GROUP VI
The sixth group of streets in our division of the City contains all those streets lying north of St. Paul’s Churchyard and Ludgate Hill.
We may consider this group as connected with Newgate Street and the streets to the north, and Paternoster Row with the streets and lanes to north and south. These lie partly in the ward of Farringdon Within and partly in that of Farringdon Without.
Probably at or before the beginning of the thirteenth century, certainly in its latter half, the present two wards of Farringdon Without and Farringdon Within formed but one ward under one alderman. That ward in early records is found named, as are most other wards, after its successive aldermen, thus: “Ward of Anketin de Auvergne” (1276-77) (Riley’s Memorials); “the ward which was that of Ralph le Fevre” (1278); “Ward of William de Farndone” (1283); “Warda Willelmi de Farendone infra et extra” (1286-87). Yet just before the last date the ward was called after the two City gates which it contained, thus: “Warda de Lodgate et Neugate: Willelmus de Farndon [aldermannus]” (c. 1285) (Sharpe, Calendar of Wills); and so it continued some time, for we find: “Warda Ludgate et Neugate presentat Nicholaum de Farndon [aldermannum]” (1293). In each case the whole ward, both within the gates and without, is intended, but it is said that the part without the gates was sometime known as the “Ward of Fletestrete” (Riley’s Memorials). In the fourteenth century the name of William de Farendone became permanently attached to this ward, as: [warda] “Farndon Infra [et] Farndon Extra: Nicholaus de Farndon [aldermannus]” (1319-20) (Sharpe); [warda] “Farndone infra et extra” (1320) (Riley); “Warda de Farndone” (1320); “Garde de Faryngdone” (1383). In 1393 the ward was made into two wards, each with its separate alderman. Henceforward the aldermanry without the walls was known by an equivalent to the present style, as: “Ward of Farndone Without” (1415) (Riley); “Ward of Faryndone Without” (1416) (Riley); “Ward of Faryngdon Without” (1444) (Catalogue of Ancient Deeds); “Warde of Faringdon Extra, or Without” (1598) (Stow); and so on with varieties of spelling.
The Roman gate of the west stood a little to the north of the later gate. The massive alcoves of the gate were uncovered in Giltspur Street near the end of the nineteenth century.
According to Stow, the “New Gate” was erected by Henry I. to relieve the traffic which had been stopped by the enclosures of St. Paul’s Precinct. Formerly, he said, the traffic had been conducted along a single street leading from Aldgate to Ludgate. There is evidently some confusion here. The “West Gate” is mentioned in a charter dated 857. It is possible that it means Ludgate; it is not, however, probable that the Saxons allowed the trade of the north and the west, which was brought down the great highway to the marsh of Thorney and was then, even before the Roman occupation, diverted along Oxford Street and Holborn, to resume its old course across the Marsh and Thorney Island, or that they would have gone out of their way to construct a new line of route along the present Piccadilly and the Strand.
It seems perfectly certain that the old line of trade was followed, partly because trade always does follow in accustomed lines, and partly because there was no reason why it should not do so. I read, therefore, the history of Newgate as follows:—The Roman Highway lay along Oxford Street and Holborn; it crossed the valley of the Fleet by a causeway through the mud and by a bridge over the stream—the causeway kept in place by piles and the bridge also resting on wooden piles. On the other side, the causeway sloped up the bank to the west gate, which stood on the hill as part of the Roman wall. When the Saxons in the sixth century came in to the City the causeway and the bridge had been swept away and destroyed; the old gate was ruinous. The merchants themselves, when they resumed the former trade, found it easier to break through the wall than to clear away the ruins of the old gate. They then made their own causeway and built their own bridge over the marshy valley and the stream. When Alfred restored the walls, he accepted the new gate and probably strengthened it, and built up the wall over the old Roman gate. This gate it was which Henry I. rebuilt, not, as Stow says, built. By this time, however, Ludgate had been opened as a postern; another causeway and another bridge had been built across the valley, and houses were springing up along the rising ground of Fleet Street and the Strand. And it is also quite possible that the rebuilding of the gate led to some reconstruction of the line of way through the City.
Henry I., therefore, rebuilt New Gate.
It was a prison from the first. All the City gates were prisons, the upper chambers being strong and easily guarded by the permanent watch below. Newgate, however, became a more important prison than any of the others, “as appeareth,” says Stow, “by records in the reign of King John and of other kings.”
