CHAPTER V
ROUND ABOUT CHEAPSIDE
“O Cheapside! Cheapside! Truly thou art a wonderful place for hurry, noise and riches.”--GEORGE BORROW.
Cheapside and Fleet Street have points of resemblance, for they are both narrow highways to the City, crowded and bustling and full of history, but Fleet Street, in spite of its literary associations, has not much attraction. Something of the mud of the old Fleet Ditch still seems to cling about it, some taint of disreputable Alsatia in Whitefriars, once the haven of roystering thieves and cut-throats, very different from the hive of grandiose newspaper offices that it is now.
But in Cheapside it is easy to call up memories of noisy apprentices and busy trafficking. Here is the home of the true Cockney, born within the sound of those bells of Bow Church that still chime as cheerfully as when Dick Whittington heard them from Highgate Hill, or when they summoned dilatory citizens to bed at nine o’clock. The very name evokes the idea of buying and selling, even if one does not know that the old word “chepe” means a market. It was once the shopping centre of the City of London, and the names of the streets branching off on either side, Bread Street, Milk Street, Honey Lane and the rest, are the names of the various commodities that were sold there. Friday Street was so called from the fish to be bought there on a Friday. Round about, in Ironmonger Lane, Bucklersbury, and most of the streets on the northern side, busy artisans worked at their trades, and if we think it a noisy thoroughfare nowadays, what must it have been when it was paved with cobblestones and thronged all day long with an endless stream of horsemen, carts and coaches, vociferating porters, citizens cheerful or quarrelling as the case might be, sellers calling their goods on either hand, and the bells of innumerable churches, priories and religious houses clanging incessantly to prayer. Always there was something going on in Chepe--a tournament to see, with stands set up at the side of Bow Church, or pageants, cavalcades and processions passing by. The London youth of those days had a diverting life. Read what Chaucer says of the prentice in Edward III.’s reign:
At every bridale would he sing and hoppe; He loved bet the taverne than the shoppe-- For when ther eny riding was in Chepe Out of the shoppe thider wold he lepe, And til that he had all the sight ysein, And danced wel, he wold not come agen.
We have most of us read in our history books of the “beau geste” of Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III., in saving the lives of the burghers of Calais; this seems to have been a habit that started early with her. In 1330, just after the birth of the Black Prince, a tournament was held in Cheapside to celebrate the event, and a fine wooden tower erected to accommodate the young queen and her ladies. No sooner had they mounted than it collapsed. There was much screaming and a scene of terrible confusion, from which they all emerged, however, more frightened than hurt. The king was so enraged that he ordered the instant execution of the careless workmen, but Philippa, who might well have been even more annoyed, at once flung herself on her knees and pleaded for their pardon until the king forgave them.
But “Safety first” was a motto with King Edward, he wanted no more wooden scaffoldings. A stone platform was built, just in front of the old church of St. Mary-le-Bow (making it extremely dark on the street side), from which he and his court could view the tournaments with minds at peace; for centuries this was the regular royal stand, whenever there was a procession or other fine doings in the City. Look at Bow Church, that glory of Cheapside, the work of Sir Christopher Wren, and, in the stone gallery running round the graceful steeple, you will see how, ever mindful of tradition, he commemorated this fact when he built his new tower to flank the pavement adjoining the site of the old grand-stand.
When I last went into Bow Church I chatted with the lady who was engaged in scrubbing the floor, and she told me the curious fact that in this English church in an English city, with its memories stretching through the ages (for it is built on the site of a much older one and you may still see the fine old Norman crypt), the Russians in London were then assembling, Sunday by Sunday, for a service in their own ritual, St. Mary’s congregation amiably going to another church near by. The City Churches that were missed so sorely, after the Great Fire, by the merchants, tradesmen, shopkeepers, apprentices, with their families, maids and servants, who lived all round about them and dutifully worshipped there, now stand empty and neglected. Here and there, as in the tiny fourteenth-century church of St. Ethelburga’s in Bishopsgate Street, the magnet of eloquent wisdom and sincerity draws men and women from all over London to worship, so that the seats are never empty, but in the majority of the City churches, a perfunctory service connotes a perfunctory congregation of caretakers and their wives, inhabitants of a quarter that is only populated in the working week-day hours. The best time to see any of the City churches is at the lunch hour, when they are sure to be open. In many of them short musical services are then held. I know few odder sensations than to walk in the City on a Sunday morning and hear all the sweet bells of the fifty-odd churches calling to prayer in the silence of the solitary streets. Practical people would pull the half of them down and devote the money from the sale of their sites to other much-needed religious purposes. But, even if these little churches no longer serve their original object, they are still shrines of the past, each one with some special memory, some special charm, and typical all together of a great phase of English architecture.
