Urban orders: touring the friaries of medieval London

Almost nothing remains above ground of London’s medieval friaries: only the names of places like Blackfriars Bridge and station, the street – and City pub – called Crutched Friars, and the City street of Austin Friars, now overshadowed by Tower 42 (the former NatWest Tower), testify to their presence. By combining maps, archives, and archaeology, Nick Holder has succeeded in reconstructing their stories and assessing their impact on the London landscape, as Chris Catling reports.

Think of monasteries and you might envisage the picturesque splendours of Tintern, Normandy’s twin-towered Jumièges – positioned on a rural loop of the Seine – or the roofless ruins of San Galgano in Tuscany, with doves fluttering through the glassless windows and nothing in the landscape as far as the eye can see but hills and forest. Abbeys such as these were founded away from worldly temptations, with their monks seeking out the wilderness like the early Christian hermits and Desert Fathers, who abandoned everything to commit their bodies and souls to discipline and prayer – the very word ‘monastery’ is derived from the Greek monos, ‘alone’.

This was the dominant monastic model during the early medieval period, when the Rule of St Benedict (AD 480-547) held sway. But different kinds of urban monastic institutions developed in the 13th century, when new mendicant orders (from the Latin mendicans, ‘begging’) were established, reliant on charitable donations for the funding of their work. The Franciscans were the first (founded in 1209 by St Francis of Assisi), soon followed by the Dominicans (founded by the Castilian priest, St Dominic, in 1215), the Augustinians (founded in 1244), and the Carmelites (organised as an order in 1247).

London’s Black Friars, showing the precinct at its most developed, in the early 16th century. Image: Mark Samuel

All told, the 13th century saw the formation of nine officially sanctioned mendicant orders, seven of which were to establish bases in London: the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Carmelites, the Pied Friars, the Friars of the Sack, the Crutched Friars, and the Augustinians (see box above). Only Paris could claim more, housing those seven, plus the Trinitarians and the Williamites. Each order was distinguished by its devotion to a particular saint or aspect of the life and passion of Christ, and each sought to carve out a distinctive role. The Dominicans saw themselves first and foremost as preachers – sanctioned by the papacy to challenge heresy, and to set an example of spiritual rectitude to Europe’s growing town and city populations. The Franciscans were more like social workers, relinquishing personal wealth in order to help the needy. The Augustinians were priests, doctors, and educators, and the Carmelites emphasised prayer as well as the provision of spiritual services and sacraments to the laity.

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