the excavation of some Roman ruins on Mark Lane near the Tower in 1650 contained a relief of the story of Samson driving foxes into a field of corn – something which could not have been known to pagan, pre-Christian Romans.
Hostility to the Jews increased over the years, especially on anniversaries and celebrations that were particularly English in character. For instance, Jews were barred from attending the coronation of Richard I in 1189, but they sent a delegation to Westminster Hall nonetheless bearing gifts for the king, and a few sneaked into the hall to have a look at the proceedings. The palace guards threw them out, whereupon some onlookers started throwing stones. A rumour began circulating that the king had ordered the destruction of the Jews. In Jewry a mob set fire to Jewish houses and thirty people were killed. One Jew, Benedict of York, saved his life by converting to Christianity on the spot; he was rushed to St Margaret’s church and baptised (although he recanted his new views the next day). When the king learned what had happened he ordered the hanging of three of the ringleaders and announced that the Jews must not be so treated.
From that time the Jews were sent to the Tower for their own safety on such days. But soon excuses were being made to send the Jews to the Tower as a punishment for what were mostly fabricated accusations, usually involving coin clipping (chipping away at coins to use the metal), and allegations of murdering children to use their blood in religious sacrificial rituals.
King John treated the Jewish moneylenders well. He even granted them a charter and allowed them to choose a chief rabbi. But this détente didn’t last long. In 1210 the king levied a penalty of 66,000 marks on the Jews, and imprisoned, blinded and tortured those who would not pay.
Henry III compelled the Jews to wear two white tablets of linen or parchment on their breasts. Wherever Jews lived, burgesses were chosen to protect them from pilgrims’ insults about infidels. But in 1220 the Crown seized the Old Jewry synagogue and handed it to the brothers of St Anthony of Vienna for use as a church. In 1232 more pressure was put on the Jews to reject their religion when Henry built a House for Converted Jews on what is now Chancery Lane.
Jews were then expelled from Newcastle and Southampton. In London the status of the community began to deteriorate sharply after a dead Christian child was found in 1244, its arms and legs embroidered with Hebrew letters – a botched crucifixion, evidently. After a number of further tribulations the Jews asked King Henry if they could leave England officially. The king was outraged. Soon after, eighty-six of London’s richest Jews were hanged for supposedly crucifying a Christian child in Lincoln and there was a riot against London’s Jews. Five hundred were killed and the synagogue was burnt down. Only those who took refuge in the Tower survived.
Edward I, who came to the throne in 1272, forced the Jews to wear yellow badges so that everyone knew who they were (a symbol Hitler adopted nearly 700 years later). He also levied a tax of threepence on them every Easter. In 1288 all England’s Jews were imprisoned and held until they paid a £20,000 ransom, a handy sum to help finance the castles he was building in Wales. It came as no surprise when in 1290 Edward announced on 18 July – the anniversary of the sacking of the Temple in AD 70 – that he was expelling the Jews from England. All Jews (some 15,000) ‘with their wives, children and chattels’ had to leave the country, and they were given until 1 November, the feast of All Saints, to comply. Any Jew who remained behind after that date would face execution. Ships carrying Jews left St Katharine’s Dock near the Tower. When one vessel ran into a sandbank off Queensborough, Kent, the captain invited passengers to stretch their legs. But once they had disembarked he made off, leaving the party to drown as the tide rose.
The Crown seized all the Jews’ property and none of their buildings survive locally . . . above ground. Recent excavations of nearby sites during the building of the huge corporate blocks that dominate the area have unearthed well-preserved ritual baths and artefacts.
→ The Jews massacred in York, p. 207
ST DUNSTAN-IN-THE-WEST, Fleet Street at Hen and Chickens Court
Founded c. 1185 as St Dunstan’s Over Against the Temple, the church was known as St Dunstan-in-the-West from 1278 to differentiate it from St Dunstan-in-the-East in Stepney. It was here that William Tyndale, whose translations of the New Testament from the Greek provided the basis for the later King James Bible, preached in the 1520s. In the seventeenth century St Dunstan’s was a centre of Puritanism where Praise-God Barebones, the divinely named Roundhead leader, preached.
The church’s unusual-looking clock, the first in London to be marked with minutes, was erected in 1671 as a thanksgiving from parishioners relieved that a sudden burst of wind sent the Fire of London away from the building. The clock features two burly figures, Gog and Magog, biblical characters who appear cryptically in the Book of Revelation: ‘And ye shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.’ However, an ancient London legend tells of a character called Gogmagog – an Ancient Briton beaten in battle around the year 1000 BC by Brutus the Trojan, founder of London.
Today the church unites all major churches of Christendom: ‘Old Catholics, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Anglican Church, the Oriental churches, the Lutheran and Reformed Churches and the Holy Roman and Catholic Church’.
ST LAWRENCE JEWRY
John Wilkins, mid-seventeenth-century vicar of this exquisitely designed Christopher Wren church, devised a new system of measurement in the 1660s based on biblical ‘sacred geometry’. He wanted the main unit length to be equal to the 2,000 cubits cited as holy in the Book of Numbers. To make calculations easier the length would be divided not into 2,000 parts but into 1,000 equal divisions, what in the nineteenth century was renamed the metre, now a standard measurement, used extensively throughout the world, but, ironically, not universally in London.
→ London, Sacred City, p. 11
ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, St Paul’s Churchyard
Britain’s major cathedral, the setting for state occasions as well as one of the capital’s leading tourist attractions, was founded in 604 by Ethelbert, King of Kent, and Mellitus, Bishop of the East Saxons. The church was destroyed by the Vikings in the ninth century and burnt down in 1087, but at the end of the eleventh century William I granted St Paul’s privileges: ‘Some lands I give to God and the church of St Paul’s, in London, and special franchises, because I wish that this church may be free in all things, as I wish my soul to be on the day of judgment.’
In the thirteenth century Maurice, Bishop of London, decided to build a new grand cathedral on a larger scale than anything witnessed outside central Europe. It was this building, completed in 1240, that is now known as Old St Paul’s, to differentiate it from the post-Fire of London cathedral.
Not all clerics have been hospitably received here. In 1093 Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, came to St Paul’s demanding his tithe of the fruit harvest, only to find the doors closed in his face. In 1259 a mob killed two canons in the papal party. In 1385 Robert Braybroke, Bishop of London, banned various frivolous activities from taking place at St Paul’s on Sundays, including barbers shaving customers, worshippers shooting arrows at the pigeons and children playing ball. Nine years later the Lollard reformers nailed a paper listing twelve complaints about the Catholic clergy on the door of the old church – a hundred years before Martin Luther famously posted his ninety-six theses on popish indulgences on the door of the church in Wittenberg.
During the Reformation of the 1530s the high altar was pulled down and replaced by a plain table. Many of the tombs were also destroyed, the reredos was smashed to pieces and St Paul’s became more of a social centre than a church. The nave, Paul’s Walk, was even used by prostitutes touting for business, and as a market for selling groceries and animals. In 1553 the Common Council of London passed an act forbidding people from carrying beer barrels, baskets of bread, fish, flesh or fruit into St Paul’s and from leading mules or horses through the cathedral. Evidently the law didn’t go far enough, for in 1558 Elizabeth had to issue a proclamation