White chapel to Whitechapel
We all know Whitechapel, home of the Blind Beggar, the London Hospital, and entrance to the East End as you emerge eastward from the City. But what was the ‘White Chapel’ and what became of it?
The present Whitechapel/Mile End/Bow Road has for centuries been the main highway out of London into Essex. About a mile beyond Aldgate, 13th century travellers out of the City would have come across the alba capella or White Chapel, standing just to the south of the main road.
Another name for the distinctively whitewashed church was the chapel of the Blessed Mary of Matfelon. There are a number of myths about the naming of the chapel – one that it refers to a ‘felon’, a sailor hanged for robbing a local widow. Another is that it refers to the knapweed (otherwise known as matfelon) that grew in the locale. Most likely is that the Matfelons, a local family, had a hand in the funding of the church.
By the middle of the 14th century, the area that had begun as an overspill from London was becoming a sizable community in its own right, and St Mary Matfelon was established as the parish church. The parish, meanwhile, had become known as Whitechapel – the glistening white of the building’s stone had made it a well-known landmark on the London-Essex road, and the name had stuck.
Sometime in the late 1300s the white chapel was replaced by a new church, 100ft long and 60ft wide, and as the parish grew in population, legacies from parishioners made it richer. In 1410, the rector, Roger Haldanby left £2 for the belfry. John Sonder left £4 8/- 6d in 1428, and Robert Mason left 3/- 4d (about 17 pence in today’s money) in 1437.
This new parish of Whitechapel was effectively a suburb of the City, an extension of the ward of Portsoken. But even if it was increasingly affluent, it was a higgledy-piggledy and unhygienic offshoot. The historian John Stow wrote in the late 1500s about what had become a filthy shanty town. The field by Whitechapel church, “being sometime the beauty of the city on that part, is so encroached upon by building of filthy cottages, and with other purpressors, inclosures and laystalls (notwithstanding all proclamations and Acts of Parliament made to the contrary) that in some places it scarce remaineth a sufficient highway”. So chaotic had the unregulated development of Whitechapel become, that people were building shops and homes that actually blocked the route out to Essex.
It’s probably inaccurate to describe Whitechapel at the time as London overspill. What was happening was that the increased size and affluence of the City was starting to draw immigrants like a magnet from Essex, Suffolk and beyond. People travelled to the capital in search of work and riches, and fetched up camping outside the City gates, where lodgings were cheap – if not pleasant. Stow had, in fact, recorded the first emergence of the East End slums, with subdivided properties and an endless inpouring of new souls to fill them. The pleasant Essex countryside “without” the City wall had gone forever.
But though the new population may have been poor and transient, they were devout. Parishioners left money for lights to be burned before the statues in the church. Individual fraternities, or associations of worshippers, also endowed tapers to be burned in the church – Blessed Trinity, St Luke, the guild of Corpus Christi and Our Lady, the guild of St Katharine and St Margaret were just some of the associations remembered in the church.
The church was rebuilt again in 1669, and again after excavations in 1874. But the church was destroyed for the last time by enemy bombs in the Second World War, and was never rebuilt. Now, all that remains of the white chapel is a name.