Sometimes,
when I’m out and about I’ll meet a building and fall in love with it. That happened today while I was wandering
around the streets in the heart of the City of London. Walking along in a bit of a daydream I
glanced up to see in the distance in front of me an arched stone gateway topped
with some carved skulls. Intrigued, I went
over and had a look. The gateway led
into a small garden area with some old, old gravestones and then the small and
rather quaint looking church of St Olave’s, an ancient little building sitting
in amongst a load of modern office blocks. Entering the building I found a little
peaceful haven from the noisy world outside.
A place just dripping with atmosphere and tinged with the silent voices
and memories of generation upon generation of worshippers and visitors who had
spent time here. A place where I just
wanted to sit down on the pews and absorb the ambience.
Now,
you may wonder who is this St Olave that the church is named after. Well, he was King Olaf II from Norway who in
1014 came to England and helped Æthelred the Unready claim his throne back from
the Danish King, Cnut (a name that should always be spell checked). At the Battle of London Bridge, he and his
men scored a decisive victory against the Danes and recaptured London for Æthelred.
After his time in England, Olaf spent some time in France where he converted to
Christianity, before returning to Norway.
There he was credited with the Christianisation of the country before losing
the crown to King Cnut and being forced into exile. In 1030 Olaf was killed at the Battle of
Stiklestad. He was then canonised just a
year after his death and became the patron saint of Norway.
The
site on which St Olave’s Church stands is believed to have been a place of
worship since the 11th Century.
The original church was likely to have been a simple wooden building
which was replaced with a stone built church in the late 12th or
early 13th Century. In the
1460s two merchants from the City, Richard and Robert Cely, had that church replaced
with the present building. St Olave’s was
one of the few churches that escaped the flames of the Great Fire of London in
1666. It was saved by the forward
thinking of Sir William Penn who ordered his men from the nearby naval yard to
blow up the houses around the church to create a fire break. The church went on to survive pretty much
intact, with a few interior and exterior alterations, right up until World War
II when it suffered severe damage during several bombing raids. It was then rebuilt between 1951 to 1954.
St
Olave’s Church is one of those places that connects you back to many historical
figures who have worshipped there. Queen
Elizabeth I, while still Princess Elizabeth, held a thanksgiving service there in
1554 to celebrate her release from the Tower of London. She had been imprisoned there for a few
months by her sister Queen Mary, also known as Bloody Mary for her penchant for
having Protestants executed.
The
diarist Samuel Pepys was a regular worshipper there who affectionately referred
to St Olave’s as ‘our own church’. Though he cared much for the building he did
not always appreciate the sermons there, writing in his diary – ‘So to church
again, and heard a simple fellow upon the praise of church musique, and
exclaiming against men’s wearing their hats on in the church, but I slept part of
the sermon, till latter prayer and blessing was all done without waking which I
never did in my life…’ When Pepys wife
Elisabeth died, he had a marble bust of her made and installed on the north
wall of the sanctuary. There, she faced
out to where he would sit in the church so that he could see her and feel she
was there with him. On his death in
1703, Pepys was buried alongside the body of his wife in the nave of the church.
The
author Charles Dickens was also a bit of a fan of St Olave’s and the gateway
decked with skulls. He commented that it
was ‘one of my best beloved churchyards, I call the churchyard of Saint Ghastly
Grim… This gate is
ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than life, wrought in stone, but
it likewise came into the mind of Saint Ghastly Grim, that to stick iron spikes
atop of the stone skulls, as though they were impaled, would be a pleasant
device…I once felt drawn to it in a thunderstorm at midnight…and found the
skulls most effective, having the air of a public execution and seeming, as the
lightning flashed, to wink and grin with the pain of the spikes.’
Though
the churchyard of St Olave’s is tiny, it is the resting place of lots and lots
of people. Of those whose bones lie in
the ground under your feet as you walk through the little oasis of green, the
names of most are now either lost to time or mean nothing to us, their
histories long gone. One of the names
that stands out though is that of Mother Goose, who was buried there in 1586. Who she was no-one seems to know, and it is
unclear if she was the inspiration for the pantomime character or maybe just an
elderly woman with the surname Goose. Hundreds
of victims from the 1665 plague outbreak were also buried there, including Mary
Ramsay, who was believed to have been the person who brought the disease to
London.
After
soaking up the atmosphere of St Olave’s, I made my way out to the churchyard. There, in early afternoon sunshine, I left
the Skulferatu that had accompanied me in a hollow in a tree.
The
coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are -
I
used the following sources for information on St Olave’s Church –
