Haunted London — St. Giles's Part 1

ST.

GILES’S.

That ancient Roman military road (the Watling Street) came from Edgeware, and passing over Hyde Park and through St. James’s Park by Old Palace Yard, once the Wool Staple, it reached the Thames.

Thence it was continued to Canterbury and the three great seaports.

Another Roman road, the _Via Trinobantica_, which began at Southampton and ended at Aldborough, ran through London, crossed the Watling Street at Tyburn, and passed along Oxford Street.

In latter times, says Dr. Stukeley, the road was changed to a more southerly direction, and Holborn was formed, leading to Newgate or the Chamberlain’s Gate.

One of the earliest tolls ever imposed in England is said to have had its origin in St. Giles’s. [611] In 1346 Edward III.

granted to the Master of the Hospital of St. Giles and to John de Holborne, a commission empowering them to levy tolls for two years (one penny in the pound on their value) on all cattle and merchandise passing along the public highways leading from the old Temple, _i.

e. _ Holborn Bars, to the Hospital of St. Giles’s, and also along the Charing Road and another highway called Portpool, now Gray’s Inn Lane.

The money was to be used in repairing the roads, which, by the frequent passing of carts, wains, horses, and cattle, had become so miry and deep as to be nearly impassable.

The only persons exempted were to be lords, ladies, and persons belonging to religious establishments.

[612] Henry V. ascended the throne in 1413, and astonished his subjects by suddenly casting off his slough of vice, and becoming a self-restrained, virtuous, and high-spirited king.

His first care was to forget party distinctions, and to put down the Lollards, or disciples of Wickliffe, whom the clergy denounced as dangerous to the civil power.

As a good general secures the rear of his army before he advances, so the young king was probably desirous to guard himself against this growing danger before he invaded Normandy and made a clutch at the French crown.

Arundel, the primate, urged him to indict Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, the head of the Lollard sect.

The king was averse to a prosecution, and suggested milder means.

At a conference, therefore, appointed before the bishops and doctors in 1414, the following articles were handed Oldcastle as tests, and the unorthodox lord was allowed two days to retract his heresies.

He was required to confess that at the sacrament the material bread and wine are turned into Christ’s very body and Christ’s very blood; that every Christian man ought to confess to an ordained priest;

that Christ ordained St. Peter and his successors as his vicars on earth;

that Christian men ought to obey the priest; and that it is profitable to go on pilgrimages and to worship the relics and images of saints.

“This is determination of Holy Church.

_How feel ye this article?

_” With these stern words ended every dogma proposed by the primate.

Lord Cobham, who was much esteemed by the king, and had been a good soldier under his father, repeatedly refused to profess his belief in these tenets.

The archbishop then delivered the heretic to the secular arm, to be put to death, according to the usage of the times.

The night previous to his execution, however, Lord Cobham escaped from the Tower and fled to Wales, where he lay hid for four years while Agincourt was being fought, and where he must have longed to have been present with his true sword.

Soon after his escape, the frightened clergy spread a report that he was in St. Giles’s Fields, at the head of twenty thousand Lollards, who were resolved to seize the king and his two brothers, the Dukes of Bedford and Gloucester.

For this imaginary plot thirty-six persons were hanged or burnt; but the names of only three are recorded, and of these Sir Roger Acton is the only person of distinction.

A reward of a thousand marks was offered for Lord Cobham, and other inducements were held out by Chicheley, the Primate Arundel’s successor.

Four years, however, elapsed before the premature Protestant was discovered and taken by Lord Powis in Wales.

[613] After some blows and blood a country-woman in the fray breaking Cobham’s leg with a stool, he was secured and sent up to London in a horse-litter.

He was sentenced to be drawn on a hurdle to the gallows in St. Giles’s Fields, and to be hanged over a fire, in order to inflict on him the utmost pain.

He was brought from the Tower on the 25th of December 1418, and his arms bound behind him.

He kept a very cheerful countenance as he was drawn to the field where his assumed treason had been committed.

