St Bartholomew-the-Great

In June 1866, with the Victorian restoration under way, somebody opened Rahere's tomb from behind. The parish's own historian, E. A. Webb, recorded what came next: the founder's remains lay exposed in a wooden coffin with sandals on the feet, and a piece of one sandal — together with a fragment of the coffin — was "abstracted and hidden". It took twenty-four years to recover them, in November 1890, traced to a house on the site of the north transept with the help of a freemason. They are still in the cloister, in a glass case. That documented theft is almost certainly the seed of the legend that Rahere walks his own church searching for his missing sandal — a story that only reaches print in the second half of the twentieth century and that the parish itself has never told. What the twelfth-century Book of the Foundation does tell is stranger and far better attested: a courtier who fell ill in Rome, vowed a hospital for the poor, recovered, and was then ordered by a vision on the road home to build a church at Smithfield. Both are still standing, nine hundred years later.

Everything known about Rahere comes from one book, and the book belonged to the priory itself. The Liber fundacionis ecclesie sancti Bartholomei Londoniarum — the Book of the Foundation — was written in Latin at Smithfield in the twelfth century; the manuscript survives as Cotton MS Vespasian B IX in the British Library, and Norman Moore printed its Middle English version in 1886. Its second chapter is unflattering about the founder. Rahere was "sprongyng or borne of lowe lynage", it says, and on reaching "the floure of yougth" he "began to haunte the housholdys of noble men and the palices of prynces", spreading their cushions "with japys and flatterynges"; at the king's palace he pushed himself forward "with jolite and carnale suavyte" amid banquets, plays and "othir courtly mokkys and trifyllys". That passage, and nothing more, is the origin of the tradition — repeated today by the parish itself — that Rahere was Henry I's jester. The third chapter sends him to Rome to buy pardon for that life, and the order of what follows matters, because it is usually told backwards. At Rome he "began to be vexed with grevous sykenesse" and "drewe to the extremyte of lyf". Believing that God was taking vengeance on him among foreigners, he vowed that if he were granted health to return home he would "make and hospitale yn recreacion of poure men". He recovered — and only then, on the journey back, came the vision of chapter four: a winged beast that carried him above a bottomless pit, and a figure of imperial bearing who told him "I am Bartholomew the Apostle of Ihu Crist that come to socoure the, yn thyn angwysshe", and that he had chosen "a place yn the Subbarbis of London at Smythfeld wher yn myn name thou shalt founde a chirche". The illness produced the hospital; the vision produced the church. Both were founded in 1123 — the parish marked nine hundred years since the laying of the foundation stone on 25 March 2023 — and both are still there. St Bartholomew's Hospital, across the road, is described by Barts Health NHS Trust as the oldest hospital in the country. The church did not reach us whole. At the Dissolution in 1539 the priory was suppressed, the nave demolished and the estate sold to Sir Richard Rich; what stands today is essentially the Norman quire. Its afterlife was industrial. The Lady Chapel became dwellings, and in 1725 it housed the printing house of Samuel Palmer, where a nineteen-year-old journeyman named Benjamin Franklin set type for Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated. Later the same rooms held a fringe factory that ran west along the triforium; a blacksmith's forge occupied the site of the north transept; a Nonconformist school sat in the triforium during the eighteenth century and the parish boys' school in the north triforium until 1892; the cloister was used as stabling. Buying the building back took forty years. Restoration began in 1863 under Rector John Abbiss with the architects Hayter Lewis and William Slater; the patron, the Rev. F. P. Phillips, paid £6,500 to remove the fringe factory; the restored portions were formally reopened on 30 November 1886; and from 1887 Aston Webb built the new south transept (opened 14 March 1891) and north transept (5 June 1893) and rebuilt the Lady Chapel, finished in 1896. Rahere's tomb stands on the north side of the sanctuary. E. A. Webb, the parish's own historian, dated the canopied monument to the remodelling of the east end about 1405 and stated flatly that the effigy is contemporary with it "and cannot therefore be relied on as a likeness of the founder". Norman Moore, writing in the 1890s, had insisted on the opposite — that the figure was "certainly a portrait of Rahere". The face visitors look at was carved roughly 280 years after the man died. And in the middle of the Victorian restoration, somebody opened the tomb. In June 1866, with the work in progress, the monument was — in Webb's words — "surreptitiously opened at the back", and the remains of Rahere, with sandals on the feet, were exposed to view in a wooden coffin. A portion of a sandal and a small piece of the coffin "were abstracted and hidden". Twenty-four years later, in November 1890, they were traced to a house then occupying part of the site of the north transept, with the aid of a freemason, the late Mr Henry Heard, "to whose craft sacrilege is particularly abhorrent". The rector and churchwardens decided against opening the tomb again, and the fragments were placed in a glass case in the cloister — where George Worley's 1908 guide duly lists "a charred fragment of Rahere's coffin and sandal, which had been surreptitiously taken from his tomb".

The Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great is at West Smithfield, London EC1A 9DS, entered through the Tudor gatehouse on the Smithfield rotunda. It opens Monday to Saturday from 10:00 to 17:00, and on Sundays between services. Admission is now free: the parish asks for a donation instead, pointing out that it receives nothing from the Church of England or from the government. That is a recent change worth knowing, because guidebooks and older pages still quote a price — in April 2019 the church's own site listed £5 for adults, £4.50 concessions, £12 for a family ticket and £1.50 for photography, with free entry only for those coming to pray. This is a working parish church, not a museum. Services, weddings, concerts and filming take precedence and visits are not possible while they are under way; the diary on the parish website is the place to check before travelling. Private guided tours are offered to groups of five or more by the Head Verger, Gordon Furry ([email protected]). For step-free access, use the path from the Tudor gatehouse to the west door. The alternative route through the churchyard from Cloth Fair involves a significant step up, a further small step and a flight of relatively steep steps with no handrail. The nearest Underground station is Barbican, with St Paul's and Farringdon also within walking distance; there are car parks under West Smithfield and in Beech Street. Beyond Rahere's tomb, three things reward the detour: the Lady Chapel, rebuilt by Aston Webb and the room where Franklin worked as a compositor; the glass case in the cloister with the recovered fragments of coffin and sandal; and Damien Hirst's bronze Exquisite Pain, a modern treatment of the apostle's flaying. The church's fame as a filming location is real and the parish documents it: Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Sherlock Holmes (2009, standing in for the crypt of St Paul's), Transformers: The Last Knight (2017), What's Love Got to Do with It? (2023), Napoleon (2023) and Mary & George (2024). St Bartholomew the Less, the hospital's own church, is a short walk away inside the Barts site and opens every day from 08:00 to 22:00.