It would take a whole volume to pass in review the prisoners of Newgate. Let me take one—an obscure person—because he belongs to the life of London, whereas the better known prisoners belong to the history of the country. It was on the eve of Pentecost, 1388, that William Wotton, Alderman of Dowgate, went to the Shambles in Newgate Street and asked of one Richard Bole, a butcher, the price of certain pieces of beef. Richard replied that it was four shillings. “That,” said the Alderman, “is too dear.” Quoth Richard, impudently, “I do verily believe that the meat is too dear for thee; who, I suppose, never bought as much meat as that, for thine own use.” Observing, then, that the inquirer wore an Alderman’s hood, he asked, “Art thou an Alderman?” “Yes,” William Wotton replies; “why askest thou?” Whereupon he said, “It is a good thing for thee and thy fellows, the Aldermen, to be so wise and wary, who make but light of riding on the Pavement, as some among ye have been doing.” Here we have reference to some grievance of the day. Why should the Aldermen ride upon the pavement? One supposes that the pavement was meant for the convenience of the stalls and not intended for horses. It was constructed in 1339.
However, William Wotton very speedily had this impudent butcher laid by the heels in Newgate. He was haled before the Mayor and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, after which he was to carry a lighted taper through the Shambles and Chepe as far as St. Lawrence Lane, when he was to offer his taper at the Guildhall Chapel. His fellows of the same trade, however, petitioned, and the imprisonment was remitted; but he walked in procession bearing that lighted taper, an object-lesson to those who would beard an Alderman.
In the fifteenth century the want of ventilation and the confinement of many in so narrow a place bred gaol-fever, which never afterwards left the prison. In 1419 the gaolers of Newgate all died, and prisoners to the number of sixty-four.
The case of Hugh le Bever may also be mentioned. He was charged with the murder of his wife Alice. He refused to plead. He was therefore taken to Newgate and there put in penance until his death. That is to say, he was placed in solitary confinement—one can still see the narrow cell in the old gate-prisons (for example, that at Rouen)—and there left to his own meditations, with a daily allowance of bread and water. One wonders how long the poor wretch lingered there. Perhaps his mind fell into a comatose condition in which the days passed on without any other feeling than that of blank misery, while the body grew weaker. Perhaps he went mad. Perhaps he begged to be taken out and hanged. So difficult it was, so heavy the task of making the people obedient to the law.
In the fourteenth century we find a new departure of a remarkable character. There sprang up a new thing in the land—a feeling of compassion for the misery of the unhappy prisoners of Newgate and other gaols in London. The wills beginning in the year 1348 show bequests for the poor prisoners. From 1348 to 1500 the wills published in the Calendar show eighty-one such bequests. This is very curious. It shows an humanising influence of some kind—what was it? Not the influence of monks and friars, because their spiritual force was fast declining. Was it the Lollarding with which the City of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was notoriously “infested”? The question is not easy to answer. But the fact remains. Further, we find that light bread was confiscated and given to the prisoners of Newgate; that all other kinds of food when confiscated for any reason, were also sent there; and that broken meats were sent to the prison from all men’s tables. It would appear, therefore, that no food was supplied to prisoners at the time, an inhuman practice, followed, until their abolition, by all the debtors’ prisons, causing for hundreds of years miseries unspeakable and incredible, were it not that compassion is a plant of such slow growth and so fragile.
The outbreak of gaol fever of 1419 was caused by the well-meant but injudicious action of the Mayor and Corporation.
They issued an ordinance, the reason of which is explained by the preamble.
“Whereas the commendable intentions and charitable purpose of those who have been governors and presidents of the City of London heretofore have ordained a prison, called Ludgate, for the good and comfort of poor freemen of the said city who have been condemned, to the end that such poor prisoners might, more freely than others who are strangers, dwell in quiet in such place, and pray for their benefactors, and live upon the alms of the people.... Now, from one day to another, the charitable intentions and commendable purposes aforesaid are frustrated and turned to evil, inasmuch as many false persons, of bad disposition and purpose, have been more willing to take up their abode there, so as to waste and spend their goods upon the ease and licence that there is within, than to pay their debts; and, what is even more, do therein compass, conspire, and imagine oftentimes, through others of their false coin, to indict good and loyal men for felonies and treasons of which they have never been guilty.”
In other words, freemen of the City chose rather to live in the gaol of Ludgate, on the alms provided for poor prisoners, than to work and pay their debts; and, worse still, they made use of their time to get up conspiracies against honourable citizens. The only remedy that could be devised was to move all the prisoners to Newgate, and close the gaol. This was done in the month of June, but in November, Richard Whittington being mayor, it was found that most of the wretches taken to Newgate had died there, “by reason of the fetid and corrupt atmosphere”; whereupon Ludgate was reopened, “seeing that every person is bound to support and be tender of the lives of men.”
