Every year, on October 16th, the “lion sermon” is preached within the church in memory of an ancient worthy, who in 1648 gave it the sum of £200, in remembrance of his delivery from a lion’s paws in Arabia. As at St. Olave’s, the noon hour, when daily service is performed for the benefit of the one or two worshippers who may stray in, is the time to visit this historic church.

The first edition of “Paradise Lost” bears the imprint: “Printed, and are to be sold by Peter Parker, under Creed Church near Aldgate, 1667.” “Creed Church” was this same Catherine Cree’s.

A little north of Leadenhall, at the entrance to the ancient street called St. Mary Axe, stands the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, another of the churches which remain, of those that Milton saw within the city walls. Its name recalls the ancient English custom of the May-day dance. A lofty May-pole, higher than the tower of the church, once stood beside it, and was pulled down on “Evil May Day,” in the reign of Henry VIII., about the time the church was built, 1520-32. It is a gray stone edifice, well preserved, and well worth a visit if for no other end than to see the tomb of the learned and devoted chronicler, Stow—a name dear to every student of ancient London and of English history. Of his “Survey,” Loftie says: “It was a wonder even in the age which produced Shakespeare.”

Stow was bred a tailor, but in middle life retired on a modest competence, and for forty years almost immediately preceding Milton’s birth had with unparalleled industry studied the history of his city and native land. His collection for the Chronicles of England, now in the British Museum, fills sixty quarto volumes. Every street of London and prominent building, every church, and almost every monument and inscription, are faithfully recorded in his volumes on London and Westminster. To him and to his editor, Strype, who has continued his work until a later period, modern London, and all who love her and her long history, owe an incalculable debt of gratitude.

But so little was his invaluable service recognised in his day that his great collection of books aroused suspicion in some quarters, and his outspoken words on public questions stirred up the jealous and malevolent, as his biographer shows. He was reduced to poverty in his old age, for he had spent his substance in his great enterprise. Like a genuine historian, he sought original sources, and “made use of his own legs (for he could never ride), travelling on foot to many cathedral churches and other places where ancient records and charters were; and with his own eyes to read them.” He studied the records in the Tower, and was expert in deciphering old wills and registers and muniments belonging to monasteries. He seems to have been somewhat conservative; perhaps, as his biographer suggests, “being a lover of antiquity and of the old Religious Buildings and monuments, he was the more prejudiced against the Reformed Religion, because of the havoc and destruction those that pretended to it made of them in those days.” One instance of Protestant fanaticism that tended to make him more opposed to zeal without knowledge was that a curate of St. Paul’s, which was his parish, inveighed “fervently against a long Maypole called a Shaft in the next Parish to his, named St. Andrew Undershaft, and calling it an Idol; which so stirred up the devotion of many hearers that many of them in the afternoon went, and with violence pulled it down from the place where it hung upon hooks; and then sawed it into divers pieces, each householder taking his piece as much as hung over his door or stall, and afterward burnt it.”

Sir Walter Besant, in a delightful chapter in his “London,” describes an imaginary visit to the learned man, and a stroll with him through the town five years before Milton opened his eyes in Bread Street: “I found the venerable antiquary in his lodging. He lived—it was the year before he died—with his old wife in a house over against the Church of St. Andrew Undershaft. The house itself was modest, containing two rooms on the ground floor, and one large room, or solar, as it would have been called in olden time, above. There was a garden at the back, and behind the garden stood the ruins of St. Helen’s Nunnery, with the grounds and gardens of that once famous house, which had passed into the possession of the Leathersellers’ Company.... I passed within, and mounting a steep, narrow stair, found myself in the library and in the presence of John Stow himself. The place was a long room, lofty in the middle, but with sloping sides. It was lit by two dormer windows; neither carpet nor arras nor hangings of any kind adorned the room, which was filled so that it was difficult to turn about in it, with books, papers, parchments, and rolls. They lay in piles on the floor, they stood in lines and columns against the walls; they were heaped upon the table. I observed too that they were not such books as may be seen in a great man’s library, bound after the Italian fashion, with costly leather, gilt letters, golden clasps, and silken strings. Not so; these books were all folios for the most part; their backs were broken; the leaves, where any lay open, were discoloured, many of them were in the Gothic black letter. On the table were paper, pens, and ink, and in the straight-backed armchair sat the old man himself, pen in hand, laboriously bending over a huge tome. He wore a black silk cap; his long white hair fell down upon his shoulders. The casements of the window stood open, and the summer sunshine poured warm and bright upon the scholar’s head.”

In an age of many elaborate and tasteless monuments, Stow’s is singularly interesting and tasteful. An almost life-size figure of him is seated, dressed in a long robe, before a table on which rests a book in which he is writing. The whole is placed within a niche in the tomb; upon the sculptured sides, the artist has carved, among other devices, a beggar’s wallet, indicative of Stow’s poverty, for which James I. in his old age issued him letters patent permitting him to solicit aid. These letters grant “to our loving subject, John Stow, who hath to his own great charge, and with neglect to his ordinary means of maintenance, for the general good of Posteritie, as well as the present age, compiled and published diverse necessary books and chronicles, and therefore we in recompense of his painful labours, and for the encouragement of the like ... authorise him and his deputies to collect among our loving subjects their contributions and kind gratuities.” Thus was the man who has chiefly contributed to our knowledge of ancient London allowed in his extreme old age to live in unappreciation and neglect.

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CHURCH OF ST. ANDREW UNDERSHAFT IN 1737
From an old engraving.