Extant sources do not offer more than disparate clues about the exact date of the arrival o f Franciscan friars to Lelów, a small town to the east of Częstochowa. According to Jan Dlugosz's C h ro n icles Kazimierz the Great founded the Lelów convent in 1357 and then presented it to the Franciscans of Cracow. However, the wording of the passage suggests that Dlugosz's focus o f interest was on the completion o f the first phase ot the Lelów foundation, ie. the construction of the church and the core building ot the convent. The Church of SS. Peter and Paul with the convent was situated inside the town walls (the Old Town). Other sources seem to indicate that the Franciscans may have arrived at Lelów already in the reign o f Bolesław the Chaste (1243-1279).
The Lelów community had belonged to the Franciscan Province of Bohemia and Poland until 1517; after that date it was part the Polish Province of the Order. Centuries of devastation and change left little of the old Franciscan walls. Nevertheless the appearance and style of the church can to some extent be reconstructed from fragmentary and sketchy sources. It was an aisleless structure built on the eastwest axis, along the adjoining street. The one-storey convent was attached to its northern flank. The history of the twin buildings was marked by frequent fires. The most devastating of them, which raged in 1638, consumed both the town and the whole Franciscan complex. The damage was so great that the rebuilding of the church had to Start almost at the foundations. Is was then thait its walls were fortified with escarps and anchors. The convent building was rebuilt as well.
For hundreds of years the Lelów convent was a beacon of Christian culture in the region. It is hard to overestimate its role in its early days, when the local population was slowly emerging from the mists of paganism. Then the convent's growth and prosperity seemed to run parallel to the flourishing Polish Commonwealth. And finally, the dismemberment of the Polish state by foreign aggressors was in a way mirrored in the demise of the Lelów convent, effected by the same hostile hand.
In 1819 the Franciscan friars of Lelów celebrated an impressive anniversary of their foundation. The occasion rounded off 450 years filled with prayer, contemplation service, and hard work for the good of men and the glory of God. The local immunity had every reason to be grateful for four and a half centuries of the Franciscan presence.
The times however, were inauspicious. The political upheavals at the turn of the 18th century climaxing in the partition of Poland and the secularist reforms pushed by the country's new masters bode ill for the future, while the highly restrictive quotas on vices plummeting donations and rapidly rising taxes and costs posed a immediate, deadly threat to the Lelów convent. In the eyes of officialdom Lelów, just like many ther religious communities, appeared useless and dispensable. So when the last guardian Father Jan Cichuciński died in 1819 the convent was de facto confiscated by the Russian-led government of the Kingdom of Poland. The buildings soon fell into ruin while disputes between the church and the state authorities over the ownership of the various pieces of real property and movables which made up the Franciscan estate dragged on for years. The people of Lelów remonstrated with the Provincial about the devastation but it was all in vain. The numerus clausus on new admissions meant that the Order had no reserves that could be sent into the breach. Eventually, the estate, or rather what remained of it, was auctioned in 1828. The church utensils were sold off quickly, but the ruined buildings could find no buyer. It was forty years later (1868) that the remnants of the church and convent walls were finally torn down and the place tidied up. The material from the demolition was taken for the construction of new houses, a road and a wall round another church in the Old Town. So, after 450 years the convent ceased to exist and its property was plundered, chiefly by the state. In 1905 a priest's house with outhouses was built on the site of the convent. The adjacent garden occupies the grounds of the demolished church.