Calm Soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city’s jar,
That there abides a peace of thine
Man did not make, and cannot mar.
Matthew Arnold.

On the south-west side of Tower Hill there stands the oldest parish church in London. But beyond the earliest date that we find any portion of the present building mentioned, it is more than probable that a still more ancient church occupied this piece of ground. Consider the importance of the site. The approach to London from the sea was then, as now, a somewhat dreary progress between the mud-flats that fringed the river. On the northern bank the rising ground, now known as Tower Hill, would be the first relief to the eye after the wearying Essex marshes. Beyond and behind that hill lay the little city, and beside{170} that hill was set a church. But, with the building of the White Tower, the church was eclipsed as a landmark for boats on the river, and now it is quite obscured from the water-side by hideous brick warehouses that only men of the nineteenth century could conceive and erect. In early days this church stood on the edge of London; now it is in its very centre. Yet few buildings equally well preserved have altered as little as this old building has—this “fair church on Tower Hill”—and we have here handed down to us much that is unique as a record not only of English history but of the progress of architecture. The furnishings of the church, the carvings and wrought-iron work, also carry us through generations of activity in such arts, and the pavement brasses and sculptured tombs serve as memorials of many a famous Englishman. The church has an additional interest in being the nearest ancient building outside the Tower walls and in having received, for burial, victims from the block on Tower Hill. Yet the close connection of this ancient church with the Tower and its history has not, hitherto, been sufficiently emphasised. It is well, therefore, that we should give Allhallows some of our time when we have explored and examined the Tower itself.{171}

Four hundred years before the Conqueror laid the foundation stones of the White Tower, a cluster of cottages on the edge of Tower Hill, and lying not far from the Ald-gate of the old walls of London, constituted the germ of the present parish, and stood within sight of the earlier church. What the history of the church was then we have no means of knowing, but as it would be the first building of importance that Danish invaders came upon during their onslaughts on London, it must have passed through exciting times in those old days of raid and turmoil.

Erkenwald, a seventh-century Bishop of London, founded the convent at Barking, in Essex. Of this convent his sister, St. Ethelburga, became first abbess, and the abbesses of Barking were not only mitred, but were in after days peeresses of the realm. Erkenwald made over certain rights of the land, upon which the parish is now spread, to this convent of Barking, and, in return, a priest was supplied from the community to serve the religious needs of the parishioners. It was thus the surname Barking was acquired. It is, however, a surname that is somewhat misleading, as printers, even to this present day, have an awkward habit of placing a comma between “Allhallows” and “Barking”{172} and so send many who would visit the church on an empty quest into Essex. But the poor printer is not altogether to blame. The people here have a way of calling themselves “Barking people” and of referring to the parish as “Barking parish.” This leads to unnecessary confusion. The only alternative would be to retain the term on Tower Hill and ask the good folk of the Essex town to adopt some other name! As it is improbable that either of these suggestions will be taken seriously, a return to the ancient title, “Berkyngechurch by the Tower,” might solve the difficulty.

The parish system in England took its rise under Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, A.D. 668, and the number and boundaries of the parishes as we know them to-day agree very nearly with the parochial divisions in Doomsday Book. The ground now included in Allhallows parish was undoubtedly included in Roman London, which extended from Tower Hill to Dowgate Hill, the present Fenchurch and Lombard Streets forming the line of its northern boundary. Eastward of the parish lay marsh and forest—the great forest of Essex, of which so wide and unspoilt a portion remains to us in Epping Forest.{173}

A True and Exact Draught of the TOWER LIBERTIES, furvey in the Year 1597 by GULIELMUS HAIWARD and J. GASCOYNE.
Image unavailable: A True and Exact Draught of the TOWER LIBERTIES, furvey in the Year 1597 by GULIELMUS HAIWARD and J. GASCOYNE. E. Gardner’s Collection.
E. Gardner’s Collection.

Larger image[150 kb] Largest image [1mb]

In 1087, when a great fire devastated the city, a church in the Norman style took the place of the Saxon building, and the nave pillars of Allhallows date from that time. Of these pillars the one that shows its great age more than the others—which, after successive cleanings, look almost new—is that westernmost pillar on the north side which stands within the choir practice-room.

