Between Broad Street and Bishopsgate Street the space was chiefly composed of gardens. One of the houses fronting Bishopsgate Street was the residence of Sir Thomas Gresham (perhaps his house in Lombard Street was reserved for business purposes).
On the opposite side of Bishopsgate Street was Crosby Hall and the precinct of the dissolved nunnery of St. Helen, extending towards St. Mary Axe and the church of St. Andrew Undershaft. At the further end of St. Mary Axe was the "Papye," a building which had been a hospital for poor priests before the Reformation. In the year 1598 Shakespeare was living in the St. Helen's precinct, within the shadow of Crosby Hall, and John Stow, in his home near the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, had just corrected the proofs of the first edition of his Survey of London. Stow tells us about Gresham's House and about Crosby Hall. He tells us that Sir Francis Walsingham, the Secretary of State, resided at the Papye. He describes the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, where his own monument may be seen at the present day; he describes, too, the ancient church of the nunnery of St. Helen, in which a memorial window now commemorates Shakespeare. But he failed to mention the fact, which has since been recovered from the subsidy-roll in the Record Office, that William Shakespeare was a denizen of the precinct in 1598. Had Shakespeare built a water conduit in the neighbourhood, or endowed an almshouse, he might have been celebrated in the pages of John Stow.
They were neighbours, and may have been acquainted. The district had been familiar to Stow from childhood, and he may have entertained the poet as he entertains us in his Survey with recollections of the changes he had witnessed in his long lifetime. Describing Tower Hill, he recalls the abbey of nuns of the order of St. Clare, called the Minories, and after giving the facts of its history, proceeds:
"In place of this house of nuns is now built divers fair and large storehouses for armour and habiliments of war, with divers workhouses serving to the same purpose: there is a small parish church for inhabitants of the close, called St. Trinities. Near adjoining to this abbey, on the south side thereof, was sometime a farm belonging to the said nunnery; at the which farm I, myself, in my youth, have fetched many a half-penny worth of milk, and never had less than three ale pints for a half-penny in the summer, nor less than one ale quart for a half-penny in the winter, always hot from the kine, as the same was milked and strained. One Trolop, and afterwards Goodman, were the farmers there, and had thirty or forty kine to the pail. Goodman's son being heir to his father's purchase, let out the ground, first for grazing of horses, and then for garden-plots, and lived like a gentleman thereby."
Here we have the source of the name Goodman's Fields, a point of some interest for us; but how vastly more interesting to have rambled with Stow in Elizabethan London, listening to such stories of the old order which had passed, giving place to the new!
We have strayed outside the wall, but not far. This road between Aldgate and the Postern Gate by the Tower, running parallel with the wall, is called the Minories, after the nunnery. Setting our faces towards Aldgate, to retrace our steps, we have the store-houses for armour and habiliments of war on our right; the wide ditch on our left has been filled up, and partly enclosed for cultivation. There are trees, and cows browsing, although the farm which Stow remembered no longer existed. Before us, just outside Aldgate, is the church of St. Buttolph, with its massive tower, standing in a spacious churchyard. Owing to the extensive building and development which had taken place outside the wall since the Reformation, it had been necessary to construct lofts and galleries in this church to accommodate the parishioners. At Aldgate the line of the wall turns westward towards Bishopsgate. Parallel to it a road has been made along the bank of the ditch, and leads into Bishopsgate Street. This is Houndsditch. The houses stand thickly along one side of the way looking towards the wall; the ditch has been filled up, and the wide surface is used for cattle pens or milking stalls.
We will not go along Houndsditch, but turning sharply to the left from St. Buttolph's we pass through Aldgate. In doing so we immediately find ourselves in the midst of the remains of the great priory of Holy Trinity. The road leads southward into Fenchurch Street, branching off on the west into Leadenhall Street. At the junction of these streets stood the hospitium of the priory. Between Leadenhall Street and the city wall, from Aldgate nearly up to St. Andrew Undershaft, lies the ground-plan of the establishment of the Canons Regular, known as Christchurch, or the priory of Holy Trinity, the grandest of all the monastic institutions in Middlesex except Westminster. The heads of the establishment were aldermen of the City of London, representing the Portsoken Ward.
"These priors have sitten and ridden amongst the aldermen of London, in livery like unto them, saving that his habit was in shape of a spiritual person, as I, myself, have seen in my childhood; at which time the prior kept a most bountiful house of meat and drink, both for rich and poor, as well within the house as at the gates, to all comers, according to their estates" (Stow).
In 1531 the King took possession of Christchurch; the canons were sent to other houses of the same order—St. Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield; St. Mary Overies, Southwark; and St. Mary Spital—"and the priory, with the appurtenances, King Henry gave to Sir Thomas Audley, newly knighted, and after made Lord Chancellor" (Stow). So extensive and so solid was the mass of building that Audley was at a loss to get the space cleared for the new house he wished to build here. He offered the great church of the priory to any one who would take it down and cart away the materials. But as this offer met with no response, Audley had to undertake the destruction himself. Stow could remember how the workmen employed on this work, "with great labour, beginning at the top"—the tower had pinnacles at each corner like the towers at St. Saviour's and St. Sepulchre's—"loosed stone from stone, and threw them down, whereby the most part of them were broken, and few remained whole; and those were sold very cheap, for all the buildings then made about the city were of brick and timber. At that time any man in the city might have a cart-load of hard stone for paving brought to his door for sixpence or sevenpence, with the carriage." Thus, in place of the priory and its noble church, was built the residence of Thomas, Lord Audley, and here he lived till his death in 1544. By marriage of his only daughter and heiress, the house passed into the possession of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and was then called Duke's Place.
Turning our backs upon Duke's Place and continuing a little further along the way by which Stow used to fetch the milk from the farm at the Minories to his father's house on Cornhill, we come to Leadenhall, a great building which served as a public granary in ancient times, and later as the chief market hall of the city. Leaving aside all the particulars of its history which Stow gives, let us note what he tells us from his own recollections: