Annual Meeting, 1851

The choir-stalls from St Katherine's-by-the-Tower, c. 1365, are the only ones to survive, in part, from the important group of English metropolitan royal ecclesiastical furniture commissions of the mid-fourteenth century. It will be argued that the surviving seating with many of its misericords provides important clues as to the much-debated stylistic origins of the later fully-canopied choir-stalls at Lincoln, c. 1370 and Chester, c. 1390, cathedrals. It will be suggested that the loss of the most important royal commissions at St Stephen's Chapel, Westminster and St George's Chapel, Windsor, is mitigated to some extent by the remarkable but incomplete survival of the choir-stalls at St Katherine's Hospital.