St Giles in the Fields

The first recorded church on the site was a chapel of the Parish of Holborn attached to a monastery and leper hospital founded by Matilda of Scotland, consort of Henry I, in 1101.[2][3] At the time it stood well outside the City of London and distant from the Royal Palace at Westminster, on the main road to Tyburn and Oxford. The chapel probably began to function as the church of a hamlet that grew up round the hospital. Although there is no record of any presentation to the living before the hospital was suppressed in 1539, the fact that the parish of St. Giles was in existence at least as early as 1222 means that the church was at least partially used for parochial purposes from that time.[4]

The hospital was supported by the Crown and administered by the city for its first 200 years, being known as a Royal Peculiar. In 1299, Edward I assigned it to the Order of Saint Lazarus, one of the chivalric orders that survived from the era of the Crusades.[3] The 14th century was turbulent for the hospital, with frequent accusations from the City authorities that members of the Order of Saint Lazarus, known as Lazar brothers, put the affairs of the monastery ahead of caring for the lepers.[3] The king intervened on several occasions and appointed a new head of the hospital.[3]

In 1391, Richard II sold the hospital, chapel and lands to the Cistercian abbey of St Mary de Graces, by the Tower of London. This was opposed by the Lazars, who used force to express their displeasure to Richard, and by the City of London, which withheld rent money in protest.[3] The property at the time included 8 acres (32,000 m²) of farmland and a survey-enumerated eight horses, twelve oxen, two cows, 156 pigs, 60 geese and 186 domestic fowl.[3] The grant was revoked in 1402 and the property returned to the Lazars.[3] Lepers were cared for there until the mid-16th century, when the disease abated and the monastery took to caring for indigents instead.[3]

The burning of Sir John Oldcastle in St Giles Fields 1417.

In 1414, St Giles Fields served as the centre of Sir John Oldcastle's abortive proto-Protestant Lollard uprising directed against the Catholic Church and the English king Henry V. In anticipation of Protestantism Lollard beliefs were outlined in the 1395 The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards, which dealt with, among other things, their opposition to capital punishment, rejection of religious celibacy and belief that members of the clergy should be held accountable to civil laws. Rebel Lollards answered a summons to assemble at St. Giles's Fields on the night of Jan. 9, 1414. The king, however, was warned by his agents, and the small group of Lollards in assembly were captured or dispersed. The rebellion brought severe reprisals and marked the end of the Lollards’ overt political influence. On 14 December 1417 Sir John Oldcastle was hanged in chains and burnt 'gallows and all' in St Giles Fields. It is not clear whether he was burnt alive.

The monastery was dissolved in 1539[3] in the reign of Henry VIII, its lands, excluding the church, being granted to Lord Lisle in 1548.[3] However, the chapel survived as a local parish church, the first Rector of St Giles being appointed in 1547. The phrase "in the fields" was added to the church name.[2]

At the time of the dissolution the hospital chapel and the parish church of St. Giles would likely have consisted of two distinct structures under a single roof, much like the arrangement still to be seen in St. Helen's Church, Bishopsgate.[5]

The Vestry minutes of 21 April 1617, record the erection of a steeple with a peal of bells, but from the fact that "casting the bells" is mentioned as well as the buying of new bells, and from the reference to it in the following year (9 September 1618) as "the new steeple," it seems probable that something of the kind had existed before.

According to an order of the Vestry at the time of the demolition of the Medieval church in 1623, the church consisted of a nave and a chancel, both with pillars, clerestory walls over, and aisles on either side and stood 153 feet by 65 feet[4]

By the second decade of the 17th Century the Medieval church had suffered a series of collapses and the parishioners decided to erect a new church which was begun 1623 and completed in 1630,[4] mostly paid for by the Duchess of Dudley, wife of Sir Robert Dudley.[2] The 'poor players of The Cockpit theatre' were also said to have contributed a sum of £20 towards the new church building.[6] The new church was handsomely appointed and sumptuously furnished. 123 feet long and the breadth 57 wide with a steeple in rubbed brick, galleries adorning the north and south aisles with a great east window of coloured and painted glass.

St Giles in the Fields Church in the 17th Cenrury

The interior was well furnished and provided with numerous ornaments, many of which were the gift of Lady Dudley. Chief among them was an elaborate screen of carved oak placed where one had formerly stood in the Medieval church. This, as stated in a petition to Parliament in 1640, was "in the figure of a beautifull gate, in which is carved two large pillars, and three large statues: on the one side is Paul, with his sword; on the other Barnabas, with his book; and over them Peter with his keyes. They are all set above with winged cherubims, and beneath supported by lions."

