St. Katharine Cree Church

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St Katharine Cree is a Church of England church in the Aldgate ward of the City of London, on the north side of Leadenhall Street near Leadenhall Market. It was founded in 1280. The present building dates from 1628–30. Formerly a parish church, it is now a guild church.HistoryFormer buildingThe parish served by the church existed by 1108, when it was served by the Augustinian Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate, also called Christ Church, which was founded by Maud, queen at the time of King Henry I. The parishioners used the priory church but this proved unsatisfactory and disruptive to the priory's activities.The prior partly resolved the problem in 1280 by founding St Katharine Cree as a separate church for the parishioners. The site of the present church was originally in the priory's churchyard and it is possible that the church began as a cemetery chapel. It took its name from the priory, "Cree" being a corrupted abbreviation of "Christ Church". It was initially served by a canon appointed by the prior but this did not prove satisfactory either, so in 1414 the church was established as a parish church in its own right. The present tower was added about 1504.Describing the building at the end of the 16th century, John Stow wrote "this church seemeth to be very old; since the building whereof the high street hath been so often raised by pavements that now men are fain to descend into the said church by divers steps, seven in number."