When he reached the gallows, he fell devoutly on his knees and piously prayed God to forgive his enemies.

The cruel preparations for his torment struck no terror in him, nor shook the constancy of the martyr.

He bore everything bravely as a soldier, and with the resignation of a Christian.

Then he was hung by the middle with chains and consumed alive in the fire, praising God’s name as long as his life lasted.

He was accused by his enemies of holding that there was no such thing as free will; that all sin was inevitable; and that God could not have prevented Adam’s sin, nor have pardoned it without the satisfaction of Christ.

[614] Fuller says of him: “Stage-poets have themselves been very bold with, and others very merry at, the memory of Sir John Oldcastle (Lord Cobham), whom they have fancied a boon companion or jovial roysterer, and yet a coward to boot, contrary to the credit of the chronicles, owning him to be a martial man of merit.

Sir John Falstaff hath derided the memory of Sir John Oldcastle, and of late is substituted buffoon in his place; but it matters us little what petulant priests or what malicious poets have written against him.

” The gallows had been removed from the Elms at Smithfield in 1413, the first year of Henry V. ; but Tyburn was a place of execution as early as 1388. [615] The St. Giles’s gallows was set up at the north corner of the hospital wall, between the termination of High Street and Crown Street, opposite to where the Pound stood.

The manor of St. Giles was anciently divided from Bloomsbury by a great fosse called Blemund’s Ditch.

The Doomsday Book contains no mention of this district, nor indeed of London at all, except of ten acres of land nigh Bishopsgate, belonging to St. Paul’s, and a vineyard in Holborn, belonging to the Crown.

This yard is supposed to have stood on the site of the Vine Tavern (now destroyed), a little to the east of Kingsgate Street.

[616] Blemund’s Ditch was a line of defence running nearly parallel with the north side of Holborn, and connecting itself to the east with the Fleet brook.

It was probably of British origin.

[617] On the north-west of London, in the Roman times, there were marshes and forests, and even as late as Elizabeth, Marylebone and St. John’s Wood were almost all chase.

The manor was crown property in the Norman times, for Matilda, daughter of Malcolm king of Scotland and the queen of Henry I. , built a leper hospital there, and dedicated it to St. Giles.

The same good woman erected a hospital at Cripplegate, and another at St. Katharine’s, near the Tower, and founded a priory within Aldgate.

The hospital of St. Giles sheltered forty lepers, one clerk, a messenger, the master, and several matrons; the queen gave 60s.

a year to each leper.

The inmates of lazar hospitals were in the habit of begging in the market-places.

The patron saint, St. Giles, was an Athenian of the seventh century, who lived as a hermit in a forest near Nismes.

One day some hunters, pursuing a hind that he had tamed, struck the Greek with an arrow as he protected it, but the good man still went on praying, and refused all recompense for the injury.

The French king in vain attempted to entice the saint from his cell, which in time, however, grew first into a monastery, and then into a town.

[618] This hospital was built on the site of the old parish church, and it occupied eight acres.

It stood a little to the west of the present church, where Lloyd’s Court stands or stood; and its gardens reached between High Street and Hog Lane, now Crown Street, to the Pound, which used to stand nearly opposite to the west end of Meux’s Brewhouse.

It was surrounded by a triangular wall, running in a line with Crown Street to somewhere near the Cock and Pye Fields (afterwards the Seven Dials), in a line with Monmouth Street, and thence east and west up High Street, joining near the Pound.

Unwholesome diet and the absence of linen seem to have encouraged leprosy, which was probably a disease of Eastern origin.

In 1179 the Lateran Council decreed that lepers should keep apart, and have churches and churchyards of their own.

It was therefore natural to build hospitals for lepers outside large towns.

King Henry II.

, for the health of the souls of his grandfather and grandmother, granted the poor lepers a second 60s.

each to be paid yearly at the feast of St. Michael, and 30s.

more out of his Surrey rents to buy them lights.

He also confirmed to them the grant of a church at Feltham, near Hounslow.

In Henry III.

