5

Saint Peter Westcheap: Crossing the divide¹

A stable and wealthy parish society

This chapter presents a third study that crosses the long Tudor century and further demonstrates the basic social and cultural transformations of London’s parishes. Saint Peter Westcheap was a small parish located in one of the richer areas of the city where the wealth, privilege, status, and unity of its social elite influenced every aspect of life. As religious belief transformed, the local social and economic organization remained fundamentally the same. A study of this parish is ultimately a study of the community advantages enjoyed by certain men, because women’s participation in parish culture is mostly undocumented although sometimes implied; it is a study of privilege. A significant group, goldsmiths, mattered in this part of London and throughout the era they dominated parish society, the church, the neighborhood, and the production of records. The social model exhibited in this parish emphasizes the pre-eminence of the goldsmiths and the abundance of their patronage created a visible and long-term association with Saint Peter Westcheap.

The dominance of one group does not mean the exclusion of others, but men from other occupations did not influence parish operations to the same extent as did the goldsmiths, nor did another craft have as large a presence in the parish. In 1442, Robert Boteller, goldsmith, and John Aspill, saddler, served as churchwardens, and in 1450, Robert Kyngson, vintner, and Robert Ragon, grocer, did so.² The occupations of some churchwardens, especially those from the 1520s, cannot be identified, but even if goldsmiths do not occupy both churchwardens’ offices for a given year, they were certainly members of the vestry and they appeared in the records in other ways. The churchwardens’ accounts tend not to give much space to describing meetings, discussions, or decisions. Instead, they present actions that were faits accomplis. There are, of course, some exceptions to this observation, but they were few.

The most significant pattern to emerge from the records begins to manifest itself in the initial notation. The junior churchwarden for the account from 1440–41 was Robert Boteller, who served seven times as a warden of the Goldsmiths’ Company between 1435 and 1466.³ Robert Boteller was also one of the authors of the 1431 parish inventory, which means that he probably served as a churchwarden then, as well.⁴ This brief reference to fifteenth-century records, parish business, the goldsmiths, and an influential parishioner presents a series of relationships that will appear continually in this chapter and which emphasize the nexus between the production of parish records and the craft. The Goldsmiths’ Company did not own the benefice of Saint Peter Westcheap, which belonged to the Benedictine abbey at Saint Albans in the early Tudor period or to Sir Thomas Wriothesly, 1st Earl of Southampton, after the dissolution.⁵ Neither abbey nor lord demonstrably influenced the parish, leaving elite parishioners to carry on.

Evidence of the privileged role of goldsmiths may be gathered from two lists made for parish collections. The first undated list was generated to raise money to acquire a suit of vestments made of blue cloth of gold, but it probably dates to 1470/71; it contains fifty-five lines, mostly individual names, but also those of some couples and some groups (Table 5.1). At the top of the list is Edmund Shaa, identified as an alderman, but also a well-established goldsmith, followed by Thomas Wood, another goldsmith. In total, there are twelve goldsmiths on the list, by far the largest representation of a craft.

Table 5.1 Crafts identified on donation lists from Saint Peter Westcheap

1470/71		1478/79
Number	Craft	Number	Craft
12	goldsmiths	10	goldsmiths
7	unidentified
5	wives
3	carpenter	3	grocers, mercers, priests, widows
2	coppersmiths, cordwainer, grocers, painters, pinners, priests, silkwomen	2	pinner, silkwomen
1	barber, blacksmith, brewer, capper, clerk, cook, fruit-wife, girder, haberdasher, mercer, parson, sadler, salter, vintner	1	blacksmith, capper, carpenter, cordwainer, cuttler, girder, haberdasher, ironmonger, painter, sadler, taylor, tyler, vintner, & unnamed
55		40

Source: MS00645/001, fos. 225v, 226r and 226v.

A second list, probably created in 1478–79, shows donations for a construction project on the vestry and contains the names of forty parishioners, ten of whom were goldsmiths. The goldsmiths represented 25 percent of donors on both lists and proves their leadership role in parish philanthropy.

Ritual landscapes

The church was also known as Saint Peter the Apostle Wood Street, because its main entrance faced Wood Street, and Saint Peter’s by the Cross in Cheap, because it was next to the Eleanor Cross (Figure 5.1). Wood Street came to an end at Cheap Street at the east end of the church, and across Cheapside from the western end of the church was the entrance to Friday Street. In that space on Cheap Street sat Cheap Cross, built to honor the Queen of Edward I. This small area established one of Tudor London’s important points for civic rituals, and that meant Saint Peter’s church was frequently part of the general landscape for some of the city’s important events. In fact, the church occupied several separately defined ritual fields, which means that the parishioners, led by the goldsmiths, held unique responsibilities and played different parts in urban ceremonies.

Figure 5.1 Saint Peter Westcheap parish, 1520

The parish existed on the boundary of a ritual area for the craft. Saint Dunstan was the patron saint of goldsmiths, and by the early Tudor period his feast day had become an important time for celebrating the company’s collective identity. On Saint Dunstan’s Eve, ca. 1515–16, a ritual procession of liverymen and four of their chaplains “in their velvet gowns and cloaks” occurred. The goldsmiths met at Saint John Zachary and then they processed to and down Wood Street, passing the entrance to Saint Peter Westcheap, turning onto Cheap Street, passing Cheap Cross, on to Saint Paul’s, and then to Goldsmith’s Hall on Foster Lane.⁶ The procession reinforced the prestige of local goldsmiths in the four contiguous parishes of Saint John Zachary, Saint Matthew Friday Street, Saint Peter Westcheap, and Saint Vedast Foster Lane.

The church’s proximity to the Cheapside Cross also brought it into another landscape defined by Reformation-era controversies over idolatry and the iconoclastic acts focused on the cross after the mid-sixteenth century. The Cheapside cross stood over 12 yards high, with three tiers, a gold cross at the top, and various religious statues including the Virgin and child.⁷ The statues would be repeatedly defaced and de-limbed after 1550, but also constantly repaired; the original infant Jesus had to be replaced. In 1554, a dead cat was found dangling from the cross, with its head shaved to suggest a tonsure and a piece of paper glued to its paw to suggest a host.⁸ A golden statue of Diana stood in a gray marble tabernacle on the cross throughout Elizabeth’s reign.⁹ The Cheap Cross was destroyed in the 1640s on the orders of the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry, but for much of the sixteenth century nightly warding against vandals in the area also meant nightly warding in the parish.¹⁰ Constables would have been selected from the parish and tended to originate from the same group of men as the churchwardens; the church might even have possessed a constable’s pew.¹¹

Cheap Cross also placed the parish and the church in the ritual landscape for royal entries and civic pageantry. When Catherine of Aragon processed through the city upon her arrival in 1501, the Lord Mayor, John Shaa, a parishioner of Saint Peter Westcheap, delivered a speech of welcome on Cheap Street at the corner of Friday Street.¹² The Cheap Cross was re-gilded for the 1522 arrival of Charles V, the coronation of Anne Boleyn, and the coronation of Edward VI.¹³ During the coronation procession of Edward VI, the city’s aldermen met the king at the cross, just as he entered the goldsmith’s area, and granted him 1,000 marks in gold coins.¹⁴ The 1557 procession through the city by Philip and Mary, which included the Lord Mayor, aldermen, sheriffs, and liverymen, passed by musicians playing the waytes on the roof of Saint Peter Westcheap. Elizabeth was presented with a Bible at the cross. The Cheapside cross was a symbol connected to the monarchy and created a suitable space for civic/royal rituals, next to Saint Peter Westcheap and its neighborhood of prosperous goldsmiths.¹⁵

The parish as an agent in the community

An analysis of the churchwardens’ accounts reveals that the parish maintained an active ritual presence in the Westcheap area prior to the 1530s. The parish purchased pennants on the feast of Saint John the Baptist in 1434; it sponsored a Passion Play on Palm Sunday, 1447, paying 3 d. for “brede and wyne to the Reders of ye passion.”¹⁶ The Passion Play or the hire of items for it appear in the accounts for eight years between 1519 and 1534. The entries from 1522 and 1534 mention the Prophets on Palm Sunday¹⁷ In 1525, a stage was erected over the church door for the pageant and afterwards the parish purchased “brede wyne and ale to the syngers” for 8 d. ¹⁸ According to Mary C. Erler, these performances were “quasi-liturgical celebration(s) in which men and sometimes boys, dressed as prophets and standing on specially built platforms, sang antiphons of welcome, hailing the sacrament carried in the Palm Sunday procession.”¹⁹ The recurring patronage of this Passion Play at Saint Peter Westcheap represents another expression of the parish leadership’s shaping of religious symbols for the parish at large and the projecting of the liturgy beyond the church—and demonstrating the piety and generosity of the parishioners who paid for it all.

