London City

by Walter Besant

Within the chapter-house all is simple and solid. A square wainscotted hall, paved with plain white marble slabs, deep-set doors and windows in the thickness of the walls, and a fine, wide, shallow-stepped staircase with well-worked iron supports to the handrail. The character of the balustrade changes above the first floor, and the handrail is supported by spiral wooden balusters. The walls of the finely proportioned chapter-room are all wainscotted, otherwise there is nothing to remark upon. This room is occasionally lent to ecclesiastical conferences. In one of the other rooms are eight panels, 2 feet 6 by 1 foot 9 inches, enclosed in small gilt frames. These hang rather high up round the walls. They are monotint, and are Sir James Thornhill’s original designs for the frescoes in the dome of the cathedral. These designs are excellently clear, and show what the now faded frescoes must have been.

The archdeacon of the cathedral has a suite of rooms in the chapter-house, and the remainder of the house is carried out in the same plain domestic style.

The north side of the churchyard consists of a row of dingy brick buildings of various heights and ages. One or two are showing signs of decrepid old age, others still flourishing, with the names of their tradesmen occupants in mighty gilt letters across their smoky fronts. The irregular roofs of tiles or slates, with fantastic little iron railings high up, or windows peeping over the parapets, are sufficiently original to be interesting. Every class of goods seems to find representatives here—we see confectioners, milliners, bootmakers, photographers, etc. The Religious Tract Society has one entrance in the churchyard. On the east side we find all the houses modern, in the modern style, with stone facings; they are chiefly occupied by manufacturers.

We turn next to Paternoster Row.

In every large town on the Continent, wherever a cathedral has been erected, there are streets occupied by shops where all kinds of ecclesiastical things are made and sold, such as beads, crucifixes, wax tapers, service books, meditations, and such like. Paternoster Row served this purpose for St. Paul’s in the first instance, and, as there is only one other street so called, namely, the lane of Paternoster in the Riole, one may reasonably conclude that, with this other street, it supplied all the churches and all the faithful of the City with these things. We read of “Paternoster” meaning rosaries, and of a “Paternostrer” or one whose trade it was to make rosaries, etc. There are frequent references to both Paternoster “Street” of St. Michael le Querne, and Paternoster Lane, or Paternoster Church Lane of St. Michael, Paternoster Royal. Of the first, for instance, there are houses and rents spoken of in wills of 1312 and 1321.

This is, in fact, one of the most ancient, as well as one of the most interesting of the City Streets.

We can catch glimpses here and there of the actual residents of this street, the place where they made the rosaries. They should have been a quiet and God-fearing folk; but they were not. In 1381 one Godfrey de Belstred was assaulted by three “Paternostrers” of this parish, whether for purposes of robbery or in a quarrel does not appear; he was picked up wounded, and carried off to die. In the same century we find persons owning houses in this street; one, William de Ravenstone, Almoner of St. Paul’s, leaves by will a house in Paternoster Row. Did his functions permit him to live outside the precinct which sheltered such a goodly company of ecclesiastics? About the same time William Russell—surely the earliest mention of that illustrious name—bequeaths his house in the Row; Garter King-at-arms has a house there; John de Pykenham, Paternostrer, leaves various tenements to his wife, who claims as one of them a house in the Row. William le Marbler, a vintner, has a house there; the name shows that a man might by this time leave the trade of his father, and take to another without changing his surname, just as the name of Chaucer, who never belonged to the “gentle craft,” means shoemaker. There are other instances of “Paternostrers,” all of whom belong to the Parish, if not to the Row, which formed the most important part of it.

PATERNOSTER ROW (AS IT WAS)

The street, in fact, belonged to two parishes; one of these was the parish of St. Faith under Paul’s (see p. [340]). St. Faith’s parish includes Paternoster Square, the Row, and Ivy Lane, with little fringes or strips, on the north and south. The east end of the Row is in the parish of St. Michael le Querne (see p. [326]). This little parish, whose church is now St. Vedast’s, Foster Lane, included no more than 250 feet of the Row, with that part of Chepe west of Foster Lane, and the buildings on the north-west of the cathedral precinct. If you stand now on the site of the church, you will find it difficult to understand how there could be room for a parish church and a graveyard on the little space between the Row and the west end of Cheapside. By measurement, however, you will ascertain that a line drawn from the shop at the end of the Row to the corner of Cheapside is 130 feet in length, while a line drawn perpendicular to the buildings is 110 feet. Now the mediæval builders were ingenious in cramming churches and halls into small areas. I have laid down the church as it might have been, and I put the present statue of Peel at the crossing of the transepts if it was a cruciform church. I do not think, however, that it was cruciform, but that it consisted of a nave and chancel only, with a small burial-ground on the north, and a tower on the east side. The Fire of 1666 left it rootless, broke its windows, melted its glass, calcined its marbles, and destroyed its woodwork. It also burned up the coffins with their contents in the vaults. The parish was poor and small; the “Paternostrers” existed no longer; the parishioners decided not to rebuild the church; they amalgamated their parish with another; they widened the way that led from Newgate Street into Cheapside; and the bones of the dead, which were now so much grey powder, were trampled in the mud and dust of the street.