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St. Botolph (Billingsgate)

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St. Botolph’s Billingsgate Church was located on the southwest corner of the intersection of Botolph Lane and Thames Street in Billingsgate Ward. It is not labelled on the Agas map. It was one of the four London churches named after the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon monk, St. Botolph, who was the abbot of Iken, Suffolk. Over fifty churches in England were named after Botolph. According to Stow, the church of St. Botolph’s once contained many beautiful monuments, but, even by his time, the monuments were gone, destroyed, or defaced (Stow 1598, sig. M1v).
The church was apparently a popular settlement for foreigners. Stow reports that in the 1570s there were not in the whole warde aboue thrée Netherlanders, but only thirty years later there were fifty-one households of foreigners residing in Billingsgate Ward, thirty of which were in the Parish of St. Botolph (Billingsgate) (Stow 1598, sig. M2r). The church of St. Botolph’s was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and was never reconstructed; the parish was eventually merged with that of the neighboring Parish of St. George (Botolph Lane).