Elaborate and expensive altar rails would have separated the altar from congregation. This ornamental balustrade extended the full width of the chancel and stood 7 or 8 feet east of the screen at the top of three steps while the altar stood close up to the east wall paved with marble.[4]

The new building was consecrated by William Laud, Bishop of London.[2] An illuminated list of subscribers to the rebuilding is still kept in the church.[2]

All this sumptuous decoration was sure to attract the hostility of the Reforming party in the land and In 1640 a petition was presented to Parliament enumerating the various articles which were considered superstitious and idolatrous. The result of this action was that most of the ornaments were stripped and sold in 1643, while Lady Dudley was still alive.[4]

William Heywood was the incumbent at the time of the Great Rebellion in 1642. As well as Rector of St Giles he was domestic chaplain to Archbishop Laud, chaplain in ordinary to King Charles I and prebendary at St Paul's cathedral. All this marked him out for special attention after the execution of the King and during the Commonwealth period he was imprisoned and suffered many hardships.[7] Heywood was forced to flee London, residing in Wiltshire until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 when he was re-instated to the living of St Giles at Westminster.[7]

Later in the 17th century, during the reign of King James II, John Sharp (who was to become Bishop of York under William III and Almoner to Queen Mary) was Rector of St Giles. In 1686, in the context of the Romanising policy of the King, Sharp's warm opposition to rising Popery and his defence of the reformed protestant religion caused him to be silenced by royal order.[8] In 1688 was further cited for refusing to read the Declaration of Indulgence. His supporter and benefactor Henry Compton, Bishop of London was himself suspended from his bishopric by James's revived Ecclesiastical commission in 1686 for refusing to suspend Sharp from the living.of St Giles.[9]

Hogarth's Noon from Four Times of the Day, a 1738 engraving showing the church in the background[10]

Looking down the aisle, inside the church

St.Giles's Parish enjoys the distinction of having originated the Great Plague of 1665. It is on record that the first persons seized were members of a family living near the top of Drury Lane, where two men, said to have been Frenchmen, were attacked by it, and speedily carried off.

The high number of plague victims buried in and around the church were the probable cause of a damp problem evident by 1711.[2] The excessive number of burials in the parish had led to the churchyard rising as much as eight feet above the nave floor.[11] The parishioners petitioned the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches for a grant to rebuild. Initially refused as it was not a new foundation and the Act was intended for new parishes in under-churched areas, the parish was eventually allocated £8,000 and a new church was built in 1730–1734, designed by architect Henry Flitcroft in the Palladian style.[2] The first stone was laid by the Bishop of Norwich on Michaelmas, 29 September 1731.[11]

The Flitcroft rebuilding represents a shift from the Baroque to the Palladian form of church building in England and has been described as 'one of the least known but most significant episodes in Georgian church design, standing at a crucial crossroads of radical architectural change and representing nothing less than the first Palladian-Revival church to be erected in London...".[11] Nicholas Hawksmoor had been an early choice to design the new church building at St Giles but tastes had begun to turn against his freewheeling mannerist style (his recent work on the nearby St George's Bloomsbury was strongly criticised).[11] Instead the young and inexperienced Henry Flitcroft was chosen and he would take as his inspiration and guide the Caroline buildings of Inigo Jones rather than the work of Wren, Hawksmoor or Gibbs.[11] Only in the matter of the spire of the church, for which Palladio had no model, did Flitcroft borrow as his model the steeple of James Gibbs's St Martin's in the Fields but even then, in altering the Order and preferring a solid, belted summit, he made it all his own.[11] The wooden model he made so that parishioners could see what they were commissioning, can still be seen in the church's north transept. The Vestry House was built at the same time.[2]

As London grew in the 18th and 19th centuries, so did the parish's population, eventually reaching 30,000 by 1831 which suggests a high density.[2] It included two neighbourhoods noted for poverty and squalor: the Rookery between the church and Great Russell Street, and Seven Dials.[2] These became a centre for prostitution and crime and the name St Giles associated with the underworld, gambling houses and the consumption of gin. St Giles's Roundhouse was a jail and St Giles' Greek a thieves' cant. As the population grew, so did their dead, and eventually there was no room in the graveyard: many burials in the 18th and 19th centuries occurred in cemeteries outside the parish St Pancras.

