FOOTNOTES:
[89] I have been unable to find the Information, but another case in the same court, 38 Eliz., concerns the same property and the same tenants.
[90] See my article “Burbage’s Theatre,” “Fortnightly Review,” July 1909.
XIX
EARLY PICCADILLY
The exact locality of early Piccadilly, the date of the first appearance of the name, and its derivation from a “collar,” a “gaming-house,” or a “hill-peak,” have been frequently discussed by London topographers and by writers in “Notes and Queries.”[91] I do not pretend to be able to decide the third question, but I have collected some definite facts concerning the first and second which are worth preserving, as they may prevent futile discussions and may hereafter help to the elucidation of the derivation.
Many writers, stating that the name was first used by Gerard in his “Herbal,” assume that he did so in his first edition of 1597. This is an error. It first appears in the edition of 1633. I have, however, found the word used at least ten years earlier than that, not in connection with “Higgins the draper,” as Walford suggests (who really lived at “the Mearemaide”), but in connection with “Robert Baker, Gent., of Piccadilly Hall, St. Martin-in-the-Fields.” “Piccadilly,” like many other names and things, has travelled considerably westward in its day. There is no mention of the name in any book, nor, so far as has yet been discovered, in any manuscript, of Elizabeth’s reign. Having found Mr. Baker first associated with it, I worked back on his traces.
In Aggas’s map, which shows the appearance of the neighbourhood at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, there is a mass of building about the royal mews, facing St. Martin’s Church (on the present site of the National Gallery), and open fields stretching beyond to the country. The wall of Convent Garden formed the eastern boundary of St. Martin’s Lane, or, as it was then called, Church Lane. There were a few buildings about St. Giles’s, and one at the end of St. Martin’s Lane, commonly described as “over the Church Lane.” The district does not seem to have changed much in the early years of James’s reign. The churchwardens of St. Martin-in-the-Fields regularly entered receipts for the rent of “the house over Church Lane,” but the first sign of an enclosure of the Fields appears in the books of 1612, when they stated they had “received from Roger Haighton, steward of the Right Hon. Earl of Salisbury, Lord High Treasurer of England, on February 17th, 1611, 50s, for a yeares rent of five acres of ground in the Lammas Common, heretofore called Swanne Close, whereuppon the new buildings are erected to the west of St. Martin’s Lane.” In the following year, 1612-3, there is a similar entry and the record of a new tenant:
Item, receved of Robert Baker Tayler, for the Lammas ground which he built uppon neare the Windmill, for one year ended Lammas Day, 1612, 30s.
The next year similar rents are recorded, and a topographical entry:
Received of Francis Gilford, Inholder, towards the charges of throwing up the ditch, and amending the highway of the upper corner of St. James’s Fields, near the Windmill, 16s. 6d.