The quiet little garden beside the church of St. Botolph Without Aldersgate, was built over the graveyard that surrounded the church for more than half a century. The church has stood here since 1796, and the garden spot of to-day is called Postman's Park, because of the many employes from the nearby General Post Office who gather here.
A fragment of the wall that surrounded early London is to be seen in the northern boundary wall of the General Post Office, from Aldgate Street to King Edward Street.
The walls that encircled Roman London, built between 360 and 380, enclosed about 375 acres in its three miles of circumference, were twelve feet thick, twenty feet in height, with towers at stated distances twenty feet higher than the walls. It had its start near the spot where the Tower is now, and followed generally the line of the present streets of the Minories, Houndsditch, London Wall, and so on to Newgate, Old Bailey, Ludgate to the Thames. The wall was marked in later days by its chief gates—Ludgate, Aldgate, Cripplegate, Newgate, Bishopsgate and Aldersgate. Fragments of it are still to be seen in the street called London Wall, between Wood Street and Aldermanbury, where a tablet marks it; at St. Giles, Cripplegate, and in the boundary wall of the new Post Office from King William to Aldgate Street.
John Milton moved to the present Maidenhead Court from St. Bride's Lane. It was then called Lamb Alley, and is off Aldersgate Street to the east. This was his pretty garden house of which he often spoke. It was here he had a sort of private school where he educated the two sons of his sister and several children of his personal friends. Here, too, he married Mary Powell, who before long finding married life irksome, left her poet husband who even then was showing signs of the blindness that was soon to be his portion.
In Jewin Street, about the year 1663, Milton lived when he had been blind for ten years, and here he married Elizabeth Minshull, his third wife.
In the street called Barbican, off Aldersgate Street, Milton lived for two years after 1645, during which time he wrote "L'Allegro" and "Comus." He moved here that he might have a large house to accommodate the increasing number of pupils he had been educating in the Lamb's Alley house. Here his wife, who had deserted him, returned, and here his first child was born in 1646. In the narrow and winding roads hereabouts, the great plague of 1665 caused greatest havoc.
Redcross Street came by its name because of a cross that once stood where Beach Street touches Redcross.
In the green and quiet churchyard of St. Giles, Cripplegate, hemmed in by tall warehouses, is a part of the old Roman wall, possibly the most perfect bit that now remains. The church was built in the 14th century, but has been well taken care of and often restored. Cripplegate takes its name from "Crepel geat,"—a covered way or tunnel, which the Roman soldiery used when defending the city wall. It was in this church that Oliver Cromwell in 1620, when he was quite a young man, was married to Elizabeth Bourchier. Milton, who wrote "Paradise Lost" in a house in this parish, was buried here. In front of the chancel is a stone which reads:
Near this spot was buried
John Milton