’s reign, Pope Alexander IV.

issued a bull to confirm these privileges.

Edward I. granted the hospital two charters in 1300 and 1303; and in Edward II.

’s reign so many estates were granted to it that it became very rich.

Edward III.

made St. Giles a cell of Burton St. Lazar in Leicestershire.

This annexation led to quarrels, and to armed resistance against the visitations of Robert Archbishop of Canterbury.

In this reign the great plague broke out, and the king commanded the wards of the city to issue proclamations and remove all lepers.

It is strange that St. Giles’s should have been the resort of pariahs from the very beginning.

Burton St. Lazar (a manor sold in 1828 for £30,000) is still celebrated for its cheeses.

It remained a flourishing hospital from the reign of Stephen till Henry VIII.

suppressed it.

St. Giles’s sank in importance after this absorption, and finally fell in 1537 with its larger brother.

By a deed of exchange the greedy king obtained forty-eight acres of land, some marshes, and two inns.

Six years after the king gave St. Giles’s to John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, High Admiral of England, who fitted up the principal part of the hospital for his own residence.

Two years after Lord Lisle sold the manor to Wymond Carew, Esq.

The mansion was situated westward of the church and facing it.

It was afterwards occupied by the celebrated Alice, Duchess of Dudley, who died there in the reign of Charles II.

, aged ninety.

This house was subsequently the residence of Lord Wharton.

It divided Lloyd’s Court from Denmark Street.

The master’s house, “The White House,” stood on the site of Dudley Court, and was given by the duchess to the parish as a rectory-house.

The wall which surrounded the hospital gardens and orchards was not entirely removed till 1639. Early in the fourteenth century the parish of St. Giles, including the hospital inmates, numbered only one hundred inhabitants.

In King John’s reign it was laid out in garden plots and cottages.

In Henry III.

’s reign it was a scattered country village, with a few shops and a stone cross, where the High Street now is.

As far back as 1225 a blacksmith’s shop stood at the north-west end of Drury Lane, and remained there till its removal in 1575. In Queen Elizabeth’s reign the Holborn houses did not run farther than Red Lion Street; the road was then open as far as the present Hart Street, where a garden wall commenced near Broad Street, St. Giles’s, and the end of Drury Lane, where a cluster of houses on the right formed the chief part of the village, the rest being scattered houses.

The hospital precincts were at this time surrounded by trees.

Beyond this, north and south, all was country; and avenues of trees marked out the Oxford and other roads.

There was no house from Broad Street, St. Giles’s, to Drury House at the top of Wych Street.

[619] The lower part of Holborn was paved in the reign of Henry VI.

, in 1417;

and in 1542 (33d Henry VIII.

) it was completed as far as St. Giles’s, being very full of pits and sloughs, and perilous and noisome to all on foot or horseback.

The first increase of buildings in this district was on the north side of Broad Street.

Three edicts of 1582, 1593, and 1602 evince the alarm of Government at the increase of inhabitants and prohibit further building under severe penalties.

The first proclamation, dated from Nonsuch Palace, in Surrey, assigns the reason of these prohibitions:--1. The difficulty of governing more people without new officers and fresh jurisdictions.

2. The difficulty of supplying them with food and fuel at reasonable rates.

3. The danger of plague and the injury to agriculture.

Regulations were also issued to prevent the further resort of country people to town, and the lord mayor took oaths to enforce these proclamations.

But London burst through these foolish and petty restraints as Samson burst the green withs.

In 1580 the resident foreigners in the capital had increased from 3762 to 6462 persons, the majority being Dutch who had fled from the Spaniards, and Huguenots who had escaped from France after the massacre of St. Bartholomew.

St. Giles’s grew, especially to the east and west, round the hospital.

The girdle wall was mostly demolished soon after 1595. Holborn, stretching westward, with its fair houses, lodgings for gentlemen, and inns for travellers,[620] had nearly reached it.

In Aggas’s map, cattle graze amid intersecting footpaths, where Great Queen Street now is.

