The parish, together with others, had a gift of 8s. per annum left by Randolph Bernard, and 40s. per annum left by Robert Warner.
Boss Alley, now vanished, preserved the memory of a “boss” of water placed there by the executors of Whittington. Beside Boss Alley was a house once belonging to the Abbots of Chertsey in Surrey, as their inn when they came to town. It was afterwards known as Sandie House. “I think the Lord Sands has been lodged there.”
Trig Lane follows, leading down to Trig Stairs:
A pair of stairs they found, not big stairs,
Just such another pair as Trig Stairs.
Broken Wharf is mentioned so far back—e.g. 1329 and 1349—that one suspects that the wall, not the wharf, was at this place broken. In 1598 a stone house stood beside the wharf, with arched gates. It belonged in the forty-third year of Henry III. to Hugh de Bygod; in the eleventh of Edward III. to Thomas Brotherton, the King’s brother, Earl of Norfolk, Marshal of England; and in the eleventh of Henry VI. to John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk.
Within the gate of this house (now belonging to the city of London) is lately—to wit, in the years 1594 and 1595—built one large house of great heith called an engine, made by Bevis Bulmar, gentleman, for the conveying and forcing of Thames water to serve in the middle and west parts of the city. The ancient great hall of this messuage is yet standing, and pertaining to a great brewhouse for beer (Stow’s Survey).
St. Mary Somerset was situated on the north side of Upper Thames Street, opposite Broken Wharf, and was so-called from a man’s name Summer’s Hith. It was burnt down in the Great Fire, and rebuilt from the designs of Sir Christopher Wren in 1695, when St. Mary Mounthaw was annexed to it. The building, with the exception of the tower, was pulled down in 1868. The earliest date of an incumbent is 1280.
The patronage of the church was in the hands of: William de Staundon, who gave it by will, dated November 20, 1273, to Arabella de Staundon, his wife; Sir John de Peyton, 1335; Edward III., 1363 (see Braybroke, London Review, 146, as to a dispute about the patronage when Thomas de Bradeston claimed it); Richard II., as custodian of Thomas de Bradeston, 1387; Walter de la Pole, in right of his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas de Bradeston; Thomas de Ingaldesthorp, cousin and heir of Walter de la Pole; Henry VI., 1435; William Norris, Knight, married to Isabel, daughter of Edmund de Ingaldesthorp, 1478; Edward VI., 1550; Mary, 1554; G. Comb, generosus, 1560; Elizabeth, 1585; George Coton, 1596; and several others until the Great Fire in 1666, when the parish was annexed to St. Mary Mounthaw.
Houseling people in 1548 were 300.