Old and New London, A Narrative of its History, its People and its Places. Illustrated with Numerous Engravings from the Most Authentic Sources. vol 3
Thornbury, Walter
1872-78
Chapter XXVI: St. Giles's in the Fields.
Chapter XXVI: St. Giles's in the Fields.
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St. Giles, the patron saint of this and of so many other outlying parishes in English towns and cities, is said, by Alban Butler in his to have been of noble birth at Athens. He flourished in the and centuries, and combined with his piety a marked love of solitude. Quitting his own country he found a retreat in France, and passed many years of his life in the recesses of a forest in the neighbourhood of Nismes. It is said that the French king and a troop of hunters pursued a hind, which fled for protection to the saint. An arrow, intended for the hind, wounded the saint, who, however, continued his devotions, and refused all recompense for the injury done to his body. The hind, it appeared, had long nourished him with its milk, and had strayed into danger in of the glades. This incident made him a great favourite with the king, but nothing could induce him to quit his forest for the atmosphere of a court. Towards the end of his life, however, he so far abandoned his solitude as to admit several disciples and found a monastery, which afterwards became a Benedictine abbey. The saint is commemorated in the Martyrologies of St. Bede and others, and St. Giles and the hind have often afforded a subject for the artist's pencil. St. Giles, is the patron saint of lepers, and is styled in the calendar of the Roman Church
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It is very doubtful whether this manor and village, of which we now come to treat, was dedicated to St. Giles before the erection of the lepers' hospital by Queen Matilda, for there is no mention of it by any such name in The hospital consisted of a house or principal mansion, with an oratory and offices, but the appears to have been only a chapel, added on to the village church. says Newton,
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According to existing records, the earliest notice of this district tells us that a hospital for lepers was founded here, about the year , by Queen Matilda, the good wife of Henry I., and that it was attached as a or subordinate house, to a larger institution at Burton Lazars, in Leicestershire, then recently founded. Grants of royalty were confirmed by a bull of Pope Alexander VI. (). The hospital here stood on land belonging to the Crown, and not very far from the present parish church. The grounds were enclosed with a wall, and formed almost a triangle, embracing between and acres. On the north it was bounded by , on the west by , and on the east by Dudley (formerly . The conventual buildings do not appear to have been of any great size, and, so far as we know, there is no print of their extent. The foundation, however, as we happen to know, was for Mr. Newton tells us that the grant from the Crown expressly stipulated that the hospital should be built and hence he argues that the village church formed part of the grant along with the ancient manor. | |
Carew, in his says that leprosy was common in the far west in his own day (James I.), and attributes it to the St. James's, , and Burton Lazars, in Leicestershire, were the oldest houses for lepers in the kingdom. | |
At the Reformation Hospital was dissolved, and granted by Henry VIII. to John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, whom the king graciously allowed to alienate it to John or Wymond Carew, in . Belonging to the hospital was a Grange at Edmonton (Edelmston). At the time of this alienation () Dr. Andrew Borde, was the tenant of a messuage, with an orchard and garden, adjoining the said dissolved hospital. Mr. Parton identifies this with the site of the residence afterwards given to the | |
p.198 | rector by the Duchess of Dudley, and now known as Dudley Court. The hospital was endowed with lands at Feltham and Isleworth, and by an annual rent from parish. Lord Lisle fitted up the chief part of the building, and lived here years. Mr. Parton publishes the list of masters and wardens of the hospital, with accounts, &c. Cotterell Garden, in parish, was confirmed to the hospital in . |
The hospital chapel and the [extra_illustrations.3.198.1] of St. Giles would appear to have been distinct structures under a single roof, much like the arrangement still to be seen in St. Helen's Church, Bishopsgate. Before the high altar in the chapel burnt light. There was a altar and chapel of St. Michael. | |
The chief part of the village of St. Giles, in the days of our Plantagenet kings, was composed of houses standing on the north of the highway which led westward from to Tyburn, and whose gardens stretched behind them to St. Blemund's Dyke. In Ralph Aggas' map it figures as a small village, or rather a small group of cottages, with their respective garden-plots nestling around the walls of the hospital. In an Act of Par- | |
