Part 5
This, however, was only in the later period of the Roman rule. When they had subdued the Trinobantes, they found the capital of the country, although a place of commercial importance, merely a scattered collection of round huts with trackways in the midst, extending from Tower Hill to the Fleet River and from the Thames to Cheapside and Cornhill, defended on the north by earthworks, felled trees, and a ditch; and in midst of these huts they erected more substantial houses, with towers at the eastern and western extremities, and probably a temple to Diana, where St. Paul's Cathedral now stands. The northern outskirts, now Bishopsgate Street Within was appropriated as a burial-place, as they never buried their dead in the midst of the living; but in process of time the exigencies of the increasing population demanded an extension of the City boundaries, and they built over the old grave-yard, making a new cemetery on the site of the modern Bishopsgate Street Without, Shoreditch, and the fenlands lying eastward and westward of these. In 1576, when digging for clay near where Christ Church, Spitalfields, now stands, a great number of cinerary urns were found, containing burnt human remains, and in each a piece of coin, wherewith to pay Charon for ferrying the defunct across the Styx; also, as Stow says, "divers vials and other old-fashioned glasses most cunningly wrought, such as I have not seen the like of, all which had water in them, differing from spring water" (_lachrymatories_), "cups and dishes of red earthenware and three or four images of white earth, about a span long, one of Pallas." Under the Camomile tesselated pavement, found in 1706, lay two feet of rubbish, and beneath that several funeral urns. Stone and timber coffins have also been found, or rather the nails of the latter, a quarter of a yard long, the wood having perished, and a Roman vault in St Botolph's Churchyard, all these, with skeletons or decayed bones in them, indicating burial after Christianity had become the religion of the empire, when the custom of burning the dead was abandoned.
The Saxons despised the effeminacy of decorated architecture and luxurious appliances in the way of household furniture, hence when they came into possession of London they allowed the sumptuous dwellings of the Romans to fall into decay and crumble to dust, preferring their own rough and uncomely habitations built of wood, but afterwards built their churches, monasteries, and public buildings generally of stone, and thus Roman London passed away.
The Saxons found it necessary to have another exit from the city northward between Aldgate and Aldersgate Street, and pierced the wall at the end of the street running from the river, whatever it may then have been called, and erected there a new gate. Erkenwald, Bishop of London, 679-97, has been credited with the work, but as this is only based upon the discovery, near by, of the statue of a mitred bishop, which it was presumed represented St. Erkenwald, the tradition may be doubted, but it was unquestionably this supposition which gave it the name of Bishops' Gate.
There are four churches in London dedicated to St. Botolph "the Briton," all situated by gates, Aldgate, Aldersgate, Billingsgate, and Bishopsgate. The latter lays claim to having been founded by the ancient British Christians, but, more probably, was built by the Saxons and dedicated to the British monk St. Botolph. It has been rebuilt no doubt several times since then. It escaped the ravages of the fire of 1666, but having become very much dilapidated, an Act of Parliament was obtained at the beginning of the last century for rebuilding it, by means of a rate of two shillings in the pound upon all household property in the parish, payable by the landlords, but this proving insufficient a parish rate was laid to supply the deficiency. It was commenced in 1725, and re-opened in 1728, having cost (there is nothing like precision) £10,444 1s. 8½d.
Tradition says that it was the burial-place of a brother of King Lud. The present building contains the tombs of Sir Paul Pinder; Edward Alleyn, the founder of Dulwich College; William, Earl of Devonshire, from whom Devonshire Square takes its name; and in the churchyard lies Hodges Shoughshware, "the chiefest servant of the King of Persia, who came from the King of Persia and died in his service, 1626, and Maghmote, his wife." The epitaph is in Persian, and entreats that all Persians who may read it will pray for their souls.
The Rev. Stephen Gorson, author of _The School of Abuse_, was rector of St. Botolph.
