Old and New London, A Narrative of its History, its People and its Places. Illustrated with Numerous Engravings from the Most Authentic Sources. vol 2
Thornbury, Walter
1872-78
Chapter III:Upper Thames Street.
Chapter III:Upper Thames Street.
Among the great mansions and noblemen's palaces that once abounded in this narrow river-side street, we must of all touch at , the residence of many great merchants and princes of old time. It is mentioned as Stow tells us in the of Edward II., when Sir John. Abel, Knight, let it to Henry Stow, a draper. It was then called Cold Harbrough, in the parish of All Saints ad Foenum (All Hallows in the Hay), so named from an adjoining hay-wharf. Bequeathed to the Bigots, it was sold by them, in the reign of Edward III., to the well-known London merchant, Sir John Poultney, Draper, times Mayor or London, and was then called Poultney's Inn. Sir John gave or let it to Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex for rose at Midsummer, to be given to him and his heirs for all services. In Richard II. dined there, with his halfbrother John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon, who then lodged in Poultney's Inn, still accounted, as Stow says, The next year, Edmund, Earl of Cambridge, lodged in it. It still retained its old name in , when Henry IV. granted the house to Prince Hal for the term of his life, starting the young reveller fairly by giving him a generous order on the collector of the customs for casks and pipe of red Gascony wine, free of duty. In the river-side mansion belonged to Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter. This duke was the unfortunate Lancastrian (great-grandson of John of Ghent) who, being severely wounded in the battle of Barnet was conveyed by of his faithful servants to at . He remained in the custody of Edward IV., with the weekly dole of half a mark. The duke hoped to have obtained a pardon from the York party through the influence of his wife, Ann, who was the king's eldest sister. But flight and suffering had made both factions remorseless. This faithless wife obtaining a divorce, married Sir Thomas St. Leggier; and not long after, the duke's dead body was found floating in the sea between Dover and Calais. He had either been murdered or drowned in trying to escape from England. Thus the Duke of Exeter's Inn suffered from victory of Edward, as his neighboor's, the great Earl of Worcester, had paid the penalties of Henry's temporary restoration in . Richard III., grateful to the Heralds for standing up for his strong handed usurpation, gave to the Heralds, who, however, were afterwards turned out by Cuthbert Tunstal, Bishop of Durham, whom Henry VIII. had forced out of in . In the reign of Edward VI., just before the death of that boy of promise, the ambitious Earl of Northumberland, wishing to win the chief nobles to his side, gave to Francis, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and its name was then changed to Shrewsbury House (), days before the young king's death. The next earl (guardian for years of Mary Queen of Scots) took the house down, and built in its place a number of small tenements, and it then became the haunt of poverty, as we see by the following extracts from old writers:--
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On the east side of Dowgate, near the church of St. Mary Bothaw, formerly stood a celebrated old house frequently mentioned by Stow and the old chroniclers, and called, we know not why, the Erber. Edward III. is known to have given it to of the Scropes. The last Scrope, in the reign of Henry IV., gave it to his brother, Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, who married Joan, daughter of the Duke of Lancaster. This earl was the son of John, Lord Neville of Raby, the knightly companion of Edward III., and who had shared with his chivalrous monarch the glory won in France. From the earl it descended to the king-making Earl of Warwick, that great warrior, who looms like a giant through the red battle-fields of the Wars of the Roses, who lodged his father, the Earl of Salisbury, and men here in the congress of , when there was a pretended reconciliation of the Houses of York and Lancaster, to be followed in years by the battle of Northampton and the deposition of the weak king. The great earl himself lived in , . After the death of this maker and unmaker of kings, the house passed to the who had fought on both sides, and, luckily for himself, at last on the victorious side. | |