Church ales were held on other occasions and functioned to raise funds and promote social unity. In 1447, the churchwardens received 23 s. 4 d. “for a drynkeyng in the chirche” on 23 May. They paid 15 d. on 26 May “for chese at the drynkyng of Stodell Kyldirkyn ale.” They also paid 4 d. for wine with the churchwardens of Saint Bride. In 1518, the churchwardens paid 1 d. for drinking on Twelfth Day. And in 1530, the churchwardens paid 8 d. “for brede & ale & wyne on o’r dedycacyon daye that ys to saye on seynt ffrauncis evyn … viij d.” Celebrations of Saint Peter’s day also appeared in the churchwardens’ accounts on occasion (1526, 1528, and 1534) with bread, ale, and wine.²⁰ All of these actions, from plays, to ales, to royal entries, were required for the reason that Saint Peter Westcheap occupied a culturally complex space because of its proximity to Cheap Street, Cheap Cross, the neighborhood filled with wealthy goldsmiths, and the spiritual obligations required of a parish church.

Parish society, history, and records

Prior to the Great Fire (1666), the parish bounds straddled the intersection of three wards and, in 1548, was home to about 470 people (360 communicants).²¹ Wealthier households were located along Cheap Street, especially in Goldsmiths’ Row and on Wood Street. The church’s vestry was next to Cock Alley, so named because of the sign of the cock on Wood Street, and several priests’ chambers were located there as well, including one for the morrow mass priest.²² In 1638, the parish “maintained … that it ‘consists of 60 houses & more then third of them [are] poore.’”²³ These poorer parishioners most certainly appear in the parish registers, but they tend to influence parish operations mainly as laborers hired to oversee tasks.

The church received its first mention in civic records in 1196 and it had undergone a major rebuilding project at the end of the fifteenth century.²⁴ The edifice probably possessed a nave with two aisles, a chancel, chapels, porch, and a tower with four bells, according to W. Sparrow Simpson (1827–98), vicar of the united parishes of Saint Peter Westcheap and Saint Matthew Friday Street and author of several papers on the early records of the parish.²⁵ There has never been an archaeological excavation of this site and there is no detailed description of the edifice in the parish records. These records can be problematic in several ways. The Registers begin in 1538 but were scorched by fire caused by the bombings of World War II.²⁶ Inventories of church goods exist for 1431, 1518, 1552, and 1558. A rate book from the late Elizabethan era survives, but the bound collection of vestry minutes is from the Stuart era. The churchwardens’ accounts run from 1441 to 1602, but there are many gaps in the accounts.²⁷

The extant records reveal that the local advantage that goldsmiths possessed rested upon numerous qualities, including historical precedent, wealth, status, prestige, and patronage. The craft had been in this part of London for centuries by the arrival of the Tudors.²⁸ The Goldsmiths’ Company received its charter in 1327. Since the High Middle Ages, Westcheap had played host to an enclave of them as they incorporated apprentices moving to London from other parts of the kingdom and “a stream of skilled immigrants” from the Continent.²⁹ By 1485, they were a well-established group, “ranking fifth in order of civic precedence,” behind the “mercers, grocers, drapers, and fishmongers.”³⁰ The area around Cheapside was home to “ninety-four payers of quarterage to the Company,” which means that circa 600 people were attached to the households of those goldsmiths, including apprentices.³¹ The households, many economically privileged, bolstered the social presence of these goldsmiths.

Part of Goldsmiths’ Row stood within the parish and was described by Stow as “the most beautiful frame of fayre houses and shoppes.”³² The Row contained combination shops and houses, and just shops with no living quarters, and it sprawled across the parish boundaries of Saint Vedast Foster Lane, Saint Matthew Friday Street, Saint Peter Westcheap, and Allhallows Bread Street. A subsidy assessment for 1559 demonstrates high concentrations of wealthier goldsmiths in parishes such as Saint Vedast Foster Lane, Saint Matthew Friday Street, and Saint Peter Westcheap.³³ In 1568–69, 50 percent of the children baptized at Saint Matthew Friday Street were the children of goldsmiths, while the church’s windows displayed the company’s coat of arms during the Elizabethan era.³⁴ These goldsmiths did not necessarily represent the wealthiest merchants of the city, or even the wealthiest members of their company (who tended to live outside the city walls), but many of the goldsmiths who lived there were economically well-to-do. Some of them helped to usher Saint Peter Westcheap through the era of change.

The patronage of the goldsmiths in the parish

Members of the craft had a long history of parish patronage. In 1434, Thomas Purchace, a goldsmith who had also served as a churchwarden, donated an image of the “Finding in the Temple” [the Disputation] for the high altar.³⁵ It would have been near the parish’s five chalices (1431 inventory), numerous books, and a relic of the True Cross contained in silver—all of which made for a richly accoutered pre-Reformation church.³⁶ Regarding mortuary endowments, John Makenhead, goldsmith, who lived in the parish and owned a shop “opposite of the stone cross in Westchepe,” asked in his will (1349) to be buried in Saint Peter Westcheap.³⁷ Also in 1349, Simon de Berkngg’s will requested that, if his heirs died, his “mansion house in Wodestrete” be left to the Goldsmiths’ Company for the maintenance of a chantry in Saint Peter Westcheap.³⁸ In 1360, John de Barton was expelled from the Goldsmiths’ Company “and deprived of his livery for his mals outrages … [but] … he was … summoned to the church of Saint Peter Westcheap” and was reconciled to the company once again.³⁹ As a result of the social make-up, the church contained monuments for several deceased goldsmiths, including Nicholas Farndon, or Farendon, (goldsmith and Lord Mayor), William Rus (goldsmith and sheriff), John Monday (goldsmith and Lord Mayor).⁴⁰ These legacies by goldsmiths demonstrated largesse, perpetuated the memory of specific members, and sometimes changed the architecture of the church.

Other bequests impacted the liturgy and the visual and audible experience of the church for a time. Sir Nicholas Farndon, grandson of Nicholas de Farendon, left a will (1361) with provision for a chantry priest to sing in front of the altar dedicated to Mary in the south part of the chancel with financial support for the chantry generated from tenements in Thames Street and also in the parishes of Allhallows the Less and St Lawrence Pountney.⁴¹ Entries in the churchwardens’ accounts provide evidence of the observance of this obligation (1434, 1447, 1518, and 1534), with money flowing into this wealthy parish from poorer parts of the city.⁴² Some money could flow back again, of course. One of the last chantry priests for the Farendon chantry, Sir William Abye, died in 1542, and his will left bequests to prisoners, to the Brotherhood of the Papey, and to the poor in several locations; he also requested the poor of Saint Peter Westcheap to pray for his soul.⁴³ The function of a parish chantry could influence the parish in ways that went beyond praying for the dead, and, in 1534, when prayers were sung at the Farendon’s chantry on Saint George’s Day, the parish purchased ale, beer, wine, bread, butter, and “pyppins.” The complexity and far-flung ramifications of these mortuary endowments stretched across time and remained pertinent in the lives of generations of pre-Reformation parishioners.

Robert de Walcote, goldsmith, left money to Saint Peter Westcheap in 1361 and requested his family maintain a chantry there.⁴⁴ The 1368 will of John Hiltoft, goldsmith, established chantries in Saint Peter Westcheap, Saint Matthew Friday Street, and Saint Vedast Foster Lane, and asked for one thousand masses immediately upon his death. John Bydyk, goldsmith, requested burial in the church and left his “primer of matins of the Blessed Mary” to his son in 1384; Thomas Fyndon, goldsmith, made bequests to several churches, including Saint Peter, for the attendance of priests at his Dirige (1395); Thomas ate Haye, goldsmith, requested burial in the church in 1408; Richard Wethyhale (1427), goldsmith, also requested the maintenance of a chantry and obit.⁴⁵ In 1514, Edward Jordan, goldsmith, endowed prayers for his and all Christian souls for four years.⁴⁶ There were also a few bequests from non-goldsmiths, but nothing approaching this level of activity.⁴⁷

The Goldsmiths’ Company also supported several mortuary endowments at Saint Peter Westcheap. In 1493, the company installed a priest (Sir John West) to sing for the soul of Thomas Polle.⁴⁸ Polle (d. 1413) had been a renter warden in 1373, company warden in 1378 and 1388, and a prime warden in 1395. While he lived in Saint Matthew Friday Street, he had endowed an obit at Saint Peter Westcheap with fellow goldsmith John Forster.⁴⁹ Such arrangements further increased the social and institutional ties between craft and church, and the general presence of the goldsmiths tended to be visible and ubiquitous.

