Catalogue description Rolls Chapel: Records and Artefacts

The building known as the Rolls Chapel was originally the chapel erected for the use of the inmates of the House of Converts, that is, of those Jews who had converted to Christianity and whose maintenance and upkeep was the responsibility of the keeper of the Domus Conversorum. It was endowed by Henry III in 1232, and the original chapel seems to have been more or less contemporaneous with that endowment. The chapel continued in use as originally intended even after the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.

In 1377 the office of keeper was united in perpetuity with that of the Master of the Rolls - many holders of which office had also held the office of keeper. The chapel became the Chapel of the Rolls. Successive Masters of the Rolls continued to account for the maintenance of converted Jews until at least the early seventeenth century. But from the turn of the fifteenth century the chapel acquired a secondary, and ultimately more significant, use as a place of storage for certain of the rolls of Chancery, as well as a continuing religious use which included occasional marriages and burials, and regular special sermons.

As a place of worship the Rolls chapel was primarily a private chapel for the use of the Master of the Rolls and his immediate family, and of the masters, clerks, and registrars of Chancery. Services continued to be held, although latterly with a diminishing congregation, until 1895. Successive deputy keepers acted as warden - which explains the preservation of such original records as survive - the first being Thomas Duffus Hardy on the appointment of the Master of the Rolls in 1860. The Reverend John Sherrin Brewer, better known as the editor of Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII, was appointed by Lord Romilly as, first, Reader, and then as Preacher, in the Chapel, usefully but co-incidentally supplementing his editorial income.

The chapel also had other secular uses: as a place in which causes in Chancery could be heard out of term before the Master of the Rolls; and, more widely, as a meeting place for creditors and debtors entering bonds of statute staple. In the nineteenth century it became for a period a meeting place for mortgagors and mortgagees proceeding to foreclosure, a use discontinued only in 1889.

Several former Masters of the Rolls and members of their families were buried in the vaults beneath the Rolls Chapel. A number of their funerary monuments were preserved after the demolition of the chapel in 1895, and incorporated into the museum which was built on the site. They remain physically incorporated into the fabric of the building.

The chapel itself was several times extensively remodelled, both as a place of worship and as a repository for the storage of records. The chancel had disappeared by 1667, possibly in consequence of damage in the Great Fire of the previous year. The chancel arch was lost to view, probably at the same period, and rediscovered only during the course of demolition in 1895.

Thirteenth century windows were blocked up over time, new entrances cut, and in the late eighteenth century the rubble walls were given an external flint cladding. The interior was extensively remodelled in gothic style after the removal of many of the records in the mid nineteenth century. Arrangements for the storage of records were both improved and augmented on several occasions between the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century, largely in consequence of increased government interest in the preservation of the nation's record heritage. The status of the chapel was altered by statute in 1837, which vested the Rolls estate, including the chapel, in the Crown.

The Rolls Chapel was finally demolished in 1895, to considerable public outcry. The monuments, including a major work of the Renaissance by the Italian sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, and the remaining stained glass, were re-erected in the building which replaced it on the same site, and which was built in gothic style and to the same external dimensions as the ancient chapel. This building was intended for use as the Public Record Office museum, and indeed continued as such until 1986: between then and 1996 it was put to various uses, including for exhibitions and as a reading room.

Between 1856 and 1861 the body of the chapel was cleared of records, which were transferred into purpose built accommodation in the new Public Record Office in course of erection on the Rolls estate. The last records to be removed from the main part of the church were those which were stored in the dual purpose pews fitted out by, probably, Sir Thomas Plumer c 1820, to serve not only as chests for the records but as seats for the congregation assembled for Sunday worship. The residue of the records stored under the roof of the chapel was not, however, finally removed until 1895.

The communion plate which is one element of the latter has been put to continued liturgical use by being placed on loan to the vicar and churchwardens of Sheriff Hutton, Yorkshire. The thirteenth century chancel arch which was discovered during the demolition of the chapel in 1895, and some original heraldic glass from the chapel, as well as those funerary monuments preserved, including the fourteenth century chapel bell, remain under the oversight of English Heritage on, or adjacent to, the former site of the chapel itself.

The remaining stained glass ranges in date from c 1821 to c 1923, and consists of the arms of Masters of the Rolls from William Burstall (1371) to Ernest Pollock (1923). This glass has been rearranged from its disposition in the former Rolls Chapel.

Communion plate, altar linen and other service books were removed on the order of the Master of the Rolls in 1927.

Burial vaults, investigated in 1895 but since re-sealed, remain in occupation beneath the chapel site.