St Bartholomew’s: the sacredest space of all
St Bartholomew the Great, in Smithfield, London, was great indeed by the 15th century, when the amplification of the church had brought its length to 349ft, longer than Rochester Cathedral (320ft) or Chester Cathedral (345ft).
In about 1400, the year Chaucer died, a translation into English was made of The Book of the Foundation of St Bartholomew’s Church. It had been written in Latin, anonymously, a couple of generations after the church and neighbouring hospital had been founded in 1123, by Rahere, a courtier to Henry I. Rahere, after the Reformation, was made out to be a sort of court jester, which is pushing his reputation for japes a bit far.
Anyway, in 1405, when the Romanesque solidity of St Bartholomew’s was beautified in high Gothic style, the founder was given a lovely new memorial tomb with his effigy recumbent in the dress of an Augustinian (the order to which his priory belonged).
A kneeling figure carved in stone holds a book with words from the beginning of chapter 51 of
Isaiah: God “will comfort all her [Sion’s] waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord”.
That is what Rahere had done on the marshy land of Smithfield where godless miscreants had formerly been executed.
St Bartholomew’s as a sacred space is explored by Laura Varnam as the prime specimen in her new book The Church as Sacred Space in Middle English Literature and Culture. Indeed, Dr Varnam, a lecturer at University College, Oxford, concludes that The Book of the Foundation presents St Bartholomew’s as “the most sacred space in medieval England” – more sacred than St Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey.
It is true that The Book of the Foundation recounts Rahere’s vision of St Bartholomew saving him from “an horrible pytte whose horryble beholding ynpressed in hym the beholder great drede and horroure”. After his building of the church in gratitude, The Book recounts a series of miracles granted to suppliants for St Bartholomew’s prayers to God. Not all of these seem to me to be much about the sacred space of the church.
One that does describe the measuring out of cubic dimensions narrates the history of a woman caught in a fire raging through the town of Hastings. She called upon St Bartholomew and began to “compasse the howse” with a thread. Lo and behold, the fire jumped over the house encompassed by the thread, not sparing the neighbours’ from being burnt to ashes.
This puzzling use of thread is no doubt connected, as Dr Varnam helpfully explains, to the good woman’s promise to light a candle in honour of the saint. As in another, rather touching case where a woman measured the length of her sick cow (which recovered) in order to present a candle of the same length in church, so the Hastings thread indicated the size of the suppliant’s faith, as it were.
In her learned (and sometimes academically phrased) study, Dr Varnam mentions that St Bartholomew’s, like all churches, was seen at the time as another version of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
I’d suggest, moreover, that an element reducing even St Bartholomew’s “most-sacred status” is a remark by The Book’s author about marvelling at “the mystery of Our Lord’s Body and Precious Blood” in this formerly muddy, profanely bloody place.
Belief in the real presence of Christ and the daily action of the Sacrifice of the Mass was something that elevated all medieval churches to supreme holiness, in which the saints could only participate.