Evidence from the Goldsmiths’ Company is quite rich in examples of the company’s observances of prayers for the dead. In 1512, the Goldsmiths kept the obit of Robert Boteller on 2 August. The obit of Oliver Davy and Robert Walton was observed on 4 September, during which new blue gowns were given to five men.⁵⁰ On 16 October, the obits of John Standlife and John Caulyll were observed in the presence of one alderman, four wardens, and twenty-five liverymen.⁵¹ The same configuration also attended the obit of John Caubonell on 4 December.⁵² The merging of charity, pre-Reformation observances for the dead, company ritual, and economic and business decisions was an integral part of the company’s culture prior to 1548. When the prayers for the dead disappeared from English religious practices, company dinners, prayer services, and funerals continued to bring the liverymen together. Still, when viewed as a series of continuous rituals, the promotion of group identity and integration would have been an obvious psychological and sociological outcome of these rituals.

Prominent parish goldsmiths

Several significant parishioners, goldsmiths, emerged to become notable figures in London history. John Shaa, previously mentioned because he met Catherine of Aragon during her first procession though London, rose to the highest ranks of the craft.⁵³ He started serving as an apprentice in 1469 with his uncle, Edmund Shaa (d. 1488), the alderman whose name appeared first on the 1470–71 donation list discussed at the outset of this chapter. John was accepted to the livery in 1480, served as a renter warden for the company in 1482, and eventually became Edmund’s heir.⁵⁴ Both uncle and nephew worked as engravers at the Royal Mint in the Tower, with John Shaa serving as a master at the mint in 1489, 1492, 1498, and 1499.⁵⁵ John Shaa lived on Wood Street and sponsored thirteen apprentices between 1480 and 1504; he was a company warden in 1484 and a prime warden in 1492, 1498, and 1499.⁵⁶ He provided jewels to Henry VII and was knighted in 1497, sat in the Commons in 1495, served as an alderman for Bread Street Ward in 1496–1504, sheriff in 1496–97, and as London’s mayor in 1501–02.⁵⁷ John Shaa died in 1504, but had been a significant presence and benefactor to his parish, having significantly contributed to a church refurbishing project, leaving money in his will to rebuild the steeple and create the flat roof (which could serve as a stage for musicians during royal entries for decades to come).⁵⁸ Edmund and John Shaa represented a prestigious family of goldsmiths who lived in the small parish for half of the fifteenth century. The will of Hugh Shaa (1492), a mercer, who lived in Saint Thomas Acons parish, the son of Edmund, left 40 s. to the high altar at Saint Peter Westcheap and 10 marks for work within the church; he had not forgotten the parish of his childhood and his benevolence demonstrates that a goldsmith connection might sometime still be present even when not explicitly identified.⁵⁹

After 1504, carved woodsmen, or the green men, or the wild men of the woods, as they may be called, appeared both within the church of Saint Peter Westcheap (supporting the roof of the middle aisle) and on the exterior of Goldsmiths’ Row, where they were combined with the Goldsmiths’ arms.⁶⁰ Such images sometimes appeared in churches, but in this instance they represented the patronage of Thomas Wood (d. 1504) as a play on his last name. Wood had served his apprenticeship with Robert Boteller and had been accepted to the livery in 1467.⁶¹ Wood took nineteen apprentices during his career, inherited from Robert Boteller “three houses and three shops in Cheapside,” with the stipulation that Wood maintain a chantry for Boteller’s soul. Wood served as a renter warden in the Goldsmith’s Company in 1472, as a warden in 1475 and 1479, and as a prime warden in 1485–86, 1490–91, 1496–97, and 1502–03.⁶² His expanded operation of “four shops in Cheapside” exceeded the rules of the company and resulted in the payment of fines. Wood also served as an alderman for eight years and as a sheriff in 1491–92.⁶³ In his will, he requested burial in a stone tomb near the high altar of Saint Peter Westcheap and arranged for prayers and grants of money and gifts of black cloth be made to the poor of the parish.⁶⁴ But his patronage of the wild men made a connection between his parish church and Goldsmiths’ Row, and created a memorial for himself as a goldsmith.

Generational connections could be created by family relationships and by business ones, too. Special ties could exist between masters and apprentices, creating transfers of wealth, property, work spaces, and leaving the living with spiritual obligations. These familial and business ties combined to establish a foundation for the wealth and social stability in the area. As a result, significant goldsmiths continued to play important roles in the parish, the company, city government, and sometimes even royal service throughout the Tudor era. The parish and company records inform of these men and their deeds, and descriptions of the church will do as well.

Parish saints

The goldsmiths established a glittering group that dominated parish culture, and the parish’s saints also expressed the goldsmiths’ significance. For example, Saint Dunstan was an important saint in this parish, and his image was more prevalent than that of the church’s patron, Saint Peter. The church possessed a chapel dedicated to Saint Dunstan as early as 1427 when the will of Richard Wethyhale, goldsmith, requested burial there.⁶⁵ The 1431 inventory mentions a green double satin vestment, decorated with gold figures, and a matching altar cloth, both for the Saint Dunstan altar.⁶⁶ The inventory also lists other items—fabric and ornaments—for the Dunstan altar, with some items given by Robert Walton in his name and for his family.⁶⁷ The Dunstan altar was an important location for the goldsmiths of the parish, who made several bequests to it.⁶⁸ Robert Walton, goldsmith, entered the freedom in 1407, possessed a shop and house on Wood Street, served as both a warden (1418) and prime warden (1423) of the Goldsmiths’ Company, made a provision for the livery, and provided altar cloths with his family’s arms to Saint Peter Westcheap; he died in 1431.⁶⁹ Saint Dunstan had a prime focus in the church’s imagery, with a chapel, an image, and (maybe) multiple altars, thanks, in part, to the patronage of goldsmiths such as Wethyhale and Walton.

Saint Dunstan’s vita included themes of upward mobility, metallurgy, wealth, power, and holiness, all themes that devout London goldsmiths would have found pertinent to their lives. He studied metalworking, threw a demon out of a church after seizing it by the nose with a pair of red-hot tongs, served as an advisor to kings, and emerged as a patron saint of the Goldsmiths’ Company almost from its inception.⁷⁰ He also occupied the offices of Abbot of Glastonbury, Bishop of London, and Archbishop of Canterbury.⁷¹ Near Goldsmiths’ Row and Goldsmiths’ Hall, churches were filled with altars, images, and chapels dedicated to the saint. Of course, images of Saint Dunstan existed elsewhere in London, beyond the area dominated by the goldsmiths, such as in the two London churches dedicated to him: Saint Dunstan in the East and Saint Dunstan in the West.⁷² Many other parishes had Dunstan vestments, such as Saint Nicolas Cole Abbey, but the fact remains that most records make no mention of the saint.⁷³

Saint Peter Westcheap also possessed other altars and chapels in honor of other saints. The 1431 inventory mentions a “rood altar” several times with altar cloths that featured images of women saints (Saint Mary, Saint Katherine, Saint Helen, Saint Margaret) and a cloth with assorted angels.⁷⁴ Saint Peter Westcheap possessed a Lady altar, and, by 1521, there were chapels, one dedicated to Saint George and another to Saint Mary.⁷⁵ On 7 February 1434, the parish dedicated an altar to Mary “on the north side, ‘et prope vestibulum,’” and an altar to Saint Dunstan “on the south side, hard by Cheapside and near to Woodstreet.” Lastly, an altar dedicated to the Holy Trinity existed “in the nave of the church, near the entrance to Saint Dunstan’s chapel,” and the chaplain for the fraternity of the Holy Cross said mass there.⁷⁶ It is difficult to explain the appearance of altars to Dunstan and Mary on the inventory in 1431 along with further documentation of dedications in 1434 of the same, unless there was either a proliferation of altars and chapels or a re-arrangement of cultic space. The 1431 inventory names and suggests the location of the saints displayed in the church. Mary (Lady chapel, Lady altar, rood), Saint Dunstan (chapel, Dunstan altar, rood screen), Saint John the Baptist (rood), Saint Katherine (rood), Saint Barbara (rood), “Saint Sithe,” (or Zita, rood), Saint Nicholas (rood), and Saint Anne (location unclear).⁷⁷ These saints were the main ones honored in the parish church, with Katherine, Barbara, Sitha (Zita), Dunstan, and Nicholas most certainly facing the worshippers from the rood screen.

