Patrick Comerford
The former Moat House Hotel in York on the corner formed by Nunnery Lane and Victoria Bar and beside and Nunnery Lane Car Park is an attractive building that looks older than it is, with an interesting past.
In recent years, the building has been converted into apartments. But a plaque high on the central bay, above the main door hints at the interesting past of the building: ‘St. Thomas’s Hospital re-built AD 1862.’
Mediaeval York had 50 or more hospitals and almshouses. Saint Leonard’s Hospital was once the largest in England – 232 people were housed there in 1399 – and was run by Augustine canons. The hospital was a place for the sick to be healed, an almshouse for the elderly, a refuge for pilgrims, a hostel for travellers and a home for orphans. Parts of Saint Leonard’s, including the vaulted undercroft and ruined chapel above can still be seen.
The other mediaeval hospitals in York included Saint Catherine’s on what is now The Mount, founded outside the city walls as a leper hospital in the early 14th century.
When we are staying in York, I regularly walk past the former Saint Thomas’s Hospital on Nunnery Lane on my way into the city centre. I had already written about other almshouses in York, including Anne Middleton’s Hospital on Skeldergate, Dorothy Wilson’s Hospital on Walmgate, and Sir Joseph Terry Cottages. Now the plaque on the wall of the rebuilt Saint Thomas’s Hospital made me curious about where and when it had been built originally.
Nunnery Lane leads off Blossom Street which since the Roman period has been the principal route into York from London and the south. The Micklegate Bar leading into the city dates from the 12th century and a horse and cattle market was held outside Micklegate Bar in the mediaeval period in what is now Blossom Street.
The original Saint Thomas’s almshouse or hospital was founded before 1391 as Saint Thomas the Martyr outside Micklegate Bar. It was for the maintenance of poor persons of either sex dwelling in the neighbourhood of ‘Mykyllythbar’, and for hospitality by day and night of all poor travellers and sick poor passing through York. The 15th century seal showed a figure of Saint Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury, seated in a canopied niche, blessing and holding his crozier.
Saint Thomas’s Hospital was transferred to the Guild of Corpus Christi in 1478, when it was agreed that from then on it would be known as ‘the Hospital of Corpus Christi and of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, and that the Master and Brethren kept seven alms beds.
From then until the dissolution of the guild, the history of the hospital is essentially that of the guild. The master, wardens and brothers of Saint Thomas’s stipulated that they should have the use of their beds and bedrooms there during their own lives and that the brethren of the guild were to ‘fund seven alms beds conveniently clothed, for the ease, refreshing, and harbouring of poor indigent travelling people coming unto the said hospital.’
Saint Thomas’s was one of six or seven mediaeval hospitals or almshouses in York to survive by 1500, while 11 had become extinct or converted to other uses before the Reformation.
The guild kept 10 poor persons in 1546, allowing them 6s 8d each a year, and also maintained eight beds for poor strangers. Following the dissolution of the monasteries and religious houses, the Guild of Corpus Christi was dissolved the following year 1547, but Saint Thomas’s Hospital held on to its estates for almost another 30 years.
After consulting the brethren of the hospital, and showing how difficult it was to maintain the house and its poor residents, the master suggested in 1551-1552 that they should seek the support of the lord mayor and aldermen of the city.
The mayor and aldermen were admitted as brothers of the hospital in 1552, the lord mayor was elected master and two of the aldermen became wardens. For the next 25 years, the lord mayor for the year, and one of the aldermen, with ‘a spiritual man’, continued to fill these offices. Since then, the charity has been in the hands of the corporation.
The almshouses in York that survivved the Tudor Reformations included Saint Thomas’s, Saint Anthony’s, Saint Catherine’s and Trinity Hospital, also known as the Hospital of Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, at Fossgate. They continued to be run under the auspices of the corporation in the Elizabethan period.
The lord mayor and wardens surveyed Saint Thomas’s, Saint Anthony’s and Trinity Hospitals, as well as Saint John’s Hall in February 1574. A scheme was set up in May 1574 to settle some poor people in the three hospitals and to use them for disbursing charity to other poor people living at home. These people were mainly aged, disabled, or widows, including some widows with children.
When John Marshe and other citizens of London were granted some of the possessions of the former Guild of Corpus Christi in 1576, they were resisted by the master and wardens. William Marshe and William Plummer handed over the property in 1583 to the recorder and town clerk of York, as trustees for the mayor and city of York, for ‘the maintenance and relief of the poor.’
The original hospital stood by the Micklegate on Blossom Street, beside what is now the Puch Bowl. It is shown there on Speed’s map in 1610, on Chassereau’s map of York in 1750 and by Jeffreys in 1776, when it is labelled ‘Thomas’s Hospital’. It is illustrated in 1782 in The Antiquities of Great Britain, among views of monasteries, castles and churches, and was also painted by Moses Griffith in 1785 and again in 1787.
The hospital had been partially rebuilt by 1810, when an anonymous watercolour shows it as a two-storey building with two pitched roof end gables, one with an entrance, fronting Blossom Street and with a a mixture of Gothic and Tudor window.
William Hargrove’s History and Description of the Ancient City of York in 1818, shows it is with a women walking through the Blossom Street entrance followed by a horse and cart, suggesting the Blossom Street frontage had become an inn while the Nunnery Lane frontage continued as the hospital.
A report in 1820 described it as ‘a house in good repair, containing six apartments on the ground floor and the same number above for the habitation of 12 poor women, who are widows … There is a small garden adjoining’. From 1837, it was administered by the York Charity Trustees.
The hospital is seen in a watercolour by Henry Barlow Carter in 1840 and in a coloured lithograph by William Monkhouse in 1845, where the new three-storey Punch Bowl is shown towering over the old, two-storey hospital building.
However, by 1860, the conditions in the hospital were reported to be ‘low, damp, the lower rooms especially, ill-ventilated and dark, with brick floors’, and Saint Thomas' Hospital was demolished around 1862-1863.
The demolition of the old hospital allowed the widening of the junction of Blossom Street and Nunnery Lane. A narrow row of shops were built to replace the hospital building, with a one-bay rounded corner and with four bays facing Nunnery Lane. Since then, this replacement building has been incorporated into the premises of the Punch Bowl.
Meanwhile, a new hospital or almshouses was built further east along Nunnery Lane, close to the newly opened Victoria Bar and opposite the Victoria Vaults. It offered accommodation to 12 women, and there were 11 residents in 1906, sharing stipends totalling £80.
Saint Thomas’s Hospital closed ca 1972 and the building was converted into the Moat Hotel. More recently the building was converted into apartments, but it remains a significant building on Nunnery Lane, close to the Victoria Bar and its original site on the corner of Blossom Gate, close to the ancient Micklegate.
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