The venerable church of St. Helen is situated on the eastern side of the street, standing back and approached by an archway. Popular tradition ascribes its origin to the Emperor Constantine in honour of his mother, which is doubtless an error, but it unquestionably dates from the Saxon age, as in 1010 the relics of King Edmund the Martyr were temporarily deposited within its walls, when brought from East Anglia, to prevent their desecration at the hands of the Danes. In the twelfth century the advowson appears to have been held by one Ranulph, as in the reign of Henry II., _circa_ 1180, he and his son, Robert Fitz-Ranulph, made a grant of it to the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's Cathedral. About half a century later, _circa_ 1212, William Fitz-William, a London goldsmith, and ancestor of the extant Earls Fitzwilliam, founded in connection with it a priory for nuns of the order of St. Benedict, which was dedicated to the Holy Cross and St. Helen, the prioress on her election to swear fealty to the Dean and Chapter, who transferred to the priory the advowson of the church.
The church seems originally to have had simply a chancel and nave, without transepts or aisles, but when the priory was attached, it was duplicated by building another nave, and thus presented the appearance of a double-aisled church without an intermediate nave. A wall of division ran along the middle, one of the aisles being appropriated to the parishioners and the other to the nuns. It is to be feared that the fair inmates of the nunnery were not always very strict in their devotional exercises and seclusion from the outer world, and were even sometimes so naughty as to be subjected to punishments, one of which was being shut up in the crypt, which still exists, with the gratings, through which they could hear the service of the church without being present. Reginald Kentwode, dean of St. Paul's, in his periodical visitations, found so many "defautes and excesses" that he felt constrained to draw up a fresh code of rules for the regulation of the house, the original of which is amongst the Cotton MSS. in the British Museum.
Willyam Basynge, Sheriff of London, 1309, added considerably to the buildings, and came to be regarded as the second founder.
The seal of the priory was an oval, representing the Empress Helena standing by the cross (which she found in the Holy Land and brought to Europe) with the nails in her hand, and on the opposite side worshippers in the act of adoration. An impression of it is pendant from a deed in the possession of the Leathersellers' Company, and an engraving of it is given in Malcolm's _London Rediv._, vol. iii., p. 548.
At the dissolution of the priory the site was given to Richard Williams, one of the visitors of the monasteries, in exchange for certain lands in Huntingdonshire. He assumed the name of Cromwell, being a kinsman of Cromwell, Earl of Essex, and was ancestor of the Protector, Oliver Cromwell. The dividing wall in the church was taken down and the whole of the space appropriated to the use of the parishioners. The Leathersellers purchased the nuns' hall, and made it the hall of their company. The priory buildings remained, but in a ruined state, until 1799, when they were cleared away, and St. Helen's Place built on the site. A view of the ruins is given in Wilkinson's _Londina Illustrata_, and a picturesque view of the church and the Leathersellers' Hall in Malcolm's _London Rediv._, 1803.
The church contained more "altar" tombs with recumbent and kneeling effigies than any other church in the City, but they suffered terrible mutilation from the iconoclastic zeal of the Puritans, many of them having been altogether destroyed. Sir Thomas Gresham had promised to build a tower, which unhappily he was prevented doing by death, and it was not until 1699, that it was furnished with a steeple. The church has undergone many repairs and restorations, notably by Inigo Jones, 1623-4, and frequently in the plaster and whitewash style of decoration. The last and most judicious restoration was carried out in 1867-8, and the venerable old church may now be seen, after weathering so many storms, with its graceful Gothic arches, its groupings of tombs and monuments, the nuns' grating in the crypt, its grotesque heads, and over one of the doors the black figure of St. Helena, for which hundreds of pounds have been offered by foreign Catholics, and refused; with many of the same features that were looked at by the Greshams, the Crosbys, and other old parishioners of the Norman, Plantagenet, and Tudor ages, with the addition of some modern stained windows and an organ built in 1742, and rebuilt in 1868. The rectory was sold by Queen Elizabeth to Michael and Edward Stanhope, with the proviso of paying a stipend of £20 per annum to a vicar. Amongst the tombs are those of Sir Thomas Gresham, a splendid monument; Sir John Crosby, in full armour, and his wife, one of the oldest remaining; Sir John Lawrence, the noble Lord Mayor of the Plague year; Sir John Spencer, "Rich Spencer," whose daughter and heiress eloped with her lover, Compton, in a baker's basket.
