the south aisle chapel may be the founders themselves, Maurice de Gaunt and Robert de Gournay, with more tombs of their Berkeley kin. Here lie Reynborn and Thomas Mathew, sons of Sir David Mathew of Llandaff; Mary Denys, last prioress of Kington St Michael — called at the Dissolution "a faire young woman of Lacock" by Cromwell's agent, bequeathed her brother's "second best bed at Codrington", and remembered as "a good olde maid, verie vertuose & godlye ... buried in the church of the Gauntes on the grene" at her death in 1593; Sir Richard Berkeley of Stoke Gifford (died 1604), whose recumbent effigy lies right of the entrance; Thomas James (died 1619), Mayor and twice MP for Bristol, with his nephew Thomas James the Arctic explorer, after whom James Bay in Canada is named; and Margaret Hopton (died 1635), wife of Sir Baynham Throckmorton, whose husband raised a large and costly marble monument against the north wall of the south aisle chapel.

The stained glass is among the finest assemblages of continental work in any English church. In the early nineteenth century Bristol Corporation shrewdly bought from the sales of Sir Paul Baghott's collection at Lypiatt Park and William Beckford's at Fonthill Abbey: fifteenth-century French saints in the east window; sixteenth-century French mannerist glass with grisaille from Écouen and Bible scenes in the nave; sixteenth-century saints from Steinfeld Abbey in Germany in the Poyntz chapel; and twenty-four German and Flemish roundels of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the south aisle chapel. The depiction of Thomas Becket in the south aisle, painted by Benjamin West in 1799, also came from Fonthill. The fittings include splendid Baroque wrought iron by the Bristol blacksmith William Edney — a sword rest of 1702 and the screen and gate of the south aisle chapel of 1726 — moved here from Temple Church after it was bombed in the Bristol Blitz. The medieval high altar screen, deliberately concealed behind wainscotting in 1722 "with the deliberate effort of concealing it", was uncovered again in 1820.

The Lord Mayor's Chapel remains open regularly for visitors and worship — and keeps a streak of modern eccentricity worthy of its history, having hosted an artwork in which caged birds sang along with a live pianist. Its archives, covering administration, finance, building alterations, music and service registers, are held at Bristol Archives. Eight centuries after Maurice de Gaunt built a chapel for the sick and poor of Billeswyke, his church still serves the city that bought it from the wreck of the Dissolution.