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St Jordan of Bristol

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The carving traditionally known as ‘The Harrowing of Hell’ displayed in the south transept of Bristol Cathedral on College Green was discovered amongst masonry rubble during repairs to the cathedral’s chapter house following the devastations of the Bristol Riots of 1831. During the restoration work, the opportunity was taken to return the chapter house floor, which had been raised by a metre or so in 1713, to the original level of the 12th century.

It’s origin is unknown but probably dates from around 1050 and has been described as ‘one of the finest carvings of its day in Britain, or indeed in western Europe‘. It has been suggested that its iconography could be better interpreted as ‘Christ Preaching in Limbo‘, though this is not supported by other evidence. It has been suggested it was a coffin lid or part of a preaching cross from a nearby chapel. In practice it seems much more likely that the Bristol panel was designed to be built into a wall; large-scale wall panels and roods are well-attested in Anglo-Saxon sculpture from the area, There is no definite origin, although most evidence does point towards it being associated with a small chapel on College Green, that has come to be associated with the 7th century figure of ‘St Jordan’.

St Jordan is reputed to have been the young pupil and companion of the first archbishop of the Church in England, St Augustine of Canterbury. Bede, the 8th-century monk and scholar, records in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People how a Roman missionary party, led by Augustine, landed on the shores of Kent in 597 and in 603 decided to confer with leaders of the indigenous churches (who followed the Celtic Christian tradition) in the hope of bringing them into the predominant Roman Christianity.

The story goes that this took place near Bristol, possibly on what is now College Green, part of the original precinct of what became St Augustine’s Abbey. Bede’s description of the location has it called “Augustine’s Oak”, on the borders of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Hwicce and the West Saxons, that is, in that border area where Bristol would later develop.

When Augustine’s conclave failed and he returned to his base in Kent, Jordan is supposed to have stayed behind to continue his master’s missionary work among the locals, establishing a chapel with an outdoor pulpit to preach from. The antiquarian John Leland refers to

‘A chapel in which St Jordan, the disciple of St Augustine apostle of the English, is buried’,

while later in the sixteenth century William Camden in his Britannia described College Green and

‘a pulpit of stone and a chapel wherein they say Jordan, companion to St Augustin the English Apostle, was buried’.

The chapel and the stone pulpit or preaching cross were also referred to by witnesses in an enquiry into an affray which took place on College Green in 1579 and is shown on the maps of Bristol drawn by George Hoefnagle in 1581 and by John Speed in 1610. Jordan was believed to have been buried on the Green, and by the 1390s he was being referred to locally as a saint.

According to M. R. James, a hymn and collect to Jordan, found in a Bristol Book of Hours, were used locally in the 15th century. The hymn includes the passage;

“O Jordan, blessed confessor of Christ and citizen of Heaven, intercede for us by virtue of the faith we of the English church profess, whom Augustine [first] baptised and you perfected in that holy trust, whose colleague you were in his preaching to the English. Be our Patron in this place where you lie entombed.”

This ‘Hymn to St Jordan’ may therefore provide the earliest documentary evidence for the veneration of St Jordan.

Apart from these bare details, nothing is known of St Jordan himself or his life. Even the appellation ‘Saint’ may be a later addition arising from the veneration of a holy man, rather than a formal canonisation. The historian Michael Hare has suggested that Jordan was more plausibly a hermit of the 13th or 14th century who lived in a chapel on College Green. According to this view, Jordan was only later described as a companion of Augustine of Canterbury by a 15th-century hymn writer.

In 1899, George Edward Weare suggested that Jordan may have been a close relative of Robert Fitzharding, the founder of St. Augustine’s Abbey, and that the chapel named in his honour on College Green may have been built by him or “erected after his death as a memorial“. Weare concluded that the monks of St. Augustine’s Abbey must have transformed Jordan into a saint to increase the abbey’s prestige.

A. S. Ellis, a genealogical researcher of the Fitzharding and Berkeley families, supported this claim, arguing that Jordan,

“brother of Robert fitz Harding… may in his old age have been a canon in the adjoining abbey founded by his brother or [may] have built [the chapel on College Green] with a hermitage to retire from the world therein.”