There were then only two or three houses in Covent Garden, but in 1606 the east side of Drury Lane was built; in the assessment of 1623 upwards of twenty courtyards and alleys are mentioned; and 100 houses were added on the north side of St. Giles’s Street, 136 in Bloomsbury, 56 on the west side of Drury Lane, and 71 on the south side of Holborn.

[621] The south and east sides of the hospital site had been the slowest in their growth.

After the Great Fire, these still remained gardens, but the north side, nearer Oxford Road, was already occupied.

The first inhabitants of importance were Mr. Abraham Speckart and Mr. Breads, in the reigns of James I. and Charles I. , and afterwards Sir William Stiddolph.

New Compton Street was originally called Stiddolph Street, but afterwards changed its name when Charles II.

gave the adjoining marsh-land to Mr. Francis Compton, who built on the old hospital land a continuation of Old Compton Street.

Monmouth Street, probably named after the foolish and unfortunate duke, was also built in this reign.

In 1694, in the reign of William III.

, a Mr. Neale, a lottery promoter, took on lease the Cock and Pye Fields--then the resort of gambling boys, thieves, and beggars, and a sink of filth and cesspools--and built the neighbouring streets, placing in the centre a Doric pillar with seven dials on it; afterwards a clock was added.

[622] This same Mr. Thomas Neale took a large piece of ground on the north side of Piccadilly from Sir Thomas Clarges, agreeing to lay out £10,000 in building; but he failed to carry out his design, and Sir Walter Clarges, after great trouble, got the lease out of his hands, and Clarges Street was then built.

[623] In 1697 many hundreds of the 14,000 French refugees who fled from Louis XIV.

’s dragoons after the cruel revocation of the Edict of Nantes settled about Long Acre, the Seven Dials, and Soho.

In Strype’s time (Queen Anne’s reign), Stacie Street, Kendrick Yard, Vinegar Yard, and Phoenix Street, were mostly occupied by poor French people; indigent marquises and starving countesses.

In the reign of Queen Anne, St. Giles’s increased with great rapidity--St. Giles’s Street and Broad Street from the Pound to Drury Lane, the south-east side of Tottenham Court Road, Crown Street, the Seven Dials, and Castle Street were completed; the south side of Holborn was also finished from Broad Street to a little east of Great Turnstile, and, on the north side, the street spread to two doors east of the Vine Tavern.

[624] The Irish had already begun to debase St. Giles’s; the French refugees completed the degradation and hopelessness, and spread like a mud deluge towards Soho.

In 1640 there are in the parish books several entries of money paid to soldiers and distressed men who had lost everything they had in Ireland:-- Paid to a poor Irishman, and to a prisoner come over from Dunkirk £0 1 0 Paid for a shroud for an Irishman that died at Brickils 0 2 6 In 1640, 1642, and 1647, there constantly occur donations to poor Irish ministers and plundered Irish.

Clothes were sent by the parish into Ireland.

There is one entry-- Paid to a poor gentleman undone by the burning of a city in Ireland; having licence from the lords to collect £0 3 0 The following entries are also curious and characteristic:-- 1642. --To Mrs. Mabb, a poet’s wife, her husband being dead £0 1 0 Paid to Goody Parish, to buy her boys two shirts; and Charles, their father, a waterman at Chiswick, to keep him at £20 a year from Christmas 0 3 0 1648. --Gave to the Lady Pigot, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, poor and deserving relief 0 2 6 1670. --Given to the Lady Thornbury, being poor and indigent 0 10 0 1641. --To old Goodman Street and old Goody Malthus, very poor ------ 1645. --To Mother Cole and Mother Johnson, xiid.

a-piece 0 2 0 1646. --To William Burnett, in a cellar in Raggedstaff Yard, being poor and very sick 0 1 6 To Goody Sherlock, in Maidenhead-fields Lane, one linen-wheel, and gave her money to buy flax 0 1 0 There are also some interesting entries showing what a sink for the poverty of all the world the St. Giles’s cellars had become, even before the Restoration.

