GROUP II
The second group of streets will be those lying north of Gresham Street, with Noble Street and Monkwell Street on the west, and Moorgate Street on the east. This part of the City is perhaps less rich in antiquities and associations than any other. The north part was, to begin with, occupied and built over with houses much later than the south. For a long time the whole area north of Gresham (then Cateaton) Street and within the Wall presented the appearance of gardens and orchards with industrial villages as colonies dotted here and there, each with its parish church and its narrow lane of communication with the great market of Chepe. Some of the names, as Oat Lane, Lilypot Lane, Love Lane, preserve the memory of the gardens and their walks.
In this district grew up by degrees a great many of the industries of the City, especially the noisy trades and those which caused annoyance to the neighbours, as that of the foundry, the tanyard, the tallow chandlers.
An examination of the Calendar of Wills down to the fifteenth century is in one sense disappointing, because it affords no insight into the nature of the trades carried on in the area before us. On the other hand, it curiously corroborates the theory that this part of the City was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries purely industrial, because among the many entries referring to this quarter there is but one reference, down to the seventeenth century, of any shops. There are rents, tenements—“all my Rents and Tenements” several times repeated; land and rents—“all my Land and Rents”; there are almshouses, Halls of Companies, gardens; but there are no shops, and that at a time when the streets and lanes about Cheapside are filled with shops!
The Companies’ Halls offer some index to the trades of the quarter. There are still Broderers’ Hall, Curriers’ Hall, Armourers’ Hall, Coopers’ Hall, Parish Clerk’s Hall, Brewers’ Hall, Girdlers’ Hall; and there were Haberdashers’ Hall, Mercers’ Hall, Wax Chandlers’ Hall, Masons’ Hall, Plaisterers’ Hall, Pinners’ Hall, Barber Surgeons’ Hall, Founders’ Hall, Weavers’ Hall, and Scriveners’ Hall, which have now been removed elsewhere or destroyed. These trades, we may note, are for the most part of the humbler kind.
Coleman Street is described by Stow as “a fair and large Street on both sides built with divers fair houses, besides alleys with small tenements in great numbers.”
Cunningham enumerates the chief events connected with the street:
“The five members accused of treason by Charles I. concealed themselves in this street. ‘The Star,’ in Coleman Street, was a tavern where Oliver Cromwell and several of his party occasionally met.... In a conventicle in ‘Swan Alley,’ on the east side of this street, Venner, a wine-cooper and Millenarian, preached the opinions of his sect to ‘the soldiers of King Jesus’” (see London in the Time of the Stuarts, p. 68 et seq.). “John Goodwin, minister in Coleman Street, waited on Charles I. the day before the King’s execution, tendered his services, and offered to pray for him. The King thanked him, but said he had chosen Dr. Juxon, whom he knew. Vicars wrote an attack on Goodwin, called ‘The Coleman-street Conclave Visited!’ Justice Clement, in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, lived in Coleman Street; and Cowley wrote a play called Cutter of Coleman-street. Bloomfield, author of ‘The Farmer’s Boy,’ followed his original calling of a shoemaker at No. 14 Great Bell-yard in this street.”