Three religious groups owned most of Clerkenwell in the Middle Ages. The map below of Medieval Clerkenwell and Smithfield, shows the various monastic houses, main roads and other features, superimposed on the modern street plan.
Two of the three monastic foundations of Clerkenwell appeared within a year of each other – 1144-45. These were endowed – set up and funded – by a rich Norman nobleman, Jordan de Bricet. He held tracts of land in Clerkenwell from the Bishop of London by a form of ownership known as ‘knights’ service’. This was an age when cash was not king. What mattered to the actual king – still a Norman rulers over an Anglo-Saxon population – was that his fellow Norman lords should provide him with an army when necessary to protect his throne. So, when land was apportioned out to William the Conqueror’s henchmen in 1066, and then by subsequent kings to their followers, the recipients, in return for their lands. committed to providing a certain number of fully equipped knights o fight for the King in his wars when asked,
Jordan de Briset decided to endow two religious foundations with his Clerkenwell land (presumably to guarantee his place in the life to come). The first of these endowments was to set up the Priory of St John of Jerusalem. The Order of St John of Jerusalem. was military religious order established during the Crusades. They set up a monastic foundation – a priory – on the land. The land itself covered the area today bounded by Cowcross and Turnmill Streets in the south and west, St John Street in the east, and Aylesbury Street in the north.
The second endowment was to set up the Convent of St Mary – a nunnery – with lands centred around the future St James’s Church in Clerkenwell Close and Clerkenwell Green. (A daughter and granddaughter of Jordan de Briset became nuns of St Mary’s.)
These 12th century religious houses were the first recorded landowners. They created walled precincts for their own estates. All that remains of the buildings of the Priory of St John is St John’s Gate, which was built as the main entrance into the precinct of St John’s by the Priory’s last great prior, Prior Docwra.
St Mary’s Convent has left no visible remains, But St James’s church was a development from the former nunnery.
A third monastic foundation arrived two centuries later. In 1371 Sir Walter Manny built London Charterhouse. It began as a chapel erected in 1349 for the plague burial ground which is roughly where Charterhouse Square is today. It also acquired land between some of St Bartholomew’s hospital in the south and St John’s Priory in the north. The Charterhouse was the only one of the three to survive in any significant form to the present day.
All these monastic foundations fell victim to Henry VIII’s ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ when he renounced the Roman Catholic Church over the Pope’s refusal to give him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. The Dissolution of the Monasteries took place between 1536 and 1541.
Charterhouse became a private house after its dissolution in 1538, and was bought by Lord North in 1545 and the Duke of Norfolk in 1565. The Charterhouse was sold to Thomas Sutton in 1611. He didn’t buy it to live in it. He dedicated it for charitable purposes as ‘Sutton’s Hospital in Charterhouse’, and that charitable foundation has continued down to the present day.