The pigeons strutting about Guildhall Yard in front of the Guildhall, that council hall of the City, are descendants of those that have inhabited the yard time out of mind. The birds of to-day are a remarkably tame variety, and crowd the court so thickly that there is danger at every foot of treading upon them, for they seem to feel their right to be here and refuse obstinately to give way to anyone. Although the Guildhall suffered much in the Great Fire, and although it has been many times restored and altered, there are still remaining portions of the original building of 1411, and the crypt is as when first designed. It was in this hall that Buckingham urged the people to acknowledge the Duke of Gloucester king, after the death of Edward IV. and while the little princes were shut up in the Tower; here, too, that Anne Askew, a young and beautiful woman and one of the first Protestant martyrs, was tried for heresy. Afterwards she was burned at Smithfield.
Church of St. Lawrence, Jewry, and front of the Guild Hall
Close by the Guildhall, to the west of the Yard, stands the official church of the Corporation—St. Lawrence Jewry, the most expensive of all the churches built by Wren, costing 12,000 pounds, and which it took nine years, from 1671 to 1680, to build. The original clock, still to be seen in the spire, was made by a clockmaker whose shop was to be found in one of the houses which in that day lined both sides of London Bridge.
When the Great Plague raged in 1665, the churchyard of St. Stephen's, Colman Street, was a place of interment for plague victims. It is said of John Hayward, sexton of the church at the time, that when everyone through fear refused him aid, he alone drove the death cart and unaided buried all the victims who lived within the parish limits.
Almost opposite St. Stephen's, in the short and narrow passageway with the musical name of Great Bell Alley, midway of the block on the north side, Robert Bloomfield, the poet of country scenes, in early days worked as a shoemaker in a garret. While living here in extreme poverty, Bloomfield, during his working hours, thought out the "Farmer's Boy," which when he was able to purchase paper for, he made haste to write. In two years twenty thousand copies of the poem had been sold. Bloomfield was born in a little Suffolk village in 1766, and worked as helper to a farmer, but ran away to London hoping to gain fame and fortune as a poet. After the success of the "Farmer's Boy," he wrote "Rural Tales," "News from the Farm" and other stories in verse, but although they met with a welcome he finally drifted back to his own country where he died very poor.
An aged sign, setting forth what looks to be a swan with two heads, is set in the doorway above a railway parcels office in Gresham Street, at the Aldermanbury corner, and is the original marking of the tavern called "The Swan with two Necks," a most famous resort, which stood on this site for almost three hundred years. It was a thriving place in 1556, and fell from public favour only when the age of stage coaches passed away.
Aldermanbury came by its name because of there being held in the street a famous court or bury of the Aldermen.