Stratford nr. Bow / Bow / Brambele / Brambelegh / Brembeley / Bromley-by-Bow / Stratford at Bow / Stratford-le-Bow

No individual entry for this Stratford found in the Domesday survey. The Victoria County History (Middlexex, vol. 1, 1969) notes: "The priory of St. Leonard, Stratford at Bow, first mentioned in 1122 [...] was a house of Benedictine nuns. [...] The priory stood near the banks of the Lea. The chapel of St. Mary in the priory church served as the parish church for the parish of St. Leonard, Bromley, and its site is indicated today by a small park lying about 200 yards south of Bow Bridge. The priory lay to the south of the church. [...] There are no means of determining the plan of the convent. The royal grant of 1537 mentions the house and site of the priory, and the church, 'steeple', and churchyard. [...] The 'steeple' disappeared, but the eastern limb of the church continued to be used for worship. The description by Lysons [...] and prints of the early 19th century [...] give little idea of the appearance of this part of the church in the Middle Ages. In 1805 the church was a small rectangular building, lighted by an haphazard collection of windows of indeterminate dates; the medieval floor appears to have been considerably lower than the ground level of 1805, [...] and the east window had been replaced c. 1700 by a primitive apse for the communion table. Inside there were signs that there had been a south aisle, but the most striking feature was the Norman choir arch, with dog-tooth ornament, at the west end. The arch had been blocked up and everything to the west of it had disappeared by 1805. The building as Lysons saw it survived until 1842, although in a dilapidated condition. In 1842-3 a new church in the neo-Norman style was erected on the site. [...] This was destroyed in the Second World War." Cox & Harvey (1907: 164) report a pre-Reformation baptismal font made of brick in this church. Listed in Bond (1908: 76) simply as a baptismal font made of brick. NB: a font from Henry V's time -i.e., 1387-1422- is identified in the parish church of St. Mary's at Stratford, Bow and Old Fort, Bow, aka, Stratford-le-Bow. The county for Bow / Stratford-le-Bow was given as Middlesex in the National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Virtue, 1868). We have not been able to ascertain whether or not the font referred to in Cox & Harvey and in Bond is the one surviving at the parish church of Stratford St. Mary's -- the church in Stratford at Bow was practically destroyed in WWII bombings]. The entry for this church in Historic England [Source ID: 1065273] notes: "Parish Church. Possible C14 core, C15 tower, further rebuilding and restoration in early-C18, 1829, 1882, 1895 and the 1950s [...] Built as chapel of ease to Stepney (licence of 1311) and parish church from 1711. [...] Octagonal font with perpendicular tracery." The entry for the Priory of St Leonard Stratford-at-Bow in The Lost City of London - Before the Great Fire of 1666 site [https://lostcityoflondon.co.uk/2014/05/15/the-priory-of-st-leonard-stratford-at-bow/] [accessed 17 May 2019] notes: "The Priory was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1536, although the last Prioress, Sybil Kirke, was allowed to carry on living there for a while. At the time of the dissolution, the priory buildings included a Hall, a Parlour, a Kitchen, a Buttery, a Dorter, a Great Chamber, a Maid’s Chamber, further Chambers over the Parlour and the Buttery, a Brewhouse, a Malting House and a Barn as well as a Church, with all of the aforementioned and their contents realising a little over £100 (the valuable books from the priory were not sold but instead incorporated into the library at Westminster Abbey). After the dissolution, the priory church was partly demolished and modified to become the parish church of St Mary with St Leonard. In 1539, the remaining priory buildings were granted to Sir Ralph Sadler, who converted some of them into tenements that he leased out (one to William Huddleston, the former Abbot of Stratford Langthorne). In 1634, they passed to Sir John Jacob, who demolished all of them to make way for a new manor house, itself now no longer standing (Bromley House). By the end of the seventeenth century, only the church remained of the original priory, and for a while was used by Protestant Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in their native France (after their religious and civil liberties were removed by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685). The church was then rebuilt and refounded in 1842-3. Sadly, it was almost completely destroyed by enemy bombing in 1941. Essentially all that survives of it today is part of the churchyard, sandwiched between the busy Blackwall Tunnel Approach Road and Bromley High Street, and containing some somewhat neglected and overgrown graves, appearing to date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." The badly-damaged church was re-built in the 1950s.