St. Ethelburga is a small and very ancient church, squeezed almost out of sight by intervening parasitic shops; when or by whom founded not known, but most probably in the Saxon age. In an old print it is represented with a spire similar to that in Langham Place. It escaped the fire of 1666, was repaired and "beautified" in 1694, and again in 1701. St. Ethelburga was the daughter of Ethelbert, the first Christian king of Kent, and patron of St. Augustine; she married Eadwine, King of Northumbria, the convert of St Paulinus, after whose death, in battle at the hands of Penda, the Pagan king of Mercia, she fled with her children and Paulinus to her brother, who had succeeded to the kingdom of Kent, and who nominated Paulinus to the see of Rochester.
Walter Brune, citizen, and Rosia, his wife, in 1235, founded a priory of canons and hospital for the sick and needy, dedicated to our blessed Mary, called St. Mary Spital Without, Bishopsgate. It was suppressed in 1539, at which time it made up 180 beds, and supplied the sick occupants with all necessaries at a cost of £478 per annum. Outside was the pulpit where the famous Spital sermons were preached at Easter before the Mayor and Corporation, and sometimes royal personages, by the most eminent City divines. After the dissolution they were preached at St. Paul's, then in St. Bride's Church, and now in Christ Church, Newgate Street. The pulpit stood on a site that now forms the north-east corner of Spital Square. There existed for 120 years in the precincts of Bishopsgate, near Camomile Street, a curious fraternity called The Papey, a religious house of St. John and St. Charity, sometimes called St. Augustine's Papey, consisting of threescore priests, governed by a master and two wardens. Its objects were to supply the necessities of the poorer clergy by providing them with lodgings, coals, bread, and ale. Near by stood the church of St. Augustine-in-the-Wall, the patronage of which was vested in the rich Priory of the Holy Trinity, who presented to the living four rectors from 1321 to 1375, but after that no one could be found to accept the incumbency in consequence of the stinginess of the Priory—the stipend not being sufficient to live upon—who therefore in 1430 gave the church to the Papey guild. The fraternity was not rich in funds, and in order to improve their exchequer they practised the singing of dirges and attended funerals as professional mourners and dirge singers. The house was suppressed 2 Edwd. VI.
From the thirteenth to the seventeenth century a conspicuous feature in the line of road leading northward from Bishopsgate was the Priory of Bethlehem, with its square-towered church, its gabled houses for the brethren and sisters' habitations, and its gardens, situated at the eastern edge of the moorland of Fensbury, a little beyond St. Botolph's Church, and facing what are now New Street and Devonshire Place. It was then built quite in the country, with the fens behind, fields in front, and no houses beyond it. The roadway in front was nothing more than a beaten trackway, almost impassable in winter, which when houses came to be built along it, and it assumed the semblance of a street, was called Bedlam Gate. There is no view extant of the priory, excepting the bird's-eye view in Aggas' Map, _temp._ Elizabeth, where there is a continuous line of houses along Bedlam Gate and onward to St. Leonard's Church, Shoreditch, where the road apparently terminated; eastward is the Spittel Fyeld, with archers and cattle; and westward, Finsburie Fyeld, with windmills, bowmen practising at the butts, and women spreading out linen to dry.
The priory was founded in 1246 by Simon Fitz-Marie, sheriff of London in the same year, for brethren and sisters, canons of the Order of the Star of Bethlehem, subject to the Bishop of Bethlehem, to whom they had to pay one mark yearly at Easter. Their habit was a black gown with a star embroidered on the breast. When it became a hospital for lunatics is not known, but there are records of sick persons being nursed there in 1330, and of insane patients in 1403, when six of the latter and three of the former were maintained in the house. Weaver tells us that at one time there was "a house for distraught and lunaticke people" at Charing Cross, and that some king, he did not know who, not liking to have an establishment of people of that class so near his palace, packed them off to Bethlem Priory, which was probably the beginning of its career as a hospital for the insane.
