The gate described by Stow,

was taken down in

1606

, and

a new one

erected in its stead, the ornaments of which are dwelt on at great length by Stow's continuators.

Two

Roman soldiers stood on the outer battlements with stone balls in their hands, ready to defend the gate; beneath, in a square, was a statue of James I., and at his feet the royal supporters. On the city side stood a large figure of Fortune, and somewhat lower, so as to grace each side of the gate, gilded figures of

St. Botolph's-Aldgate

St. Michael's Chapel-Aldgate

Peace and Charity, copied from the reverses of

two

Roman coins, discovered whilst digging the new foundations for the gate. The whole structure was

two

years in erecting.

Ben Jonson, in his , says,

Many things that seem foul in the doing, do please done. You see gilders will not work but inclosed. How long did the canvas hang before

Aldgate

? Were the people suffered to see the city's Love and Charity while they were rude stone, before they were painted and burnished?

The city's Love and Charity were standing in ; the other statues had been long removed.

Through this gate--under which, about the year

During the reign of Edward IV., again felt maces beat at its doors, and clothyard shafts tremble in its tough planks. In the Bastard Falconbridge, collecting seamen in Essex and Kent, came with his vessels and anchored near the Tower. On hearing of his intention, the mayor and alder-

[extra_illustrations.2.246.4] 

[extra_illustrations.2.248.1] 

[extra_illustrations.2.248.2] 

[extra_illustrations.2.248.3] 

[extra_illustrations.2.248.4]  men fortified the Thames shore, from Baynard Castle to the Tower, and stood to their guns. The Bastard, finding the south side unapproachable, then assailed the east of London, and attacked with turbulent men; but the citizens, letting the portcullis drop, entrapped and cut off many of their assailants. Elated by this, Robert Bassett, the alderman of , ordered the portcullis to be drawn up, in God's name, and, by a brave sortie, drove the enemy back as far as St. Botolph's. At this juncture, Earl Rivers and the Constable of the Tower arriving with reinforcements, drove the rebels back as far as Mile End, Poplar, and . Many of the assailants of were slain in this attack, after which the Bastard fled.

Near this gate, in the reign of Edward I., in a small projecting turret, was a hermitage. Without was a conduit, erected in . The water was conveyed from Hackney. The crowd of poor water-bearers, with their tubs, pails, and tankards, proving, however, a nuisance, the conduit was removed into a side court.

Among the records of the city of London is a lease granting the whole of the house above the gate of to the poet Chaucer, in .

In all the prisoners of the Poultry Compter were lodged after the Great Fire, till the prison could be rebuilt. In the year , when the city gates were taken down to widen the streets, was bought by Mr. Mussell, of , a zealous antiquary, who inhabited a house belonging to Lord Viscount Wentworth, built in the reign of James II. Mr. Mussell rebuilt [extra_illustrations.2.248.5]  on the north side of his mansion, to which he henceforth gave the name of House. There was a bas-relief on the south front, carved from Wat Tyler's tree, an old oak which once grew on , and which the aldermen and council had had carved to adorn the old city gate, A year ago, as workmen were excavating near Pump, some very curious arches, resembling the cloisters of an ancient abbey, were discovered.

[extra_illustrations.2.248.6] , was so called from Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, who was beheaded in for his political intrigues with Mary Queen of Scots, to whose hand the weak and ambitious Catholic nobleman had aspired.

I find,

the said duke, anno

1562

, with his Duchess, riding thither through

Bishopsgate Street

to Leadenhall, and so to Cree Church, to his own place, attended with a

hundred

horse in his livery, with his gentlemen afore, their coats guarded with velvet, and

four

heralds riding before him, viz., Clarencieux, Somerset, Red Cross, and Blue Mantle.

The influx of Jews from Lithuania and Germany became greater and greater towards the end of the

seventeenth

century. The aristocratic Sephardim, whose ancestors had banqueted with sovereigns, and held the purse-strings of kings, looked, it must be owned, with some disdain on their poorer and humbler brethren--the plebeian Ashkenazim, who had dealt in worn garments or huckstered in petty commodities on the banks of the Vistula, or in German Ghettos. The Portuguese did not allow the Germans to have any share in the management of congregational affairs. The Germans, in point of fact, were treated as belonging to a lower caste, and the only functions that a member of that nationality was permitted to fulfil were the useful, albeit lowly duties of beadle, which were actually entrusted to a German--a certain Benjamin Levy. In time the Germans resolved to establish a synagogue of their own, and in

1692

, during the reign of William III.,

one

of their body, a philanthropic and affluent individual, named Moses Hart, built a place of worship in

Broad Court

, Duke's Place.

[extra_illustrations.2.249.1] 

[extra_illustrations.2.249.2] 

In the , lying between and , there stood, in the Middle Ages, an abbey of nuns of the order of St. Clare, called the , founded in by Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, Leicester, and Derby, and brother to Edward I., to receive nuns who were brought from Spain by his wife Blanche, Queen of Navarre. Ribideneira, the Spanish Jesuit, who wrote the tells us that St. Clare was an Italian saint who, by the advice of St. Francis, ran away from her father's house to take refuge in a convent, where she miraculously multiplied the bread, and rebuked the devil in person. She died in (Henry III.) During the plague of twentyseven of these nunswere carried off besides lay servants. The nunnery, which spent a year, was surrendered by Dame Elizabeth Salvage, the last abbess, to Henry VIII., in . After the dissolution the nunnery became the residence of many great people; of all, of John Clark Bishop of Bath and Wells, Henry's ambassador, afterwards of officers of the Tower; and early in Edward VI. gave it to Henry, Duke of Suffolk, father of Lady Jane Grey. In Stow's time, in place of the nunnery were built

divers fair and large storehouses for armour and habiliments of war, with divers workhouses serving the same purpose.