Eamon Duffy has argued that images on the rood screen referenced stories that related to their location, such as figures contemplating the crucifixion, if the crucifix was in fact depicted above, or saints emphasizing intercessory prayers and divine mercy, while images of God’s justice were displayed in doom paintings above the high altar.⁷⁸ The rood images at Saint Peter Westcheap fit into Duffy’s theory, however, they also existed in the cultural milieu of the goldsmiths and their craft. Saint Dunstan and Saint Nicholas were two saints associated with gold. Dunstan, the one-time metalworker and patron saint of the company, dominated the iconography of this parish. Saint Nicholas, a protector with many concerns, including merchants, was typically represented with a crosier and miter, symbolizing his status as a bishop, and three gold balls, symbolizing his gift to poor maidens in need of a dowry.⁷⁹ This hagiographic symbolism signified a transformation of the potential source of spiritual danger (gold) into a miraculous gift that helps to bring poor maids into the sacrament of marriage. At Saint Peter Westcheap the image of Saint Nicholas stood next to an image of Saint Dunstan on the rood screen, conveying messages of masculinity, gold, leadership, and virtue.

The other rood saints—Saint Katherine of Alexandria, Saint Barbara, and Saint Sitha (Zita)—did not possess obvious connections to goldsmiths, but their traditional iconographic symbols connected to the interests of the goldsmiths in unique ways. Katherine was typically displayed with a martyr’s crown and a gold ring (given as a promise of marriage to Christ). She aided poor women seeking husbands and thus she had an association with Nicholas on the far side of the rood screen. In this parish, the gold ring and gold crown connected with the elite men who produced such items. Saint Katherine appeared in numerous medieval calendars and prayer books and was invoked in numerous popular prayers and chants that emphasized her relationship with Christ, but Saint Peter Westcheap’s parish culture emphasized a specific aspect of Katherine’s intercessory interest.⁸⁰

Saint Barbara became increasingly popular in the West during the post-plague era.⁸¹ Her vita states that she had been locked in a tower by her soldier father who feared that her beauty would lead to scandal.⁸² Barbara’s iconographic symbols were a martyr’s crown and a tower. Yet, the tower, which she was frequently depicted as holding, was sometimes understood to symbolize a chalice: another gift of the goldsmiths that proved central to the saint’s iconography as well as to the mass.⁸³ Saint Sitha (Zita) was a new saint for England. Her iconographic representation with rosary beads promoted what had only become a practice in England in the fifteenth century, which corresponded with the rise of Sitha’s cult.⁸⁴ The creation of rosaries was a concern of goldsmiths, since they frequently oversaw the quality of imported precious and semi-precious beads that were frequently employed for their production.⁸⁵ These particular rood saints were not that unusual for a London church, but they resonated with the goldsmiths’ trade in a unique fashion.

Hagiography was not static, and the lives of women saints, especially the virgin martyrs, changed over time. In the fifteenth century, Saint Margaret, once “one of the most pugnacious virgin martyrs in earlier Middle English hagiography,” had evolved “into a model of humility and piety.”⁸⁶ Saint Barbara similarly transformed, especially in artistic representation. Karen Winstead employed the word decorous to describe the more passive and humble representations of the saints, a word also employed by Christine Peters, who argues that Margaret’s battle with demonic forces had become less significant than long-suffering, quiet patience and the assurance of Christ’s love.⁸⁷ The values of the more humble, pious, long-suffering, and decorous virgin martyrs undoubtedly fit better with gender norms of the wealthy and significant merchant culture of the parish. Because saints such as Katherine, Barbara, Margaret, and Lucy came from families of wealth and privilege, their newly appreciated quiet contemplation resonated in the paternalist culture of the city’s freemen.

By 1526, the parish possessed an image of Saint Roch, another expression of late medieval devotion. The parish built a stage for their annual Passion Play under their image of Saint Roch in that year, which suggests that he was on the outside of the edifice, because it was typical for such stages to be located on the church porch and these specific accounts also mention nails and laths for the church door.⁸⁸ Roch assisted plague victims and those with dental problems, but his appeal to the goldsmiths in Saint Peter Westcheap’s parish probably related to his mendicant spirituality. The appearance of urban saints who preached charity and demonstrated voluntary poverty probably resonated with wealthy merchants who would have been attracted to such a message since an emphasis on philanthropy was much preferable to being subjected to finger-wagging about merchants’ preoccupation with stores of gold and silver, jewels, and usury.⁸⁹

The parish’s saints existed in several overlapping frameworks that helped to define their significance. They were visually integrated into larger systems of religious representation, one of which was the entire collection of ecclesiastical art within the church, which expressed the wealth, power, and the social significance of the goldsmiths. That larger framework would have influenced the meaning of even typical iconic symbols such as martyrs’ golden crowns. All the pre-Reformation churches contained chalices, reliquaries, images of saints, but at Saint Peter Westcheap those items gave proof of the skill of the goldsmiths who made them. There would have been emotional connections between particular objects and specific goldsmiths and their families. The glitter and wealth at Saint Peter Westcheap reflected both the glory of God and the wealth, power, piety, and largesse of its dominant group of parishioners.

Of course, between 1536 and 1548, the cult of saints disappeared.⁹⁰ The churchwardens’ accounts for Saint Peter Westcheap survive sporadically, but are as passive in the recording of the changes as are most other parish accounts (the 1555 accounts contain a line paying £7 for a new rood, complete with Mary and John) but the powerful iconographic association between the earlier rood saints and the goldsmiths had probably been lost by then.⁹¹ In 1557, an image of Saint Peter was installed, which probably lasted less than two years. By the end of the Elizabethan era, a new series of symbols filled the church, such as unspecified shields and, of course, the church continued to display several funerary monuments of important goldsmiths.⁹²

The social and cultural hegemony of the goldsmiths

The presence of one well-defined group in a parish is at odds with traditional representations of parish culture and holds tremendous significance for the traditional conceptualization of the institution. J.C. Cox has argued that the office and responsibilities of the churchwarden shifted from an obligation based on custom and a handful of synodal decrees to a more legally defined responsibility dealing with numerous civil requirements handed down from official bodies of government; it has also been suggested that the “autonomy” of the parish disappeared over the Tudor century.⁹³ These arguments are related in that both stress the greater legal and political oversight of the parish in the later Tudor period. The second part of both theories have merit in that state, civic, and ecclesiastical officials were increasingly issuing directives and reviewing parish operations.⁹⁴ Yet the presence of a hegemonic group of merchants requires qualification of the sense of informality or custom that would make that model inapplicable. The dominant group provided direction, channeled decision-making, and their interests ultimately supported their own social privilege.

Economic scarcity would also have been a constraint on the actions of a churchwarden, but that was less of an issue in this parish than in others. Fundraising at Saint Peter Westcheap tended to produce impressive amounts of money. As a sample year, the registered income for 1535–36 was £92 9 s. 2 d.⁹⁵ Both churchwardens for this year were goldsmiths: Thomas Trappys and Roger Mundy.⁹⁶ These churchwardens allocated for the parish’s sources of income according to rental income (38.58 percent) and casual receipts (61.42 percent). The accounts indicate that ca. 65 percent of expenditures went to pay for the morrow mass priest, chantry priest, and the clerk’s wage (£20 6 s. 8 d.). Other expenditures included an unexplained payment to “the parson churchwardeyns the prestes clerke and sexton … xiiij s. iiij d.”; wine, wax, oil, candles, assorted quitrents, and for making the church clean.⁹⁷ They mention “mendyng of y^e lantern of glasse,” while observing in the course of the year, Saint Peter’s Day, Palm Sunday, Easter, Corpus Christ, Whitsuntide, Midsummer, Lammas Day, and Christmas.⁹⁸ The general approach to reporting expenses is to bundle “necessary expenses” apart from what is sometimes (but not always) labelled “casual expenses.” These were another set of financial records clearly created by businessmen.

The 1555–56 accounts contain an anomaly because there is acknowledged a large sum of money that will continue to appear in the accounts for several years. William Tyllesworth (Tillesworth) and John Jackson served as churchwardens for the year in question; the former was a goldsmith who also worked at the royal mint in Canterbury in 1534 and at the Tower mint in 1547–48.⁹⁹ Income is divided into categories of rent (4.5 percent), the clerk’s wage (5.94 percent), and casual receipts (89.56 percent), and included in the casual receipts was an acknowledgment for the money from the previous year’s account—an astounding amount: £108 12 s. 1 d.¹⁰⁰ The 1556–57 accounts listed £76 19 s. 7 d. as originating from the previous year and the 1557–58 accounts show similar levels of income with £76 0 s. 10 d. acknowledged from the previous year’s account.¹⁰¹ Therefore, somehow the parish acquired a large amount of money during a year for which the accounts do not survive, and the money steadily decreased over the next three to four years.