There is little of this past now actually left in busy Cheapside, except No. 37, of which I shall speak presently, two tiny houses at the corner of Wood Street, the handsome seventeenth-century façade (restored, of course) of the Mercers’ Chapel at the corner of Ironmonger Lane at the Lower Bank end, and No. 73 opposite, that was built by Wren for Sir William Turner who was Lord Mayor in 1668. It is still known as the Old Mansion House.
Probably it was his own house and he went on living in it till his death. Where, then, did the lord mayors stay officially during their term of office from that time till the present Mansion House was built in 1739? I am indebted to Mr. Leopold Wagner for supplying the answer by showing me the way to one of the most fascinating spots in the City. This third old Mansion House still exists, but in a corner so obscure, so tucked away, that I have passed within a stone’s throw of it a dozen times and never had the least suspicion of its existence.
It is at No. 5, Bow Lane, hard by Bow Church, in a narrow passage, with a sign directing you, if you are fortunate enough to see it, to Williamson’s Hotel. Follow the passage and you will find yourself remote from the world, with the quaintest old creeper-clad Restoration house imaginable surrounding three sides of the courtyard. Yet this quiet spot was once the hub of civic life,--there is a stone let into the charming little octagonal-shaped parlour (now called the reading room) that is supposed to mark the very centre of the City. Here for a few years the lord mayors after Sir William Turner dwelt in state, and here came William III. and Mary to dine, and give, as a memento of their visit, the handsome iron gates, now much corroded and covered with thick green paint, through which you seek the entrance.
Later on, in the early seventeen hundreds, the original Williamson started his hotel. It would have been described as “high-class residential,” had they known those terms, for in those days, when country squires and their families came up to town, they found the City as convenient a centre as anywhere. The forty bedrooms, the long salon, now a bar, where you may see, still hanging on the wall where it has been for centuries, an ancient map of London Bridge,--the pleasant rambling up-and-down passages, with their deep embrasures and window-seats, the low-ceilinged coffee-room with its only bell-pull marked “Boots,” and elegant little parlour where now no ladies ever sit,--all speak of a past of consequence.
But nowadays, apart from the birds of passage who pass a night in the huge station caravanserais, does anyone put up in the City? Only a few “commercials,” such as I saw lunching at Williamson’s, on the very excellent “ordinary” of lamb, green peas, new potatoes, cauliflower, cherry tart and cheese, winding up with coffee, liqueur and a fat cigar, over which they discuss the latest prices, and the latest sporting news. Williamson’s, in fact, does not cope with modern notions--“Take it or leave it” is their motto. The all-invading business girl has not yet dared to put her nose in here--she would probably create a revolution if she did. But if you want to get right back into the atmosphere of Dickens, in a place where electric bells, smart waitresses, music, flappers and foolish ideas of the value of time are not, conscript a friend and take a meal at the Old Mansion House.
Coming out into Bow Lane, on the right, at the opposite corner where Watling Street crosses it, you will find the Old Watling Restaurant, one of the first houses built in London after the Great Fire: a very delightful example of its kind, with its dormer windows and heavy-beamed ceilings.
In Cheapside, at No. 37 at the corner of Friday Street, where Messrs. Meakers carry on a business appropriate enough to the shop that tradition assigns to John Gilpin, is another house that claims, on the insufficient evidence of an undated cutting from the _Builder_, to have been standing even before the Fire.