[extra_illustrations.2.249.3] , in the , was founded by Matilda, queen of Henry I., in . It escaped the Great Fire, but becoming dangerous was taken down and rebuilt in . In Strype's time this church claimed mischievous privileges, such as marrying without a license. In the church is the tomb of William Legge, that faithful servant of Charles I., to whom the king confided his message to his degenerate son, enjoining him to remember

the faithfullest servant ever prince had.

Near adjoining to this abbey, called the

Aldgate.

Minories

,

on the south side thereof, was some time a farm belonging to the said nunnery; at the which farm I myself (in my youth) have fetched many a halfpenny worth of milk, and never had less than

three

ale-pints for a halfpenny in the summer, nor less than

one

ale-quart for a halfpenny in the winter, always hot from the cow, as the same was milked and strained.

One

Trolop, and afterwards Goodman, were the farmers there, and had

thirty

or

forty

kine to the pail. Goodman's son being heir thereof, let out the ground,

first

for grazing of horses, and then for garden plots, and lived like a gentleman thereby. He lieth buried in St. Botolph's Church.

In Strype's time were

no longer fields and gardens, but buildings consisting of many fair streets, as

Maunsel Street

, Pescod or

Prescot Street

,

Leman Street

, &c., and tenters for clothworkers, and a large passage for carts and horses out of Whitechapel into Wellclose, besides many other lanes,

On the other side of that street,

lieth the ditch without the walls of the city, which of old times was used to lie open, and was always (from time to time) cleansed from filth and mud, as need required; and was of great breadth, and so deep, that drivers watering horses, where they thought it shallowest, were drowned, both horse and man. But now of later time the same ditch is enclosed, and the banks thereof let out for garden plots, and divers houses be thereon builded; whereby the city wall is hidden, the ditch filled up, a small channel left, and made shallow enough.

That miserable and worthless coward, Lord Cobham, who falsely accused Raleigh of a share in his plot, almost died of starvation in the in the mean lodgings of a poor woman who had been his laundress. Congreve has some verses full of strained wit and gallantry, after his manner, on the Mulcibers of the , who deform themselves in shaping the stays of steel that

give Aurelia's form the power to kill.

of the most extraordinary old houses in London was sketched by J. T. Smith, in , and taken down in . It stood at the end of a low dark court on the south side of , and was universally known in as [extra_illustrations.2.250.1] . The last lodger was a carpenter, who had sunk a saw-pit at the north end of the courtyard. The whole front of the house, which had originally formed sides of a square, was of carved oak. The tradition was that the cats' heads carved on the ceilings always had their eyes directed on the spectator wherever he stood, and that even the knockers had once been shaped like cats' heads. [extra_illustrations.2.250.2] , and above and below ran wild-beasts' heads and crouched goblins, that acted as corbels. The doorway panels were richly carved, and above and below each tier of windows were strings of carved shields, including several arms of the city companies. A curious old house which formerly stood in the is shown on page . It was at time an inn, and when taken down in the timber-work was so firmly fixed together, that it had to be pulled asunder by horses.

In a curious group of seated figures of goddesses, bearing baskets of fruit in their laps, were discovered in digging a sewer in , . The group is now at the .

The House of , or Friars of the Holy Cross, at the corner of , was founded by Ralph Hosiar and William Sabernes, about the year . The founders themselves became friars of the order, and to them Stephen, the prior of the Holy Trinity, granted tenements for In the reign of Henry VIII. the solicited the city magistrates to take the establishment under their patronage. At the dissolution the watchful emissaries of Cromwell caught the Prior of and down at once went the king's hammer upon the corrupt little brotherhood. The church was turned into a carpenter's yard and a tennis-court, and the friars' hall eventually became a glass-house. On the , Stow says,

a terrible fire burst out there that destroyed all but the stone walls.

Herbal

The great benefactor to the was Sir John Milborne, who was buried in their church. This worthy draper, mayor in the year , was the founder of certain Drapers' Almshouses in the parish of , close to the old priory. The will, given by Strype, is a curious exemplification of the funeral customs of the old religion, and of the superstitions of the reign of Henry VIII. By the last testament of Sir John, his bedesmen from the adjoining almshouses were required to come daily to the church and hear mass said or sung near the tomb of their benefactor, at a.m., at Our Lady's altar in the middle aisle; and before the said mass the bedesmen, of them standing right over against the other and encompassing the tomb, were severally, and of them together, to say the

De Profundis,

De Profundis

all Christian souls.

The inmates of the Drapers' Almshouses received a month, the day of every month, for ever. The bedesmen were to be of honest conversation, and not detected in any open crime. They were forbidden to sell ale, beer, or wine,

or any other thing concerning tippling.

a

four

-square stone, with the figure of the Assumption of our Blessed Lady, supported by

six

angels in a cloud of glory.

[extra_illustrations.2.246.4] Robert Dow's Monument

[extra_illustrations.2.248.1] Hall of Brotherhood of Holy Trinity

[extra_illustrations.2.248.2] Audley House

[extra_illustrations.2.248.3] St. James-Duke's Place

[extra_illustrations.2.248.4] Remains-Duke's Place

[extra_illustrations.2.248.5] the gate

[extra_illustrations.2.248.6] Duke's Place, Aldgate

[extra_illustrations.2.248.7] a synagogue

[extra_illustrations.2.248.8] the celebration of the weddings

[extra_illustrations.2.249.1] Ruins of Nunnery-Minories

[extra_illustrations.2.249.2] Old Fountain-Minories

[extra_illustrations.2.249.3] The Church of the Priory of the Holy Trinity

[extra_illustrations.2.250.1] Whittington's Palace

[extra_illustrations.2.250.2] Two sides of the outer square were nearly all glass lattice