Clarence obtained, after the battle of Barnet, a grant of the house in right of his wife, Isabel, daughter of Warwick. After Clarence's murder in the Tower, his younger brother, Richard of Gloucester--the Crookback and monster usurper of Shakespeare-occupied the house, repaired it, and called it Ralph Darnel, a yeoman of the Crown, kept the building for King Richard till that hot day at Bosworth Field rendered such matters indifferent to him; and Henry VII. then gave it back to Edward, son of the Duke of Clarence, who kept it till his attainder in . It was rebuilt in by Sir Thomas Pullison (a Draper, ancestor of the Stanleys), Lord Mayor of London, and was afterwards honoured by being the residence of that great sea-king, [extra_illustrations.2.18.1] , who must have found it convenient for dropping down to Greenwich. | |
Mr. Jesse, in writing of the Neville family, dwells with much pathos on the fate of the family that once held the Erber. he says,
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Queenhithe-or Queenhive, as it was corruptly called by the Elizabethan dramatists--was originally, according to Stow, called or bank, from some Saxon owner of that part of . It was royal property as early as the reign of King Stephen, who bestowed it upon William de Ypres, who left it to the convent of the | |
Holy Trinity within . King John is said to have given it to his mother, Eleanor, queen of Henry II. If vessels came up the river together, had to discharge at and at ; if , went to and to . The tolls were, in fact, the Queen of England's pin-money. Vessels which brought corn from the Cinque Ports usually discharged their cargoes here. At the end of the century, however, Fabian says the harbour dues at were worth only a year. A century later (Stow's time) it was quite forsaken. In the curious old ballad quoted with such
in Peele's chronicle-play of Edward I., Queen Eleanor (Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I.), having taken a false oath, sinks into the ground at and rises again at . The ballad-writer makes her say:--
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p.20 [extra_illustrations.2.20.1] | |
It was at that the rash Essex, the favourite of Elizabeth, took boat after the affray in the city, when he was beginning to be hemmed in, and he rowed back from here to Essex House in , where he was soon after besieged. He might as well, poor fellow! have pulled straight to the Tower, and ordered the block to be got ready. | |
St. Nicholas Olave's stood on the west side of , in the ward of . That it is of great antiquity is evident by Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London, having given the same to the Dean and Chapter of about the year ; and its name is supposed to be derived from Olave, or Olaus, King of Norway. The church sharing the common fate in the flames of , was not rebuilt, and the parish was annexed to the church of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey. The following epitaph relating to Blitheman, organist of the Queen's Chapel, and buried in St. Nicholas, has been preserved:--
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He died on Whitsunday, Anno Domini . | |
The was formerly a favourite London sign. Instead of the cranes which in the Vintry used to lift the barrels of wine, birds were represented. The in was a famous tavern as early as the reign of James I. It was of the taverns frequented by the wits in [extra_illustrations.2.20.2] time. In of his plays he says: And in another of his plays we have:
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On the -, Pepys suffered a bitter mortification of the flesh in having to dine at this tavern with some poor relations. The sufferings of the snobbish secretary must have been intense:--
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The of , says:
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says Strype,
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The church of St Martin in the Vintry was sometimes, according to Stow, called by the name of St. Martin de Beremand. This church, destroyed in the Great Fire, was not rebuilt. A curious epitaph in it related to Robert Dalusse, barber in the reign of Edward IV.:--
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A little to the west of Vintner's Hall once stood a most celebrated house, in , the residence of that learned nobleman, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, and Lord High Treasurer of England (Edward IV.), but more distinguished to later generations as the generous patron of Caxton, our great printer. | |
In the dedication of his Caxton says of the earl:
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&c. But this prosperity was not of long duration. A new revolution took place. Edward IV. was obliged to abandon his kingdom with great precipitation to save his life. The Earl of Worcester was not so fortunate as to escape; but, after he had concealed himself a few days, he was discovered on a high tree in the forest of Waybrig, conducted to London condemned at , and beheaded on , . He was accused of cruelty in the government of Ireland; but his greatest crime, and that for which he suffered, was his steady loyalty to his rightful sovereign and generous benefactor, Edward IV. says Fuller, in his usually pithy way, While the earl resided at Padua, which was about years, during the heat of the civil wars in England, he visited Rome, and delivered an oration before Pope Pius II. (AEneas Silvius) and his cardinals, which drew tears of joy from His Holiness; and made him say aloud, and yet so barbarous was the age, that this same learned man impaled Lancastrian prisoners at Southampton, put to death the infant children of the Irish chief Desmond, and acquired the nickname of