Everything goes to refute this story. The very beautiful staircase dates from the Restoration period, the brickwork is similar to that of other buildings erected at this time, but, more than this, it is quite certain that the house stands on the site of the older “Nag’s Head,” a tavern with an overhanging timbered structure, that may be seen in a print of Cheapside showing the procession to welcome Marie de Medici when she came in 1638 to visit her daughter Henrietta Maria. The sign on the frontage now is no Nag’s Head, but a Chained Swan, once the heraldic badge of King Henry IV., but debased, like so many other noble devices, to become the sign of a hostelry. Innkeepers were fond of calling their houses after the swan, for this poor bird has always had an undeserved reputation for being fond of strong drink; on the other hand, it holds a special place in English history, for when Edward III., jousting at Canterbury in 1349, put on his shield the device of a white swan with the motto:
Hay, hay, the wythe Swan, By Gode’s Soule I am thy man,
this was the very first time that the English tongue was used at Court since the Conquest, and the White Swan made fashionable a language that has since spread all over the world.
At the sign of the “Chained Swan” is certainly the most interesting house in Cheapside. Quite probably it was really the first to be erected in the City after the Fire, as it is a four-storied house of some importance.
Cross the road to Wood Street, and, if you look through the railings at the back of the two diminutive shops that are shadowed by the great and famous plane-tree, you will see that they are built of the same red brick as No. 37 and bear a tablet with this inscription:
Erected at ye sole Cost and Charges of ye Parish of St. Peter’s Cheape Ao. Dni. 1687.
WILLIAM } HOWARD, } } _Churchwardens_. JEREMIAH } TAVERNER,}
The owners of these little houses are forbidden by their leases to add a second story, so the tree remains, bringing a breath of the country to City dwellers, reminding them of Wordsworth’s thrush, whose habit of continuous singing used to amaze my childhood:
At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears Hangs a thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years.
In Wood Street lived Launcelot Young, that master glazier of peculiar tastes who, finding the head of James IV., the King of Scots who was slain at Flodden Field, among a lot of old rubbish in the lumber room of the Duke of Suffolk’s place at Sheen, took it home with him and kept it till it lost its novelty.
When I said that there is little to remind one of the past in Cheapside, I forgot the churches that crop up round every corner. They have a wealth of memories clustering about them, and the moment you dive into the narrow courts and passages off the beaten track, you will lose the sense of modernity. In the dark, queer little lanes, most of them with a public-house tucked away in some obscure corner, may be found the London of Dickens’ day, if of no earlier. And what romance in the odd names--Gutter Lane, by Wood Street, named after Gutheran the Dane, who lived here before the time of the Conqueror; Huggin Lane that unites them farther up, called after one Hugan or Hugh; Addle Street, where King Adel the Saxon had a mansion; Love Lane of dissolute memory.
CITY COMPANIES
“Thy famous Maire, by pryncely governaunce, with sword of justice thee ruleth prudently.”--DUNBAR.
Wandering in Cheapside, I came across some massive emblazoned coats-of-arms over great doorways, and found they always announced the halls of the City Companies of London, those great mediæval trade unions that survive to-day--so taken for granted by the Londoner that few people remark their amazing existence.
Yet most of the real history of the old City is bound up with the tale of the rise to wealth and power of these great companies. They once numbered a hundred, and about seventy-six still survive. I see that in one recent guide-book the Pattenmakers are quoted as extinct, but though this ancient guild, founded in 1300, might be supposed to have received its deathblow a hundred years ago, when the improvement in the streets made pattens unnecessary, they are still made for country use and the company has recently renewed its vitality by association with the rubber boot and shoe industry.
I like the quaint names of the companies that are now no more. The occupation of the Bowyers and the Horners is fairly obvious, but who would guess that the Fletchers were makers of arrows, or the Lorriners makers of bridles and bits, and I leave you to discover the lugubrious meaning of the Worshipful Company of Upholders.
They were the trade unions of the Middle Ages, but they had this great difference, that they were a combination of the masters for the benefit of their particular industry, whereas now the trade unions are composed of the workmen, who combine for their own benefit even if it ruins the industry. Comparisons may be odious but they are inevitable. Our present trade unions, which seem to be growing almost as powerful as their forerunners, are exclusively concerned with the question of wages, but the guilds, whilst jealously guarding the privileges of their members and craftsmen, not only guaranteed a fixed wage, but administered even-handed justice as between master and men, and, more important still, insisted on a high standard of workmanship. Nothing but the best satisfied them, and they built up the tradition of English excellence which our present distaste for honest work puts us in a fair way to lose.
