CHAPTER III
THE CATHEDRAL, THE ABBEY, THE TEMPLE, AND THE TOWER.
“The Saints are there—the Living Dead,
The Mourners glad and strong;
The sacred floor their quiet bed,
Their beams from every window shed,
Their voice in every song.”
Keble.
There is one burial-ground in London which has received a large share of attention, and which has really been thought worthy of lengthy and detailed notices in histories of the metropolis—I mean St. Paul’s Churchyard. The words convey a very distinct meaning to us now. They suggest Messrs. Hitchcock and Williams, and a number of other firms with large premises, a constant stream of vans, carts, omnibuses, cabs, and bicycles passing between Ludgate Hill and Cheapside or Cannon Street, and a neat garden with flower-beds, seats, and pigeons under the shadow of the great Cathedral—Wren’s “monument”—which is so different from any other cathedral, and yet so suitable for the centre of the largest city in the world. Just as St. Paul’s Cathedral was not always as it is now, so St. Paul’s Churchyard is also vastly changed. Underneath the soil are the graves of Britons, Saxons, and Romans; and I have already referred to these, and have pointed out how far back into obscure history we can trace this particular graveyard.
Many books have been written about St. Paul’s; Dugdale’s is the best old history, and perhaps Dean Milman’s is the best modern one. The stories of its foundation, of the shrine of St. Erkenwald, the disastrous fire of 1136, the Boy Bishops, the chained bibles and the commotion they aroused, the difficulties of the Reformation, and finally the other “Great Fire” of 1666, which led to the rebuilding of the Cathedral, not again as a Gothic structure, but somewhat after the style of St. Peter’s at Rome, have all been told again and again. The crypt of the Cathedral was the parish church of St. Faith, and that of St. Gregory stood where the clock tower now is, at the west end. The site of St. Gregory’s Churchyard is within the posts in front of the west door, where Queen Anne’s statue stands, while the parish of St. Faith had a piece at the eastern end of the Cathedral, and, according to Newcourt, another piece was allotted to St. Martin’s, Ludgate Hill. It is to Dugdale that we are chiefly indebted for a knowledge of what old St. Paul’s, with its windows and monuments, was like—and a splendid church it must have been. He was an eminent antiquary who, thinking that the chief ecclesiastical buildings in England would suffer from the Civil War, made a most noble pilgrimage, and drew the monuments, copied the epitaphs, and took notes of the arms in windows, on walls, &c., in St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey first, and subsequently in Ely, Norwich, Peterborough, Lincoln, and a number of other cathedral, conventual, and parish Churches. The work he did at St. Paul’s was of exceptional value, owing to the ravages of the Great Fire.
The Cathedral has been surrounded by such interesting buildings as a Bishop’s Palace, the Chapter House and Library, a Bell Tower, several Chantries, a Charnel House, and St. Paul’s School, founded by Dean Colet, and which, some years ago, was totally destroyed, reappearing as a meaty-red structure of huge dimensions (where the foundation scholars, or “fish,” are in a small minority), in the uninteresting district of East Hammersmith, which is misnamed West Kensington.