ABSTRACT
On 24th June 1893, the feast day of St John the Baptist, the Prince of Wales, in his role as Grand Prior, officially opened the newly restored St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell as the headquarters of the Grand Priory of England of the Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. From at least the 1160s St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell had formed the entrance to the inner courtyard of the Priory of England. It was substantially rebuilt by Prior Thomas Docwra and completed in 1504. It had been denuded of its battlements sometime in the 1760s as they had become unsafe, and by the 1850s it had become a pub called the Old Jerusalem Tavern decorated with suits of armour like the ‘vault of some feudal ruin’, and selling its own ‘Chivalrie’ gin. From the mid-nineteenth century the Anglican Church was trying to counter perceived ‘feminisation’ of religion, with church- going increasingly seen as the province of women.
