Mediæval London. Welch Charles

Ironmonger Lane, Wood Street, Milk Street, and the Poultry tell their own story. Budge Row was so called because here were sold robes of Budge, a kind of fur, for Aldermen and other public officers. Milton talks of the “budge doctors.” Friday Street, in close contiguity with St. Paul’s and some of the other great religious houses, was so called because it was devoted to the sale of fish for fast-days, &c. At a later time it became necessary to have an additional market-square, and it was found in the East Cheap.

      All through the Plantagenet times, the “golden age of chivalry,” the great square of “the Chepe” was the scene of tournaments and martial pageants. Adjoining the church of St. Mary-le-Bow was a scaffold projecting into the street, which it was the privilege of Royalty and the courtiers to occupy on such occasions. Once, in the reign of Edward III., a sad accident occurred by the falling in of this scaffold, whereby some not only of the occupants, but of the spectators in the street beneath, were killed. It is said that the King, with true Plantagenet violence, ordered the head carpenter to be hanged, and was turned from his purpose, as at Calais, by the intercession of the Queen. It led to an alteration. The Royal gallery was firmly fixed to the wall of the church, and so remained. Years later, after the Great Fire, when Wren rebuilt the church, and surmounted it with its present beautiful spire, there was a stipulation that there should be a “Royal gallery.” And there it is still, the passer-by can see it from the street. I doubt whether Royalty in our time has ever mounted into it, but it is an historical relic of the ancient pageants of Cheapside.1 Nor is this the only relic of the past in that church. In ancient times there was a great chamber, resting on arches, in the tower, and the church was called the Church of Sancta Maria de Arcubus; hence its present name of “St. Mary-le-Bow.” That chamber was the rightful possession of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who held it as his court for the trial of ecclesiastical causes brought before him as Metropolitan. Hence came the title of “Court of Arches,” the Spiritual Court of the Metropolitan. Strangely altered as the office has become in the course of years, it still exists; the judge of ecclesiastical cases is still known as “the Dean of Arches.” And when this St. Mary’s Church was rebuilt after the Fire of 1666, Wren placed its magnificent spire on an arched base – a memorial of the ancient ecclesiastical dignity.

      We are now in a position to look back, and take a comprehensive survey of our great city in the Middle Ages.

      First. We have the Tower on the east side, guarding the approach from the sea, and the high and spacious wall surrounding the whole city. Fitzstephen, a monk of Canterbury, gives an interesting picture of the times of Henry II. He describes London as bounded on the land side by a high and spacious wall, furnished with turrets and double gates. These were Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, Newgate, Ludgate, and probably Bridgegate. But see Stow’s comment (Ed. Thoms, 1842, page 11). There was also a postern near the Tower. The latter he calls “the Tower Palatine,” and also names “two castles well fortified” in the west, Baynard and Montfichet. The former stood at the western extremity of the city wall on the site of the present Castle Baynard Wharf, and adjoining Carron Wharf. The name survives also in the name of “Castle Baynard Ward.” It was built by Baynard, a follower of William the Conqueror, and though it was burnt more than once, it was duly restored, and lasted till the Great Fire. It became a Royal palace, and in it Edward IV. assumed the title of King. Henry VIII. made it one of his residences. So did Edward VI., on whose death Queen Mary was here proclaimed Queen. Montfichet Tower was between the site of Ludgate Hill Station and Printing House Square. A bastion of the London Wall still remains in the churchyard of St. Giles’, Cripplegate.

      Secondly. The great market-place – the Cheap – with the principal streets all leading into it, represents the commercial magnitude of the city. The residences of the merchants and traders had, for the most part, each its garden, large or small. It is a commonplace saying that there is not a street in London from some part of which you cannot see a tree. This was more true a few years ago than it is to-day. Thus, there was a beautiful plane-tree in front of Grocers’ Hall, in Princes Street, but exigencies of building-space led to its destruction but lately. Cheapside still rejoices in its fine tree at the corner of Wood Street, which has found a great poet to write pleasantly about it. Down in secluded streets the London saunterer comes on more of these trees, relics of old citizens’ gardens and resorts, as well as those in closed churchyards. The parish of St. Martin Pomeroy preserves in its second name the memory of the ancient orchard which once gladdened the Londoner’s eyes.

