Charles Mathews’ House, Highgate.
In Crosby’s ‘Notes’ mention is made of the varying and interesting windings of the Fleet River in its course from Hampstead to the Thames. Even in his ‘Additional Notes’ (1845) he speaks of the silver Fleet meandering through and irrigating those charming meadows which reach on either side of Kentish Town to the sister hills of Hampstead and Highgate.
It was only a little later than this date that I first knew these meadows, and the dried channel of the winding stream he speaks of, the course of which might be traced by the decaying alders and old willows that fringed it through Gospel Oak fields, at the end of which it had subsided in a ditch.
It had remained navigable as far as Holborn Bridge till Henry VII.’s time, from which period the less we say of its city life the better. It had been dredged and scoured to no purpose, but after the Great Fire, much of the débris being thrown into it, it became, in Charles II.’s reign, an abomination. In Anne’s time, Gay gives us a sufficiently disagreeable description of the desecrated river, and Pope, in the ‘Dunciad,’ asserts it
‘The king of dykes, than whom no sluice of mud
With deeper sable blots the silver flood.’
It was the Creek that in modern times was called Fleet Ditch. It had its entrance immediately below Bridewell, Blackfriars being to the east of it, and reached as far as Holborn Bridge, at the foot of Holborn Hill. Here it received the little river Fleet, Turnmill Brook, and the rivulet known as the Old Bourne. The latter rose at Holborn Bars (removed[230] not many years ago), and gave its name to Holborn. It lost itself, as has been said, in the Fleet at Holborn Bridge.
In 1737 Fleet Ditch was covered over, and the space gained was occupied by Fleet Market. Nearly a hundred years later (1829) this was removed, and Farringdon Street now occupies its site.
Upon the right, going towards Holborn, stood the Fleet prison for debtors, founded in the first year of Richard I. I remember its removal in 1845, and, long before I ever saw it, hearing my mother tell of the sad feelings with which she had often passed it in her youth, by reason of the melancholy implorations of certain of the prisoners, wretched-looking beings, who let down bags from the windows, and cried to the passers-by: ‘Please remember the poor debtors!’ One penny loaf per day was the gaol allowance, and those who had not friends to supply them with food to supplement this dole literally starved to death.
This was the scene of the Fleet marriages. Pennant tells how in his youth he had often been tempted by the question ‘Sir, will you please to walk in and be married?’ and he tells us that a painted sign of a male and female, hands conjoined, with the inscription ‘Marriages performed here,’ was hung on the walls of the building. A dirty fellow invited you in, and the parson, a squalid, profligate figure, ‘clad in a tattered plaid nightgown, with a fiery face,’ stood just within, ‘ready to couple you for a dram of gin or roll of tobacco.’ This state of things was not put an end to till 1753.