The hospital of St Thomas of Acre on Cheapside, London, consisted of a small group of secular canons and an impressively large church, the counterpoise to St Paul’s at the other end of the main market thoroughfare of the city. As the magnificent memorial of the birthplace of one of London’s patron saints, Thomas Becket, it was the centre of much civic ritual, yet it struggled against under-endowment. These contradictions of size and wealth dominate the house’s history, of which only the outline is known. For the fifteenth century the hospital benefits briefly from the visibility of one charismatic master, John Neel (1420–63). During his forty-three-year term, Neel reinforced his house’s title to its properties, increased its endowment and improved its liturgy. He did this while exercising a beneficial influence over the powerful Mercers’ community, over the adjacent parish of St Mary Colechurch (of which St Thomas’s held the advowson), over several earls of Ormond who claimed descent from the saint’s sister, and even over the life of one London chronicler. In many cases his paternal and spiritual support was repaid with financial aid. Overall his career illustrates how such a master could involve himself (and his house) in secular life at all levels without disparagement, be it by the pragmatic hiring out of rooms and side chapels, or by the burial and commemoration of the dead. Neel engaged in financial minutiae but he also looked to the future maintenance of an improved liturgy for his house and the city, and therefore took a leading role in the campaign for more schools in the capital and more schoolmasters, the educators of choristers, singing men and future priests. In this area his particular legacy was to become the Mercers’ School.

The hospital had had a chameleon development before Neel’s day. It was a product of the cult of St Thomas Becket (canonised 1173). When Thomas, the son of Theobald of Helles, the son or nephew and heir of Agnes, the saint’s sister, granted the Becket family house to the order of St Thomas of Acre in 1227–8, the fast-growing cult of St Thomas had the opportunity to build a splendid centre of worship. The order had originally been a small group of secular canons concerned with the burial of the dead, the care of the poor, and the ransoming of captives in the Holy Land.