The last appearance of this mysterious money occurs in the 1557–58 accounts. The churchwardens delivered £60 to William Chambers, having Robert Aske, goldsmith, and Thomas Hodgeson, clothworker, each stand for £30 because of their obligations. Two other obligations are noted, and all four of these seem connected to “Item the plate of the churche accordynge to the invetorye these of made.”¹⁰² Those who had purchased parish items in 1548 would have been required to reimburse the parish during Mary’s reign, which would have been a large amount of money, and perhaps that is the origin of this large and mysterious sum of money: men paying fines for items they could not produce. Dispersing the money through loans to parishioners seems an appropriate way to deal with such a sum and such loans shifted the risk of keeping cash to others while establishing a repayment plan, usually with interest, to the benefit of the parish.

Obligations become more prevalent in the London churchwardens’ accounts, especially in the last part of the sixteenth century which suggest that parishes could play a significant role in the local economy. The men who stood for these obligations at Saint Peter Westcheap in 1558 were not economically or socially marginalized. Robert Aske lived on Goldsmiths’ Row at the sign of the Lamb from 1558 to 1569.¹⁰³ He gained the freedom of the city in 1555, took the livery in 1564, was thrice a company warden (1579, 1582, and 1585), and a prime warden in 1590.¹⁰⁴ John Dane, who also received an obligation of Saint Peter Westcheap, was another goldsmith whose wealth had been assessed for £40 in the subsidy of 1541.¹⁰⁵ Details of the obligation, which appears to have worked as an open and renegotiable loan, are not explained.

Beginning with the accounts of 1558–59, the receipts included £10 18 s. 4 d. from the previous churchwardens, and so the parish was back to operating within more typical financial parameters, including significant leadership by the parish goldsmiths.¹⁰⁶ John Keylle was the junior churchwarden in 1562–63 and a senior churchwarden in 1563–64, and he may have been the same person as John Keale who lived and worked by the sign of the Belhouse on Goldsmiths’ Row between 1558 and 1569.¹⁰⁷ Keylle/Keale became a freeman in 1538 and joined the livery in 1555.¹⁰⁸ Stephen Durant was the junior churchwarden in 1563–64 and the senior churchwarden in 1564–65.¹⁰⁹ Durant also lived on Goldsmiths’ Row, under the sign of the Blue Boar. He had entered the freedom in 1545, the livery in 1561, was a renter in 1570, and was a warden in 1578, 1586, and 1589.¹¹⁰ These transfers of wealth went from an institution managed mostly by goldsmiths, to individuals, mostly goldsmiths, and supported the economic and social presence of those goldsmiths, most of whom lived near the Westcheap parish.

The earnestness of the reformed

Richard “Martyn” was the junior churchwarden in 1565–66, senior churchwarden in 1566–67, and again the junior churchwarden in 1585–86.¹¹¹ Richard Martin’s shop had the sign of the Harp, and he lived on Goldsmiths’ Row between 1558 and 1569, but he also maintained a residence outside the city walls (which was a traditional pattern for the wealthiest goldsmiths). Martin became a freeman, took the livery in 1558, served as a renter warden in 1569, a company warden in 1572 and 1577, and a prime warden in 1579, 1583, and 1587. He was knighted in 1588, served a partial year as Lord Mayor in 1589, replacing a predecessor who had died in office. Martin was also a master of the royal mint for 1581–83 and 1584–1601, serving with his son for much of the later period.¹¹² He should have served as a sheriff in 1578, but the Queen secured his discharge from the office; he did serve as an alderman from 1578 to 1602, dying in 1617.¹¹³

Ian Archer suggests that Martin was “probably” hopeful of more Protestant reform in the Elizabethan church, but was ultimately a pragmatist. Micheline White, however, has argued that both Richard Martin and his wife Dorcas were dedicated to Presbyterian doctrine.¹¹⁴ Dorcas Eccleston Martin was a businesswoman in her own right, translating and selling books. She translated a small catechism from French—An Instruction for Christians, conteining a fruitfull and godlie exercise, as well as in wholsome and fruitfull praiers, as in reverend discerning of Gods holie Commandements and Sacraments (1581)—which was republished in a seven volume collection (1582) edited by Thomas Bently, alongside works by Elizabeth I, Katherine Parr, Jane Grey, Anne Askew, and others.¹¹⁵ Both Richard and Dorcas Eccleston Martin were involved in radical religious politics, including helping to distribute Thomas Cartwright’s A replye to An answere made of M. doctor Whitgifte. Cartwright was a dedicated critic of the ceremonies of the Elizabethan Church, the Book of Common Prayer, and the episcopal hierarchy. This text was part of a running dialogue with conservative John Whitgift, who would become Elizabeth’s last Archbishop of Canterbury (1583–1604). In fact, in 1573, Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of York, wrote to Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, that Thomas “Cartwright was said to be hiding ‘in Cheapside, at Mr. Martyn’s house, the goldsmith’ and then noted that Martin’s ‘wife’ had been ‘the stationer for all the first impressions of the book,’ that is, of Cartwright’s Reply.” ¹¹⁶ One of the leading married couples of the late Elizabethan parish agitated for further reform of the church throughout the 1570s, 1580s, and 1590s. Dorcas Eccleston Martin was active inside and outside of her parish prior to her death in 1599, but, typically, she does not appear in the churchwardens’ accounts.

The parish culture of the Martins was also the parish in which Richard Judson served as the curate between 1585 and his death on 24 November 1615.¹¹⁷ Judson had previously served at Saint John the Evangelist Watling Street, 1579–85, and he was a pluralist, serving as vicar of Saint Peter le Poer from 1583 to 1615 while also serving at Saint Peter Westcheap.¹¹⁸ Little additional information survives, but he oversaw the production of parish registers and frequently signed off on the churchwardens’ accounts. By 1653, the church would be home to a militantly Presbyterian-leaning pastor named Roger Drake who had been educated at Cambridge and Leiden. The merchants and goldsmiths of seventeenth-century Westcheap were as attuned to currents in international Calvinism as their fifteenth-century predecessors had been to late medieval Catholicism.¹¹⁹

With people such as Richard Judson and the Martins playing such important roles in parish culture, it is not surprising to find Saint Peter Westcheap associated with the more ardently dissatisfied critics of the Elizabethan Settlement. It was one of the earlier parishes to leave documentation of celebrating the anniversary of the Queen’s accession (1564), but such an event may not always have been a positive statement.¹²⁰ Natalie Mears has suggested that Saint Peter Westcheap celebrated, at least on occasion, as a “means to admonish Elizabeth for failing to reform the church fully.”¹²¹ Of course, a bevy of special prayers for the monarch were observed across the Tudor era; St Michael le Querne paid 3 d. for a prayer book for the queen in 1578, while Saint Michael Cornhill paid 6 d. for prayer books and songs for the Queen.¹²² The evidence suggests a strong, but not uncritical, allegiance between the parish and the last Tudor monarch.

Economically, Saint Peter Westcheap demonstrated more financial consistency in the last part of the sixteenth century than did some London parishes; £78 18 s. 10 d. was the average income in the churchwardens’ accounts.¹²³ A few parishes maintained higher average incomes, such as Saint Mary Magdalen Milk Street (£84 2 s. 10 d.), but most raised much less. The pattern might reveal something concerning the socio-economic geography of the city, or it might provide evidence that neither parish finance, nor the churchwardens’ accounts were homogenized as a result of Tudor policies. In 1585–86, the churchwardens were William Harcourt and Richard Martyn, but the following year there was just one, William Martyn. He does not appear to have been a son of Richard and Dorcas, but he might have been a nephew or more distant relation. Nicholas Moore was the churchwarden for 1586–87.¹²⁴ The parish had indeed moved to one churchwarden, and the practice continued until the Stuart era.¹²⁵

The complexity of the accounts would imply that being a churchwarden would have brought with it a great deal of responsibility and work. In the 1589–90 accounts, the income still begins with rental income, which is the same total amount as collected during the reign of Queen Mary: £6 6 s. 8 d. The tenants were Master Thomas Ashemore, Mistress Wood, widow, and, Henry Byrom. All three renters appear in the records for the first time in 1582–83, suggesting that the collection of rent would have been a simple enough task. The clerk’s wage, six burials, and then a few more entries that would have been rather mundane; it appears not too arduous a task for one churchwarden.

