Bygone London

by Frederick Ross

St. Ethelburga is a small and very ancient church, squeezed almost out of sight by intervening parasitic shops; when or by whom founded not known, but most probably in the Saxon age. In an old print it is represented with a spire similar to that in Langham Place. It escaped the fire of 1666, was repaired and "beautified" in 1694, and again in 1701. St. Ethelburga was the daughter of Ethelbert, the first Christian king of Kent, and patron of St. Augustine; she married Eadwine, King of Northumbria, the convert of St Paulinus, after whose death, in battle at the hands of Penda, the Pagan king of Mercia, she fled with her children and Paulinus to her brother, who had succeeded to the kingdom of Kent, and who nominated Paulinus to the see of Rochester.

Walter Brune, citizen, and Rosia, his wife, in 1235, founded a priory of canons and hospital for the sick and needy, dedicated to our blessed Mary, called St. Mary Spital Without, Bishopsgate. It was suppressed in 1539, at which time it made up 180 beds, and supplied the sick occupants with all necessaries at a cost of £478 per annum. Outside was the pulpit where the famous Spital sermons were preached at Easter before the Mayor and Corporation, and sometimes royal personages, by the most eminent City divines. After the dissolution they were preached at St. Paul's, then in St. Bride's Church, and now in Christ Church, Newgate Street. The pulpit stood on a site that now forms the north-east corner of Spital Square. There existed for 120 years in the precincts of Bishopsgate, near Camomile Street, a curious fraternity called The Papey, a religious house of St. John and St. Charity, sometimes called St. Augustine's Papey, consisting of threescore priests, governed by a master and two wardens. Its objects were to supply the necessities of the poorer clergy by providing them with lodgings, coals, bread, and ale. Near by stood the church of St. Augustine-in-the-Wall, the patronage of which was vested in the rich Priory of the Holy Trinity, who presented to the living four rectors from 1321 to 1375, but after that no one could be found to accept the incumbency in consequence of the stinginess of the Priory—the stipend not being sufficient to live upon—who therefore in 1430 gave the church to the Papey guild. The fraternity was not rich in funds, and in order to improve their exchequer they practised the singing of dirges and attended funerals as professional mourners and dirge singers. The house was suppressed 2 Edwd. VI.

From the thirteenth to the seventeenth century a conspicuous feature in the line of road leading northward from Bishopsgate was the Priory of Bethlehem, with its square-towered church, its gabled houses for the brethren and sisters' habitations, and its gardens, situated at the eastern edge of the moorland of Fensbury, a little beyond St. Botolph's Church, and facing what are now New Street and Devonshire Place. It was then built quite in the country, with the fens behind, fields in front, and no houses beyond it. The roadway in front was nothing more than a beaten trackway, almost impassable in winter, which when houses came to be built along it, and it assumed the semblance of a street, was called Bedlam Gate. There is no view extant of the priory, excepting the bird's-eye view in Aggas' Map, temp. Elizabeth, where there is a continuous line of houses along Bedlam Gate and onward to St. Leonard's Church, Shoreditch, where the road apparently terminated; eastward is the Spittel Fyeld, with archers and cattle; and westward, Finsburie Fyeld, with windmills, bowmen practising at the butts, and women spreading out linen to dry.

The priory was founded in 1246 by Simon Fitz-Marie, sheriff of London in the same year, for brethren and sisters, canons of the Order of the Star of Bethlehem, subject to the Bishop of Bethlehem, to whom they had to pay one mark yearly at Easter. Their habit was a black gown with a star embroidered on the breast. When it became a hospital for lunatics is not known, but there are records of sick persons being nursed there in 1330, and of insane patients in 1403, when six of the latter and three of the former were maintained in the house. Weaver tells us that at one time there was "a house for distraught and lunaticke people" at Charing Cross, and that some king, he did not know who, not liking to have an establishment of people of that class so near his palace, packed them off to Bethlem Priory, which was probably the beginning of its career as a hospital for the insane.

The Hospital-Priory does not appear to have been very amply provided with funds, as in 1403 some of the houses were alienated, for the purpose seemingly of raising money, and the brethren had to go abroad collecting alms for the sustenance of the inmates. In 1523, one Stephen Gunnings, a merchant tailor, left £40 in trust to the Corporation for purchasing the house, to be continued as a receptacle for lunatics, and the Mayor took some steps for that purpose; but before they were carried out it was granted to the Corporation, after the Dissolution, by King Henry VIII., who placed it in charge of the governors of Christ's Hospital in 1556, and the following year transferred it to the governors of Bridewell. In 1555 the income, arising chiefly out of rents, amounted to £43 4s. 8d. per annum, and by 1632 they were valued at £470, which, not being all forthcoming, was inadequate for the support of the house, and the Spital preachers were directed to appeal to their hearers on its behalf, there being then forty-four lunatics within the walls, the revenues paying only two-thirds of the cost of their maintenance. Besides, there were so many pressing cases for admission, that it became necessary to discharge many of the half-cured and less violent patients, to whom were granted licences for begging, and they went abroad, dressed fantastically, singing "mad songs," and imploring food or money. They went by the name of "Tom o' Bedlams," and are alluded to by Shakespeare in King Lear, where he says —

"With a sigh like Tom o' Bedlam."

In the reign of Elizabeth the church and chapel were taken down, and houses built on the site; and in the following century, the buildings having become ruinous and much too small for the constantly increasing patients, it was resolved to build a new and larger hospital. The Corporation made a grant of land on the southern margin of Finsbury Moors, where the Liverpool Street railway stations now stand, and the public contributed £17,000 towards its erection. It was commenced in 1644, and completed in 1676; and in 1732 two wings were added, which made the entire length of the building 540 feet, with a depth of forty feet. The style adopted was that of the Tuileries in Paris, which so offended Louis XIV. that he caused some out-offices of a more useful and less dignified character to be built in the style of St. James's Palace, London. It was adorned with figures of raving and melancholy madness from the chisel of Caius Cibber, which are now in the hall of the present hospital.

The estates belonging to the hospital afterwards rapidly increased in value, and at the beginning of the present century the governors found themselves in a position to build a larger and better-planned building, and purchased a large plot of land in St. George's Fields, which with the new hospital cost £100,000. The total income is now about £20,000 per annum.

Until towards the end of the last century the insane were treated in a most barbarous way. Nakedness, chains, scourgings, and solitary confinement were their lot, calculated rather to intensify than alleviate their aberration of intellect, without any of the modern appliances of modern asylums—music, flowers, prints, books, amusements, cheerful society, and comparative liberty—which are now found to be essential towards their recovery. A good idea of the old style of madhouse may be obtained from the eighth plate of Hogarth's series of "The Rake's Progress," which represents a scene in the Moorfields Bedlam.