For in this matter we compare badly with our forefathers. Their ruthless methods might well be copied in this age of the meretricious and shoddy. In 1311 there was a bonfire in Cheapside (at the instance of the Hatters’ and Haberdashers’ Company) of forty grey and white and fifteen black “bad and cheating hats,” which had been seized in the shops of dishonest traders, and other defective goods were publicly burnt in the same place from time to time, but so rarely as to show how high was the usual standard of trade honesty. Nowadays, such seizures would provide almost enough fuel to tide us through another coal strike.
The City Companies were an autocracy, but, given the conditions of the time, they were a benevolent autocracy, and the guilds laid the foundations of the vast commercial wealth which has made London what she is. For centuries the Lord Mayor, their civic head, has been chosen almost always from amongst the members of the twelve great companies, and enjoys a prestige abroad only second to that of the king, as anyone who has lived in France can testify. Trade in England has always been honourable. The merchants of the Middle Ages belonged almost exclusively to families of good position; often they were younger sons of the landed gentry, for whom a commercial life, in days when there were no engineers, journalists, or bankers, was the usual opening if they did not go into the Church or Law. Whittington was the son of a Gloucestershire knight: Sir Thomas Gresham, that finest type of City magnate and honoured friend of Elizabeth, came of a good old stock and was educated at Cambridge. For centuries our kings and queens have been pleased to come to banquets in the Guildhall and the halls of the greater companies, though they might not nowadays look favourably upon that lord mayor with whom Charles II. dined, who became so drunk that when the king got up to leave he rushed after him and dragged him back, good-naturedly protesting, “to finish t’other bottle.”
The old power of the guilds has gone, but in what other country would you find bodies of merchants, each with a vast revenue at its disposal of which it need give account to no man, using that wealth, generation after generation,
for the public good instead of for private profit? They spend it either in maintaining excellent schools or in generous gifts to various charitable objects, or in subscriptions for the advancement of science (the City Companies are responsible for the City and Guilds Institute), but in whatever they do they uphold the best traditions of integrity and generosity of the City merchant.
The centre of all this civic activity is the Guildhall. From Oxford Circus a tube to the Bank or any bus along Holborn takes you along Cheapside and past King Street, at the end of which you see the Guildhall. If you start from the neighbourhood of Charing Cross any train to the Mansion House brings you to Queen Victoria Street, out of which Queen Street, a few minutes’ walk to your right, leads through directly to King Street.
Of course the great civic event of the year is the well-known and oft-described procession and the banquet given on the 9th November by the new lord mayor, chosen on Michaelmas Day, and the sheriffs to the members of the Cabinet and other distinguished guests. No women are permitted to be present and to hear the important political speeches often made at these dinners, but there are other times when their presence is tolerated. I have seen the big wooden figures of Gog and Magog in the gallery of the great hall look down on a recruiting meeting early in the war--on the gathering of one of those organisations that now and then are the temporary guests of the City Corporation, and on the ceremony of presenting the Freedom of the City to an overseas Prime Minister.
The hall is open to the public at the usual hours, 10-5.30, so go in and nod to Gog and Magog and look at the fifteenth century two-light window in the south-west corner--the only old one in the hall.
Coming out of the Guildhall on the left is the passage leading to the Museum and the Library. The latter is a fascinating place, with less red tape about consulting the books than in any other place of the size in London. You simply write your name and the book you want on a slip of paper, and the affair is done. If you seek information on a certain point, and do not know where to find it, the courteous director and his no less willing staff take the greatest trouble to help. I went there lately on such a quest, and book after book was produced for me by three assistants till the director in charge, who had evidently been doing some private research on my behalf, appeared triumphantly with the volume that gave the solution to my problem. It is a long, pleasant room, as indeed all book-lined rooms must be, with seven book-lined bays on either side. The collection contains about 200,000 volumes, besides many manuscripts. If you are a Shakespearean enthusiast you will find there among its rare treasures, the first, second and fourth folios of Shakespeare’s plays and a document bearing Shakespeare’s signature.
Naturally the library rather specialises on books about London, and the museum in the basement beneath (entered from Basinghall Street) is nearly filled with London relics--Roman antiquities, mediæval shop-signs, some of the lovely Jacobean jewellery found in Wood Street, the rest of which is in Lancaster House, instruments of torture from Newgate, and many other things that tell of the City life in mediæval days.