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[extra_illustrations.2.21.3] -- of the most interesting buildings now existing in , once so much inhabited by the rich and noble--stands on the river-side not far from . | |
According to worthy Stow, the Vintry, up tillthe of Edward I., was the special spot where the Bordeaux merchants unloaded their lighters and sold their wines. Sir John Stodie, Vintner, gave the ground, in (Edward III.), to the Vintners, with all the neighbouring tenements, and there the Vintners built a fair hall, and almshouses for poor people. | |
The contentions between the citizens of London and the Gascon wine merchants, in the reign of Edward I. it has been remarked, would lead us to infer that the Vintners had long before that time acted as a fraternity, though not formally incorporated till the reign of Henry VI. Edward I. granted them Botolph Wharf, near , in the mayoralty of Henry de Valois, on their paying a silver penny annually at the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. Towards the French wars they contributed , a greater sum than that given by the majority of the companies; and in Edward III. they sent members to the Common Council, which showed their wealth and importance. | |
The Saxons seem to have had vineyards. In the Norman times there was a vineyard in the Tower precincts It is supposed this uncomfortable home-made wine was discarded when Gascony fell into our hands. Some writers who disbelieve in English wines declare that the Saxons used the English word for and that wine was, after all, cider. Certain, however, it is that at Bath and other old towns there are old streets still called the Vineyard. The traffic in Bordeaux wines is said to have commenced about , when Henry II. married Eleanor of Aquitaine. | |
says Herbert, The wines enumerated are Muscadell, a rich wine; Malmsey, Rhenish; Dale wine, a sort of Rhenish; Stum, strong new wine; Gascony wine; Alicant, a Spanish wine, made of mulberries; Canary wine, or sweet sack (the grape of which was brought from the Canaries); Sherry, | |
p.22 | the original sack, not sweet; Rumney, a sort of Spanish wine. Sack was a term loosely applied at to all white wines. It was probably those species of wines that Fitzstephens, in the reign of Henry II., mentions to have been sold in the ships, and in wine-cellars near the public places of cookery on the . |
There were Vintner mayors in the reign of Edward III.; and yet, says Stow, gravely, In this reign John Peeche, a fishmonger, was imprisoned and fined for having obtained a monopoly for the sale of sweet wines; and in the of Henry VI., John Rainewell, Mayor of London, finding that the Lombard wine merchants adulterated their sweet wines, he, in his wrath, ordered vessels to be staved in,
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In Henry VI. there was a petition to Parliament praying that the wine-casks from Gasconytonnes, pipes and hogsheads--should be of full and true measure; and in Henry VI. there was another petition against the adulteration of Gascon and Guienne wines, in which the writer says,
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The charter confirmed by Henry VI. forbids any but such as are enfranchised by the craft of Vintners to trade in wines from Gascony; and Gascoigners were forbidden to sell wine except in the tun or pipe. The right of search in taverns and the regulation of prices was given to members of the Company, annually chosen. It also permitted merchant Vintners to buy cloth, and the merchants of Gascoigne to purchase dried fish in Cornwall and Devon, also herrings and cloth, in what other parts of the kingdom they please. All wines coming to London were to be unloaded above , at the Vintry, so that the king's bottlers and gaugers might there take custom. | |
Charles I., always arbitrary and greedy, seems to have extorted a tun from the Vintners, and in return prohibited the wine coopers from exporting wines. Licences for retailing wine were at this time granted by the Vintners' Company for the king's benefit. He also forbade the sale of wines in bottles instead of measures. | |
The Vintners have charters-Edward III., Henry VI. (), Mary, Elizabeth, and their acting charter, James I. The Vintners' arms, granted by Henry VI., are sable, a chevron cetu, tuns argent, with a Bacchus and loving-cup for the crest. | |
