The other house depicted upon the right of our view, its front bearing the arms of the Apothecaries’ Company, is the well-known establishment of Mr. J. D. Farrer, Chemist. “Farrer’s Cestrian Bouquet” and “Floral Extract” are perfumes too well known to the fair élite of Chester to need more than a passing notice here. Strangers and visitors, however, will thank us for the hint that these, and other like gems of the toilet, fragrant mementos of “rare old Chester,” are “prepared and sold only by Mr. Farrer.”
Opposite to these premises stands the parish Church of St. Peter, the site of which is supposed to have been also that of the Roman Prœtorium. Tradition ascribes the first building of this church to that Mercian celebrity, the Countess Ethelfleda, who raised an edifice in the centre of the city to the mutual honour of St. Peter and St. Paul. These two saints had, up to that time, presided over the destinies of the mother church of Chester, now the Cathedral, but a ‘new light’ having sprung up in the person of the virgin-wife, St. Werburgh, the two aforesaid apostles were relieved of their charge, and a new Church erected and dedicated to them on the spot we are now surveying. Bradshaw the monk, from whose quaint historic poem we have already quoted, thus records the translation:—
And the olde churche of Peter and of Paule
By a generall counsell of the spiritualte,
With helpe of the Duke moost principall,
Was translate to the myddes of the sayd cite,
Where a paresshe churche was edified truele
In honour of the aforesaid apostoles twayne,
Whiche shall for ever by grace divine remayne.
St. Paul’s connection with the church appears to have ceased before the Conquest, since which time the edifice has been once or twice rebuilt. The spire is recorded to have been re-edified in 1479, in which year the parson of the parish, with his officers, ate a goose upon the top, and cast the well-picked bones into the four streets below. The ecclesiastics of those days were a jovial crew,—none of your lean, skewery-built men, like their degenerate types of the present day,—but priests of size and substance; men who quaffed their wine and sack right merrily; and who evidently looked after the spirits of their flocks more than after their souls. Must not those have been “good old times!” The east and part of the south sides of the church were rebuilt in 1640, just before the breaking out of the great Civil War. The “parson and goose spire” having been injured by lightning in 1780, was that same year removed. The present square steeple was rebuilt in 1813; and the illuminated clock which ornaments the south front was first publicly lit up in 1835. The interior of the church, which contains some venerable monuments, has of late years been considerably improved and beautified.
CHAPTER VI.
Watergate Street.—God’s Providence House.—Bishop Lloyd’s House.—The Puppet Show Explosion.—Trinity Church.—Dean Swift and the Yacht,—St. Martin’s and St. Bridget’s Churches.—The Stanley Palace.—Watergate.—Port of Chester.
Westward, ho! a few steps, and we find ourselves moving along Watergate Street; once, and when Chester was a thriving port, the chief street of the city. As with men, so
There is a tide in the affairs of streets,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
but the tide for Watergate Street has ebbed away, and now flows in other and more favoured channels. Still, as we shall presently see, this Street is not behind any of its neighbours in absorbing interest. You will perceive that, like Eastgate Street, it has the Cestrian characteristic on either side,—its high-level Row. The one upon the right hand, adjoining St. Peter’s Church, is, perhaps, as good a specimen as we have now left to us of the “Rows” of the last century. Had we the time to spare, a ramble along this Row, and a hole-and-corner visit to the numerous alleys that intersect it, would convince the most sceptical that there is more in Chester than meets the eye. But we must away,—for see! here is an odd-looking tenement, on the other side the street, inviting our attention. Two hundred years ago that house was in the pride of youth, and the residence of a family of “some rank and standing,” as is evidenced by the armorial bearings carved on one of the beams; but, as somebody or other (Longfellow, we believe), has justly enough observed, “it is not always May!”, in proof of which this house has of late years been occupied as a sausage shop, and now shelters the defenceless head of a barber. Small and low are the rooms of this house—absurdly so to the critic of the present generation; and so contracted is the ceiling of the Row at this point, that no man of ordinary stature can pass along without stooping. Is it not a quaint old spot? Look up at yon inscription on the cross-beam. Tradition avers that this house was the only one in the city that escaped the plague, which ravaged the city during the seventeenth century. In gratitude for that deliverance, the owner of the house is said to have carved upon the front the words we are now reading—