St Giles-in-the-Fields is the Anglican parish church of the St Giles district of London. The parish stands within the London Borough of Camden and forms part of the Diocese of London. The church, named for St Giles the Hermit, began as the chapel of a 12th-century monastery and leper hospital in the fields between Westminster and the City of London and now gives its name to the surrounding urban district of St Giles in the West End of London, situated between Seven Dials, Bloomsbury, Holborn and Soho. The present church is the third on the site since 1101 and was rebuilt most recently in 1731–1733 in Palladian style to designs by the architect Henry Flitcroft.
History 12th–16th centuries Hospital and chapel The first recorded church on the site was a chapel of the Parish of Holborn attached to a monastery and leper hospital founded by Matilda of Scotland, "Good Queen Maud", consort of Henry I between the years 1101 and 1109. The foundation would later become attached as a "cell," or subordinate house, to the larger Hospital of the Lazar Brothers at Burton Lazars, in Leicestershire. At the time of its founding it stood well outside the City of London and distant from the Royal Palace of Westminster, on the main road to Tyburn and Oxford. Between 1169 and 1189, on Michaelmas, Henry II granted the Hospital the lands, gifts and privileges that were to secure its future. For this he has been credited as a 'second founder'.
The chapel probably began to function as the church of a hamlet that grew up round the hospital. Although there is no record of any presentation to the living before the hospital was suppressed in 1539, the fact that the parish of St. Giles was in existence at least as early as 1222 means that the church was at least partially used for parochial purposes from that time.
The Precinct of the Hospital probably included the whole of the island site now bounded by High Street, Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue. As well as the Hospital church which stood on the site of the present St Giles there would have been other buildings connected to the hospital including the Master's House (subsequently called the Mansion House) to the west of the church, and the 'Spittle Houses', dwellings attached to the Hospital on the eastern end of the present churchyard including the Angel Inn, which remains on the same site.
St Giles's position halfway between the ancient cities of Westminster and London is perhaps no coincidence. As George Walter Thornbury noted in London Old & New "it is remarkable that in almost every ancient town in England, the church of St. Giles stands either outside the walls, or, at all events, near its outlying parts, in allusion, doubtless, to the arrangements of the Israelites of old, who placed their lepers outside the camp."
Under the Lazar brothers During the 13th century a Papal Bull confirmed the hospital's privileges and granted it special protection under the See of Rome. The Papal Bull reveals that the lepers were trying to live as a religious community and that the Hospital precinct included gardens and 8 acres of land adjoining the Hospital to the north and south. The hospital was supported by the Crown and administered by the City of London for its first 200 years, being known as a Royal Peculiar.
In 1299, Edward I assigned it to Hospital of Burton Lazars in Leicestershire, a house of the order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem, a chivalric order from the era of the Crusades. The 14th century was turbulent for the hospital, with frequent accusations of corruption and mismanagement from the City and Crown authorities and suggestions that members of the Order of Saint Lazarus (known as Lazar brothers) put the affairs of the monastery ahead of caring for the lepers. In 1348 The Citizens contended to the King that since the Master and brothers of Burton Lazars had taken over St. Giles's the friars had ousted the lepers and replaced them by brothers and sisters of the Order of St. Lazarus, who were not diseased and ought not to associate with those who were. The Hospital appears to have been governed by a Warden, who was subordinate to the Master of Burton Lazars. The King intervened on several occasions and appointed a new head of the hospital.
Eventually, in 1391, Richard II sold the hospital, chapel and lands to the Cistercian abbey of St Mary de Graces by the Tower of London. This was opposed by the Lazars and their new Master, Walter Lynton, who responded by leading a group of armed men to St Giles, recapturing it by force and by the City of London, which withheld rent money in protest. During this occupation the Order of St Lazarus opposed with armed force a visitation by the Archbishop of Canterbury and many important documents and records were lost or destroyed. The dispute was finally settled peacefully in court with the King claiming he had been misled about the ownership of St Giles and recognising Lynton as legal 'Master of St Giles Hospital' and the Hospital of Burton Lazarus with the Cistercian sale being formally revoked in 1402 and the property returned to the Lazar Brothers.
The property at the time included of farmland and a survey-enumerated eight horses, twelve oxen, two cows, 156 pigs, 60 geese and 186 domestic fowl. Lepers were cared for there until the mid-16th century, when the disease abated and the monastery took to caring for indigents instead.
The Precinct of the Hospital probably included the whole of the site now bounded by St Giles High Street, Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue; it was entered by a Gatehouse in St Giles High Street.