To this Norman building Richard I. added, either where the chancel portion of the north aisle now stands, or near at hand, a Chantry Chapel known as Capella Beatae Mariae de Berkinge juxta Turrim. This was, for some time, the most famous shrine in connection with the building, and became the care of the kings of England. In this Chantry was placed, by Edward I., a statue of the Virgin, in accordance with a command received by him in a vision, before his father’s death, in which he was assured that he should subdue Wales and Scotland, and would be victorious while this Berkinge Chapel was kept in repair. Tradition asserts that the heart of the Lion-hearted Richard was placed under the altar of the chapel here, but others maintain that after its removal from Fontevrault, where the king was buried, it was sent to{174} Rouen. Yet in the time of the first Edward, an Indulgence of forty days was obtained for all penitents worshipping at the shrine of the Virgin at Berkinge Chapel, and in that instrument prayer is especially asked for the soul of the founder, Richard I., “whose heart is buried beneath the high altar.”

A little later in the history of the church and its chapels we come upon the names of John Tiptoft and Sir John Croke, both of whom, famous in their generations, took especial interest in Allhallows. The former was brought into touch with the place upon his appointment as Constable of the Tower. He was created Earl of Worcester by Henry VI., was the friend and supporter of Caxton, and has been called “the nursing father of English printing.” A man of great learning, he had studied under Guarino at Ferrara, had occupied a professor’s chair at Padua, was termed by Walpole “one of the noble authors of England,” is remembered as a good, but ruthless, soldier, lawyer, and politician, and was, in the end, by the influence of Warwick, the king-maker, disgraced and beheaded on Tower Hill. Tiptoft founded a confraternity or guild at Berkinge Chapel, and of this guild elected Sir John Croke to be one of the first Wardens. Of{175} Tiptoft, who was buried at Blackfriars monastery, no memorial remains here, but Croke’s tomb we shall come upon, later, as we go through the church.

In the time of Richard III. the chantry chapel comes once again into the light of fame, and is known far and wide as “Berkingshaw.” Richard, who, as we have seen, was no saint when dwelling in the Tower, seems to have been influenced by the age and sanctity of Allhallows to do good deeds, and is known here only as pious benefactor. He achieved this by “newbuilding this chapel,” and adding to the original foundation a college of priests, consisting of a Dean (Chaderton, a friend of Richard’s), and six Canons. In the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Henry VIII., 10th July, 1514, there is to be found a record of a “confirmation of the Chapel of St. Mary in the C?metary of Barkingchurch London to the Guild of St. Mary.” Provision is also made “for the election of a Master and four Wardens annually for the safe custody of the said chapel.”

If Berkinge Chapel during its long history had been the peculiar care of royalty, the church, after the upheavals in the time of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., became the care, and also the resort, of the prosperous burgesses of the City. It was{176} conveniently near the Tower where the King and his Court were lodged, and where the King’s Justiciars held their sittings, and so became a meeting-place of representative citizens, where matters could be discussed when the City and Tower happened to be at variance—not by any means an infrequent occurrence. From early times, indeed, we may trace the feelings of affection which dwellers in the City, and more especially in the parish, have felt for their historic church. In 1265 we hear of Sir Roger de Leiburn, who was “lodging in the Tower,” meeting the representatives of the City at Berkyngechurche on their proposing to make their submission to the king, after the battle of Evesham. To that meeting came the Mayor “and a countless multitude of citizens.” Again, in 1280, the burgesses “apparelled in their best attire” gathered at Berkyngechurche and proceeded to the Tower to meet the King’s Justiciars “for the purpose of holding an Inquest, or inquiring into the peace of the City.” “Gregory, the Mayor,” as we read in the Liber Albus of the Corporation of London, “disputing the right of the Crown to hold an Inquest for the City of London, for the honour of the Mayoralty refused to enter the Tower as Mayor, but, laying aside his insignia and seal at the high Altar of{177} Berkyngechurche, as the last church in the City next the Tower, entered the Tower merely as one of the Aldermen, alleging that by the ancient liberties he was not bound to attend the Inquests, nor to make appearance therein for judgments, unless forewarned for forty days.” The King, Edward I., as punishment for this disobedience, “abolished the office of Mayor, appointing a Warden in his place; which custom obtained till 26 Ed. I., when the ancient liberties of the City were restored.” Those of the citizens “who had accompanied Rokesly to Berkyngechurche” were confined in the Tower for some days and would, no doubt, on their return to their admiring families, be looked upon with a certain awe ever afterwards.

In the archives of the Guildhall we find that in 1302 Allhallows Barking appears as one of the advowsons of the City of London belonging to the Abbess and Convent of Barking. But after the suppression of the convent by Henry VIII. the patronage passed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, in whose hands it remains to this day. Another interesting fact we gather from the ancient records of the City is that Allhallows was one of the three churches where the curfew was rung each night as a warning that it was time for all good citizens to{178} be indoors, and as a precaution against fire. This ancient curfew bell, it is believed, is that hung in the small bell-turret on the tower of the church and upon which the hammer of the clock strikes the hours.