St Giles was the last church on the route between Newgate Prison and the gallows at Tyburn, and the churchwardens paid for the condemned to have a drink (popularly named St Giles' Bowl) at the next door inn, The Angel, before they were hanged, a custom dating back to the early 15th century.[2][3] The dissolute nature of the area is described in Charles Dickens' Sketches by Boz.

Architects Sir Arthur Blomfield and William Butterfield made minor alterations in 1875 and 1896.[2] St Giles escaped direct bombing hits in the Second World War, though losing most of its Victorian stained glass to bomb blast.[2] The church underwent major restoration in 1952–1953 adhering to Flitcroft's intentions, on which the Georgian Group and Royal Fine Art Commission were consulted[12] and described by the journalist and poet John Betjeman as "one of the most successful post-war church restorations" (Spectator 9 March 1956).[2] The parish today sits in a commercial district with a resident population of about 4,600.[2]

The church was designated a Grade I listed building on 24 October 1951.[13]

The churchyard lies to the south of the church building.

St Giles Churchyard

The first victims of the 1665 Great Plague were buried in St Giles's Churchyard. By the end of the plague year there were 3,216 listed deaths in a church parish with fewer than 2,000 households.[2]

The churchyard formerly contained numerous tombs and monuments notably to the poet and dramatist George Chapman and the Royalist hero Richard Penderell, preserver of the Kings life within the branches of the Royal Oak, after the 1651 Battle of Worcester.[6] Following the burial acts of the late 19th Century The tombs and graves were largely cleared to create a public space of greenery.

Twelve Roman Catholic martyrs (executed for High Treason on the testimony of Titus Oates), who were later beatified by Pope Pius XI are buried near the church's north wall:[2]

Memorial in St Giles Church.

• Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, buried (according to the parish register) on 1 July 1681, but exhumed in 1683 and taken to Lamspringe Abbey in Germany. Later it was moved again. His head went to Rome, was then given to the Archbishop of Armagh, and is now at Drogheda. His body rests at Downside Abbey, Somerset. He was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1975.
• The five Jesuit fathers with whom Plunkett asked to be buried:
  • Thomas Whitbread,[14] William Harcourt, John Fenwick, John Gavan and Anthony Turner (martyr)
• Edward Coleman (or Colman), secretary to the Duchess of York
• Richard Langhorne, barrister[15]
• Edward Micó, priest, who died soon after arrest. He was the only one of the twelve martyrs not to be executed at Tyburn.
• William Ireland, priest
• John Grove, priest[16]
• Thomas Pickering, lay brother[17]

A memorial for the seven Jesuit martyrs and all those buried within the churchyard was unveiled on 20 January 2019.[18]

The Resurrection Gate

At the western end of the churchyard facing Flitcroft Street stands the Resurrection Gate, a grand lychgate in the Doric order. It is adorned with a bas-relief of the Day of Judgement. The carving is probably the work of a wood-carver named Love commissioned in 1686 when directions were given by the vestry to erect "a substantial gate out of the wall of the churchyard near the round house". It formerly stood on the north side of the churchyard and was rebuilt in 1810 to the designs of the architect and churchwarden of St Giles William Leverton.[19] In 1865, being unsafe, it was taken down and carefully re-erected opposite the west door in anticipation of the re-routing of Charing Cross Road. As it happened Charing Cross road bypassed Flitcroft Street and now the gate faces onto a narrow alleyway.[5]

The first 17th-century organ was destroyed in the English Civil War. George Dallam built a replacement in 1678, which was rebuilt in 1699 by Christian Smith, a nephew of the great organ builder "Father" Smith. A second rebuilding in the new structure was done in 1734 by Gerard Smith the younger, possibly assisted by Johann Knopple. Much of the pipework from 1678 and 1699 was recycled.

A rebuilding, again recycling much of Dallam's original pipework, was done in 1856 by London organ builders Gray & Davison, then at the height of their fame. In 1960 the mechanical key and stop actions were replaced with an electro-pneumatic action. This was removed when the organ was extensively restored in a historically informed manner by William Drake, completing in 2006. Drake put back tracker action and preserved as much old pipework as possible, with new pipework in a 17th-century style.

St Giles is sometimes called the "Poets' Church" on account of connections to several poets and dramatists beginning in the 16th Century.

An early post-reformation Rector, Nathaniel Baxter was both clergyman and poet. In earlier life he had been tutor to Sir Philip Sidney, and interested in the manner of Sidney's circle in literature and Ramist logic,. He is now remembered for his 1606 poem Ourania.

The poor players of the Cockpit Theatre are said to have contributed £20 to the building of the second church on the site before their suppression by Parliament in 1642.

