An Historical Sketch of the Priory and Royal Hospital of St. Bartholomew

St Bartholomew’s was founded by the monk Rahere, formerly Henry I’s minstrel, in 1123 to give free medical care to the poor of the City of London. Its church priory was dissolved in 1539 and, to quote Delamotte, ‘bestowed upon the unworthy minions of the king’ (p. 14). Mary gave it to the Black Friars, and under Elizabeth I it became an Anglican church in West Smithfield, as it remains today. Henry VIII transferred the hospital to the City of London in 1546, under the name ‘The House of the Poore in West Smithfield in the suburbs of the City of London of Henry VIII’s Foundation’ (the official name until the National Health Service was formed in 1948). Thus although the hospital is the oldest in Britain to provide all medical facilities on the site on which it was founded almost nine hundred years ago, it is firmly linked with the Reformation. A stained glass window in the Great Hall depicts Henry VIII handing the hospital’s charter of 1546 to his surgeon, Thomas Vicary. The main entrance is still through an arch with a statue of Henry VIII over the centre: the only remaining statue of Henry VIII in London.