St Stephen Coleman Street

St Stephen's Church, Coleman Street — also called "St Stephen's in the Jewry" — was a church in the City of London at the corner of Coleman Street and what is now Gresham Street, first mentioned in the twelfth century, rebuilt by the office of Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire, and finally destroyed by German bombing in the Blitz of 1940, never to be rebuilt. Though the church is gone, it left an extraordinary documentary legacy — churchwardens' accounts from 1486, parish registers from 1538, tithe and poor rate assessments from 1592, vestry minutes from 1622, and the "Vellum Book" of 1466 recording church property — and a history that touches Shakespeare's theatre, the English Civil War, and the founding of an American colony.

St Stephen's was one of two City churches dedicated to the Christian protomartyr, who by tradition was stoned to death in Jerusalem about 35 AD. Coleman Street took its name from the charcoal burners who once lived there, and the church's situation in the quarter of London inhabited by many Jews led the Tudor antiquary John Stow to assert — incorrectly — that the building had once been a synagogue. The earliest surviving reference, to "the parish of St Stephen colemanstrate", comes from the reign of King John. Between 1292 and 1303 the advowson was acquired, without licence, by Butley Priory in Suffolk; around 1400 the church is recorded as a chapel of ease to St Olave Old Jewry, and its parochial status was permanently re-established in the mid-fifteenth century, Butley's rights being acknowledged in 1449 and confirmed against the counter-claims of the Dean and Chapter of St Paul's in 1452. A homely touch survives from 1431, when John Sokelyng, owner of the neighbouring brewery "La Cokke on the hoop", left a bequest on condition that Mass be sung on the anniversaries of his death and those of his two wives: the gift was commemorated by a cock-in-a-hoop motif that decorated the church until 1940 and can still be seen on parish boundary markers in the surrounding streets.

In the early seventeenth century St Stephen's became one of London's great Puritan strongholds, with Sir Maurice Abbot a prominent vestryman. The church was renovated at the parishioners' cost in 1622 and a south gallery added in 1629. The playwright Anthony Munday — Shakespeare's collaborator on Sir Thomas More — was buried in the church in 1633, during the incumbency of John Davenport, the vicar appointed in 1624, who resigned to become a Nonconformist pastor. Davenport departed for the Netherlands in 1633, returned in 1636, and in 1637 — with Theophilus Eaton and a company centred on a core of St Stephen's parishioners — sailed for New England. Finding Boston torn by religious dissent, they diverted to Long Island Sound, where they founded the plantation of New Haven Colony, Connecticut: a Connecticut city traces its birth to this Coleman Street congregation. Davenport's successor John Goodwin, instituted in 1633, was another prominent Puritan preacher, ejected in 1645 for setting up a covenanted community within his parish and briefly imprisoned after the Restoration for his political views. The parish's radical sympathies ran deep: when Charles I's troops searched for the five impeached Members of Parliament in January 1642, the five repaired to Coleman Street for refuge, and during the Commonwealth, communion at St Stephen's was permitted only to those approved by a committee of the vicar and thirteen parishioners — two of whom had signed the King's death warrant.

The medieval church was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and rebuilt on its old foundations by Wren's office, the exterior completed in 1677, with a gallery and burial vault added in 1691 from coal tax funds, the whole restoration costing £4,517. The walls of the medieval tower had substantially survived the Fire, their old masonry remaining visible on the north side, refaced toward the top with Portland stone; the tower stood at the north-west corner, barely visible from the street, rising 85 feet to the top of its small leaded bell lantern, crowned by a gilded vane in the form of a cock — Sokelyng's emblem aloft. Wren's church kept the medieval plan, an irregular quadrilateral tapering toward the east, its brick and rubble walls stuccoed, with only the south and east fronts exposed. The main east façade on Coleman Street was faced in Portland stone with rusticated corners, a circular pediment between two pineapples, and a carving of a cock between two swags above the great round-headed window; the south front had five large round-headed windows. The interior was a single space without piers or columns, about 75 feet long and 35 wide, under a flat coved ceiling pierced by round-headed windows, the chancel raised one step; the carver William Newman made the altar-table, rails and altar-piece in 1676–77. The interior was low — about 24 feet — yet in the early nineteenth century galleries multiplied on iron columns: south in 1824, north and a children's gallery above the organ in 1827. John Avery provided an organ in 1775. A small graveyard lay north of the church and a paved yard south, its gateway crowned by a relief of the Last Judgement; it is possible that the explorer and buccaneer William Dampier, who died in the parish in 1715, was buried in the church or churchyard. Among its notable vicars was the Reverend Josiah Pratt (1768–1844), for twenty-one years Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, whose son John Henry Pratt became a noted clergyman-geologist.

The church suffered slight bomb damage in 1917, in the First World War. Then, on the night of 29 December 1940 — the great fire raid that devastated the City — St Stephen's was destroyed with all its fittings. It was never rebuilt; its parish was combined with that of St Margaret Lothbury, where its memory and records are kept. Today the site at the corner of Coleman Street and Gresham Street carries office buildings, with only the parish boundary markers and their cock-in-a-hoop to recall the church of the Puritans, the playwright, and the founders of New Haven.