completed in 1355, and the College, richly endowed, began its existence.[1]
The new Church had not been finished when the good Duke was swept away by the second epidemic of the Black Death in 1361. In his will he enjoined his executors to complete it; and he bequeathed to it all the furniture and relics of his chapel, and ordered that his body should be buried therein "on one side of the high altar over against the place where the body of our lord and father is interred." After his death, John of Gaunt, during the latter years of his life, took a personal interest in the building; and when he died, in 1399, he bequeathed to the church his red garment of velvet embroidered with gold suns, and all the apparel connected with it, and the whole of his missals and some of the books belonging to his chapel. In the same year King Henry the Fourth executed a deed, in which, after reciting that his grandfather had begun the foundation of a collegiate church at Leicester, and that John, Duke of Lancaster, his father, had been desirous to complete the same, he granted a writ of aid for masons and material for the completion of the building. When the church was actually finished is not known. It was still incomplete when Henry the Fifth came to the throne in 1413, but was probably finished within a few years after his accession.
It was not a large building. "The College Church is not very great," wrote Leland. who saw it about 1536, "but it is exceeding fair." It lay on the south side of the quadrangle, the north side of which was occupied by the hospital. The cloisters, which stood on the south-west side of the church, were described by Leland as "large and fair"; and the houses in the compass of the area of the college for prebendaries all seemed to him "very pretty." The walls and gates of the college were stately. "The rich cardinal of Winchester," (Cardinal Beaufort), "gilded all the flowers and knots in the vault of the church."
- ↑ The Statutes may be read in full in Mr. A. Hamilton Thompson's comprehensive "History of the Hospital and the New College of the Annunciation of our Lady of the Newarke at Leicester," published in the Papers of the Associated Architectural Societies, 1913-1916.
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