Old London Maps
Free access to scores of rare and detailed maps, plans, articles, information and views of medieval, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century London for the genealogist, family historian, student and the curious.

 

 

 

St Helen

St Helen's is said to have been founded by the Emperor Constantine - it is dedicated to his mother (who was sanctified for travelling to Jerusalem and there finding Christ's cross). In the early thirteenth century the church became the site of a Benedictine nunnery, founded by William Fitzwilliam. The nuns appear to have led a joyous life, being reprimanded on more than one occasion for keeping too many little dogs, for wearing gaudy veils, and for public dancing and revelling. Joyous or not, neither nuns nor institution survived the dissolution of the monasteries of the mid-sixteenth century.

See the page on St Helen's nunnery for engravings done during its demolition in 1799.

 

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