The principal towns served from the Bull and Mouth were: Holyhead, Oxford, Birmingham, Shrewsbury, Kidderminster, Worcester, Leominster, Ludlow, Hereford, Kendal, Glasgow, Leeds, Halifax, Sheffield, Nottingham, and Northampton. Coaches started from these places daily, three times, or twice a week. The traffic appears strangely divided; this, however, was due to the competition of other coaches. Thus, a coach started twice a day for Birmingham, and also twice a day for Kendal.
Twenty-one coaches ran out of the Bull and Mouth every Monday. The same number came in. Other days were quite as busy. Besides, there were the wagons, of which twelve went out every week. The offices of the Post Office are now built over the site of this inn.
Farther north to the west of Aldersgate is the district ravaged by the fire of 1897, which burned down blocks of houses and streets. Jewin Crescent and Australian Avenue were the centre of the conflagration, but both have risen from their ashes. In Jewin Street Milton lived before his third marriage.
Little Britain was in the reigns of the Stuarts the centre of the bookselling trade, as Paternoster Row was later. Here lived Richard Chiswell (d. 1711), “the Metropolitan bookseller”; also Samuel Buckler, publisher of the Spectator; and Benjamin Franklin lodged for a time in “Little Britain.” But the association which confers the greatest distinction upon the street is that it was for a short time the residence of Milton when he lodged with the bookseller Millington about 1670.
The street at present is lined on one side by the uniform row of the buildings in the hospital precincts; these are of dingy brick with stuccoed ground-floor. On the east, there are a few modern buildings mingled with one or two older ones, which give the street a quaint aspect. No. 37 and the two numbers to the south of it are decidedly picturesque.
A full account of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and Priory has been given in Mediæval London, vol. ii. p. 251.
The Priory on its suppression was granted to Sir Richard, afterwards 1st Baron, Rich, with the exception of the choir and south transept of the church, which were given to the parishioners, and it is this beautiful fragment that now forms the church of St. Bartholomew the Great.
ST. BARTHOLOMEW THE GREAT