Towards the end of the fifteenth century great changes took place with regard to the structure of the church. The chantry chapels had fallen into a state of disrepair, and it became necessary to rebuild the chancel to which they were attached and to strengthen the fabric of the nave. It is to this rebuilding that we owe the contrast afforded by the massive pillars of the body of the church with the graceful, deeply moulded Perpendicular pillars of the chancel. The manner in which the one style has been grafted on the other, where, as Allen says, “the pillars between the chancel and the nave are singularly composed of half a circular and half a clustered column worked together” attracts the attention of even the most casual observer. Mr. Fleming, in his admirable little pamphlet on the church, sums up the various alterations that have taken place in the structure when he says “the view of the stately interior tells at once, and more fully than the outside features, the story of the changes that have befallen the church through the{179} centuries since its foundation. For the columns of the nave are Norman, the east window with its intricate tracery was the work of the sumptuous Decorated period, whilst the clerestory and aisles, with the slender clustered shafts of the chancel arcading, belong to the Perpendicular style.... Allhallows is a good instance of the manner in which, entirely convinced of the supreme merits of their school of building, the architects of the Perpendicular period superimposed their style on what had gone before. The contrast between the light clustered columns of the chancel, with their beautiful splayed arches, and the heavy pillars of the nave, is extremely striking, and almost remorseless in its hint of the supercilious ease with which the men of the Tudor period parted from the past and its traditions.”

The interior of the church was at this time embellished by mural decorations; and lingering traces of the paint, on one or two of the nave columns, were left undisturbed during the last restoration, in 1904. A rood-screen stood in front of the new chancel, and above it rose the famous Duddyngton organ. Alas, no traces of either remain to us, even in a museum. While Charles I. was on the throne the interior was again renovated, and during the{180} long toll of subsequent years the history of Allhallows resolves itself into a record of successive restorations. Few churches have been more carefully and lovingly tended than this has been, and its present state of preservation is due to this interest which it has always inspired in those who appreciate its worth and beauty. Allhallows, unlike so many other churches, has not lost but gained by its restorations. An old building, such as this, is in constant need of attention. The problem has ever been the vexed one of renewing without destroying. But any one who enters Allhallows to-day will feel that the problem has been solved here with complete success. The later restorations, including the reroofing, restoration of the ancient battlements, and preservation of the lower parts of the outer walls, has cost, in round figures, twelve thousand pounds, and every penny has been wisely spent in handing down to future generations so wonderful a memorial of the past.

The period of the Commonwealth has left its mark in most sacred buildings as a time of pulling-down; but this church has the singular advantage of remembering it as a time of setting-up. The old stone tower which stood at the south-west corner of the building—the foundations of which{181} were uncovered a few years ago during the erection of that amazing indiscretion, the warehouse which now stands upon the site—was severely disturbed in 1649, when, on January 4 of that year, “a blow of twenty-seven barrels of gunpowder, that took fire in a ship-chandler’s house on the south side of the church,” created havoc in the immediate neighbourhood. The explosion is described in Strype’s edition of Stow’s Survey. “It seems that the chandler was busy in his shop barrelling the powder, about seven o’clock in the evening, when it became ignited and blew up, not merely that house, but fifty or sixty others. The number of persons destroyed was never ascertained, for the next house but one was a tavern, known as ‘The Rose,’ which was full of company, in consequence of a parish dinner: it must have been very great, however, judging from the number of limbs and bodies which were dug up from the ruins. The hostess of the tavern, sitting in the bar, and the waiter standing by with a tankard in his hand, were found beneath some fallen beams, but were dead from suffocation. It is recorded that, the morning after this disaster, a female infant was discovered lying in a cradle on the roof of the church neither bruised nor singed.” The parents of the babe were never traced. The{182} child was given the surname “Barking,” adopted by the parish, and “lived to an adult age.” But, while the baby was saved, the heavy tower was doomed. As a result of the shock it became so insecure that complete demolition was necessary. During the Protectorate the present tower was set up, and, though it is about as uninspired a piece of ecclesiastical brickwork as one can imagine, yet it has a certain interest not only for having arisen during the days of Cromwell, but for having just barely escaped destruction when the Great Fire came to its base. It was up this tower that the ever-curious Pepys, who lived near by, in Seething Lane, climbed hurriedly to see the devastation of Old London. The event will be found recorded in the Diary under the date September 5, 1666.

