The chapel provided for by the good bishop was rebuilt, at a cost of £6,000, in 1860, by the aid of subscriptions. The Jacobean building it replaces is said to have been extremely ugly, but that is easily said of anything already marked for destruction; and the ’60’s were scarce sufficiently well-disposed towards architecture of that period to be able to determine fairly what was ugly and that which was merely not at that time fashionable in bricks and mortar.
There are now forty widows in the College, and a second quadrangle was added and endowed about 1790, from funds provided jointly by William Pearce, brother of Bishop Zachary Pearce, and Mrs. Bettinson.
There has been in the past a good deal of nepotism in the government of the College, and father has succeeded son in the chaplaincy, often held by greedy pluralists, and often thrown in as a kind of extra sop for the vicar of Bromley. Things like these must surely vex the spirit of that truly pious benefactor, who, when raised to be bishop, could not endure to hold his many preferments, and accordingly resigned them, much against the spirit of his age.
An even later addition to this institution was made in 1840, when the “Sheppard College” was built in the grounds. It consists of five houses, endowed with £44 each per annum, for the benefit of daughters who have lived with and attended upon their mothers in the original College.
VIII
Bromley, in the days when it was only a small thing, was in the diocese of Rochester. It has long since been transferred to Canterbury, and the manor that had belonged to the Bishops of Rochester ever since the eighth century, when it was given to them by King Ethelbert, was sold with the palace into private hands in 1845. Those who will may see the exterior of it to this day, but it is not the palace that the Norman Gundulf built, nor even that whence Bishop Warner escaped, for it was several times rebuilt, lastly in 1775. The site of the once Holy Well of St. Blaise, the woolcombers’ saint, formerly much resorted to for its chalybeate waters, is still to be seen in the grounds.
There are pitfalls for the stranger on every road in the way of pronouncing place-names. Bromley-by-Bow is (or was until recently, but there is a constant flux in these things) “Brumley,” and accordingly this should have the like sound; but you will not hear this Kentish town so named. The natives will not change the “o” into “u.”
But aborigines are somewhat difficult to find here, for the Bromley that was a little market town with two fairs a year and a weekly market granted by Henry the Sixth is a thing of the buried past. Bromley is now suburban. It has grown from the little place of 1801, with 2,700 inhabitants, to a populous town which in 1901 numbered 27,358.
Much of the old town has vanished, but it will never be like an ordinary suburb that grew potatoes last year, and has within six months grown streets of houses “fitted with electric light, hot and cold water-supply, and drained in accordance with the latest improvements,” thus to quote advertisements. The town, in common with other places, has all those modern features, but it has also a surviving proportion of ancient houses, and even when they are gone it will still have its history. By virtue of that past it keeps to-day a larger air and a greater disunity than it could command merely as the dormitory of City men who leave early in the morning and return at night, and pay rent, rates, and taxes, but can have little of the sense of belonging to the place.
Bromley, precisely like an assertive person who has “got on” in the world, signalised its recent expansion by acquiring a coat-of-arms; but not the most magnificent parvenu would dare sport a display so elaborate and comprehensive as that which alone would serve Bromley. In the recondite terminology affected by heralds it is “quarterly, gules and azure; on a fesse wavy argent three ravens volant proper between, in the first quarter, two branches slipped of the third: in the second a sun in splendour; in the third an escallop shell or; and in the fourth a horse forcené, also argent: and for the crest, on a wreath of the colours, upon two bars wavy azure and argent, an escallop shell, as in the arms, between two branches of broom proper.”