All Hallows is one of London’s earliest churches, founded by the famous Erkenwald, Bishop of London, before AD675. It is one of a very few City churches to have physical evidence of its Saxon beginnings. After the bombing a discovery was made of a Saxon door arch, and also the stone shaft and part of the wheel-head of a cross inscribed in Anglo-Saxon. The name ‘Barking’ also takes us back to early Saxon times. Originally a nunnery at Barking, a few miles down river, was supported by rents from the property around the church. A Norman church replaced the Saxon one in 1088, ten years after the construction of the Tower of London.
During medieval times various changes and additions were made, including a chapel across the road to the north. This later had a royal chantry attached to it by Edward IV in 1465. Both chapel and chantry were removed during the Reformation. Because of All Hallows’ proximity to the Tower, the headless bodies of several notable persons executed on Tower Hill were brought here first before burial elsewhere. These included Bishop John Fisher; Thomas Howard, the Earl of Surrey; Lady Jane Grey’s father, Lord Thomas Grey; and, later, Archbishop William Laud. Buried here (though his monument has disappeared) is the body of draper and sheriff Humphrey Monmouth, who protected and encouraged William Tyndale in his translation of the New Testament. Monmouth was punished by Thomas More with imprisonment in the Tower.
On 4 January 1649, the year of the execution of King Charles I, a ship’s chandler whose shop was close to All Hallows was busy barrelling gunpowder when it somehow ignited. The explosion destroyed fifty or sixty houses in the vicinity and badly damaged the church tower, which was replaced in 1659 (a rare event in the Cromwellian period). The disaster took place at 7 p.m. when a parish dinner was under way at the Rose Tavern just two houses away. Everyone in the crowded pub was killed, some blown to bits and others found perfectly intact but dead by concussion. Amazingly, an infant in a cradle was discovered alive and unharmed on the roof of the church. The parents were never found, and the little girl was raised by one of the parishioners.
All Hallows narrowly escaped major damage in the Great Fire of September 1666, primarily because it was east of Pudding Lane and thus upwind from the source. Samuel Pepys says in his famous Diary for 5 September:
About two in the morning my wife calls me up and tells me of new cryes of fire, it being come to Barking Church, which is at the bottom of our lane (Seething Lane).
He again refers to All Hallows on the afternoon of the 5th:
But going to the fire, I find by the blowing up of houses, and the great helpe given by the workmen out of the King’s yards, sent up by Sir W. Pen, there is a good stop given to it, as well at Markelane end as ours; it having only burned the dyall of Barking Church, and part of the porch, and was there quenched. I to the top of Barking steeple, and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw...
The ‘Sir W. Pen’ who played such an important part in stopping the spread of the fire was Sir William Penn, father of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania. Young William was baptized in All Hallows. Another notable person associated with America, John Quincy Adams, was married here in 1797 to Louisa Catherine Johnson, daughter of the American consul.
In December 1940, All Hallows, which had stood intact for nearly 900 years, was reduced to a ruin by hits from two air raids. The red brick tower of 1759 survived, however, and is now topped by a spire sheathed in copper. The rest of the building was admirably restored by Lord Mottistone and Paul Paget, and many of the original furnishings, monuments and brasses may still be seen. A museum below the nave houses the Saxon finds mentioned earlier as well as Roman artifacts and other items of historical interest.