The beginnings of this ancient church are unknown, as the Saxons kept few records. But a popular legend told to Stow by the last prior, Bartholomew Linsted, links it with an early London Bridge. According to the story, a ferryman named Audrey once lived on the site of the cathedral. The old man thought to cheat his servants by pretending to be dead, assuming that they would fast in mourning. Instead, they had a party. When Audrey sprang up and attacked his apprentice, the younger man slew him. Mary Audrey, the gentle daughter, gave her inheritance to found a nunnery on the spot, dedicated to the Virgin, which later subsisted by the profits from the ferry.
Between 852 and 862 St Swithen, Bishop of Winchester, changed it to an Augustinian monastery, called St Mary Overie (or St Mary Over the Water), whose monks supposedly built a wooden bridge. In the year 1106 a church building was erected by the Priory of St Mary Overie. This was destroyed by fire and replaced in 1207 by an edifice of stone. The choir and Lady Chapel of the present church are survivals from this date. In medieval times St Mary Overie was the scene of many elaborate religious ceremonials, processions and various events involving royalty. In 1406 Edmund Holland, earl of Kent, was married to Lucia, eldest daughter of Barnaby, lord of Milan. King Henry IV himself ‘gave away’ the bride and conducted her to the marriage banquet at Westminster Palace. Eighteen years later, in 1424, James I of Scotland was wedded here to the goldenhaired beauty Jane Beaufort, daughter of the earl of Somerset. The name of ‘St Saviour’ was attached to St Mary Overie during Reformation times.
The priory was dissolved in 1539, and St Mary’s was purchased by the members of two nearby parishes and joined with a separate priory church called St Saviour’s, whose name it acquired. During the reign of Mary Tudor, the retrochoir was used as a consistorial court, presided over by Bishops Gardiner and Bonner. Here John Rogers and Bishop Hooper were condemned as heretics and sentenced to the stake, as were Bradford, Ferrar, Saunders and Taylor. As might be suspected from its location near the old Globe Theatre, St Saviour’s has associations with Chaucer and Shakespeare, as well as other famous literary figures. Shakespeare is commemorated by a memorial window as well as an alabaster monument. John Gower, the friend of Chaucer and a substantial benefactor to this church, is buried here; as is Edmund Shakespeare, brother of the bard; the dramatists Fletcher and Massinger; and Lawrence Fletcher, a joint lessee of the Globe Theatre with Shakespeare and Richard Burbage. John Harvard, founder of the university that bears his name, was baptized in St Saviour’s on 29 November 1607. A beautiful chapel is dedicated to him.
The famous divine Launcelot Andrewes, one of the translators of the King James Version of the Bible, is commemorated by a fine tomb in the south aisle. St Saviour’s became the seat of a bishop in 1905, hence the present name of Southwark Cathedral. It has undergone a number of alterations and repairs over the centuries: the famous Lady Chapel became a bakery in the seventeenth century and has been restored twice, the stone nave vault collapsed in 1469 and was rebuilt then and again in 1890. A railway bridge was built nearby in the nineteenth century, and during World War II it received considerable war damage, requiring a recent restoration. Yet St Saviour’s is still today one of London’s great medieval treasures, with a near-perfect Early English Lady Chapel, a choir and retro-choir that are among the earliest Gothic work in London, and numerous monuments and famous associations.