An examination of the payments suggests the opposite. The expenses begin with a list of about eighty entries for items such as articles from the archdeacon, assorted items for the clerk, bread and wine for the communion, clock repair, candles, and so on. Some of the notable entries included breakfast during the parish perambulation, herbs for the church during Whitsuntide, “exhibiting” answers to the archdeacon’s articles, and a prayer book for the French King conforming to the form employed in the queen’s chapel.¹²⁶ Then there is a second section recognizing payments for “painted work at the east end of the church,” additional construction jobs, and general repairs from throughout the year. This section covers ca. four pages and contains over 200 to 250 entries for a variety of purchases and payments. If one churchwarden had to coordinate this amount of work, then he did face a daunting task. Sometimes special overseers were appointed to such a task, but there is no mention of such. The lack of vestry minutes is most unfortunate here; perhaps the vestrymen helped with all of this. Still, one churchwarden was apparently all there was.¹²⁷

At the end of the Tudor period, the parish continued to hold services, baptize babies, marry couples, and bury the dead, as it would until 1666 when things would change drastically. And yet at the end of the Tudor period, the parish possessed a pluralist pastor, one churchwarden, and a leading parishioner who apparently desired a Presbyterian system of church government and whose wife distributed a book promoting such a system. Something fundamental had changed, and the very organization of the parish suggests that it was so.¹²⁸ In the pre-Reformation era, the parish had been a space for numerous cultural and liturgical negotiations by parishioners seeking to establish prayers for the dead, or for parish celebrations, or who sought to fashion the liturgy in some way, decorate the church, honor a saint, support a Passion Play, rent a shop, and so on. The evidence provides overwhelming proof of wealthy goldsmiths dominating the parish offices, playing benefactors for the parish, dominating the church spatially, visually, socially, and financially. In the economically troubled years of the 1550s, this parish carried a ca. £80 surplus, which eventually was invested in loans to parishioners, two of whom were goldsmiths. The parish officials and local elite never ceased to merge the appropriated faith with their own local significance.

The various pre-Reformation practices allowed this parish elite to renegotiate their standing constantly and to exhibit their place of power and privilege, but so did the pursuit of a more Calvinist parish in the Elizabethan period. From John Shaa to Richard Martin, both Lord Mayors and servants of their monarchs, their social, political, and economic significance originated in the unique culture around Cheapside, before taking them to the Tower Mint and Goldsmiths’ Hall. The religious changes of 1536–63 altered certain patterns but, of course, the goldsmiths ushered the parish through the changes and helped to create something new. By 1570–90, a prominent goldsmith, and his wife could hope for more and agitate for further reform. The Martins expressed and continued a long tradition of elite goldsmiths and their wives leading the way and shaping the parish’s piety; and the restructured parish emphasized their role. The primacy of craft aided social stability in creating multi-generational business links that augmented the family/household structure. Parish patronage further augmented this process; the promotion of Saint Dunstan and the chantries connected to various goldsmiths extended the presence of the goldsmith into the sacred and made their presence visible, audible, and concrete even if they were not in the church. Ironically, the promotion of reform did the same.

The women of the parish

The prominent place of Dorcas Eccleston Martin, while obviously a product of the post-printing press and post-Reformation era, most certainly rested upon a long-standing but mostly undocumented foundation of women’s participation in the parish. The maids, goodwives, and widows of Saint Peter Westcheap undoubtedly engaged in a great many social activities; in fact, the thesis of Christine Peters that identifies a shift of women’s behavior in the English parish from a model of “more sociability” to one of “more Godly” seems an applicable guide through the sparse and vague evidence.¹²⁹ A few wives and widows appeared in the donation lists from 1470–71 and 1478–79, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. John Brett’s wife and Thomas Capron and his wife made donations to acquire blue cloth of gold. The churchwardens’ accounts also mention “the maydyns hall” (1528), a maids’ pew (1533), and a maids’ gallery (1595), suggesting that the segregation of maidens during services continued right through the Tudor Reformations.¹³⁰ An entry for the wives’ knell from 1556–57 implies a certain bell, or perhaps a pattern of ringing, or perhaps an obit maintained by a wives’ guild for deceased members.¹³¹ In the parish inventories of 1518 and 1552, a purification cloth for the churching ceremony received mention.¹³²

In the pre-Reformation church, women were churched forty days after giving birth to a male child and eighty days after giving birth to a female child.¹³³ The pre-Reformation church emphasized ordo ad purificandum mulierem, while the Edwardian prayer books employed “the order for the purification of women” (1549) and “the thanksgiving of women after child-birth, commonly called the churching of women” (1552).¹³⁴ Some reformers sought to redefine the ritual in the course of the sixteenth century, while others sought to eradicate the practice as a holdover from the Roman Church, while the parishioners’ thoughts on the topic are less easy to discern. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford argued that the ritual expressed two main functions: (1) as a public acknowledgment of the woman’s change in society resulting from becoming a mother; and (2) as a moment of thanksgiving for having come through the birthing process safely.¹³⁵

The churching ceremony probably lasted about ten minutes and began with the woman kneeling at the church door or, according to the 1552 rubric, the communion table.¹³⁶ While the godly had little toleration for the event in the Elizabethan era, churching may have remained popular with some women.¹³⁷ Other than the two entries on the 1518 and 1552 inventories, there is no further evidence from Saint Peter Westcheap regarding such ceremonies, but in Southwark the evidence indicates that many woman attended the churchings held there, and Katherine French has argued that women were very active in the planning of liturgies that deal with “lifecycle rituals.”¹³⁸ The existence of the “purification cloth” forms the only direct evidence of churchings but it would have been a frequent ceremony.

More typically, women appear in Saint Peter Westcheap’s churchwardens’ accounts in the following fashion. A 1583 memorandum concerning parishioners who had not yet paid their obligation for the clerk’s wage included Goodwife Wilson, Oma Barlow, and Widow Sharpe, each of whom owed 4 d. Two men, William Foster and Javys Jones owed the same amount. However, the others on the list, all men, had been assessed at higher amounts: Morgan Popa (3 s.), Peter Martyn and Henry Bywam (16 d., each), and William Madsen (2 s.).¹³⁹ The three women were deemed to matter enough economically and socially to be assessed for the clerk’s wage, but they were assessed the lowest amount and could not pay it. This evidence suggests economic circumstances that conform to studies about the lives of London’s widows and it corresponds to the way many widows appear in the London churchwardens’ accounts. Given the general prosperity of Saint Peter Westcheap, status mattered if a woman wished to achieve something, and, in the sixteenth century, a woman’s status was typically shared with her husband. Dorcas Eccleston Martin, wealthy, literate, and engaged in publishing, faced a new and unusual opportunity and she made much of it, but there were precedents to her behavior.

The final days of an independent parish

Saint Peter Westcheap was refurbished and beautified in 1616–17, which also fits into a general pattern for London churches.¹⁴⁰ The 1630s, 1640s, and 1650s would prove difficult for the city, and then, in 1666, the Great Fire destroyed the church, and the parish was merged with Saint Matthew Friday Street. Today, the site of the church is marked by a small garden near the intersection of Wood Street and Cheapside.¹⁴¹ There was a time when such a location placed the old church in the center of numerous cultural and religious discourses, in a city where symbol and ritual mattered tremendously. Through all the drama of the Tudor age, a core group of wealthy goldsmiths directed parish actions and by doing so preserved their own wealth, status, and privilege. Historians have focused a great deal of attention on the emergence of Calvinist city leaders such as Richard and Dorcas Eccleston Martin, but the continuity in the lives of these parish leaders is even more remarkable. The social, cultural, and economic setting remained a constant, consistently empowering the leading goldsmiths, who, in turn, protected and guided the parish. As with other city parishes, the local social hierarchy provided an essential element for stability in a tumultuous era. At Saint Peter Westcheap, parish leaders worked with the incessant change of the long Tudor century to preserve their parish, their status, and their faith, while also serving the interest of their craft, their city, and their monarch.

Notes

1 Some of the information in this chapter will appear in Gary G. Gibbs, “London’s Goldsmiths and the Cult of St. Dunstan, ca 1330–1530,” in Cynthia Turner Camp and Emily Kelley (eds.), Intercessors between the Wealthy and the Divine: Art and Hagiography among the Medieval Merchant Classes (London: Routledge, 2019): 179–203; and Katherine L. French and Gary G. Gibbs, “The Poor and the Parish: The Problems of Participation in Late Medieval London,” in David Harry and Christian Steer (eds.), Harlaxton 2017: Church and City in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Clive Burgess (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2019).

2 The CWA and VM of Saint Peter Westcheap, 1441–1601, LMA MS P69/PET4/B/006/MS00645/001, fo. 35r; W. Sparrow Simpson, “On the Parish of Saint Peter Cheap, in the City of London, from 1392 to 1633,” JBAA 24 (1868): 258.

3 Boteller served as a company warden in 1435, 1441, 1445, 1450–51, 1456, 1463, and 1466.Wardens’ Accounts and Court Minutes, Minute Book A, 1444–1516, Goldsmiths’ Hall MS 1520, fos. 95 and 107; T.F. Reddaway and Lorna E.M. Walker, The Early History of the Goldsmiths’ Company, 1327–1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1975): 365.