liament was passed, ordering the of London, from to St. Giles-in-the-Fields, to be paved, The village of St. Giles had its ancient stone cross, which seems to have stood near what is now the north end of . | |
In there was in London a conspiracy of the sect called the Lollards. They met in the fields adjoining Hospital, headed by Sir John Oldcastle, who afterwards was executed on the spot, being hung in chains over a slow fire. | |
In the days of Elizabeth it was not so easy either for lepers or for ordinary people to find their way from to St. James's, as there were no continuous rows of houses in that south-west direction. But at the point where now intersects , there was a notice, at the top of a narrow lane running across where is now Soho, It led, however, by a somewhat singular bend, no further than the top of the and a narrow lane parallel to it, which bore the rural name of Hedge Lane, not far from the corner of Leicester Fields. | |
The era of building began a little before | |
p.199 p.200 | , at which date and were nearly connected together. On the wall of the hospital being pulled down, houses began to be built on the east, west, and south sides of the church, and on both sides of Street new dwellings multiplied. years later saw the commencement of , and a continuation of the houses down both sides of . And so great was the increase that in no less than houses were rated. Indeed, in Elizabeth's time, the parish was very largely built on, and distinguished by the rank of its inhabitants. (Both Elizabeth and James, it will be remembered, forbade building in the suburbs.) At the end of Charles II.'s reign there were more than ; in Anne's, more than ; in , nearly houses rated in the parish books. |
A great era of building came in with the Restoration. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, large numbers of poor French took up their quarters about this part. | |
In this parish, unfortunately, the earlier volumes of the rate-books have perished, so that it is not possible to obtain such accurate information as to its inhabitants in the Tudor and Stuart times as we find in those of , and of , Covent Garden. | |
Although the parish of St. Giles is reckoned, as indeed it is, a poor and -rate neighbourhood, and its very name has passed into a by-word as the very antipodes of fashionable St. James's, still it is richer in its materials for history than many districts inhabited by a class higher in the social scale. It is observed in that
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When criminals ceased to be executed at the Elms in , or, as some say, at a much earlier date, a gallows was set up near the northwest corner of the wall of the hospital; and it soon became a regular custom to present every malefactor, as he passed the hospital gate in the fatal cart on his way to the gallows, with a glass of ale. When the hospital was dissolved, the custom was still kept up; and there is scarcely an execution at recorded in the in which the fact is not mentioned that the culprit called at a public-house for a parting draught. | |
The memory of this last drink given to criminals on their way is still preserved by Bowl Yard or Alley, on the south side of the , and Parton, in his published in , makes mention of a public-house bearing the sign of which stood between the end of , , and Hog Lane. | |
writes Pennant,
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The would appear to have been succeeded by the or to have had a rival in that inn. At all events, in , the reported that another memorial of ancient London was about to pass away, namely, the Inn, at , the on the road to Tyburn--the house at which Jack Ketch and the criminal who was about to expiate his offence on the scaffold were wont to stop on their way to the gallows for a Mr. W. T. Purkiss, the proprietor, however, was prevailed upon to stay the work of demolition for a time. | |
When Lord Cobham was executed at , it is said that a new gallows was put up for that special occasion. But Lord Cobham was not the only distinguished person who here paid the last penalty of the law. Pound is also memorable as the scene of the execution of some of the accomplices in Babington's plot against Queen Elizabeth, though Babington himself suffered at ,
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The Cage and the Pound originally stood close together in the middle of the , but they were removed in to make room for almshouses. The Pound, too, occupied, as we learn casually, a space of feet near the same site, but it was removed about the same time to the corner of , where it stood till on the site of the isolated block of houses opposite the entrance to Messrs. Meux's Brewery. | |
The immediate neighbourhood of this Pound bore none of the highest characters, if we may draw any inference on the subject from the words of a popular song by Mr. Thompson, an actor at , which we have prefixed as a motto to this chapter. | |
In the , on the left-hand side going towards , the late Mr. J. T. Smith remembered large and handsome houses, He also tells us that just where and | |
p.201 | meet there was a large circular boundary-stone let into the pavement. he adds,
