In the early monkish days they looked upon bells as the voices of good angels: they were blessed and dedicated: the passing bell was tolled to keep off evil spirits from the dead. Henry VIII., that ruthless iconoclast, cared little for superstition, and in the general destruction of the religious houses hundreds of old bells were sold or melted down. But the pious people of those days would point out how the Bishop of Bangor, who sold his Cathedral bells, was shortly afterwards stricken with blindness, and that Sir Miles Partridge won the Jesus Bells of St. Paul’s from King Henry at play and, proceeding to remove them and have them melted down, was hanged soon after on Tower Hill.
The bells of St. Clement’s were added after the church had been rebuilt in 1692, under the supervision of Sir Christopher Wren, who gave his services for nothing in his usual generous-hearted way.
Dʳ. Johnson’s Pew in Sᵗ. Clement Dane’s Church
St. Clement’s is dear to all true Londoners as Dr. Johnson’s church. You may see the very pew where he sat, and there is something about the solid, handsome structure that seems to fit the thought of the ponderous great man who worshipped there Sunday by Sunday, striving “to purify and fortify his soul and hold real communion with the Highest.” It is a fine and a prosperous church, and so richly endowed that at one time all the paupers of the neighbourhood used to flock there for the sake of what they could get. That they were well looked after, the carefully kept parish registers bear witness as far back as 1558. There are other interesting entries in the old registers. You may read of the baptism of Master Robert Cicill, the sonne of ye L. highe Threasurer of England, and of the marriage of Sir Thomas Grosvenor with Mary Davies, the child heiress of Ebury Manor, who brought to her husband all those lands of Pimlico and Belgravia from whose rents the Dukes of Westminster draw the bulk of their colossal fortune. Her life story has been published recently by Mr. Charles T. Gatty in his two-volumed Mary Davies and the Manor of Ebury.
Chapel Royal of the Savoy
“It is a wonderful place ... this London ... and
what do I know of it?”—Lord Beaconsfield.
From St. Mary’s and St. Clement’s it is but a few minutes’ walk back along the Strand to the Chapel Royal of the Savoy, that once served all the district, but it is now perhaps the tiniest parish in London west of Temple Bar. There it stands in its quiet graveyard, all that is left to remind us of “the fayrest manor in England.” The old palace of the Savoy was built by Simon de Montfort, that “Cromwell of the Middle Ages,” on land granted by Henry III. to his wife’s uncle, Peter of Savoy, for which the said Peter had to pay the not very exorbitant rent of three barbed arrows. Afterwards it came into the possession of the Dukes of Lancaster. Here it was, in 1357, that the Black Prince, riding on a little black hackney, brought his prisoner King John of France, who stayed here, with brief intervals, till his death, as nobody seemed able to raise the money for his ransom. And here lived John of Gaunt, with his numerous household, not least of whom was Geoffrey Chaucer. Later came Henry IV., who annexed the manor, and since his time it has always belonged in a particular manner to the reigning house.
Nothing is left, though, to tell of it, save the chapel, which was begun by Henry VII. in place of a more ancient one fallen into decay,—and that strange judicial survival, the Court Leet with view of Frankpledge of the Manor and Liberty of the Savoy. Few people know that once a year the jury of the Court, headed by the Beadle with his silver-topped and carved staff of office, solemnly makes the round to inspect the boundary marks of the Manor. One is in Child’s Bank, another on the Lyceum stage, one in Burleigh Street, one by Cleopatra’s Needle, another in Middle Temple Lawn, where many scuffles have taken place in the past between the jurymen and indignant Benchers and officers of the Inns of Court concerning the question of trespass. The Court itself, which dates back to Saxon days, sits annually about Easter time, and still does “what is usually called everybody’s business, and nobody’s business,” as a former High Bailiff wrote.
The old Roman Bath in Strand Lane is a little beyond St. Clement Dane’s, and next to the Tube station. That belongs to a later chapter, but a short way further, on the same side of the road, is another bit of unnoticed London.