below London’s Black Friars, showing the precinct at its most developed, in the early 16th century.

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.

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Current Archaeology

May 1, 2018

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 monas

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