The building of this tower brings to mind an amusing episode in the records of the church. It appears that over the clock (the “dyall of Barking Church,” mentioned by Pepys) the wardens then in office put up a huge effigy of St. Michael, weighing nearly twenty tons. “Its right hand held a trumpet and in its left was a leaden scroll, inscribed, ‘Arise, ye dead, and come to judgment.’” St. Michael, having been scorched and blistered by the Fire of London, was taken down in 1675—there{183} was no “hustling” in those days—repainted, and placed “over the Commandments at the east end of the church.” Two smaller figures which had supported the central effigy on the wall of the tower were put up over the organ in the new organ-loft at the west end, where, reclining gracefully, they remain to this day. St. Michael had a rougher time of it, and was the cause of one of those absurd squabbles that too often mar the harmony of a quiet parish. One or two of the congregation indicted the churchwardens “at Old Bailey, under the statute of Edward VI., against images,” but the prosecution was abandoned on the ground of expense. A Mr. Shearman supported the parishioners, “and upon his own responsibility destroyed the image.” This occasioned “a furious war of words between him and the lecturer, Jonathan Saunders,” acting as curate of the parish. Shearman wrote virulent pamphlets which were “published by a friend of the Author’s, to prevent false reports,” and addressed them to the Vicar, Dr. Hickes, and his wardens. The latter part of this entertaining publication asserts—as a dig at Saunders as compared with the Vicar—that “men of the least learning are always the most formal.” It goes on to insinuate “that Barking parish was{184} then as famous for its love of drinking ceremonies as for its dislike of religious formality.” The drinking ceremonies have certainly passed away. The pamphlet concludes thus: “I hope our parish shall not lose an inch of its reputation, nor be censured as irregular, but remain a primitive pattern for all London, yea, and all England.” Mr. Saunders replied with double-shotted guns, and the Shearman battery opened fire again with unfailing vigour. The parishioners soon tired of the troublesome and cantankerous Shearman and all his ways. His statements were considered “rude, scurrilous, and scandalous,” and it was recorded in the minutes of the vestry, held on April 24, 1681, that his attack “tends to the dishonour of the Church of England as now established, and is a libel upon the Vicar and the whole parish.” So ends this seventeenth-century turmoil.

Before we enter the church by the north porch, our attention will be attracted by the three carved figures above the doorway. That in the centre represents the Virgin (the church being dedicated to St. Mary and All Saints), with St Ethelburga, Abbess of Barking, on one side and Bishop Andrewes (who was baptised in Allhallows) on the other. This group, as has been well said, “combines in one{185}

Image unavailable: THE TOWER FROM GREAT TOWER STREET (SOUTH PORCH OF ALLHALLOWS BARKING)
THE TOWER FROM GREAT TOWER STREET (SOUTH PORCH OF ALLHALLOWS BARKING)

presentment three periods in the history of the Church, the primitive, the medi?val, and the modern.” Inside the porch the quaint chambers on the left are restorations of what in earlier times were, it is conjectured, recesses for meditation and study. In front of us is the second doorway, delicately carved, and much weather-worn owing to exposure of the soft stone before the building of the porch. The first glance we have of the interior of the church, from just within this doorway, must impress us with a sense of the dignity of the building.

North Aisle.—As we turn to go down the north aisle we will see, set in the pavement, a plain, square brass above the grave of George Snayth, auditor to Archbishop Laud, who was buried here, to be near his master, in 1651. The church is singularly rich in pavement brasses, and, before the removals and mutilations of Puritan times, possessed an even more remarkable collection of these memorials. At the eastern end of the aisle we come upon the curious stone commemorating Thomas Virby, seventh vicar. This is the only tomb of a pre-Reformation vicar that remains in the building. Though the slab is worn almost smooth by the feet of so many generations, yet the outlines of an elaborate design can still be traced upon it.{186} A rubbing taken recently showed a full-length figure, with a dog lying at the feet to the left. The fragment of brass towards the top of the stone bore, apparently, an engraving of the head and of the hands, raised to the chin, in an attitude of prayer. Virby was a remarkable man. In a fifteenth-century English Chronicle, edited for the Camden Society in 1856, it appears that “in the XIX yr. of King Harry, the Friday before midsummer, a Priest called Sir Ric. Wyche, a Vicar in Essex, was burnt on Tower Hill for heresy, for whose death was a great murmuring and many simple people came to the place making their prayers as to a saint and bare away the ashes of his body for reliques. Some were taken to prison [in the Tower]: amongst others the Vicary of Barking Church beside the Tower, in whose parish all this was done.” Virby was charged with scattering “powder and spices over the place where the heretic was burnt that it might be believed that the sweet flavour came of the ashes of the dead.” But evidently this was considered no very great offence, for Virby was subsequently set free, restored to his position at Allhallows, and died Vicar in 1453. Nearer the altar steps will be found the beautifully engraved brass, in the French style, of John Bacon, who{187} died in 1437. A heart, inscribed with the word “Mercy,” and encircled by a scroll, lies in the upper part of the stone, and the figures of Bacon and his wife, cut out of “latten” or sheet-brass, and two feet one inch in length, occupy the sides. The treatment of the drapery of both figures is quite perfect, giving, too, an excellent idea of the costume of the time. The scroll bears the words, “Mater Dei memento mei: Jesu fili Dei miserere mei.” Bacon belonged to the ancient company of Woolmen, which seems to have been the leading guild of the Middle Ages; its members were usually adventurous and wealthy men. Brasses dedicated to men of his craft are very numerous; and this need excite no surprise when we remember how much of their trade was continental and particularly carried on in those countries where latten was milled. Bacon, we may surmise from his will preserved at the Guildhall, was a man of substance and of many acres. Near by will be seen an incised slab over the tomb of the wife of Wm. Denham, Alderman, Sheriff, and Master of the Ironworkers’ Company, who departed this life “on Wednesday at 5 of ye clok at afternown Ester Weke ye last day of Marche A° D° 1540.” The brass has disappeared.{188}