      Then, thirdly, there were the Religious Houses. Fitzstephen says that in his day (temp. Henry II.) there were thirteen conventual churches and 126 parochial. Some were of pre-Norman times, like the Collegiate Church of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, founded by one Ingelric in 1056, and confirmed by a charter of William the Conqueror in 1068. Though this stood in the heart of the city it was independent of civic control; the Mayor and Corporation often endeavoured in vain to exercise authority over it. Criminals on their way to execution now and then managed to slip within its boundaries, in which case they were safe in sanctuary. It was from this church that the Curfew Bell for London tolled out each evening, a signal for closing the city gates, as well as the taverns.

      An event of vast importance in the religious life of this nation was the great Cistercian movement in the beginning of the twelfth century. This is not the place to tell the history of the origin of it, the mighty endeavour to reform the decadent Benedictine order made by Robert of Molesme, who settled himself in the hamlet of Citeaux (Cistercium), near Dijon, and set up the first reformed monastery. The movement soon found its way to England, the first Abbey being founded at Waverley, near Farnham; and before long it had its devotees in London, the most noteworthy of whom was Gilbert Becket, a wealthy trader in Cheapside. It was the excitement of this which was upon the Londoners when, as we have already had to note, they chose Stephen for king against the supposed irreligion of the House of Anjou. Under the influence of this religious revival a new impulse seemed to come upon the Church, which bound it closer than it had ever been before in the affections of the people. Gilbert Becket’s son, Thomas, became known to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald, for his intense religious earnestness, became his right hand in administration, guided him unfalteringly through the troubles which came out of the dreadful civil war between Stephen and Matilda, and finally gave peace to distracted England. How the eager young Londoner himself became Archbishop, and how he came for many a year to be regarded as the very chief of English saints, we need not tell here. And this new religious impulse told in the city to the extent of changing its very aspect. The Cathedral which Bishop Maurice had begun seemed for a while to be languishing. Now barges came up the river with stone from Caen for the great arches which excited the popular wonder. Rahere, the king’s minstrel, raised his noble Priory of St. Bartholomew in Smithfield, of which enough still remains to make it the finest Norman building in London. Alfune, in 1090, built St. Giles’s, Cripplegate. The dissolution of the Cnichten Guild (a body of thirteen knights as old as King Edgar, which continued to hold land on fanciful tenures down to 1115) was followed by the bestowal of their property on the Priory of the Holy Trinity in Aldgate, and out of this arises an interesting episode. The first prior, Norman, built his cloister and church, and bought books and vestments on so liberal a scale that there was nothing left to buy food. The citizens, visiting the place on Sundays according to custom, saw that the poor canons were famished with hunger. “Hic est pulcher apparatus, sed panis unde veniet?” exclaimed somebody. “It is a fine show to be sure; but where is the bread to come from?” The women present, Becket’s mother among them, vowed to send a loaf every Sunday, and soon there was enough and to spare. Very pretty is the story of the early life of the future martyr, how his mother, Rohese, used to weigh him on each birthday, and send money, clothes, and provisions, according to his weight.

      The Cistercian is the first of the great religious movements which have wrought an enduring effect upon our national life. The Crusades, which have also left their mark in London, made a second; and within the period we are considering we have also to place the preaching of the Friars, the Lollardism of Wyclif, and the Reformation. Later on, past mediæval times, came the Puritan Rebellion, the preaching of the Wesleys, the Oxford Tract Movement, and the work of F. D. Maurice and the “Broad Church.”

      But it will be well to set down in order the principal religious establishments which grew up with the years.

1

One of the “properties” still remains in Ironmongers’ Hall, an ostrich on which a black boy was seated in a seventeenth-century Mayoralty pageant. The beautiful drawings of Anthony Munday’s “Chrysanaleia,” a pageant prepared for Sir John Leman’s Mayoralty procession in 1616, are preserved at Fishmongers’ Hall.