Martyrs and Mystics. Ed Glinert

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СКАЧАТЬ – an Ancient Briton beaten in battle around the year 1000 BC by Brutus the Trojan, founder of London.

      Today the church unites all major churches of Christendom: ‘Old Catholics, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Anglican Church, the Oriental churches, the Lutheran and Reformed Churches and the Holy Roman and Catholic Church’.

       ST LAWRENCE JEWRY

      John Wilkins, mid-seventeenth-century vicar of this exquisitely designed Christopher Wren church, devised a new system of measurement in the 1660s based on biblical ‘sacred geometry’. He wanted the main unit length to be equal to the 2,000 cubits cited as holy in the Book of Numbers. To make calculations easier the length would be divided not into 2,000 parts but into 1,000 equal divisions, what in the nineteenth century was renamed the metre, now a standard measurement, used extensively throughout the world, but, ironically, not universally in London.

      → London, Sacred City, p. 11

       ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, St Paul’s Churchyard

      Britain’s major cathedral, the setting for state occasions as well as one of the capital’s leading tourist attractions, was founded in 604 by Ethelbert, King of Kent, and Mellitus, Bishop of the East Saxons. The church was destroyed by the Vikings in the ninth century and burnt down in 1087, but at the end of the eleventh century William I granted St Paul’s privileges: ‘Some lands I give to God and the church of St Paul’s, in London, and special franchises, because I wish that this church may be free in all things, as I wish my soul to be on the day of judgment.’

      In the thirteenth century Maurice, Bishop of London, decided to build a new grand cathedral on a larger scale than anything witnessed outside central Europe. It was this building, completed in 1240, that is now known as Old St Paul’s, to differentiate it from the post-Fire of London cathedral.

      Not all clerics have been hospitably received here. In 1093 Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, came to St Paul’s demanding his tithe of the fruit harvest, only to find the doors closed in his face. In 1259 a mob killed two canons in the papal party. In 1385 Robert Braybroke, Bishop of London, banned various frivolous activities from taking place at St Paul’s on Sundays, including barbers shaving customers, worshippers shooting arrows at the pigeons and children playing ball. Nine years later the Lollard reformers nailed a paper listing twelve complaints about the Catholic clergy on the door of the old church – a hundred years before Martin Luther famously posted his ninety-six theses on popish indulgences on the door of the church in Wittenberg.

      During the Reformation of the 1530s the high altar was pulled down and replaced by a plain table. Many of the tombs were also destroyed, the reredos was smashed to pieces and St Paul’s became more of a social centre than a church. The nave, Paul’s Walk, was even used by prostitutes touting for business, and as a market for selling groceries and animals. In 1553 the Common Council of London passed an act forbidding people from carrying beer barrels, baskets of bread, fish, flesh or fruit into St Paul’s and from leading mules or horses through the cathedral. Evidently the law didn’t go far enough, for in 1558 Elizabeth had to issue a proclamation forbidding the drawing of swords in the church and the shooting of guns inside it or in the churchyard, under pain of two months’ imprisonment.

      St Paul’s collection of holy relics was sold off during the Cromwellian Commonwealth of 1649–60, but there appeared to be an inexhaustible stock of these. The authorities were still selling portions of the Virgin Mary’s milk, the hair of Mary Magdalen, the hand of St John, pieces of Thomas à Becket’s skull and the blood of St Paul himself – all preserved in jewelled cases – 150 years later.

      The Fire of London destroyed Old St Paul’s in 1666, but the building was spectacularly redesigned by Christopher Wren, who created what many believe to be the finest example of Renaissance architecture in Britain. Somehow St Paul’s escaped destruction during the Second World War Blitz.

       PAUL’S CROSS

      An open-air pulpit erected by the south wall of the pre-Fire of London St Paul’s was known as Paul’s Cross. Here papal bulls were broadcast, excommunications pronounced, royal proclamations made and heresies denounced at what was a kind of medieval Speakers’ Corner. It was also where the earliest English Bibles were burnt before the authorities decided to allow the people to hear the Scriptures in their native tongue.

      In 1422 Richard Walker, a Worcester chaplain, appeared at Paul’s Cross on charges of sorcery. Two books on magic which he had been caught reading were then burnt before his eyes. In 1447 Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, was made to kneel here before the Archbishop of Canterbury and around 20,000 onlookers to make a full confession of his ‘errors’. That was how his captors described his writings, which were then cast into the fire as a warning of the fate that might soon befall him.

      Preacher Beal stirred up the crowd so passionately on May Day 1517 that riots broke out across London as the mob attacked foreign merchants on what came to be called Evil May Day. Troops managed to restore order and took 400 rioters as prisoners. The leaders of the riots were hanged, drawn and quartered.

      On 12 May 1521 an unusual book, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (The Defence of the Seven Sacraments), setting out Catholic arguments against the new Protestant creed being propounded by Martin Luther in Germany, was unveiled at Paul’s Cross. The author was supposedly none other than Henry VIII, the jousting, hunting, non-bookish king. Though few believed that Henry was capable of such writing, evidence shows that the king was indeed the author of the work, which he dedicated to the Pope and which earned him the title ‘Defender of the Faith’.

      Copies of William Tyndale’s pioneering English translation of the Bible were burnt here in 1526, shortly after they had been smuggled into the country. They were selling in London for three shillings, but those found with such a Bible were made to ride backward on a donkey and wear a pasteboard mitre emblazoned with some of the offending passages. Tied to their backs were symbolic faggots of wood which they had to hurl into a bonfire as a warning of what would happen to them soon at Smithfield if they continued with their heretical reading.

      The Rood of Grace (→ p. 132), a wooden cross bearing an image that could supposedly move and speak if approached by one who had lived a pure life, was smashed to pieces under the king’s orders at Paul’s Cross in 1538. Two years later it was here that William Jerome, the vicar of St Dunstan and All Saints, was burnt alive for preaching an Anabaptist sermon (belittling infant baptism).

      Crowds would gather at Paul’s Cross to hear contentious sermons, which often resulted in trouble. For instance in 1549 preachers incited the onlookers to sack the cathedral itself, and a mob tore inside, destroyed the altar and smashed several tombs. At the first sermon preached here following the death of the Protestant king, Edward VI, on 6 July 1553 Bishop Bourne provoked the crowd by denouncing the Protestant Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley. A group of spectators began shouting: ‘He preaches damnation! Pull him down! Pull him down!’ Someone threw a dagger at Bourne. It stuck in one of the wooden side posts and the bishop was rushed into St Paul’s school for his own safety. In their desperation to exact revenge, the authorities arrested several people and imprisoned them in the Tower, while a priest and a barber had their ears nailed to the pillory at Paul’s Cross.

      Ridley himself soon made his stand here. On 16 July he denounced both royal princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, daughters of Henry VIII, as illegitimate and singled out Mary for special abuse as she was a papist. Ridley believed that Lady Jane Grey, great-granddaughter of Henry VII, should take the throne as the best way of preserving a Protestant succession – which she did but for only nine days.

      In April 1584 the Bishop of London СКАЧАТЬ