West Smithfield, and who was to be designated the Hospitler. The hospital was to accommodate one hundred aged, sick, or impotent men and women, attended on by a matron, twelve nurses, and a resident surgeon. The corporation of London was bound to sustain these establishments by indentures made with the king, dated the 27th December, 1546, and the estates were granted and the foundation confirmed by letters patent dated on the 13th January following.[1]
Meanwhile, on the 3rd of January, being the first Sunday in the new year, as related in our Chronicle, the church that was sometime the Grey Friars' was again set open, and mass said at the altars—it will be recollected that no English service had hitherto been established—by divers priests.[2] On the same day, as Stowe tells us, doctor Ridley, then bishop of Rochester—and who, only a few months after, succeeded Bonner in the see of London—preached at Paul's Cross, declaring the king's gift, how that he had bestowed, for the relief of the poor, the hospital of Saint Bartholomew in Smithfield, lately valued at 305l. 6s. 7d., and for the maintenance of the new Friars, valued at 32l. 19s. 7d., and the church of the Grey parish church of Christ church had assigned lands valued at five hundred marks.
It was probably imagined that the pomp with which the new year witnessed the commencement of religious services in the long desecrated church of the Franciscans was in accordance with the altered mood of the Supreme Head of the Church of England. But this was as the flickering of the lamp in its socket. Before the close of the same month the great despoiler and small restorer lay dead in the palace of which he had deprived the archbishops of York.
- ↑ Both these documents are printed at length in Trollope's History of Christ's Hospital, 1834, 4to. Appendix, Nos. I. and II.
- ↑ See p. 53.
