The London Franciscan Church Where Three Medieval Queens Were Buried and Whose Site Is Now a Vacant Plot Behind Newgate

The Greyfriars Church at Newgate was the second-largest church in medieval London — approximately 90 metres long and accommodating perhaps 1,500 worshippers — and the mother house of the Franciscan Order in England. It had been founded in 1225 with a substantial property grant immediately north of the Newgate city walls, expanded substantially in the late 13th century under Marguerite of France (second wife of Edward I), and substantively rebuilt in its definitive medieval form by Marguerite’s bequest at her death in 1318.

It became the favoured burial site for English medieval royal women.

The royal burials

The Greyfriars choir held royal tombs of three English queens. Marguerite of France (1279–1318) — the Capetian princess who had been Edward I’s second wife — was buried at the high altar she had paid to rebuild. Isabella of France (c. 1295–1358) — daughter of Philip IV, wife of Edward II, mother of Edward III, the queen who had invaded England in 1326 to depose her own husband — was buried at Greyfriars in 1358 in the Franciscan habit she had taken in her last years of widowed retirement at Castle Rising. Joan of the Tower (1321–1362) — daughter of Edward II and Isabella, Queen of Scotland as the wife of David II — was buried beside her mother in 1362. Eleanor of Provence (c. 1223–1291) — widow of Henry III — had been buried at Amesbury but her heart was interred at Greyfriars in a separate reliquary tomb.

Beyond the queens, the church held the tombs of numbers of medieval English noblewomen, royal mistresses (most famously Joan of Kent, the Black Prince’s wife, in 1385), and at least one alleged saint (the Franciscan tertiary Margery Kempe, by some 15th-century traditions). The substantive total number of marked medieval tombs in the church at the time of the Dissolution was approximately 670.

What the Dissolution did

Henry VIII’s 1538 Dissolution of the monasteries closed the Greyfriars community. The church building substantively survived — it was too large and too prominent to demolish outright — but the monastic income was substantively confiscated; the library of approximately 380 manuscripts was dispersed (a small number survived into the Bodleian collection); and the royal tomb structures were progressively desecrated through the 1540s under the Edwardian iconoclastic campaign. The brass and lead components of the tombs were stripped and sold for the military-budget value of the metal; the stone effigies were defaced and the bodies themselves were progressively removed from their original tombs and reburied as unmarked common interments under the church floor.

The substantively rebuilt nave became Christ Church Greyfriars, parish church of the adjacent Christ’s Hospital school, in 1547.

What the Great Fire did

The Great Fire of September 1666 destroyed Christ Church Greyfriars completely. Christopher Wren rebuilt the church between 1677 and 1704 in a reduced footprint — only the original choir was rebuilt; the nave site was left as an open paved square.

The rebuilt Wren church survived for 236 years.

What the Blitz did

A German incendiary bomb hit Christ Church Greyfriars on the night of 29 December 1940 — the ‘Second Great Fire of London’ raid that targeted the City churches. The Wren church burned out; the walls and the tower survived; the interior was destroyed. The church was substantively not rebuilt after the war.

The site today is a garden enclosed by the surviving Wren walls. The original medieval church footprint is marked in stone in the pavement. The three queens and the 670 other medieval burials lie beneath the modern Newgate Street paving stones in unmarked common interment, where they have lain since the 1540s.