While the name ‘Jordan’ had been popularised in England by pilgrims returning from the Holy Land with bottles of water from the Jordan River, the name occurred with greater frequency in 12th-century Bristol, especially among the noble Fitzharding and Berkeley families.

Samuel Seyer, the early-19th-century historian of Bristol, also supported the view that Jordan, brother of Robert Fitzharding, had been named after an earlier saint, but he firmly believed this saint had been a member of the Gregorian mission, writing,

“Nothing is more probable than that the pious founder of the abbey [Robert Fitzharding] gave it its name in memory of St. Augustine; and that Harding, his father, named one of his sons Jordan, in memory of the preacher, Augustine’s companion.”

Another possibility that has been suggested based on the evidence is that Jordan may have been a local hermit on College Green in Bristol in the 12th or 13th century. After his death a local following might have developed, but nothing of his life was ever written, and he may have remained of minor importance while further hermits continued to live on College Green, presumably with the support of the Abbey. In the course of time the details of the saint’s life may have been so completely forgotten that when the author of the hymn preserved in the Book of Hours came to set about his composition, he had a clean sheet to work with. In these circumstances it would have been entirely natural for an author associated with a community in which the cult of St Augustine of Canterbury was prominent to imagine Jordan as a companion of Augustine and as a founding saint of Christianity in the area.

The earliest evidence for the existence of St Jordan’s Chapel can actually be found in the will of widow Agnes Spelly, who left a donation to the chapel of Saint Jordan on College Green in 1393. Later references can be found in the financial records of St. Augustine’s Abbey, Bristol : in the year 1491–92, funds were described as being taken “from the pyx within St. Jordan’s chapel on the green”.

Maps of Bristol from the 17th century by cartographers John Speed and James Millerd appear to show the location of the chapel before it was destroyed. John Speed’s map of 1610, in particular, corresponds to William Camden’s description of the former chapel’s location as a

“green plain, shaded all along the middle with a double row of trees; among which is a pulpit of stone, and a Chapel, wherein they say, that Jordan, Companion to St. Austin the English Apostle, was bury’d.”

Detail from John Speed’s 1610 Map, between Bristol Cathedral (A) and St. Mark’s Church (C)

Looking at the Abbey’s calendar and account books of the period from 1491 to 1512, the popularity of St Jordan appears to suffer a decline. His chapel appears to have become redundant, presumably deconsecrated before being put to use as the grammar school of the abbey and then of the cathedral. St Jordan’s following nevertheless appears to have lived on for a while within the abbey itself until the Dissolution of the monasteries puts an end to the public veneration of all local saints.

The fabric of St Jordan’s chapel survived as a ‘free school’ building until at least 1678. By 1734 the chapel had disappeared, being unrecorded on Samuel and Nathaniel Buck’s meticulous topographical engraving ‘The North-West Prospect of the City of Bristol’ (displayed in the Bristol Art Gallery and Museum), with its uncluttered view from Brandon Hill of College Green and the cathedral. The chapel’s actual destruction may well have occurred in the Great Storm of November 1703 when, although the Free School that it had become is not mentioned, it is recorded that trees were toppled on College Green and damage done to the fabric of the cathedral itself. As described above, the chapel sat between two rows of trees and therefore even more at risk from this storm.

Before the renewed interest in the Anglo-Saxon period that followed Victorian fondness for all things medieval, St Jordan’s chapel and its contents would not have been thought of as a significant monument. It may have suffered the same fate as the Anglo-Saxon chapel of St Laurence in Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire, being largely forgotten.

In 2012, archaeologists began a survey at College Green in Bristol, with speculation on the part of the Dean of Bristol Cathedral, the Very Reverend David Hoyle, that Jordan’s chapel and relics might be discovered. Although no evidence was found, it is likely that any archaeological evidence which might have confirmed the site of St Jordan’s chapel was destroyed when College Green was levelled for the building of the Council House in 1950.


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