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Mr. Smith also tells us, in his that he remembered a row of small almshouses, surrounded by a dwarf brick wall, standing in the middle of . They were pulled down about the year , and rebuilt near the coal-yard at the eastern end of . There was formerly a vineyard here, as there was on the slope of the hill near to . | |
It is remarkable that in almost every ancient town in England, the church of St. Giles stands either outside the walls, or, at all events, near its outlying parts, in allusion, doubtless, to the arrangements of the Israelites of old, who placed their lepers outside the camp. | |
[extra_illustrations.3.201.1] stands on the south side of , at the junction of , and was erected between the years and . It is a large and stately edifice, built entirely of Portland stone, and is vaulted beneath. The steeple, which rises to a height of about feet, consists of a rustic pedestal, supporting a range of Doric pilasters; whilst above the clock is an octangular tower, with -quarter Ionic columns, supporting a balustrade with vases, on which tands the spire, which is also octangular and belted. The interior of the church is bold and effective; the roof is supported by rows of Ionic pillars of Portland stone, and the semicircular-headed windows are mostly filled with coloured glass. | |
There was here a previous structure of red brick, consecrated by Laud, whilst Bishop of London, in , and towards the building of which the poor so cruelly persecuted by the Puritan party, gave . This church was pulled down to make room for the present edifice, which was opened for worship in . It had for its architect Henry Flitcroft, the same who built the church of St. Olave, ; and Mr. Peter Cunningham draws attention to the fact that it bears a close resemblance to that of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. The church of all on this spot appears to have had a round tower, not unlike those to be seen in the small parishes in the eastern parts of Norfolk and Suffolk. | |
Strype gives an account of several of the monuments in the church and churchyard, but we shall notice only a few. There is, or was, near the South-west corner, put up in , by John Thornton to his wife, who died in childbed. He probably was the builder of Thornton's Alley, and that he was from the north country is more than probable from the legend round the family tomb:-- A stone in the churchyard against the east end of the north wall of the church records the death of Eleanor Stewart, an old resident in the parish, who died in , at the age of and months, an age which we venture to bring here under the notice of Mr. Thomas. | |
In the churchyard are tombs to the memory of Richard Pendrill, to whom Charles II. owed his escape after the fatal battle of Worcester, and of George Chapman, the earliest translator of Homer's the latter is said to have been the work of Inigo Jones. The following bombastic epitaph on Pendrill's tomb will amuse our readers:
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Chapman deserves more particular mention here, as the intimate friend of Ben Jonson, who thus speaks of his translation of Homer :--
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He translated Hesiod's as well as Homer, and was even better known as a play-writer; and was more than once imprisoned, along with Ben Jonson, for the freedom of his pen. Chapman and Fletcher, indeed, were Jonson's most intimate friends. He told Drummond of Hawthornden that he loved them both, and that Chapman died in , at the age of nearly . | |
On the very verge of the churchyard, overlooking the busy traffic of , lies a flat stone, having upon it some faint vestiges of what was once a coat of arms and some appearance of an inscription; but the most expert of heralds would fail to describe the , and eyes, however penetrating, may be baffled to decipher the other. Yet this is a grave without its dead--a mockery of the tomb--a cheating of the sexton; for hither were brought the decapitated remains of who was among the brightest and most popular young noblemen of his time, and hence were they afterwards disinterred and privately conveyed to Dilston, in Northumberland, where they moulder in the family vault, amid the ashes of his forefathers. Here, in fact, was deposited the body of the amiable and unfortunate James Radcliffe, Earl of Derwentwater, whose fatal connection with the fortunes of the Pretender, and untimely death on , are matters of history, and reveal a sad tragedy, in which he was at once the hero and the victim. The body of the earl was again removed from its grave in Northumberland, and carried to Thorndon, Lord Petre's seat in Essex, for re-interment, in . | |
In the church and in the churchyard adjoining repose several other persons known to history. Among them Lord Herbert of Cherbury; Shirley, the dramatic writer; Andrew Marvell, of whom we have already spoken; the notorious Countess of Shrewsbury; Sir Roger L'Estrange, the celebrated political writer; Michael Mohun, the actor; and Oliver Plunkett, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, who was executed at Tyburn on the charge of high treason in . | |