Patents received their death-blow from the Parliament in , when patentees, Alderman Abell and Richard Kilvert, were severely fined for having obtained from Charles I. an exclusive patent for wine. The of , thus notices the transaction:--
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A very scarce and satirical contemporaneous tract on the subject (says Herbert) gives, in a supposed dialogue between the parties, a ludicrous exposure of this business of patent hunting. Abell and Kilvert, who in the tract are called accidentally meet, and the latter claiming acquaintance with the alderman, as at whose house he had often been a guest, Abell answers that he did indeed get a good estate there by retailing wines, but chiefly through finding hidden treasure in digging a vault near his cellar, or, as he terms it, and without which, he adds, Kilvert's proposal contains a fine piece of satire on the mode in which such patents were obtained: | |
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The song we annex occurs at the end of the only printed pageant of the Vintners, and was sung in the hall. No subsequent city pageant was ever publicly performed since; that written for was not exhibited, owing to the death of Prince George of Denmark the day before. For that pageant no songs were written, so that this is the song of the city poet at the city pageant, and a better specimen than usual of his powers:--
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Many of the documents of the Company kept at the hall are supposed to have been lost in the Fore of London, which is said to be the reason why some of the almshouse and other donations cannot be satisfactorily accounted for. | |
The New View of London () describes [extra_illustrations.2.23.2] to be and to be it adds,
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of the London Companies--the Dyers' and the Vintners' Companies-are, with the Crown, the principal owners of swans in the Thames. These companies have long enjoyed the privilege of keeping swans on the river, from the Metropolis to a considerable distance above Windsor. says Mr. Kempe, | |
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On , while intriguing with the city, lived Dryden's the Duke of Buckingham. In a pasquinade, preserved in the State Poems, entitled the occur the following lines :
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Nor would our readers ever pardon us if we omitted Dryden's immortal portrait of the mercurial, duke:-- | |
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Lord Clarendon, in his life of himself, indeed, informs us that
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says Sir Walter Scott, who has himself nobly sketched the of the poet,
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The death of this butterfly Pope has drawn with terrible force:--
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It must, however, be allowed that the poet's shadows are too dark, for the duke died in the house of a respectable tenant in Yorkshire, from a fever caught out hunting. | |
The Mercers' School, , is of the ancient schools of London, of which number the Mercers' Company have the proud privilege of having given their generous patronage to . It stood originally in the (west side), and formed part of a cemetery for strangers and a house of the Knights Hospitalers, founded during the reign of Henry II. by Thomas Fitz- Theobald de Helles, who married Agnes, a sister of the so-called martyr Thomas b Becket. The school was held in a chapel of St. Thomas of Acon (Acre). It was classed among the city schools which received the sanction of Parliament in (Henry VI.), when of city parishes, seeing the gross ignorance prevalent in London since Henry V. had seized many of the alien priories and religious houses in England, and so reduced the number of schools, humbly petitioned that they might be allowed to play a part in. the advancement of learning. These worthy men were at once allowed to set up schools of their own founding in their respective parishes--i.e.., Great Allhallows, St. Andrew's, , , , and St. Mary Colechurch (St. Thomas Acons). When Henry VIII. laid his eager hands on the Abbot of St. Nicholas' princely revenues, and sold the hospital to the Mercers' Company, he expressly stipulated that the school, chapel, and cemetery should be retained. After the: Great Fire, in the Act for rebuilding the city (), it was expressly provided that there should be a plot of ground set apart on the west side of for Mercers' Chapel . In the school was removed to No. , , about yards from . On the death of Mr. Waterhouse, the master, in , the school was suspended for a time, and then removed to No. , , . There it remained till , when it was removed to its present situation on . Up to it had been a free school with scholars, the master being allowed to take private pupils. Greek and Latin were alone taught; but after English and the modem sciences were also introduced. The school reopened with a single scholar, but soon began to take root; and in the Company increased the number of scholars to . There are exhibitions of each, founded by Mr. Thomas Rich, a master of the school, who died in . The rules of require every boy to bring wax tapers for his use in winter. Mr. William Baxter, an eminent grammarian, who died in the year , was master of this school for more than years. | |
