Unnoticed London

by Elizabeth Montizambert

There is a Roman bath of a different kind underneath the Coal Exchange in Lower Thames Street, but on your way to this from the Temple station (or bus 13 from the Strand), get out at Cannon Street, where in a sort of cage against the wall of St. Swithin’s Church, directly opposite the station, is the very oldest relic in the whole of the city of London,—London Stone, the stone that the Romans set up to mark the centre of the city; the starting point from whence they marked the miles along their branching highways. As long as history has been written in this land, there has been mention of London Stone. Do you remember how, in Henry VI., Shakespeare makes Jack Cade proclaim himself King of the City, striking his staff against the block? Once it was a big pillar and set on the other side of the way, but famous stones are seldom allowed to rest in peace, and time, the weather, and clumsy mediæval cart-wheels have chipped and worn it to its present size.

LONDON STONE, CANNON STREET

Now take the train again, or another 13 bus, and go on to the Monument, where King William IV. stands on the very spot where Falstaff and Prince Hal made merry at the “Boar’s Head,” Eastcheap. Going down by the beautiful column which Sir Christopher Wren built to commemorate the Great Fire, hard by where it started in Pudding Lane, turn to your left in Lower Thames Street opposite the church of St. Magnus, and walk along this unattractive causeway till you come to the Coal Exchange with its Corinthian porch. You will find the porter through a door up the side-street of St. Mary-at-Hill. Do not go on Monday, Wednesday or Friday afternoons, for those are marketdays or whatever the correct term is on Coal Exchanges, and, as that most agreeable porter explained to me: “We found it didn’t do, Ma’am; for when the genelmen on the Exchange see me taking a lady or genelman or it might be a party down below into the cellar, they naturally says to me ‘What for?’ And when I say ‘Roman bath,’ they say ‘Roman bath, Jones! Did you say Roman bath? You don’t mean to say there’s a Roman bath below and me here forty years and never know it!’ And down they goes with all their friends, all equally surprised, and business gets neglected. That’s how it is, Ma’am.”

Business in the coal trade has been too much neglected for anyone to wish to hinder it further, so go on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday afternoon. It is quite worth the exertion, for this hot-air or sweating chamber, with its fire-blackened bricks, forming part of an elaborate system of baths, is even more interesting than the Roman bath in the Strand.

The Coal Exchange, with its curious rotunda floor of inlaid wood, was only built in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it has two more unexpected links with the past. I am indebted to Messrs. Thornbury and Walford for pointing out that the black oak used in the woodwork is part of a tree, four or five centuries old, that was discovered in the River Tyne, and the blade of a dagger in the shield of the City arms is made of wood from a mulberry tree that Peter the Great planted when he worked as a shipwright in Deptford Harbour.

Turning up St. Mary’s-at-Hill into Great Tower Street, I found, nearly opposite All Hallows, Barking, a prosperous merchant’s house still standing practically untouched, as it was built a year or two after the Great Fire. At No. 34, an ordinary-looking archway leads into a courtyard fronting a perfect example of the home of a wealthy citizen of Charles II.’s time. A flight of steps leads up to the doorway, from which you catch a glimpse of panelled walls and noble staircase. The counting-house is on the right, and upstairs are the living rooms where the merchant lived with his wife and family and servants, in the fashion of those times. They entertained, too, after the day’s work was done, for amongst the private papers still treasured here is one complaining of the excessive noise of carriages and coaches turning in the cobbled courtyard at night.

It is worth while pushing open the door of the fifteenth-century perpendicular church of All Hallows, Barking, just opposite, to see the Norman pillars and the fine brasses. The best one is in front of the litany desk, and in the corner to the right is a brass to the memory of William Thynne and his wife.

This is not the Thynne who has such a gruesome monument in Westminster Abbey, but a more worthy sixteenth-century ancestor, who was “chefe clerk of the Kechyn of Henry VIII.,” and who published the first edition of the entire works of Chaucer. Both of them are descendants of that John of the Inn whose soubriquet became the name of the Bath family.

All Hallows gets its surname from the Abbess of Barking, the head of the seventh-century Benedictine convent of Barking. She was a powerful lady,—one of the four abbesses who was a baroness ex officio, and she held the lands of the king by a baronage, furnishing her share of men-at-arms. Only an old gateway of the Chapel of the Holy Rood, eight miles out of London by the Fenchurch Street railway, is left of the nunnery, but All Hallows, which was connected with it, survived the Great Fire and is still intact.