Round about and within a few minutes’ walk of the Guildhall cluster the halls of the City Companies. The most important in the order of precedence are the Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant Taylors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners and Clothworkers. Their halls are not supposed to be open to the general public, but it is possible to see most of them on application.
The history of the guilds is such a long one that their beginning is lost in Time’s mist. Mr. Muirhead says that “the chief object of their foundation was to afford religious and temporal and social fellowship, and trade supervision and help to the members of their fraternity or mystery,”--but they were not incorporated till the reign of Edward. Most of their halls date from the days of Henry VIII., when, grown rich and powerful, they looked about them for a home and were glad to buy from the avaricious king the houses of fugitive monks or favourites fallen into disgrace. But property so acquired was doomed to perish, and in the Great Fire of 1666 the ancient halls, almost without exception, were burnt to the ground. “Strange it is to see Clothworkers’ Hall on fire, these three days and nights in one body of flame, it being the cellar full of oyle,” says Pepys, who was a Master of the company. They have a fine collection of gold plate only used at state banquets, with a gold tray presented by Pepys in 1677 and also an immense loving-cup richly chased, that is now shown in a glass case on the sideboard, as it began to show signs of much handling.
The halls were rebuilt afterwards,--some, like the Vintners’ in 68 Upper Thames Street, and possibly the Haberdashers’ in Gresham Street, by Wren,--but by the beginning of the eighteen hundreds most of them seem to have fallen into such disrepair as to require rebuilding again.
One at least, the Merchant Taylors’, the largest hall of all, which faces Threadneedle Street, stands as originally erected, with its little crypt beneath it, in the latter part of the fourteenth century, for though the roof and walls were damaged by the Great Fire, the main building is still intact. This is a rich and proud company, with its income of £60,000 a year, and its fine gallery of royalties and distinguished personages, numbering many kings among its freemen. Yet not so proud as the Mercers’, first on the list, which will not admit visitors to its hall in 87 Cheapside. Whittington and Sir Thomas Gresham were mercers. Within the walls is kept the famous Legh cup (1499), always used at City banquets and supposed to be one of the finest pieces of English mediæval plate in existence. The chapel adjoining the hall, whose handsome front, erected immediately after the Great Fire, you may inspect at any rate, is on the site of Thomas à Becket’s house.
Close by in Prince’s Street, opposite the Bank of England, is the hall of the Grocers, once called the Pepperers, a guild with advanced notions for the Middle Ages, for they apparently believed in the equality of women. The wives of the Grocers were members as well, and were even fined if they were absent from the banquets for any avoidable reason. “Grocer” is one of those words that have grown less honourable with time, for a grocer formerly meant one who dealt _en gros_ (wholesale).
The halls of the Goldsmiths’ and the Fishmongers’ Companies have so many mediæval relics that they well repay a visit, and a card of admission is usually granted on application. The Goldsmiths are in Foster Lane, Cheapside, just behind the G.P.O., and amongst their plate you may see the cup from which Queen Elizabeth is said to have drunk at her coronation. In the Court Room is an old Roman altar, found when the present foundations were dug. The Goldsmiths still keep their ancient privilege of assaying and stamping all articles of gold and silver manufacture in Great Britain, just as the Fishmongers still have the less remunerative right to “enter and seize bad fish.” The hall of this guild is, appropriately enough, on the banks of the river, just at the north end of London Bridge, and in one of the rooms is a chair made out of the first pile driven in the construction of Old London Bridge, said to have been under the water for 650 years.
The hall of the Stationers’ Company in Paternoster Row was stone-faced a mere 121 years ago, but the attics still have horn-paned windows and part of it was built before the Great Fire. Visitors are shown the hall and the old relics, and every good American likes to see the compositor’s stick that Benjamin Franklin used when he came to London as a journeyman printer and lived in Bartholomew Close.
Stationers’ Hall is the headquarters of the Royal Literary Fund for assisting Authors in Distress, and among their treasures are the daggers used by Col. Blood and his accomplice when they tried to steal the crown jewels in Charles II.’s reign.
Most of the bare facts about the other chief companies can be found in any London guide-book, but if a reader wants to know more of these interesting survivals of the day when the craftsman loved his craft, he will find a detailed account in Mr. P. H. Ditchfield’s _The City Companies of London_, 1904, and Mr. George Unwin’s _The Gilds and Companies of London_.