4 Reddaway and Walker, Early History, 146–7; W. Sparrow Simpson, “Inventory of the Vestments, Plate, and Books, Belonging to the Church of Saint Peter Cheap, in the City of London, in the Year, 1431,” JBAA 24 (1843): 151; MS00645/001, fo.163r.

5 Richard Newcourt, Repertorium ecclesiasticum parochiale Londoniese. 2 vols (London: 1708): 520.

6 A similar celebration occurred in 1460. William Chaffers, Gilda Aurifabrorum: A History of English Goldsmiths and Pewterers, and Plateworkers (London: Allen, 1883): 19; William McMurray (ed.), The Records of Two City Parishes: A Collection of Documents Illustrative of the History of SS. Anne and Agnes, Aldersgate, and St John Zachary, London (London: Hunter & Longhurst, 1925): 31.

7 David Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 236; and Vanessa Harding, “Cheapside: Commerce and Commemoration,” HLQ 71 (2008): 80.

8 John Gough Nichols (ed.), The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, 1550–1563 (London: Camden Society, 1848): 59 and 338; W. Sparrow Simpson, “Notes of the History and Antiquities of the United Parishes of S. Matthew Friday Street and S. Peter Cheap, in the City of London,” TLMAS 3 (1870): 344.

9 Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 109–10.

10 Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003): 42, 43 and 83.

11 Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City 1550–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 292–4.

12 Chronicles of London, 246.

13 W. Sparrow Simpson, “Notes of the History and Antiquities of the United Parishes of S. Matthew Friday Street and S. Peter Cheap, in the City of London.” Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society 3(1870): 342.

14 Jennifer Loach, Edward VI, ed. George Bernard and Penry Williams (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999): 34.

15 Simpson, “Notes on the History and Antiquity,” 347.

16 MS00645/001, fo. 24v; Simpson, “On the Parish of Saint Peter Cheap,” 263; Charles Pendrill, Old Parish Life in London (London: Oxford University Press, 1937): 53.

17 W. Simpson, “On the Parish of Saint Peter Cheap,” 263.

18 MS00645/001, fo. 180v.

19 Mary C. Erler, “Spectacle and Sacrament: A London Parish Play in the 1530s,” Modern Philology 91 (1994): 449, 449ff.

20 Simpson, “On the Parish of Saint Peter Cheap,” 266.

21 C.J. Kitching (ed.), London and Middlesex Chantry Certificates, 1548 (London: London Record Society, 1980): 48–9.

22 T. C. Dale. “Inhabitants of London in 1638: Saint Peter, Westcheap,” in The Inhabitants of London in 1638 (London: Society of Genealogists, 1931), 174–5. British History Online, available at: www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/london-inhabitants/1638/pp174-175 (accessed August 5, 2018), and, Simpson, “On the Parish of Saint Peter Cheap,” 251.

23 Eighty-nine parishes were assessed. Tai Liu, Puritan London: A Study of Religion and Society in the City Parishes (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1986): 30.

24 Mary C. Erler (ed.) Ecclesiastical London (Toronto: The British Library and the University of Toronto Press, 2008): xcvi.

25 Simpson, “On the Parish of Saint Peter Cheap,” 251.

26 PR of Saint Peter Westcheap, 1538–1598, LMA MS P69/PET4/A/001/MS06502.

27 Erler, Ecclesiastical London, xcvi.

28 The very origin of the word cheap derived from the Anglo-Saxon word ceap (< Latin caupīre) meaning barter. Karen Newman, “‘Goldsmith’s Ware’: Equivalence in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside,” HLQ 71 (2008): 103. See also, Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 199 and 201.

29 T. F. Reddaway, “The London Goldsmiths circa 1500,” TRHS, fifth series, 12 (1962): 49; and T.F. Reddaway, “Elizabethan London—Goldsmith’s Row in Cheapside, 1558–1645,” Guildhall Miscellany 11 (1963): 182.

30 Reddaway, “The London Goldsmiths circa 1500,” 52.

31 Ibid., 52.

32 John Stow, A Survey of London, 2 vols (London: 1603; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908): 345.

33 Reddaway, “Elizabethan London—Goldsmith’s Row in Cheapside, 1558–1645,” 185.

34 J. Cox, Churchwardens’ Accounts (London: Methuen, 1913): 86–9; Bruce A.M. Bannerman (ed.), The Register of Saint Matthew Friday Street, London, 1538–1812, and the United Parishes of Saint Matthew Friday Street and Saint Peter Cheap, Marriages, 1754–1812 (London: John Whitehead and Son, 1933): 6.

35 MS00645/001, fo. 23r; Simpson, “Inventory,” 154.

36 MS00645/001, fo. 172r; Simpson, “Inventory,” 159.

37 Cal Husting, 1: 587.

38 Cal Husting, 1: 542–3.

39 Reddaway and Walker, Early History, 29.

40 Stow, Survey, 1: 314.

41 Simpson, “Notes on the Antiquities,” 246; Simpson, “On the Parish of Saint Peter Cheap,” 250.

42 Simpson, “On the Parish of Saint Peter Cheap,” 251 and 266; MS00645/001, fos. 24v and 37r.

43 Ida Darlington (ed.), London Consistory Court Wills, 1492–1547 (London: London Record Society, 1967): 96–7.

44 Cal Husting, 2: 24.

45 Cal Husting, 2: 109, 245, 317, 377, and 445–6.

46 TNA Prob 11–17–606.

47 By 1548, the visiting Royal Commissioners found endowments for only one chantry connected to Saint Peter Westcheap. Kitching, London and Middlesex Chantry Certificates, 48.

48 Goldsmith’s Hall, MS 1520, fo. 329.

49 Reddaway and Walker, Early History, 302.

50 Goldsmiths’ Hall, MS 1520, fo. 117.

51 Goldsmiths’ Hall, MS 1520, fo. 122.

52 Goldsmiths’ Hall, MS 1520, fo. 126.

53 Chronicles of London: 215 and 246.

54 Liverymen emerged in the fifteenth century and were the more significant members of a London company. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 214.

55 Goldsmiths’ Hall MS 1520, fos. 295, 321, 357, and 363; Chaffers, Gilda Aurifabrorum, 288.

56 F.G. Price Hilton, A Handbook of London Bankers, with Some of their Predecessors, the Early Goldsmiths (London: Leadenhall Press, 1890): 149.

57 Barron, “The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London,” in Caroline M. Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill (eds.), The Church in Pre-Reformation Society: Essays in Honour of F.R.H. Du Boulay (London: Boydell, 1985): 348; Chronicles of London: 215 and 246.

58 Reddaway and Walker, Early History, 307–8. See also, Stow, Survey, 1: 314.

59 TNA Prob 11–8-657.

60 Stow, Survey, 1: 345.

61 Reddaway and Walker, Early History, 315–16; Stow, Survey, 1: 314.

62 Goldsmiths’ Hall MS 1520, fos. 253, 261, 305, 313, 345, 347, 391, and 399; Reddaway and Walker, Early History, 143.

63 Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 347; Reddaway and Walker, Early History, 143, 315–16.

64 TNA Prob 11–14–53.

65 Cal Husting, 2: 445.

66 MS00645/001, fo. 174r. The 1431 inventory has been transcribed and published in Simpson, “Inventory of the Vestments,” 156–7.

67 MS00645/001, fo. 174r; Simpson, “Inventory of the Vestments,” 158.

68 The inventory fails to use the word “chapel,” making mention only of an “altar.” It seems likely that the altar was located in the chapel.

69 Walton is identified as a merchant seaman in some indices, but he was clearly a goldsmith. TNA Prob 11–3-266; Reddaway and Walker, Early History, 146, 313; MS00645/001, fo. 174r; Simpson, “Inventory of the Vestments,” 157.

70 Francis Bond, Dedications and Patron Saints of English Churches: Ecclesiastical Symbolism, Saints and Emblems (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1914): 67; N.B. Brooks, “The Career of Saint Dunstan,” in Nigel Ramsay, Margaret Sparks, and Timothy Tatton-Brown (eds.), Saint Dunstan: His Life, Times, and Cult (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992): 2–3; John Crook, English Medieval Shrines (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011): 36.

71 The Gesta Regum Anglorum makes no mention of Dunstan being bishop of London. See William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, trans. and ed. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

72 LMA, Comm. Wills, 1522–39, LMA MS 9171/10, fo. 34v; LMA, Comm. Wills, 1489–1502, LMA MS 9171/8, fo. 6v; TNA Prob 11–27–396, Margaret Denham (1539), widow; TNA Prob 11–19–360, William Parsons (1520); TNA Prob 11–27–282 Joan Evererd, widow (1538); TNA PRO E 117/4/98; H. B. Walters, London Churches at the Reformation (London: SPCK 1939): 248, 252.

