Stories That Words Tell Us

by Elizabeth O'Neill

Many of the names in the City take us back to the very earliest days of the capital. This part of London stands on slightly rising ground, and near the river Thames, just the sort of ground which early people would choose upon which to build a fortress or a village. The names of two of the chief City streets, the Strand and Fleet Street, help to show us something of what London was like in its earliest days. A few years ago, in a famous case in a court of law, one of the lawyers asked a witness what he was doing in the Strand at a certain time. The witness, a witty Irishman, answered with a solemn face, "Picking seaweed." Everybody laughed, because the idea of picking seaweed in the very centre of London was so funny. But a strand is a shore, and when the name was given to the London Strand it was not a paved street at all, but the muddy shore of the river Thames.

Then Fleet Street marks the path by which the little river Fleet ran into the Thames. The river had several tributaries, which were covered over in this way, and several of them are used as sewers to carry away the sewage of the city. There is a Fleet Street, too, in Hampstead, in the north-west of London, and this marks the beginning of the course of the same little river Fleet which got its water from the high ground of Hampstead.

This river has given us still another famous London name. It flowed past what is now called King's Cross, and here its banks were so steep that it was called Hollow, or Hole-bourne, and from this we get the name Holborn.

The City being the centre of London had a certain amount of trading and bargaining from the earliest times. In those times there were no such things as shops. People bought and sold in markets, and the name of the busy City street, Cheapside, reminds us of this. It was called in early times the Chepe, and took its name from the Old English word ceap, "a bargain."

At the end of Cheapside runs the street called Poultry, and this, so an old chronicler tells us, has its name from the fact that a fowl or poultry market was regularly held there up to the sixteenth century. The name of another famous City street, Cornhill, tells us that a corn market used to be held there. Another name, Gracechurch Street, reminds us of an old grass market. It took its name from an old church, St. Benet Grasschurch, which was probably so called because the grass market was held under its walls.

Smithfield is the great London meat market now; but its name means "smooth field," and in the Middle Ages it was used as a cattle and hay market, and on days which were not market days games and tournaments took place there. Later its name became famous in English history for the "fires of Smithfield," when men and women were burned to death there for refusing to accept the state religion.

Many London names come from churches and buildings which no longer exist. The names help us to picture a London very different from the London of to-day. One of the busiest streets in that part of the City round Fleet Street where editors and journalists, and printers and messengers are working day and night to produce the newspapers which carry the news of the day far and wide over England, is Blackfriars. This is a very different place from the spot where the Dominicans, or "Black Friars," built their priory in the thirteenth century.

In those days the friars chose the busiest parts of the little English towns to build their houses in, so that they could preach and help the people. They thought that the earlier monks had chosen places for their monasteries too far from the people. There were grey friars and white friars, Austin friars and crutched friars, all of whose names remain in the London of to-day.

There were many monasteries and convents in the larger London which soon grew up round the City, and in the City itself we have a street whose name keeps the memory of one convent of nuns. The street called the Minories marks the place where a convent of nuns of St. Clare was founded in the thirteenth century. The Latin name for these nuns is Sorores Minores, or "Lesser Sisters," just as the Franciscans, or grey friars, were Fratres Minores, or "Lesser Brethren." And so from the Latin minores we get the name Minories as the name of a London street, standing where this convent once stood.

The name of the street London Wall reminds us of the time when London was a walled city with its gates, which were closed at night and opened every morning. Many streets keep the names of the old gates, like Ludgate Hill, Aldersgate, Bishopsgate.