The finely wrought canopied altar-tomb against the north wall, close by the Bacon brass, dates back to the fifteenth century. It is carved in Purbeck marble and at the back has two small brasses, one representing a man with five sons and the other a woman with seven daughters, all kneeling. Name and date are both gone, but a shield in the left-hand corner enables us to connect the monument with the family of Croke. Sir John Croke, it will be remembered, was one of the early wardens of Berkinge Chapel, a trustee to whom Edward IV. “conveyed lands for the support of the Chapel of St. Mary” and founder of a chantry here in 1477. This John Croke, “citizen, leather-seller, and alderman of London,” was a generous benefactor to Allhallows, leaving to it at his death many gifts and sundry legacies “to the altar of Allhallows Bkg., the works of the church, to purchase vestments and books, for the repair of the rood-loft,” and so on. It is quite probable that this memorial was used as a chantry altar, of which there were many in the church until 1547 and the beginning of “the years of spoliation.” A well-carved crest will be seen on the pavement stone covering the Marishall tomb, and, nearer the altar-steps, a grey marble slab of the year of the{189} Great Fire lies over the grave of Sir Roger Hatton, Alderman, whose coat-of-arms may be traced near the head of the stone. On the north wall we find a memorial to Charles Wathen, “the indulgent parent of nine children,” one of which, Master William, “received his death-wound in battling with a pirate in the East Indies” and should therefore be somewhat of a hero to all boys in the adventure stage of their careers. A broken pillar on this wall was put up in 1696 in memory of Giles Lytcott, “the first Controller-General of the Customs of England and the English Colonies in America,” whose mother was the daughter of Sir Thomas Overbury, poisoned in the Tower. Pepys, in his account of the Fire of 1666, refers to an “Alderman Starling, a very rich man, without children. The fire at the next door to him in our lane (Seething Lane). After our men had saved his house he did give 2s. 6d. amongst thirty of them, and did quarrel with some that would remove the rubbish out of the way of the fire, saying that they had come to steal.” This “very rich man” was Lord Mayor in 1670, and his arms are depicted in stained glass on one of the windows of this aisle “as a remembrance of the escape of the church from the Great Fire.” Attached to the{190} pillar behind the pulpit there remains an interesting relic in the form of an elegantly designed hat peg, the only survivor of many such pegs on the pillars of this church, dating back, it is believed, to the early seventeenth century. Above the Croke altar-tomb, to the left, there is to be seen the kneeling figure of Jerome Bonalia, an Italian, probably the Venetian Ambassador, who died in 1583 and, in his will, thus indicates his burial-place, “Volendo che il mio corpo sia sepoltra n’ella pariochia d’i Barchin.”

East End.—The eighteenth-century monument that partially hides the window at the east end of the north aisle covers the tomb of Thomas Gordon of Tower Liberty, who, according to the inscription, had the “singular felicity” to command “esteem, confidence, and affection in the tender and more delicate connections of private life.” But his is certainly the misfortune to be remembered by as ugly and depressing a memorial as could be imagined. Even in the year of its erection a vestry minute records “that the monument now erecting for the late Mr. Gordon is a nuisance”! In Machin’s Diary, 1556, it is stated that on “the vi day of September was bered at Barking Church Mr. Phelype Dennys, Squyre, with cote of armes.”{191} This Denn............