1640. --Gave to Signor Lifecatha, a distressed Grecian ------ 1642. --To Laylish Milchitaire, of Chimaica, in Armenia, to pass him to his own country, and to redeem his sons in slavery under the Turks £0 5 0 1654. --Paid towards the relief of the mariners, maimed soldiers, widows and orphans of such as have died in the service of Parliament 4 11 0 These were for Cromwell’s soldiers; and this year Oliver himself gave £40 to the parish to buy coals for the poor.

1666. --Collected at several times towards the relief of the poor sufferers burnt out by the late dreadful fire of London £25 8 4 In 1670 nearly £185 was collected in this parish towards the redemption of slaves.

After 1648 the Irish are seldom mentioned by name.

They had grown by this time part and parcel of the district, and dragged all round them down to poverty.

In 1653 an assistant beadle was appointed specially to search out and report all new arrivals of chargeable persons.

In 1659 a monthly vestry-meeting was instituted to receive the constable’s report as to new vagrants.

In 1675 French refugees began to increase, and in 1679-1680, 1690 and 1692 fresh efforts were made to search out and investigate the cases of all new-comers.

In 1710 the churchwardens reported to the commissioners for building new churches, that “a great number of French Protestants were inhabitants of the parish.

” Well-known beggars of the day are frequently mentioned in the parish accounts, as for instance-- 1640. --Gave to Tottenham Court Meg, being very sick £0 1 0 1642. --Gave to the ballad-singing cobbler 0 1 0 1646. --Gave to old Friz-wig 1 6 0 1657. --Paid the collectors for a shroud for old Guy, the poet 0 2 6 1658. --Paid a year’s rent for Mad Bess 1 4 6 1642. --Paid to one Thomas, a traveller 0 0 6 To a poor woman and her children, almost starved 0 5 6 1645. --For a shroud for Hunter’s child, the blind beggar-man 0 1 6 1646. --Paid and given to a poor wretch, name forgot 0 1 0 Given to old Osborn, a troublesome fellow 0 1 3 Paid to Rotton, the lame glazier, to carry him towards Bath 0 3 0 1647. --To old Osborne and his blind wife 0 0 6 To the old mud-wall maker 0 0 6 In 1665 the plague fell heavily on St. Giles’s, already dirty and overcrowded.

The pest had already broken out five times within the eighty years beginning in 1592; but no outbreak of this Oriental pest in London had carried off more than 36,000 persons.

The disease in 1665, however, slew no fewer than 97,306 in ten months.

[625] In St. Giles’s the plague of 1592 carried off 894 persons; in 1625 there died of the plague about 1333;

but in 1665 there were swept off from this parish alone 3216. The plague of 1625 seemed to have alarmed London quite as much as its successor, for we find that in St. Giles’s no assessment could be made, as the richer people had all fled into the country.

A pest-house was fitted up in Bloomsbury for the nine adjoining parishes, and this was afterwards taken by St. Giles’s for itself.

The vestry appointed two examiners to inspect infected houses.

Mr. Pratt, the churchwarden, who advanced money to succour the poor when the rich deserted them, was afterwards paid forty pounds for the sums he had generously disbursed at his own risk.

In 1642 the entries in the parish books show that the disease had again become virulent and threatening.

The bodies were collected in carts by torchlight, and thrown without burial service into large pits.

Infected houses were padlocked up, and watchmen placed to admit doctors or persons bringing food to the searchers, who at night brought out the dead.

The following entries (for 1642) in the parish books seem to me even more terrible than Defoe’s romance written fifty years after the events:-- Paid for the two padlocks and hasps for visited houses £0 2 6 Paid Mr. Hyde for candles for the bearers 0 10 0 " to the same for the night-cart and cover 7 9 0 " to Mr. Mann for links and candles for the night-bearers 0 10 0 The next year the plague still raged, and the same precautions seem to have been taken as afterwards in 1665, showing that the terrible details of that punishment of filth and neglect were not new to London citizens.

