The monastery before the market: Spitalfields’ medieval chapter revealed

St Mary Spital was London’s first religious house founded by Londoners. Between 1197 and 1539, the Augustinian priory flourished, developing from a small roadside hospital into a large institution serving the capital’s poor and sick – a story brought to light by almost two decades of excavations, as Susan M Wright reports.

Between 1991 and 2007, Spitalfields Market in London’s East End was home to one of the capital’s largest- ever archaeological investigations, which uncovered an extraordinary range of finds spanning the Roman period to the late 19th century. These discoveries are now being published in a series of monographs themed by historical period; CA 310 reported on the post-medieval features dating from 1539 to1800, and with the 12th- to 16th-century findings newly published (see ‘Further reading’ on p.35), it is time to explore the medieval part of the site’s history. This is the story of the priory and the hospital of St Mary without Bishopgate, and how ‘St Mary Spital’ cared for London’s sick poor for over 300 years.

© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. — Wyngaerde’s panorama of London of c.1540 shows St Mary Spital on the skyline, in open ground (the southern outer precinct) north of the medieval city wall and approached by Bishopsgate Street. The remains of the priory-hospital have recently been excavated by MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) and the findings published in a new monograph. Image: ©Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

The site’s long history of occupation should come as no surprise – it lies on the north-east fringes of what had been the core of London’s Roman and medieval settlement, outside the city walls but alongside a major road: a liminal space, and one that was well suited for organised burial. There, on the east side of Ermine Street (the Roman road running between London and York), lay part of the northern cemetery of Roman London. This burial ground included the exceptionally rich 4th-century burial of a woman dubbed the ‘Spitalfields Lady’, who had been laid to rest in a stone sarcophagus and inner lead coffin, and who was excavated in 1999 amidst a storm of media interest (see CA 162).

Image: MOLA. — Spitalfields before the Spital: this 12th-century vaulting rib may have come from a chapel in the early, extra-parochial cemetery. It had been recut to use in the central arch of the crypt of the later, 14th-century, cemetery chapel perhaps as a symbol of the priory’s origins.

Moving forward some 700 years, another burial ground was created on the site: an extramural and extra-parochial cemetery that the Bishop of London founded in what was then open fields, just east of Bishopsgate Street, as the road was then known. Dating evidence for the pre-monastic cemetery comes from radiocarbon dating of the earliest burials (enhanced by Bayesian statistical analysis – see CA 259), and the fact that such large numbers of people, probably c.3,000, were buried there during the 12th century, some in mass graves, suggests that it could have been established as an emergency burial ground intended to cope with an unusual number of deaths that had overwhelmed existing cemeteries. Was this loss of life linked to a single catastrophic event like a famine, such as that recorded in 1124–1126?

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