The only monument of interest in the church is to be seen in the window in the north aisle. It is a [extra_illustrations.3.202.1] , who was created a duchess in her own right by Charles I., and who died in . Mr. P. Cunningham tells us, Among other matters, she had contributed very largely to the interior decoration of the church, but had the mortification of seeing her gifts condemned as Popish, cast out of the sacred edifice, and sold by order of the hypocritical Puritans. The duchess, who was also in other ways a benefactor to the parish of St. Giles, was buried at Stoneleigh, Warwickshire. | |
The gate at the entrance of the churchyard, which dates from the days of Charles II., is much admired. It is adorned with a bas-relief of the Day of Judgment. It formerly stood on the north side of the churchyard, but in , being unsafe, it was taken down and carefully re-erected opposite the western entrance, where it will command a prominent position towards the new street that is destined sooner or later to be opened from to . | |
Mr. J. T. Smith, in his speaks of this as being of red and brown brick: he says of the carving above it that it was Rowland Dobie, in his states that Mr. E. L Blanchard, in his informs us that the carving is and that it was But a better authority, Canon Thorold, tells us, in his that | |
The lich-gate was erected from the designs of William Leverton, Esq., and cost altogether the sum of , as may be seen in the parish records. Out of this sum received the miserable stipend of , showing the estimation in which sacred art was held under our Stuart kings. At the time of the removal of the gate, the tombstones were levelled in the churchyard, young trees were planted, the footway outside widened, and an ornamental railing placed by the kerb-stone instead of a dead wall. | |
Of all the dark and dismal thoroughfares in the parish of , or, indeed, in the great wilderness of London, few, we think, will compare with that known as , which runs between and . During the last half century, while the metropolis has been undergoing the pressure of progress consequent upon the quick march of civilisation, what remains of the of our early days has been left with its little colony of Arabs as completely sequestered from London society as if it was part of Arabia Petraea. Few pass through who are not members of its own select society. None else have any business there; and if they had, they would find it to their interest to get out of it as soon as possible. Its condition is a disgrace to the great city, and to the parish to which it belongs. | |
The mansion house inhabited by Lord Lisle, | |
p.203 | and afterwards by the Carews and the Duchess of Dudley, stood a little to the west of the church. It was demolished in order to build . Its site is marked by Lloyd's Court. |
In a small court known as Monmouth Court, leading out of into Little , is the celebrated printing and publishing office named after the late Mr. James Catnatch, by whom it was founded, in . From it has been issued by far the largest store of ballads, songs, broadsides, &c., that has ever appeared in London, even in this most prolific age. He was a native of Alnwick, in Northumberland, and, coming to London when a lad to fight the battle of life, was apprenticed as a compositor in the office of the newspaper. He deserves the credit of having been the who, availing himself of larger capital and greater mechanical skill than his precursors and rivals, substituted white paper and real printer's ink for the execrable tea-paper, blotched with lamp-black and oil, which had marked the old broadside and ballad printing. He also conceived and carried out the idea of publishing collections of songs by the yard, and giving for penny (formerly the price of a single ballad) strings of poetry. He was the patron of much original talent among the bards of and ; and in the quarter of a century which elapsed between the establishment of his press and his death, he had literally made a name in literature--of a particular kind. Among the events of the day which he turned to the best and most profitable account, were the trial of Queen Caroline, the Cato Street conspiracy, and the murder of Weare by Thurtell. On the last-named occasion, when the excitement about the execution was about to die out, he brought out a penny broadside, headed which the public read as The public did not like the trick, and called it a hence arose the set phrase, which for a long time afterwards stuck to the issues of the Dials' press, though they sold as well as ever. All sorts of stories are told to show the fertility of Catnatch's resources. He received such large sums in coppers, that he used to take them to the in a hackney-coach; and when his neighbours in Dials refused to take them, for fear of catch ing a fever which was said to have spread through their contact with low cadgers and hawkers, he boiled them with a decoction of potash and vinegar, to make them bright, and his coppers recovered their popularity. He had also a knack of carving rough and rude illustrations on the backs of music-blocks, which he nailed on to pieces of wood. Probably through his connection with Northumberland, he