Charterhouse Chapel St Thomas

Return to the Middlesex Parishes A-B page, or return to the Middlesex Church Records page.

The Charterhouse is situated on the north side of Charter House Swuare, Aldersgate Street. It is one of the Principal foundation schools of the metropolis.The site upon which it stands was anciently part of the estates of the hospital of St John of Jerusalem. Sir Walter Manny, one of the earliest knights of the garter, who had served with Edward III, in his wars with France, purchased it in 1349, of the knights of St John, for the purpose of interring the dead, after the dreadful plague whihc in that year had visited the metropolis. He built a chapel on part of the ground and named theplace New Church Haw. Sir Walter conceived the design of the foundling a college upon this site, about the year 1360, but the whole cemetery was purchased of him, by Michae de Northbury, Bishop of London, who in 1361 errected and founded a conver of Carthusians, an order of Monks founded by St Bruno, in the Chartreux, a steep rock in a desert, new Grenoble in France. Hence its name, which is a vulgar corruption of Charteuse. In the reign of Henry VIII, John Houghton, the last prior...subscribed to the king's supremacy, yet was afterwards executed for some opposition to that tyrants's will. This monastery was suppressed, among other, in 1538, and granted by the crown in 1542, to John Bridges and Thomas Hall for this joint lives; and in 1555, to Edward Lord North, who sold it to the Duke of Northumberland; and on that nobleman being attainted of high treason, it again reverted to the crown. It was afterward conferred...greatly improved..." and retained its commission as a an eminent hospital.

[Adapted from: "Topographical Dictionary of London" by James Elmes; published 1831]