St Bartholomew the Great: London's Oldest Church Nave

Founded in 1123 by courtier Rahere, St Bartholomew the Great is London's oldest surviving church nave, featuring a 1595 Tudor gatehouse exposed by a German Zeppelin bomb in 1915. In 1725, a 19-year-old Benjamin Franklin worked as a typesetter in the church's repurposed Lady Chapel. Beside the church stands St Bartholomew's Hospital, also established by Rahere, which remains England's oldest continuously operating hospital.

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St Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield, London EC1A 9DS

Which American Founding Father worked at St Bartholomew the Great in London in 1725?

You're standing before one of London's best-kept secrets... and one of its oldest survivors. St Bartholomew the Great. Nine hundred years of history, tucked behind a half-timbered Tudor gatehouse that most people walk right past.......... The story begins in eleven twenty, when the court of King Henry the First was shattered by tragedy. The king's heir, Prince William Adelin, drowned in a shipwreck off Harfleur. Among the grief-stricken courtiers was a man named Rahere... variously described as a jester, a minstrel, and a cleric. Could one man really be all three? In twelfth-century England... apparently yes.......... Consumed by guilt over a life of loose living, Rahere set out on pilgrimage to Rome. There, malarial fever nearly killed him. He was nursed back to health at the church of San Bartolomeo on an island in the Tiber. And in his delirium... he saw a vision. A winged beast carried him to a great height, and a voice commanded him to build a church in a place called Smithfield.......... He came home. He convinced the king to grant him a marshy, filthy piece of land outside the city walls. Building started in eleven twenty-three, and the church was consecrated by eleven twenty-seven. Rahere became its first prior and founded a hospital beside it... which Still stands today as Saint Bart's Hospital, the oldest in England still in continuous operation.......... Now, look up at the gatehouse you passed through. In fifteen ninety-five, a man named William Scudamore built a Tudor house right on top of the medieval archway. Then in the eighteenth century, someone slapped a Georgian shopfront over the whole thing... and everyone forgot the Tudor building existed. Until nineteen fifteen. A German Zeppelin dropped one of the largest bombs London had ever seen on Bartholomew Close, blowing the Georgian facade clean off... and revealing this extraordinary Tudor survivor underneath!......... And here's something most visitors never learn. After the Dissolution, the church's ancient Lady Chapel was chopped off and used for commercial purposes. In seventeen twenty-five, it housed the printing shop of master printer Samuel Palmer. And the young man who came to work there as a typesetter? Nineteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin... a future Founding Father of America, setting type in a medieval chapel, three hundred years ago.......... One more thing. During nineteenth-century restoration, workers opened Rahere's tomb to check he was buried facing west, as priestly tradition demands. He was. But someone Stole his sandal... and his foot along with it. The sandal was returned. The foot... was not. Legend says that on the first of July, every year at seven in the morning, a shadowy cowled figure emerges from the vestry and hobbles through the church... still searching for his missing foot.

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