The second pamphlet, dated 1643, is entitled, "The Downfall of Dagon; or, the Taking Downe of Cheapside Crosse, the 2nd of May, 1643. Wherein is contained these principalls following, viz.: 1. Cheapside Crosse sick at the heart. 2. His death and funerall. 3. His will, legacies, inventory, and epitaph. 4. The reason why it was taken down, and the authority for it. 5. The benefit and profite that is made of the materialls of it, and the severall summes of money which is offered for it. Likewise the satisfaction it will give to thousands of people. 6. Notes worthy of the reader's observation that the crosse should just happen to bee taken downe on that day which crosses were first invented and set up."
We have now brought down the annals of Cheapside to comparatively modern and more prosaic times.
We no longer see the splendid pageantry and quaint festivities of the Norman, Plantagenet, and Tudor eras, with their bonfires, cresset-bearers, morrice-dancers, mummers, allegorical pageants, and house-fronts hung with tapestries, and other such textures. The joust, and tournaments, the setting of the Midsummer watch, and other curious and picturesque spectacles, are things of the past. It is true we still have the Lord Mayor's Show, and the procession to Westminster, but passing along the embankment instead of in the civic barges. We still retain the men in armour and the old gilt coach, and have representatives of the city companies in olden-time costumes, and we sometimes introduce novelties, such as a group of elephants mounted by "Africans."
Bishopsgate Street Within and Without.
Some fourteen or fifteen centuries ago what is now Bishopsgate Street Within was a fashionable suburb of the Roman Londinium, the Belgravia or South Kensington of the period, where the aristocracy and wealth of the City located itself and built magnificent mansions after the fashion of Rome, with columns, frescoes, and tesselated pavements, such as we see in the disinterred city of Pompeii. In the streets might then be seen charioteers driving rapidly along to contend in the chariot race; fair ladies going to witness the gladiatorial displays in the amphitheatre; bronzed soldiers from many a distant province of the empire; slaves groaning beneath heavy burdens or employed in laborious occupations—all mixed up with the ordinary traffic of a considerable city. Northward, stretching eastward and westward, ran the City wall, a portion of which may still be seen in the street call London Wall, adorned with stately towers and bastions, one of the latter having been exposed to public view by the opening of a pathway through St. Giles's Churchyard. There was, however, no gateway in this part of the wall, as beyond lay an untraversable morass, and beyond that a forest extending to and up the heights of Highgate, Muswell Hill, etc., those who wished to go northward from the city having to go eastward to Aldgate or westward to Aldersgate. This probably was the reason why the rich selected this portion of the environs of the City for their residence, as being more retired and quiet than in the vicinity of a thoroughfare leading to a City outlet.
Of these mansions of the patricians of Londinium several vestiges have been found. On the site of St. Helen's, the foundations of large edifices have been laid bare. In 1707, at the corner of Camomile Street, a fine tesselated pavement was found; in 1752 another at the side of St. Helen's Gateway; in 1761 another in Camomile Street; and in 1836 a splendid specimen, in red, white, and grey, at the north-west angle of Crosby Square, besides fragments elsewhere.
This, however, was only in the later period of the Roman rule. When they had subdued the Trinobantes, they found the capital of the country, although a place of commercial importance, merely a scattered collection of round huts with trackways in the midst, extending from Tower Hill to the Fleet River and from the Thames to Cheapside and Cornhill, defended on the north by earthworks, felled trees, and a ditch; and in midst of these huts they erected more substantial houses, with towers at the eastern and western extremities, and probably a temple to Diana, where St. Paul's Cathedral now stands. The northern outskirts, now Bishopsgate Street Within was appropriated as a burial-place, as they never buried their dead in the midst of the living; but in process of time the exigencies of the increasing population demanded an extension of the City boundaries, and they built over the old grave-yard, making a new cemetery on the site of the modern Bishopsgate Street Without, Shoreditch, and the fenlands lying eastward and westward of these. In 1576, when digging for clay near where Christ Church, Spitalfields, now stands, a great number of cinerary urns were found, containing burnt human remains, and in each a piece of coin, wherewith to pay Charon for ferrying the defunct across the Styx; also, as Stow says, "divers vials and other old-fashioned glasses most cunningly wrought, such as I have not seen the like of, all which had water in them, differing from spring water" (lachrymatories), "cups and dishes of red earthenware and three or four images of white earth, about a span long, one of Pallas." Under the Camomile tesselated pavement, found in 1706, lay two feet of rubbish, and beneath that several funeral urns. Stone and timber coffins have also been found, or rather the nails of the latter, a quarter of a yard long, the wood having perished, and a Roman vault in St Botolph's Churchyard, all these, with skeletons or decayed bones in them, indicating burial after Christianity had become the religion of the empire, when the custom of burning the dead was abandoned.
The Saxons despised the effeminacy of decorated architecture and luxurious appliances in the way of household furniture, hence when they came into possession of London they allowed the sumptuous dwellings of the Romans to fall into decay and crumble to dust, preferring their own rough and uncomely habitations built of wood, but afterwards built their churches, monasteries, and public buildings generally of stone, and thus Roman London passed away.