73 TNA PRO E 117/4/54; Walters, London Churches, 532.

74 MS00645/001, fo. 174r; Simpson, “Inventory of the Vestments,” 157–8.

75 MS00645/001, fo. 175r; Simpson, “Inventory of the Vestments,” 158; Simpson, “On the Parish of Saint Peter Cheap,” 252.

76 Simpson, Inventory of the Vestments,” 150–60, at 153.

77 The sword and wheel are traditional symbols for Saint Katherine, and she is named elsewhere in the inventory. John Vince, Discovering Saints in Britain (Aylesbury: Shire, 1979): 11; MS00645/001, fol. 175r; Simpson, “Inventory of the Vestments,” 158.

78 Eamon Duffy, “The Parish, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval East Anglia: The Evidence of Rood Screens,” in Katherine L. French, Gary Gibbs, and Beat Kümin (eds.), The Parish in English Life (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997): 148–9; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992): 157–9.

79 Joel Fredell, “The Three Clerks and Saint Nicholas in Medieval England,” Studies in Philology 92 (1995): 181–202.

80 Sherry L. Reames, “Saint Katherine and the Late Medieval Clergy: Evidence from English Breviaries,” in Jacqueline Jenkins and Katherine J. Lewis (eds.), Saint Katherine of Alexandria; Texts and Contexts in Western Medieval Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003): 201–20, at 203–4.

81 Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013): 204.

82 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 172.

83 Megan Cassidy-Welch, “Prison and Sacrament in the Cult of Saints: Images of Saint Barbara in Late Medieval Art,” Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009): 371–84.

84 Caroline M. Barron, “Medieval Pilgrim Badges of Saint Sitha,” in Jon Cotton et al. (eds.), Hidden Histories and Records of Antiquity: Essays on Saxon and Medieval London for John Clark, Curator Emeritus, Museum of London, London and Middlesex Archaeological Society Special Paper 17 (London: LMAS, 2014): 91–6; Caroline M. Barron, “‘The Whole Company of Heaven’: The Saints of Medieval London,” in Miri Rubin (ed.), European Religious Cultures: Essays Offered to Christopher Brooke on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2008): 137–40.

85 John Cherry, Medieval Craftsmen: Goldsmiths (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 23.

86 Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997): 122.

87 Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 111.

88 Charles Pendrill, Old Parish Life in London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937): 53; Simpson, “On the Parish,” 263.

89 Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983): 213 and 216.

90 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 398, 407, 450, and 458; Ronald Hutton, “The Local Impact of the Tudor Reformations,” in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 120; and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996): 384.

91 Simpson, “On the Parish of Saint Peter Cheap,” 256.

92 The “green men” undoubtedly referred to the wild men of the wood, which were approaching their centennial in 1590. Ibid., 256.

93 Cox, Churchwardens’ Accounts, 1–3.

94 Gary G. Gibbs, “New Duties for the Parish Community in Tudor London,” in Katherine L. French, Gary Gibbs, and Beat Kümin (eds.), The Parish in English Life (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997): 164.

95 MS00645/001, fo. 36r.

96 Mundy was a brother of John Mundy, also a goldsmith and Lord Mayor (1522–23) with a will dated 1562. Charles Welch (ed.), Register of the Freemen of the City of London in the Reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI (London: LMAS, 1908): 89; Percy Dryden Mundy, “Mundy,” Notes and Queries 10 (1904): 31–2.

97 MS00645/001, fo. 37r.

98 MS00645/001, fo. 37v.

99 “Master Tyllesworth” appears among the funerary entries in the 1557 account. Chaffers, Gilda Aurifabrorum, 288. Tyllesworth was also a collector of rents in Westminster. See Acts of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, 1543–1604, part one, ed. C. S. Knighton (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997): 8ff; and, MS00645/001, fos. 38r, 45v.

100 MS00645/001, fos. 38r, 38v, and 39r.

101 MS00645/001, fos. 43r, 43v, and 47v.

102 MS00645/001, fo. 50r.

103 He may have lived there longer, but those are the years that may be documented (1558, 1566, and 1569).

104 Reddaway, “Elizabethan London—Goldsmith’s Row in Cheapside, 1558–1645.” Guildhall Miscellany 11 (Oct. 1963): 181–206, at 204.

105 Welch, Register of the Freemen: 103; “1541 London Subsidy Roll: Cripplegate Ward,” in R. G. Lang (ed.), Two Tudor Subsidy Rolls for the City of London, 1541 and 1582 (London: London Record Society, 1993): 56–62. British History Online, available at: www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol29/pp56-62 (accessed August 5, 2018).

106 MS00645/001, fos. 51r and 51v.

107 MS00645/001, fos. 66v and 69r.

108 Reddaway, “Elizabethan London—Goldsmiths’ Row,” 205.

109 MS00645/001, fos. 71r and 74r.

110 Reddaway, “Elizabethan London—Goldsmiths’ Row,” 203.

111 MS00645/001, fos. 74r and 78r.

112 Chaffers, Gilda Aurifabrorum, 288.

113 Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 33; Reddaway, “Elizabethan London—Goldsmiths’ Row,” 204.

114 Archer: Pursuit, 257; Micheline White, “A Biographical Sketch of Dorcas Martin: Elizabethan Translator, Stationer, and Godly Matron,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999): 775–92; and Micheline White, “Power Couples and Women Writers in Elizabethan England: The Public Voices of Dorcas and Richard Martin and Anne and Hugh Dowriche,” in Rosalynn Voaden and Diane Wolfthal (eds.), Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Texts and Studies (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005): 119–38.

115 White, “A Biographical Sketch,” 775–92, at 775–6.

116 William Nicholson (ed.), The Remains of Edmund Grindal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1843): 347–8; as cited in White, “A Biographical Sketch,” 785.

117 Clergy of the Church of England Database, available at: http://db.theclergydatabase.org.uk/jsp/DisplayVacancy.jsp?CDBAppRedID=193924.

118 Leland H. Carson (ed.), Elizabethan Non-Conformist Texts, Vol. 4: The Writings of John Greenwood, 1587–1590, together with the Joint Writings of Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, 1587–1590 (New York: George Allen & Unwin, 1962): 97ff.

119 Liu, Puritan London, 165.

120 As did Saint Botolph Aldersgate.

121 Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 250.

122 Overall, Accounts, 171; and the CWA of Saint Michael le Querne, 1514–1606, LMA MS P69/MIC4/B/005/MS02895/001, fo. 211.

123 The amount may be skewed upward some by the nearly £100 kept in reserve for several years in the 1550s and accounted as “income,” but the average is well below the amount registered in some years. MS00645/001, fo. 99v.

124 MS00645/001, fo. 123

125 Bound out of chronological order in the current manuscript. MS00645/001, fo. 54v; Peter W. M. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): Chapter 1; TNA Prob 11/122/550.

126 Henry III was assassinated in August 1589. MS00645/001, fo. 130r.

127 This does not appear to be an example of a designated account for a building project, such as discussed in Gabriel Byng, Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

128 This conclusion parallels Clive Burgess’s conclusion regarding the parish of Saint Andrew Hubbard. See Clive Burgess, “London Parishioners in Times of Change; Saint Andrew Hubbard, Eastcheap, ca. 1450–1570,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002): 38–63.

129 Peters, Patterns of Piety, 25–6, 343.

130 W. Simpson, “On the Parish of Saint Peter Cheap, in the City of London, from 1392 to 1633.” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 24 (1868): 252, 255.

131 MS00645/001, fo. 45v.

132 Walters, London Churches, 564; Simpson, “On the Parish of Saint Peter Cheap,” 259.

133 Peters, Patterns of Piety, 19.

134 David Cressy, “Purification, Thanksgiving and the Churching of Women in Post-Reformation England,” P&P 141 (1993): 118; see also, “Ordo ad purificandum mulierem. Taken from a Pontifical kept in Trinity College, Cambridge, also printed in Manuale Eboracense. Adolph Franz. Die kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter, 2. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1909).” available at: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mikef/ordo.html

135 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): 153–4.

136 Valerie Fides, Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England (New York: Routledge, 2013): 79; Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 63.

137 Maltby, Prayer Book and People, 63.

138 Katherine L. French, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008): 52.

139 MS00645/001, fo. 113v.

140 Strype, Book 3, 125. An electronic edition of John Strype’s A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster is available at: www.hrionline.ac.uk/strype/index.jsp.

141 Gordon Huelin, Vanished Churches of the City of London (London: Guildhall Library Publications, 1996): 24.