THE CHARTERHOUSE

CHARTERHOUSE, an offshoot of the Grande Chartreuse

in Savoy, by turns a Monastery, a Palace, a Hospital and School, and now a Hospital only, is, to our shame be it said, best beloved by Americans. To them its first appeal is through Thackeray's delightful picture of his old school-Grey Friars, he calls it—and finding it even more charming than it had been painted, they remain true lovers of its peaceful courts and memory-haunted precinct.

The Black Death of 1348 so fiercely ravaged the City of London that there was not enough consecrated ground wherein to bury the dead. The Bishop of that date, Ralph Stratford, bought a plot of ground in West Smithfield, outside the city wall, which he fenced in and consecrated, together with a chapel, calling the place Pardon Churchyard. Soon after, Sir Walter Manny, one of Philippa of Hainault's retainers, who entered the service of Edward III, and was made one of the first Knights of the Garter, bought thirteen acres and one rod of land adjoining Pardon Churchyard, and devoted it to the like pious purposes. Twenty-three years later, having obtained another plot of adjacent ground to the northward, Manny, moved thereto by the will of De Northburgh, Stratford's successor in the See of London, in which he bequeathed two thousand pounds for his foundation of a Carthusian House of Monks, obtained a charter permitting him to establish a double Monastery adjoining his cemetery.

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In 1371, the buildings being completed, John Luscote was installed as the first Prior of the House of the Salutation of the Mother of God, of the Carthusian Order, by London. It was a double Monastery, that is to say containing a double number of cells, twenty-four or upwards. It consisted of a great and a little cloister for the monks and the lay brethren respectively. The former was a square with sides measuring some 300 feet, which was surrounded by a penticed walk in front of the monks' dwelling-houses. For a Carthusian monk lives in his own detached, four-roomed house, with its little walled-in garden. On the south side were ranged the refectory, the Chapel and the Chapter-house. The other cloister was assigned to the lay brothers, who worshipped in the antechapel. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Little Cloister was rebuilt on a larger scale, when the Lay Brothers were provided for in the picturesque court now known as Washhouse Court, and suitable lodgings for visitors were erected, together with a Guesten Hall adjoining the monks' freytor. At the same time the outer gatehouse, still used as the entrance, was built. The interior of the Guesten Hall is pleasingly depicted in the frontispiece. Its fittings are of the Elizabethan period, and probably the four upper windows and the present high pitch of the roof belong to that period also.

Of the atrocities committed at the Dissolution none has made a deeper impression than the brutal murder of the Prior, Blessed John Houghton, together with his brethren. History has to relate that after being drawn, hanged and quartered at Tyburn, the Prior was decapitated, his head was exposed on London Bridge, and one of his dissevered limbs was fixed up over the entrance gate of Charterhouse.

The buildings of the dissolved monastery were first acquired