NEWGATE MARKET, 1856
Other works of repair, enlargement, and restoration were carried on in 1555 and in 1630. In 1666 the gate and prison were destroyed in the Great Fire, but rebuilt in 1672.
The gate was removed in 1767, and now the prison has been demolished also.
The modern account of Newgate Prison will be found in London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 538.
Outside Newgate and on the western edge of the river, there was a suburb dating from very early times. It grew up round Smithfield where horses were bought and sold, and where young men shot with the bow and ran and wrestled. It contained the people who belonged to the service of the religious houses there, and those who belonged to the hospital. We also find, outside Newgate, “rents” in the thirteenth century, and bakehouses and tanneries also outside Newgate, while the spurriers in 1355 are enjoined to work in their quarters outside Newgate until curfew rings from St. Sepulchre’s Church.
NEWGATE, 1799
Within Newgate, where a “pavement” was constructed to keep the stalls from the mud of the unpaved street, was the Market of the Shambles. Here were two churches—St. Ewen’s, at the north-east corner of Warwick Lane, and St. Nicholas Fleshambles in what is now King Edward Street, formerly Butcher’s Lane or Stinking Lane. Both parishes were united to form that of Christ Church after the Dissolution.
Newgate Market is generally spoken of as a meat market only, which in later years it became; but formerly many other things were sold there. It is the natural tendency of markets to admit goods for sale other than those for which they were created.
Thus we find in the fourteenth century that wheat was sold in the “corn market of Newgate”; that poulterers who were freemen had to sell their fowls either in Newgate Market or else west of the Tun in Cornhill; that cheese brought into the City by “foreigners” had to be sold in the market between the Shambles and Newgate, and nowhere else; that blacksmiths were forbidden to sell their goods except in the pavement of Newgate or else by the Tun of Cornhill; and that pork was also sold in the market. Further investigations would doubtless bring to light the fact that it became a general market.