James Shirley and Thomas Nabbes, two noted English playwrights of the 17th Century were buried within the church. Both were writers of city comedies and historical tragedies. Shirley was perhaps the most prolific and highly regarded dramatist of the reign of King Charles I,[20] writing 31 plays, 3 masques, and 3 moral allegories. He is best remembered for his comedies of fashionable London life. Also buried in the churchyard was Michael Mohun, a leading English actor both before and after the 1642–60 closing of the theatres.[6]

A memorial in the church commemorates George Chapman (died 1634), intimate friend of Ben Jonson, the translator of Homer and writer of masques, who is buried outside in the churchyard. His memorial was designed by Inigo Jones, who produced the masques to Chapman's texts, and paid for by Jones because Chapman died in dire poverty. Chapman is perhaps equally famous as forming part of the subject of John Keats's sonnet 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer'.

The politician, pamphleteer and metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell (died 1678) was buried and memorialised in St Giles as is Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury (died 1648) (poet-philosopher and brother of the poet George Herbert),[6] who in 1624 published his controversial metaphysical treatise De Veritate on the advice of the philosopher Hugo Grotius (it which remains on the Catholic index of forbidden books)

Sir Roger L' Estrange, buried and memorialised at St Giles, was the last Surveyor of the Press in England as well as Licenser of the Press until 1672 - effectively a national literary censor. He is remembered for attempting to suppress the following lines from Book I of Milton's Paradise Lost, for potentially impugning the Kings Majesty:

As when the Sun new ris'n

Looks through the Horizontal misty Air

Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon

In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds

On half the Nations, and with fear of change

Perplexes Monarchs

The font of St Giles and nave interior.

John Milton's daughter Mary was baptised in the second church building in 1647; whilst the daughter of Lord Byron, Clara and the son William and daughter Clara of the poet Percy Shelley by his marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft were all baptised in the present St Giles church building. The Poetry Society holds its annual general meeting in St Giles Vestry House.

As of 2021 the church began to expand this association, announcing Jay Hulme as their Poet-In-Residence.

Distinguished people with memorials in St Giles include:

• Richard Penderell, Roman Catholic yeoman forester who accompanied king Charles II on his famous escape from the Battle of Worcester
• Lord Belasyse, a noted Roman Catholic Royalist Lieutenant General.
• Sir Roger L'Estrange, English pamphleteer, author, courtier and the last Surveyor of the Press of England.
• Andrew Marvell, English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician.
• John Flaxman RA, sculptor and draughtsman, and a leading figure in British and European Neoclassicism.
• Luke Hansard, printer to the House of Commons
• Thomas Earnshaw, watchmaker who simplified the production of the marine chronometer making them available to the general public for the first time. Watchmaker to Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty.
• James Shirley 17th Century English dramatist. House dramatist to Queen Henrietta's Men.
• Thomas Nabbes, 17th Century English dramatist and writer of masques.
• Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, Anglo-Welsh soldier, diplomat, historian, poet and religious philosopher. "the father of English Deism".[21]
• George Chapman, English dramatist, translator and poet.
• Cecil Calvert, first Proprietor of the Colony of Avalon in 1610 and the Maryland colony in 1633. (Some of the colonists were from St Giles's parish.) His memorial was unveiled on 10 May 1996 by the Governor of Maryland, Parris N. Glendening. Calvert, his son and daughters-in-law are buried at St Giles.[2]
• 

  The tomb of George Chapman
  William Balmain, one of the founders of New South Wales and Principal Surgeon of the Colony, has a memorial on the north-west wall, put up by the Balmain Society of Sydney in 1996.[2]
• John Lumsden of Cushnie, member of the Bengal Supreme Council and made director of the East India Company in 1817..
• John Coleridge Patteson, Born in St Giles Parish he became a missionary, anti-slavery campaigner in the South Seas and first Anglican Bishop of Melanesia.[22] Martyred on the island of Nukapu, he is commemorated in the Church of England calendar on 20 September.

The wooden pulpit on the north side of the church was rescued from the nearby West Street Chapel (now in non-religious use). It was the pulpit from which Methodist founders John and Charles Wesley preached 1741–1793.[2]

The two paintings of Moses and Aaron on either side of the altar are by Francisco Vieira the Younger, court painter to the King of Portugal.[2]

The mosaic Time, Death and Judgment by G. F. Watts was formerly in St Jude's Church, Whitechapel. The cartoon for it was by Cecil Schott; it was executed by Salviati.[23]