Church History

1100

The parish of St James Clerkenwell has had a long and sometimes lively history. About the year 1100 a Norman baron named Jordan Briset founded a Benedictine nunnery dedicated to St Mary, which became wealthy and influential. It had a place of pilgrimage at Muswell Hill, and the parish kept an outlying tract of territory there until the nineteenth century. This photo shows the cloisters as they would have been at the nunnery.