In the Shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral: The Churchyard That Shaped London
MARGARET WILLES
(YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 320 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £19.99 • tel 020 7799 4064
St Paul’s today is synonymous with Wren’s great structure, completed in 1711. From ancient times until just into living memory, though, it was something more: a vibrant, often boisterous residential community of laypeople gathered around “Paul’s Churchyard”, people whose lives intersected with that of the building in complex ways.
Margaret Willes’ book recovers that community’s texture, neatly threading together evocation of the churchyard’s physical space and public spectacles with the personal stories of its occupants.
Medieval St Paul’s, constituted as a college of secular canons, not a monastic priory, was unusual among English cathedral foundations. Until the twelfth century, its canons were free to marry. Thereafter, there remained a greater porousness between cathedral and community than elsewhere. St Paul’s had no “close” locked at night to keep locals out – though also no hospital, dormitory or refectory to foster spiritual community. In the Middle Ages, and across the chasm of the Reformation, Londoners made St Paul’s their own, blurring interior and exterior, sacred and secular.