The entries go on:-- To the bearers for carrying out of Crown Court a woman that died of the plague £0 1 6 Sent to a poor man shut up in Crown Yard of the plague 0 1 6 Then follow sums paid for padlocks and staples, graves and links:-- Paid and given Mr. Lyn, the beadle, for a piece of good service to the parish in conveying away of a visited household to Lord’s Pest House, forth of Mr. Higgins’s house at Bloomsbury £0 1 6 Received of Mr. Hearle (Dr. Temple’s gift) to be given to Mrs. Hockey, a minister’s widow, shut up in the Crache Yard of the plague 0 10 0 But now came the awful pestilence of 1665; the streets were so deserted that grass grew in them, and nothing was to be seen but coffins, pest-carts, link-men, and red-crossed doors.

The air resounded with the tolling of bells, the screams of distracted mourners crying from the windows, “Pray for us!

” and the dismal call of the searchers, “Bring out your dead!

”[626] The plague broke out in its most malignant form among the poor of St. Giles’s;[627] and Dr. Hodges and Sir Richard Manningham, both first-rate authorities on this subject, agree in this assertion.

In August 1665 an additional rate to the amount of £600 was levied.

Independent of this, very large sums were subscribed by persons resident in, or interested in, the parish.

The following are a few of the items:-- Mr. Williams, from the Earl of Clare £10 0 0 Mr. Justice (Sir Edmondbury) Godfrey, from the Lord Treasurer 50 0 0 Earl Craven and the rest of the justices, towards the visited poor, at various times 449 16 10 Earl Craven towards the visited poor 40 3 0 There are also these ominous entries:-- August.

--Paid the searchers for viewing the corpse of Goodwife Phillips, who died of the plague £0 0 6 Laid out for Goodman Phillips and his children, being shut up and visited 0 5 0 Laid out for Lylla Lewis, 3 Crane Court, being shut up of the plague; and laid out for the nurse, and for the nurse and burial 0 18 6 In July 1666 the constables, etc. were ordered to make an account of all new inmates coming to the parish, and to take security that they would not become burdensome.

They were also directed to be careful to prevent the infection spreading for the future by a timely guard of all “that are or hereafter may happen to be visited.

” “During the plague time,” says an eye-witness, “nobody put on black or formal mourning, yet London was all in tears.

The shrieks of women and children at the doors and windows of their houses where their dearest relations were dying, or perhaps dead, were enough to pierce the stoutest hearts.

At the west end of the town it was a surprising thing to see those streets which were usually thronged now grown desolate; so that I have sometimes gone the length of a whole street (I mean bye streets), and have seen nobody to direct me but watchmen[628] sitting at the doors of such houses as were shut up; and one day I particularly observed that even in Holborn the people walked in the middle of the street, and not at the sides--not to mingle, as I supposed, with anybody that came out of infected houses, or meet with smells and scents from them.

” Dr. Hodges, a great physician, who shunned no danger, describes even more vividly the horrors of that period.

“In the streets,” he says, “might be seen persons seized with the sickness, staggering like drunken men; here lay some dozing and almost dead; there others were met fatigued with excessive vomiting, as if they had drunk poison; in the midst of the market, persons in full health fell suddenly down as if the contagion was there exposed to sale.

It was not uncommon to see an inheritance pass to three heirs within the space of four days.

The bearers were not sufficient to inter the dead.

”[629] It is supposed that till the Leper Hospital was suppressed, the St. Giles’s people used the oratory there as their parish church.

Leland does not mention any other church, although he lived and wrote about the time of the suppression, and even made an effort to save the monastic MSS.

by proposing to have them placed in the king’s library.

The oratory had probably a screen walling off the lepers from the rest of the congregation.

It boasted several chantry chapels, and a high altar at the east end, dedicated to St. Giles, before which burnt a great taper called “St. Giles’s light,” and towards which, about A. D.

1200, one William Christemas bequeathed an annual sum of twelvepence.

There was also a Chapel of St. Michael, appropriated to the infirm, and which had its own special priest.