| Administrative history | The first steps made by St Bartholomew's Hospital towards independence from the Priory of St Bartholomew, in about 1170, gave the medieval Hospital the right to accept and administer its own property. The first gift of property to the hospital was from Rahere himself, who granted the living of St. Sepulchre without Newgate to Hagno the clerk, on condition that he gave 50s. a year to the canons and to the hospital. Gradually, donations of land increased: of the hospital’s property in 1456, the majority of grants had been received by the mid thirteenth century, although a few large gifts dated from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The estates were administered by the master and canons of the Hospital, and under the mastership of John Wakeryng (Master 1423 to 1466), the hospital acquired more property through gifts as well as diversifying its investment into brewhouses, bakehouses, gardens and shops, as well as simple residential accommodation, generating a secondary income from property rentals, and enabling the hospital to compete successfully with other religious establishments.
The medieval hospital probably stored its deeds in deed boxes with divisions, each one containing the deeds of one particular property. If any deed was needed, the clerk or renter would look for the name of the house or land in the margin of the Cartulary, find the right entry, and trace in its compartment the relevant document endorsed with the same number and folio number.
When St Bartholomew's Hospital was granted to the City of London, it was granted by Letters Patent of Henry VIII, 27 December 1546, that a Board of Governors would oversee the administration of the hospital and its property. It is likely that the property deeds of the hospital (alongside the cartularies catalogued as SBHB/HC/2/1 and SBHB/HC/2/2) were the only pre-Reformation records of the Hospital preserved by the newly appointed Governors, as they were the only evidence of the rights of the Hospital to its endowments. The endowments had been confirmed by a second Letters Patent issued on 13 Jan 1547, and consisted of most of the medieval property of the Hospital, excepting the manor of Ducket in Middlesex. (NB a comparison of the names of donors and tenants listed in the rental of 1456 with those in the cartulary indicates that many of the early deeds had already been lost prior to the refoundation).
Many of the hospital’s properties were located in London, spread across nearly sixty parishes but focused on the neighbouring parishes of St. Sepulchre without Newgate and St. Botolph Aldersgate. The hospital’s London properties fell into two categories: those within the hospital precinct and those elsewhere in the city. Other properties outside London were concentrated in Middlesex and Essex, of which the latter were vitally important to the hospital, providing produce such as corn, hay and oats, and even cattle for breeding and slaughter, although the hospital also owned property in counties far removed from London from which it derived rental income. The work of the hospital was supported throughout this period (and after the refoundation too) by the rental income and produce from its estates. The hospital's estates were sometimes classified as either 'London' (those in the City of London), or 'country' (which included properties in areas that are now part of London but were previously part of counties neighbouring the City, such as Middlesex. In post-medieval deeds, parishes are not always mentioned, in which case, properties in City parishes may be listed as 'City of London', and in London parishes outside the City as 'Middlesex'.
The Hospital continued to own and lease out property in London and beyond through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, deriving much of its income from rentals, and it was put into severe financial difficulties by the loss of property in the Great Fire of London in 1666, and in addition to the medieval deeds, this series consists of a large number of deeds, leases and related documents spanning the 16th-20th centuries. The leases and related deeds have remained on the hospital site throughout the hospital's history, except possibly during the Great Fire, when they may have been taken to Hornsey for reasons of safety. They appear to have been held in the Muniments Room in the east basement of the hospital's North Wing (probably constructed when the building was built in the 1730s) in a series of numbered wooden and metal deed boxes. Where the number of the box is known, this is recorded as an alternative reference number in item-level catalogue descriptions in this series. By the 19th century, 'leases' and 'expired leases' appear to have been arranged separately, although in some cases the distinction seems unclear.
The hospital governors began to divest of its estates through sales in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and most of the remaining 'country' properties (ie those outside London) were sold in the 1920s (see SBHB/HA/1/29 pp501-502 for lists of properties sold at that time, as well as of property retained). The Hospital's Estate Office appears to have been established in around 1905 to manage the leases and sales of the remaining estates, and it's records are catalogued as SBHB/EO. Surviving records of the Estates Office primarily consist of correspondence, reports and surveys and financial statements relating to the hospital estates. Some of the properties which were still in the ownership of the hospital in 1974 transferred to the newly established Special Trustees of St Bartholomew's Hospital, and some estates records may also be found amongst their papers (SBHST).
Around sixteen hundred medieval deeds, pre-dating the refoundation of the hospital, survive in the archives (SBHB/HC/1/1-1625). In 1883, William Cross, Clerk to the Governors, put each medieval deed in an envelope on which he wrote a summary of the contents of the document concerned. Afterwards he arranged all his envelopes according to the parish relevant to the transaction recorded in each deed. The work of listing the medieval documents was continued by Sir D'Arcy Power and Dr Gweneth Whitteridge (nee Hutchings), first archivist of the hospital, and the numbering in this series follows that used in Whitteridge's card index. A further group of post-medieval deeds and leases was catalogued to item level (with sequential numbering from SBHB/HC/1/4075-4323) in the 1980s and 1990s; the remaining 80 boxes remained uncatalogued until 2024, when they were catalogued at box level to improve access. |