The Charterhouse is a former Carthusian monastery in London, located between Barbican and Smithfield Market, and to the north of what is now Charterhouse Square. Since the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century the site has served as a private mansion, a boys’ school and an almshouse, which it remains to this day.
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Residents of the almshouse are known as‘Brothers’, which is a purely traditional term acknowledging the Charterhouse’s monastic past. The building is formally known as Sutton’s Hospital in Charterhouse, and is a registered charity(number 207773).
Desirous of an excuse to view the magnificence of the Charterhouse, I made a call upon my friend Brother Hilary Haydon one sunny afternoon, using the excuse of undertaking a photoessay, and these pictures – interspersed with lantern slides from the Bishopsgate Institute of the same subject a century ago – are the result.
Clerkenwell 101
22 Charterhouse, in Charterhouse Square, is a former Carthusian monastery established as a priory in 1371. Its name was derived from the Chartreuse Mountains, where the originator of Carthusian order, St Bruno of Cologne, built a hermitage in the 11th century.
23 Charterhouse was the largest of nine Carthusian houses in England, but was closed in 1538 during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of Monasteries. seventeen monks were killed for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as the Supreme Head of the Church. In 1545 Edward, first Baron North, bought what remained and rebuilt the site as a large house. Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, bought the house in 1564 and lavishly extended it. It was bought in 1611 by Thomas Sutton, the wealthiest commoner of his time.
24 Charterhouse was founded on the site of a Black Death plague pit where up to 50,000 people may have been buried between 1348-49. Excavations for Crossrail unearthed dozens of the bodies. Of the 25 analysed, 10 were found to be born outside London.
25 Thomas Sutton’s Charterhouse contained almshouses and a hospital for 80 poor men known as the‘Brothers’–“either decrepit or old captaynes either at sea or at land, maimed or disabled soldiers, merchants fallen on hard times, those ruined by shipwreck or other calamity”. The hospital still remains and there are still around 40 elderly‘Brothers’ residing at Charterhouse. It’s unclear how many of them are‘decrepit old captaynes’, but occasionally Brothers have been known to‘escape’ for a swift drink in the Fox and Anchor nearby.
26 Sutton also provided a school for 40 poor scholars. The school was later developed into a well-known public school Charterhouse, which moved to Surrey in 1872.
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