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.

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 survied from of the Crusade period.[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and a survey-enumerated eight horses, twelve oxen, two cows, 156 pigs, 60 geese and 186 domestic fowl.[3] The grant was revoked in 1402 and the property returned to the Lazars.[3] Lepers were cared for there until the mid-16th century, when the disease abated and the monastery took to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]

In the reign of Henry V, the village served as the centre of Sir John Oldcastle's abortive Lollard rebellion in 1414 and as the site of Oldcastle's execution in 1417.

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] An illustration from the time shows it with a round tower and dome, [2] which were replaced by a spire in 1617.[2] John Bromley was curate in the early reign of James I.[4]

The early church fell into disrepair and was replaced by a Gothic brick building in 1623–1630, mostly paid for by the Duchess of Dudley, wife of Sir Robert Dudley.[2] 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]

Hogarth's Noon from Four Times of the Day, a 1738 engraving showing the church in the background[5]

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. Other notable burials in the period include twelve Roman Catholic martyrs (killed on the testimony of Titus Oates), who were later beatified and are buried near the church's north wall:[2]

• 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,[6] William Harcourt, John Fenwick, John Gavan and Anthony Turner (martyr)
• Edward Coleman (or Colman), secretary to the Duchess of York
• Richard Langhorne, barrister[7]
• Edward Micó, priest (died soon after arrest; the only one of the twelve martyrs not to be executed at Tyburn)
• William Ireland, priest
• John Grove, priest.[8]
• Thomas Pickering, lay brother.[9]

A memorial for the seven Jesuit martyrs was unveiled on 20 January 2019.[10]

Looking down the aisle, inside the church

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 parishioners petitioned the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches for a grant to rebuild. Initially refused as it was not a new foundation, they were eventually allocated £8,000 and a new church was built in 1730–1734, designed by the architect Henry Flitcroft in the Palladian style (the first English church in that style).[2] The 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, to 30,000 by 1831.[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. 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 round 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.

The architects Sir Arthur Blomfield and William Butterfield made some alterations in 1875 and 1896.[2] St Giles escaped severe bombing in the Second World War, losing only most of the Victorian glass.[2] The church underwent major restoration in 1952–1953, 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.[11]

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, still recycling the original pipes, was done in 1856 by the 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 (organ builder), 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 known as the Poets' Church. The poet John Milton's daughter Mary was baptised in the Gothic brick building in 1647 and the Poetry Society holds its annual general meeting in the Vestry House. Two memorials in the church commemorate George Chapman, the translator of Homer (buried outside) and politician and poet Andrew Marvell.

Other famous people with memorials in St Giles include:

• Richard Penderell, who accompanied king Charles II on his famous escape
• Lord Belasyse, a noted royalist
• Sir Roger L'Estrange, the last public censor
• John Flaxman, sculptor
• Luke Hansard, printer to the House of Commons
• Thomas Earnshaw, watch and chronometer maker.
• James Shirley
• Thomas Nabbes
• Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury

Recent memorials commemorate:

• 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' 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]
• 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]

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.[12]