In April 1431, Whittington being dead, the prisoners of Ludgate were once more removed to Newgate, and, to the general indignation, eighteen of them were led through the streets, pinioned as if they had been felons, to the Sheriff’s Compter, probably with the view of not crowding Newgate again. But in June of the same year they were all taken back to Ludgate, which remained a debtor’s prison for the citizens of London till the year 1762, when the gate was taken down and the prisoners removed to the London Workhouse in Bishopsgate Street. This double removal looks as if works of enlargement or of repair were in progress at Ludgate. Twenty years later, in 1454, it was greatly enlarged by Dame Agnes Forster; see also p. [196].
Meanwhile, however, New Gate and Prison had been enlarged or practically rebuilt by Whittington, who began it, and his executors, who finished it. He seems to have furnished the prison with additional chambers on the south side. It is pleasant to think that one of the last actions of this great and good man was to improve the “fetid and corrupt atmosphere in the noxious Prison of Newgate.”
It may be remarked that the gate was decorated with a bas-relief of the famous cat, showing that there was current in Whittington’s own life the story of the cat.
NEWGATE MARKET, 1856
Other works of repair, enlargement, and restoration were carried on in 1555 and in 1630. In 1666 the gate and prison were destroyed in the Great Fire, but rebuilt in 1672.
The gate was removed in 1767, and now the prison has been demolished also.
The modern account of Newgate Prison will be found in London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 538.
Outside Newgate and on the western edge of the river, there was a suburb dating from very early times. It grew up round Smithfield where horses were bought and sold, and where young men shot with the bow and ran and wrestled. It contained the people who belonged to the service of the religious houses there, and those who belonged to the hospital. We also find, outside Newgate, “rents” in the thirteenth century, and bakehouses and tanneries also outside Newgate, while the spurriers in 1355 are enjoined to work in their quarters outside Newgate until curfew rings from St. Sepulchre’s Church.
NEWGATE, 1799
Within Newgate, where a “pavement” was constructed to keep the stalls from the mud of the unpaved street, was the Market of the Shambles. Here were two churches—St. Ewen’s, at the north-east corner of Warwick Lane, and St. Nicholas Fleshambles in what is now King Edward Street, formerly Butcher’s Lane or Stinking Lane. Both parishes were united to form that of Christ Church after the Dissolution.
Newgate Market is generally spoken of as a meat market only, which in later years it became; but formerly many other things were sold there. It is the natural tendency of markets to admit goods for sale other than those for which they were created.
Thus we find in the fourteenth century that wheat was sold in the “corn market of Newgate”; that poulterers who were freemen had to sell their fowls either in Newgate Market or else west of the Tun in Cornhill; that cheese brought into the City by “foreigners” had to be sold in the market between the Shambles and Newgate, and nowhere else; that blacksmiths were forbidden to sell their goods except in the pavement of Newgate or else by the Tun of Cornhill; and that pork was also sold in the market. Further investigations would doubtless bring to light the fact that it became a general market.
There was a great deal of trouble with the butchers. They were an unruly class—we have seen how one of them was put to shame for impudence; they persisted in pouring the blood from the shambles down the gutters; they carried the offal through the streets, and threw it into the river at the Temple. In 1369 strict ordinances were passed that animals should be slaughtered outside the walls. As the butchers disobeyed the law it was again proclaimed two years later, with the exception for the butchers of East Chepe and the Stocks. I do not think, however, that the slaughter of beasts was ever carried on without the walls. The market stood all along Newgate Street, with a “Middle Row” of sheds, under which were the stalls for the sale of grain, cheese, butter, poultry, etc., besides that of meat. The butchers also had their stalls in Butchers’ Lane. The Middle Row became like that in Holborn—a row of houses over shops. This Middle Row must have made Newgate Street narrow and intolerably dark and close. The Great Fire swept it away, and among the improvements made after the Fire it was ordered “that the Ground where the Middle Row of the Shambles stood and the ground of the four late houses in Newgate Market between Warwick Lane End and the Bell Inn there shall be laid into the streets” (Maitland).
Those who can remember Newgate Street before the butchers’ shops were taken to Smithfield, can bear witness to the horrible appearance of the street, lined as it was with butchers’ shops, where the passenger, who never went through the street if he could avoid it, was jostled by greasy blue smocks, and saluted on the cheek with ribs and legs of bleeding ox flesh. The end of Newgate Street and of Paternoster Row facing Cheapside was, in 1720, called Jackanapes Row, a modern name given for some unknown reason. Passing along Newgate Street on the north side we come to Christ’s Hospital.