The list of eminent persons educated in the Mercers' School includes the wise and worthy Dean Colet, the friend of Erasmus and founder of School; that great merchant, Sir Thomas Gresham; William Fulke, master of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and a commentator on the Rheims Testament; John Young, Bishop of Rochester (died ); Davenant, Bishop of Salisbury (died ); Sir Lionel Cranfield, afterwards Earl of Middlesex and Lord Treasurer to James I.; and Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely (died ). | |
St. Michael's Paternoster Royal, , is mentioned as early as , when Hugh de Derby was rector. It is interesting to us from having been rebuilt by the illustrious Richard Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London. Here, on the north side of the church, he built [extra_illustrations.2.27.1] (now the site of the Mercers' School), some years since removed to Highgate; and here, in great state, he was buried. Alas for human fame and human gratitude no memorial of the good man now exists at St. Michael's--not even a half-worn-out stone--not even a thin, trodden, defaced brass. The great sculptured marble tomb is gone to dust; the banners have faded like the leaf. In the reign of Edward VI. Mountain, an incumbent (may the earth lie heavy on him!), believing great riches of gold and jewels were buried with Whittington, dug him up, and, probably in his vexation, destroyed | |
p.27 | the tomb. In the reign of Mary the parishioners reopened the grave, to re-wrap the dishonoured body in lead. It is now beyond- desecration, nor could it be sifted from the obscurer earth. In the old epitaph, which is in excellent rhyming Latin, Whittington is quaintly termed
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says Stow,
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The original declaration of the executors begins thus:
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The laws of the college required that
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St. Michael's was destroyed in the Great Fire, and rebuilt under Wren's directions. The spire was erected in . The parish of St. Martin Vintry is incorporated with that of St. Michael. In this church is Hilton's commendable picture of St. Mary Magdalene anointing the feet of Christ, presented by the directors of the British Institution in . There is some good carving in the oak altar-piece below the picture. The marble font was the gift of Abraham Jordan in . The monument to Sir Samuel Pennant (an ancestor of the London historian), who died in the year of his mayoralty (), is worthy of record, as is that of Marmaduke Langdale, a descendant of that Lord Langdale who commanded the left wing of King Charles's army in the battle of Naseby. The lower storey of the steeple is formed by projecting Ionic columns, bearing an entablature and vases, and the effect, though fantastic, is not unpicturesque. | |
In St. Michael's lies buried that brave young Cavalier poet, John Cleveland, as clever and as unfortunate a bard as his contemporary, poor Lovelace. Expelled from a Cambridge fellowship as a malignant, Cleveland mounted his horse and drew sword for King Charles, for whom he wrote or fought till his life's end. He was thrown into prison by Cromwell, who let him out on his telling him that he was too poor to purchase his release. The poet then took up his' abode in , close to Butler, the author of and there they established a nightly Cavalier club. Cleveland died young, and his friend, good Bishop Pearson, preached his funeral sermon. Of the poet's quick, overstrained fancy, and of his bitter satire against. the Scotch, who had betrayed King Charles for money, we give examples:-- | |
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Against the Scotch our poet discharges not merely bullets, but red-hot shot:--
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Some curious characteristic touches on [extra_illustrations.2.28.1] are to be found in Cleveland's prose satires, as for instance where he says: (, poor Cromwell's red nose, the result of ague). | |
Footnotes: [extra_illustrations.2.18.1] Sir Francis Drake [extra_illustrations.2.20.1] St. Michael's, Queenhythe [extra_illustrations.2.20.2] Ben Jonson's [extra_illustrations.2.21.3] Vintners' Hall [extra_illustrations.2.23.2] Vintners' Hall [extra_illustrations.2.27.1] almshouses [extra_illustrations.2.28.1] Cromwell |