next fortunately picked up some of the wood blocks of Thomas Bewick, which raised at once the character of his printing-press. His next step was to increase the quantity which he gave for a penny, embodying his generosity to the public in a phrase which soon was in everybody's mouth, He next employed his talents on cheap Christmas carols and broadsheets of a higher class; and having realised something more than a competency, retired, in , to the neighbourhood of South Mimms, on the borders of Hertfordshire, where he died about years afterwards. The business of the he left to his sister, Mrs. Ryle, by whom it was carried on for a time, in conjunction with a Mr. Paul. It is now managed by Mr. W. S. Fortey, who, as a boy, was employed by Mr. Catnatch. The press is still as busy as ever, and though rivals have arisen, it enjoys a literary which will not soon pass away, if we may judge from the fact that it still turns out and sells yearly no less than a million of cheap fly-sheets of the various kinds mentioned above. | |
Some idea of the Catnatch literature may be formed from the items here following, taken from the catalogue of a -hand bookseller:-- | |
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The central space in this neighbourhood, called Dials, was so named on account of the plan upon which the neighbourhood was laid out for building, streets being made to converge at a centre, where there was a pillar adorned with, or, | |
p.204 | at all events, intended to be adorned with, dial faces. Till this column was put up, it was called according to the which tells us that at the time of its publication () only of the streets had been actually built. The locality is built on what was formerly known as the Marshlands, and also as Cock and Pie Fields. These were surrounded by a ditch, which ran down to and so into the Thames, but was blotted out when the Dials was built. Evelyn thus mentions the work in his under date :-- Gay, in his sings :-- It appears that the dial-stone had but faces, of the streets opening into angle. The column and dials were removed in , to search for a treasure supposed to be concealed beneath the base; they were never replaced, but in were purchased of a stonemason, and the column was surmounted with a ducal coronet, and set up on Weybridge Green as a memorial to the late Duchess of York, who died at Oatlands, in . The dial-stone formed a stepping-stone at the adjoining inn. The angular direction of each street renders the spot rather embarrassing |
p.205 [extra_illustrations.3.205.1] | to a pedestrian who crosses this maze of buildings unexpectedly, and frequently causes him to diverge from the road that would lead him to his destination. |
The business carried on in Dials seems to be of a very heterogeneous character. It is the great haunt of bird and bird-cage sellers, also of the sellers of rabbits, cats, dogs, &c.; and as most of the houses, being of an old fashion, have broad ledges of lead over the shop-windows, these are frequently found converted into miniature gardens, which help, in some degree, to counterbalance the squalor and misery that is too apparent in some of the courts and lanes hard by. In (formerly ) the shops are devoted chiefly to the sale of old clothes, -hand | |
boots and shoes, &c.; ginger-beer, green-grocery, and theatrical stores. Cheap picture-frame makers also abound here. In many of the houses, in some of these streets, whole families seem to live and thrive in a single room. In Charles Knight's we read that
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says Mr. J. Smith, in his
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Considering the class of the inhabitants, it is not surprising that many lodging-houses are to be met with. Mr. Diprose, in his tells us that perhaps the most celebrated and notorious of those in was kept by
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It is related that Major Hanger accompanied George IV. to a beggars' carnival in . He had not been there long when the chairman, Sir Jeffery Dunston, addressing the company, and pointing to the then Prince of Wales, said, The prince, as well as he could, got excused upon his friend promising to sing for him, and he chanted a ballad called with great applause. The major's health having been drank with times , and responded to by him, wishing them he departed with the prince, to afford the company time to fix their different routes for the ensuing day's business. At that period they used to have a general meeting in the course of the year, and each day they were divided into companies, each company having its particular walk; their earnings varied much, some getting as much as per day. | |
, it may be remembered, is the street to which the Nonconformist minister, Daniel Burgess, referred when preaching on the subject of a
he said, [extra_illustrations.3.206.2] | |
Footnotes: [extra_illustrations.3.198.1] parish church [extra_illustrations.3.201.1] St. Giles's Church [extra_illustrations.3.202.1] recumbent figure of the Duchess of Dudley [extra_illustrations.3.205.1] Interior of London Ragged School [extra_illustrations.3.206.2] St. Giles Mission |