Lollardy and Oldcastle's Rising
In 1414, St Giles Fields served as the centre of Sir John Oldcastle's abortive proto-Protestant Lollard uprising directed against the Catholic Church and the English king Henry V. In anticipation of Protestantism, Lollard beliefs were outlined in the 1395 The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards which dealt with, among other things, their opposition to capital punishment, rejection of religious celibacy and belief that members of the clergy should be held accountable to civil laws. Rebel Lollards answered a summons to assemble among the 'dark thickets' by St. Giles's Fields on the night of Jan. 9, 1414. The King, however, was forewarned by his agents and the small group of Lollards in assembly were captured or dispersed. The rebellion brought severe reprisals and marked the end of the Lollards' overt political influence after many of the captured rebels were brutally executed. Of their number, 38 were dragged on hurdles through the streets from Newgate to St Giles on January 12 and hanged side by side in batches of four while the bodies of the seven who had been formally condemned as heretics by the Catholic Church were burned afterwards. Four more were hanged a week later. Finally, on 14 December 1417 Sir John Oldcastle himself was hanged in chains and burnt 'gallows and all' in St Giles Fields.
The famous scene of the meeting of the Lollards at St Giles Fields was later memorialised by Lord Tennyson in his poem Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham:
16th century dissolution and decay.
Dissolution of the Hospital of St Giles and the first parish church Under the reign Henry VIII, in 1536, the hospital's ownership of certain parcels of land was disputed by the King's commissioners and as a result it was stripped of almost all the lands gifted by parishioners and benefactors since its foundation. This included over 45 acres of St Giles Parish itself and the avowdson of the ancient parish of St Dunstan's Feltham, which was among the earliest gifts to the Hospital which were all handed over to the Crown. All this, however, merely anticipated the momentous events of 1544 when the entire hospital, along with the Hospital of Burton St Lazar, was finally dissolved with all the Hospital lands, rights and privileges, excluding the chapel, being granted to the king John Dudley, Lord Lisle in 1548. The chapel survived as the local parish church, the first Rector of St Giles being appointed in 1547 when the phrase "in the fields" was first added to the name to distinguish it from St Giles Cripplegate.
Perhaps nothing remains of the medieval church of St Giles however we can reconstruct something of its appearance from the historical record.
According to an order of the Vestry of 8 August 1623, the medieval parish church stood 153 feet by 65 feet and consisted of a nave and a chancel, both with pillars and clerestory walls above and with aisles on either side. in the 46th year of Henry III or 1262 there is a record of a bequest by Robert of Portpool to the Hospital chapel providing for the maintenance of a chaplain "to celebrate perpetually divine service in the chapel of St. Michael within the hospital church of S. Giles.". Thus we may surmise that the church building was of a tripartite structure likely consisting of side aisles supported on rounded Norman arches and lit by clerestory windows above, leading to separate chapels dedicated to St Michael and St Giles on either side of the central nave which lead to a chancel separated from the body of the church by a rood screen.
There is a further indication, in the Vestry minutes of 21 April 1617, that there was a sort of round tower, spirelet or conical bell turret at the western end of the structure.
Intriguingly, the other remaining medieval relic of the order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem in England, the 12th-century Church of St James, which now serves as the parish church of Burton Lazars, Leicestershire, appears quite closely to resemble the description of what St Giles may have looked like in its medieval state.
The Babington Plot 140 years after Oldcastle's rising, St Giles was the scene of another act of public treason when it played host to the Babington Plot.
The issuance of the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis by Pope Pius V on 25 February 1570 had granted English Catholics licence to overthrow the Protestant English queen and in 1585 a cell of recusants, crypto-Catholics and Jesuit priests hatched a plan in the precincts of St Giles to murder Queen Elizabeth I and invite a Spanish invasion of England with the purpose of replacing her with Catholic Queen Mary.
The chief conspirators in the plot were Anthony Babington and John Ballard. Babington, a young gentleman of Derbyshire, was recruited by Ballard, a Jesuit priest and Roman Catholic missionary who hoped to do away with the 'heretic' Queen Elizabeth and rescue the Scottish Queen Mary from her imprisonment at Fotheringhay Castle.
The plot was quickly uncovered by Queen Elizabeth's spymaster Francis Walsingham and used by him as a means to entrap Mary. The plan was conceived in talks in held at St Giles's Fields and the taverns of the parish and thus, when the plot was finally exposed, the conspirators were returned to St Giles churchyard to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.
Ballard and Babington were executed on 20 September 1586 along with the other men who had been tried with them. Such was the public outcry at the horror of their execution that Elizabeth changed the order for the second group to be allowed to hang until "quite dead" before disembowelling and quartering.
The fact that Babington had solicited a letter from Mary Queen of Scots expressing tacit approval for the plot led to her execution on 8 February 1587.
The exposure of the plot and the role of the Catholic church in fomenting rebellion was to stoke anti-Catholic reaction in the century to come.
17th century, Civil War, Restoration and Plague.
Duchess Dudley's church