We read, in old plays, of the apple-woman at the corner of the street, and the vendor of herbs who passed through those ancient thoroughfares; but of the greengrocers, like those of our own day, we find no mention, for they had no predecessors; and, excepting the cabbage and the parsnip, peas and beans, and the radish mentioned by Izaak Walton, there seems but to have been a scanty supply of vegetables. The potato is of comparatively modern introduction, while fruit-trees appear to have been grown in England from time immemorial; even as far back as the days of the Saxons, we find the vine cultivated in the gardens of the monasteries, and that the monks made their own wine. Their vegetable diet was very limited; and we need no further proof than the quantity of cattle slaughtered for the winter consumption, and salted for the sole purpose of saving the food they would require. Indeed, with the exception of beans, peas, wheat, barley, and a kind of cabbage called kale, we scarcely find any other mention of the vegetables used by our Saxon ancestors. Even in the time of Elizabeth, according to old Tusser, a supper of bacon broth was not to be despised, and a breakfast off the same substance cold, with the addition of a piece of cabbage in its cold state, and a lump of barley-bread, formed the chief diet of the English farmer, washed down, no doubt, by a draught of beer.
Still the Londoners seem always to have been a flower-loving people, and although the stern Puritans banished their May-poles and Whitsuntide games, they were revived again at the Restoration, and continued, but with little alteration, until the middle of the last century. Even chatty old Pepys allowed his wife to go down into the neighbourhood of Greenwich, so that she might rise early and wash her face in May-dew; and bluff Hal, attended by his queen and nobles, went out to “do observance to the May” at Shooter’s Hill. We cannot help marvelling, while such a love for the beauties of nature prevailed, that no such thing as a regular flower-market should exist. It is true the dramatists mention the smell that pervaded Bucklersbury; and no doubt a few centuries back this was the chief spot where the country-people assembled and sold the flowers and fruits they brought from the country. That thitherward they came, streaming from the wild woods of Hampstead and Highgate, or from the wilder wastes on which Norwood now stands, each bearing their burden into “Bucklersbury at simple-time,” when only one bridge spanned across the Thames.
Yet it must have been a merry London when, to quote the words of an old chronicler, “the king himself rose early in the morning to fetch May or green boughs—he fresh and richly appareled; and all his knights, squires, and gentlemen clothed in white satin; his guards and yeomen of the crown in white sarsenet. And so went every man with his bow and arrows, shooting to the wood; and so repaired again to the court, every man with a green bough in his cap.” This was the time when, although London was without its Covent Garden Market, in May, according to Herrick’s description:
“Each field became a street—each street a park,
Made green, and trimm’d with trees.
Devotion gave each house a bough, a branch;
Each porch and door
With white-thorn neatly was inwove,
As if they were the cooler shades of love.”
In the first volume of the Illustrated London News we find the following description of the church of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden.
“When Francis Duke of Bedford, in the reign of the first Charles, proposed to erect a place of worship for his tenantry in the then thinly populated locality of the Covent Garden, he called to his councils the celebrated Inigo Jones, suggesting, as we find it recorded, that ‘any thing—a barn would do;’ an expression sounding more of the prudence than of the piety of the said Francis. The architect took the hint; and thence arose, in 1640, the Palladian structure of which we now behold a duplicate; the original building having been destroyed in 1795, through the carelessness of some workmen engaged in its repair. The contemplation of this edifice has given rise to a shrewd suspicion in our mind, that the above venerable anecdote relating to its origin may have been the after-thought of some architectural critic, whose admiration for the designer of Whitehall was stronger than his respect for the memory of the duke. Be that as it may, the structure, for several years, was merely known as the Chapel of Ease to St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, until 1645, when it was erected into a separate living, and, in the year of the Restoration (1660), the patronage was vested in the Duke of Bedford; the whilom chapelry becoming known as the church and parish of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden.
“St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, has some peculiarities in its structure. The Tuscan portico, with its prazzi, being placed in the rear instead of the front of the edifice, which latter stands in the quiet by-way of Belford-street. Hence the back of the altar is (to use a palpable Hibernicism) the front, the lantern and principal entrance being at the western extremity of the church. Popularly speaking it is right; for this is the elevation which has looked down on the many glorious rows, cracked crowns, and mêlées consequent upon each recurrence of a Westminster election, the hustings-hammering high bailiff of that ancient borough and city having made this spot memorable as ‘the field of a thousand fights,’ by here fixing the polling-place for the return of members to represent it in Parliament. Here, then, were the tag-rag and bob-tail of this ancient and radical borough wont to disport themselves in fighting, roaring, drinking, and swearing, during the fourteen days saturnalia of each contested election. But these scenes are no more; the Reform bill, by dividing the constituencies and the erection of district polling-booths, has destroyed the glorious anarchy, the rude liberty of the Westminster canaille; and we may look with equal success for the May-pole in the Strand or the Standard on Cornhill, as for an election-mob, such as in the days of Fox, Burdett, Hobhouse, Maxwell, or Sheridan, crowded the front of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. But if the history of the hustings of Covent Garden would be the history of political party for the last hundred years, not less would the history of the hotels and coffee-houses, which occupy two sides of the quadrangle, comprise the anecdotal annals of the last century, and the earlier portion of the present. The early companions of George IV. here revelled; and a host of buried talent, senatorial, literary, forensic, and dramatic, has the ‘venue’ of its brightest witticisms and most brilliant sallies laid in the hotels of ‘the Garden’—in the Bedford, the Russell, the Piazza, Offley’s, Mother Butler’s, and the rest.
“All around the subject of our article has experienced its full share of change. There is a painting by Hogarth, from which an etching has been published, representing Covent Garden in 1745. There stands the predecessor of the present church, alike in every respect (except the illuminated clock in the pediment); but here the resemblance ceases. The area now occupied by the handsome market, with its granite columns, plate-glass windows, covered arcades and conservatories, is in Hogarth’s picture an uneven space divided by posts and chains, with a pump in its centre. Here and there a market-woman, with looped-up petticoats and exposed neck, presides over heaps of vegetables scattered on the ground, while among mounds of turnips, carrots, and cabbages, strut several formal figures in the uncouth head-dresses, pinched stomachers, and stiff diamond-quilted skirts of a century ago, accompanied by puppy-dogs, and beaux as precise and quaint in attire as themselves. But to return. The design both of church and piazza of the present building is said to have been borrowed from a place built by Cosmo de Medicis at Leghorn. The bold projecting cornice outside, and the eight Corinthian columns of the altar-piece within, have found many admirers among the cognoscenti. In conclusion, we must add, that the inimitable author of Hudibras is also buried here, and no less a humorist than Dr. Walcot, the well-known ‘Peter Pindar:’ their monuments ought to be preserved.”
CHAPTER XIV.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND THE PARKS.
