ABSTRACT
When Henry VIII sent letters to the Bassanos in Venice to entice them to come back to England, he would presumably have offered them financial and other reward. One of the ways in which the king did favour them was to establish them within a few years, allegedly at no rent, in unusual but highly desirable housing: in the former monks' quarters of the dissolved monastery of the Charterhouse. The Carthusian monastery of the Charterhouse had been founded in 1371 on a site between St John Street and Aldersgate Street, just outside the City of London to the north-west. On 14 April 1545, the reversion of the whole Charterhouse was sold to Sir Edward North. One of the former Charterhouse monks, Maurice Chauncy, writing around 1547, the year of Henry VIII's death, records that North had already destroyed the great part of the cloister and made the church into his dining-hall.
