In the winter of 1521, Anne Boleyn arrived in London. It was probably her first time in the city and is likely that she came by ship. Whenever possible, the gentry avoided London’s plague-ridden streets.
The bells of Saint Paul’s would have rung on the hour. But the medieval cathedral Anne Boleyn would have seen in 1521 was very different from the one we know today.
The old St Paul’s stood 224ft higher than today’s cathedral, with a needle spire rather than the dome designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Built up against its walls, there would have been small shops trading in buskins, biggins, and slops (knee-length boots, close-fitting caps, and short trousers).
In Anne’s day, the precinct would have been bustling with richly-attired prelates, with the murmuring of benedictions and the sound of the choir echoing all around. The nearby streets would have been seething with flocks of sheep, goats, and swine, accompanied by drovers and fleshers, all heading to the morning market.
The grand nave, known as Paul’s Walk, was 100ft wide. It consisted of twelve bays and was home to weekly markets. The people who assembled there became known as Paul’s Walkers and News Mongers. Later it was called the ‘general mint of all lies and exchange of all discourse’. Beggars, thieves, and prostitutes met there too. It was as much a den of iniquity as a house of piety.
In 1285, the Dean of St Paul’s asked King Edward I for permission to fit gates and strengthen and raise the height of the walls around the churchyard, where fornication, robberies and even murders were known to have taken place.
There were six gates into the cathedral. Ave-Maria in the east corner at the entrance to Ave-Maria Lane was named after the rosaries sold at its entrance. Paternoster, on Paternoster Row, was so named because copies of the Lord’s Prayer were sold there. Little North Door or the Postern Gate was the servant’s gate. Creed Gate got its name in the Tudor era when copies of the alphabet and creed were sold there. There was also a gate in the city wall on Ludgate Hill that had a small chapel in it. Paul’s Chain comes from the chain that was drawn across the gateway when services were taking place.
A series of paintings called the Dance of Death decorated the cloister, reminding people of their fragility and their relationship with death. In the paintings, armoured soldiers attempted to defend themselves in a last bitter duel with death.
The cathedral was filled with the tombs of bishops. Royalty were buried in Westminster Abbey, although the two Saxon Kings, Sebba and Elthelred, were buried in the cathedral. On 9th May 1509, the body of Henry VII was taken in a black chariot from Richmond Palace to the cathedral, accompanied by 700 torchbearers, to lie in state before his funeral.
Denunciations of heretics took place at the open-air pulpit, known as St Paul’s Cross. Traditionally, heretics were forced to carry fagots and were marched through the cathedral to the north door to throw them on the fire to burn with their heretical books and tracts.
The Lollards’ Tower in the west churchyard was a prison for heretics. In the winter of 1514, a wealthy merchant named Richard Humme was found hanged after the church authorities raided his house two months earlier and discovered heretical books written in English.
In 1505, the Dean of Saint Paul’s, John Colet, inherited a sum of money after the death of his father and began working with scholars and advocates of the new religion to re-establish the reputation of the cathedral’s school. He built a new school on the east side of the precinct. It opened in 1510, for 153 pupils, without any fees. Colet fought with the Church and assigned control of the school to the Mercers’ Company whom his father had worked for.
By the late sixteenth century the cathedral had started to decline. After the dissolution of the monasteries, much of the land and many of the religious buildings within the churchyard were seized by the Crown and sold off or rented out as shops.
During the reign of Elizabeth I, lightning struck the cathedral spire, and it caught fire. Although at the time the roof was rebuilt, the spire was not.
James I attempted repairs during his reign after the cathedral had fallen into further disrepair, but the authorities of the time were lukewarm to the cause as England was now more fiercely protestant.
During the English Civil War, Paul’s Cross was pulled down and the cathedral’s revenues were seized for the military, while its precious vessels were sold and the nave turned into cavalry barracks. The cathedral itself was too big and cumbersome to pull down, so it was left to fall into ruin.
On Monday 27th August 1666, King Charles II requested estimates to rebuild parts of the cathedral. Less than a week later, on 2nd September, Samuel Pepys began to write his diary documenting the Great Fire of London. London burned for six days. On 7th September, Pepys records that he took a boat to Paul’s Wharf, where he took a walkabout. He says that the roof of the cathedral had fallen in, along with the body of the choir, and that the school had burned to the ground. Other chronicles of the time refer to the cathedral as a ‘sad ruin,’ with ‘flakes of vast stone split asunder’.
William Sancroft, Dean of St Paul’s at the time of the fire, wanted to see the cathedral restored to its former glory, and even preached to King Charles II inside the ruin, but he was forced to concede that this was not possible after two of its pillars collapsed.
In November 1673, the King announced his determination to rebuild for the nation ‘a cathedral worthy of England and her capital’. He wanted French Architect Claude Perrault to design it, the man who had designed the front of the Louvre, but parliament rejected this proposal. The job later fell to Christopher Wren, who had previously condemned the building as unsafe.
The remains of Old St Paul’s were demolished with gunpowder in 1668 and work on the new cathedral began to the design of Christopher Wren. By 1710 it was declared officially complete.
It is a little sad that none of Old St Paul’s remains. It bore witness to so much history, good and bad. But the cathedral that stands today is one of a kind in the UK, with its classical style that is meant to replicate St Peter’s Basilica. It is still well worth a visit and has a colourful history all of its own. The St Paul’s of today had withstood bombs from suffragettes as well as the Blitz. Shrapnel scars are visible on the stone of the cathedral, which became first a symbol of wartime resistance, then of celebration and peace. The wedding venue of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer took place here, which legend identifies as the site of an old Roman temple dedicated to Diana, Goddess of Hunting, to whom they made sacrifices from the well-stocked hunting forests that surrounded the Thames. More recently the Queen came to St Paul’s on her Dimond Jubilee.