The Hospital-Priory does not appear to have been very amply provided with funds, as in 1403 some of the houses were alienated, for the purpose seemingly of raising money, and the brethren had to go abroad collecting alms for the sustenance of the inmates. In 1523, one Stephen Gunnings, a merchant tailor, left £40 in trust to the Corporation for purchasing the house, to be continued as a receptacle for lunatics, and the Mayor took some steps for that purpose; but before they were carried out it was granted to the Corporation, after the Dissolution, by King Henry VIII., who placed it in charge of the governors of Christ's Hospital in 1556, and the following year transferred it to the governors of Bridewell. In 1555 the income, arising chiefly out of rents, amounted to £43 4s. 8d. per annum, and by 1632 they were valued at £470, which, not being all forthcoming, was inadequate for the support of the house, and the Spital preachers were directed to appeal to their hearers on its behalf, there being then forty-four lunatics within the walls, the revenues paying only two-thirds of the cost of their maintenance. Besides, there were so many pressing cases for admission, that it became necessary to discharge many of the half-cured and less violent patients, to whom were granted licences for begging, and they went abroad, dressed fantastically, singing "mad songs," and imploring food or money. They went by the name of "Tom o' Bedlams," and are alluded to by Shakespeare in _King Lear_, where he says—
"With a sigh like Tom o' Bedlam."
In the reign of Elizabeth the church and chapel were taken down, and houses built on the site; and in the following century, the buildings having become ruinous and much too small for the constantly increasing patients, it was resolved to build a new and larger hospital. The Corporation made a grant of land on the southern margin of Finsbury Moors, where the Liverpool Street railway stations now stand, and the public contributed £17,000 towards its erection. It was commenced in 1644, and completed in 1676; and in 1732 two wings were added, which made the entire length of the building 540 feet, with a depth of forty feet. The style adopted was that of the Tuileries in Paris, which so offended Louis XIV. that he caused some out-offices of a more useful and less dignified character to be built in the style of St. James's Palace, London. It was adorned with figures of raving and melancholy madness from the chisel of Caius Cibber, which are now in the hall of the present hospital.
The estates belonging to the hospital afterwards rapidly increased in value, and at the beginning of the present century the governors found themselves in a position to build a larger and better-planned building, and purchased a large plot of land in St. George's Fields, which with the new hospital cost £100,000. The total income is now about £20,000 per annum.
Until towards the end of the last century the insane were treated in a most barbarous way. Nakedness, chains, scourgings, and solitary confinement were their lot, calculated rather to intensify than alleviate their aberration of intellect, without any of the modern appliances of modern asylums—music, flowers, prints, books, amusements, cheerful society, and comparative liberty—which are now found to be essential towards their recovery. A good idea of the old style of madhouse may be obtained from the eighth plate of Hogarth's series of "The Rake's Progress," which represents a scene in the Moorfields Bedlam.
A few years ago a skeleton of a dwarf with fetters on the legs was dug up near Bishopsgate, supposed to be that of a patient of Bedlam. The road in front of the second hospital was formerly called "Old Bethlem" and was changed to Liverpool Street in honour of Lord Liverpool, Prime Minister 1812-27.
The Hon. Artillery Company, which originated here, removed to the present Artillery Ground in City Road in 1622, and has numbered amongst its officers Charles II., when Prince of Wales; James II., when Duke of York, after the Restoration; and George IV., when Prince of Wales, as Captain in Command. The old Artillery Ground in Bishopsgate Street has left reminiscences of its existence in the names of Artillery Lane, Artillery Passage, Gun Street, and Fort Street.
