page_title: Old St Paul's Cathedral
section_title: Decline (16th century)
hierarchical_section_title: Old St Paul's Cathedral / Decline (16th century)
context_page_description: Old St Paul's Cathedral was the cathedral of the City of London that, until 1666, stood on the site of the present St Paul's Cathedral. Built from 1087 to 1314 and dedicated to Saint Paul, the cathedral was perhaps the fourth church at Ludgate Hill.
  Work on the cathedral began after a fire in 1087. Work took over 200 years, and was delayed by another fire in 1135. The church was consecrated in 1240, enlarged in 1256 and again in the early 1300s. At its completion in the mid-1300s, the cathedral was one of the longest churches in the world, had one of the tallest spires and some of the finest stained glass.
  The presence of the shrine of Saint Erkenwald made the cathedral a site of pilgrimage. In addition to serving as the seat of the Diocese of London, the building developed a reputation as a social hub, with the nave aisle, "Paul's walk", known as a business centre and a place to hear the gossip on the London grapevine. After the Reformation, the open-air pulpit in the churchyard, St Paul's Cross, became the place for radical evangelical preaching and Protestant bookselling.
  The cathedral was already in severe structural decline by the early 1600s.
context_section_description: By the 16th century the building was deteriorating. Under Henry VIII and Edward VI, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Chantries Acts led to the destruction of interior ornamentation and the cloisters, charnels, crypts, chapels, shrines, chantries and other buildings in the churchyard.
  
  Many of these former religious sites in St Paul's Churchyard, having been seized by the crown, were sold as shops and rental properties, especially to printers and booksellers, such as Thomas Adams, who were often evangelical Protestants. Buildings that were razed often supplied ready-dressed building material for construction projects, such as the Lord Protector's city palace, Somerset House.
  Crowds were drawn to the northeast corner of the Churchyard, St Paul's Cross, where open-air preaching took place. It was there in the Cross Yard in 1549 that radical Protestant preachers incited a mob to destroy many of the cathedral's interior decorations. In 1554, in an attempt to end inappropriate practices taking place in the nave, the Lord Mayor decreed that the church should return to its original purpose as a religious building, issuing a writ stating that the selling of horses, beer and "other gross wares" was "to the great dishonour and displeasure of Almighty God, and the great grief also and offence of all good and well-disposed persons".
caption: A sermon preached from St Paul's Cross in 1614
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