From a very remote period has the company of Leathersellers been connected with Bishopsgate Street and its vicinity. In the Norman age the tanners, curriers, and leather dressers clustered about Cripplegate and further eastward, where the stream of Walbrook entered the City, that locality being the Bermondsey of the period. The Company is supposed to have been formed in the Saxon times, but little or nothing is known of it until 1372, when the wardens and seniors presented a petition to the Corporation praying that stringent measures might be put in force against fraudulent craftsmen who used inferior dyes for staining their skins. They were incorporated in 1397-8, and were re-incorporated by Henry VI. in 1444, with power to elect four wardens and fifteen members of the court, and to use a seal with arms. The charter is a magnificent specimen of penmanship, and beautifully illuminated. There is a picture extant of the king presenting the charter to the four kneeling wardens in livery dresses of red and blue, furred at the edges, descending to the knees, and fastened at the waist with a girdle garnished with white metal. By this charter they were empowered to regulate the mystery in London, which powers were enlarged by Henry VII., who extended their supervision of the trade throughout the kingdom. In 1604 James I. granted them a new charter, which, like that of Henry VI., is a wonderfully fine specimen of art, with an emblazonry of the company's arms and an illumination of eight liverymen in their robes of office—black gowns trimmed with "foins," hoods of scarlet, and black flat caps.
The first hall of the company was built in 1445, in the parish of All Saints' by the Wall, south of the present Finsbury Circus, where now stand Leathersellers Buildings. A century after it became too small, and a portion of the site and buildings of the dissolved priory of St. Helen was purchased in 1543, and the nuns' hall converted into that of the company, which, with alterations and embellishments, came to be for a long time the finest livery hall in London. The ceiling was enriched with beautiful pendants, and at the end was a splendid Elizabethan screen, elaborately decorated. In the courtyard was a pump with the figure of a mermaid, from whose breast issued wine on gala occasions. It was the work of Cibber, who gave it in 1679, in payment of his admission fee to the membership of the company.
In 1799 the hall was sold along with other of the priory buildings, to clear the site for the building of St. Helen's Place. A new hall was built on the same site, but with new fittings, all the antique decorations of the old hall having been disposed of. This, the third hall, was destroyed by fire in 1819, the valuable collection of records being fortunately saved, and the present hall, occupying the north-east corner of St. Helen's Place, was built 1820-22.
The first record book of the company commences November 12th, 1472, with the following as the earliest entry:—
"Wyllyam J. Curtes gave to us this boke, For to regystre every wardenn's tyme in; Pray for hym when ye doe loke, That God will reward hym. Amen."
There are almshouses of the company in Clarke's Court, St. Helen's; White's Alley, Coleman Street; and Hart Street, Cripplegate.
Excepting the Borough High Street, perhaps no street in London had so many famous old inns, with galleried court-yards, cross-timbered walls, quaint gables, and latticed windows, as Bishopsgate Street, established for the accommodation of carriers and travellers from the north-eastern towns. Amongst them were the White Hart; formerly the Magpie, which stood by the gateway of Bethlem Priory, supposed to have been originally the hostelry of the priory, afterwards an inn for travellers who arrived after the gate was shut for the night. It seems, from a date on the wall, to have been rebuilt in 1480, and was standing in 1810, when a view was taken representing it with a double range of bay windows. It was again rebuilt in 1829, and stood at the corner of Liverpool Street. The Bull, where Burbage and his companions obtained a patent from Queen Elizabeth for the performance of theatricals in the quadrangle, the spectators occupying the surrounding galleries. This was the inn to which old Hobson, the Cambridge carrier, resorted, from whom came the saying of "Hobson's choice"—that or none. On a wall of the inn was his effigy, in fresco, clutching a money bag, with an inscription—"The fruitful mother of a hundred more."
The Green Dragon, an old Tudor house. The Catherine Wheel still a carriers' house. The King's Head, at the corner of Spital Square. The Wrestlers, a large inn, and the Angel, were in existence _temp._ Henry VI. The City of London Tavern, with pillared facade, famous in modern times for its public dinners, was converted, in 1839, into the Wesleyan Centenary Hall, established in commemoration of the centennial year of the formation of the Society of Methodists.