Cunningham enumerates the chief events connected with the street:
“The five members accused of treason by Charles I. concealed themselves in this street. ‘The Star,’ in Coleman Street, was a tavern where Oliver Cromwell and several of his party occasionally met.... In a conventicle in ‘Swan Alley,’ on the east side of this street, Venner, a wine-cooper and Millenarian, preached the opinions of his sect to ‘the soldiers of King Jesus’” (see London in the Time of the Stuarts, p. 68 et seq.). “John Goodwin, minister in Coleman Street, waited on Charles I. the day before the King’s execution, tendered his services, and offered to pray for him. The King thanked him, but said he had chosen Dr. Juxon, whom he knew. Vicars wrote an attack on Goodwin, called ‘The Coleman-street Conclave Visited!’ Justice Clement, in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, lived in Coleman Street; and Cowley wrote a play called Cutter of Coleman-street. Bloomfield, author of ‘The Farmer’s Boy,’ followed his original calling of a shoemaker at No. 14 Great Bell-yard in this street.”
ST. STEPHEN, COLEMAN STREET
The Church of St. Stephen, Coleman Street, was “at first a Jews’ synagogue, then a parish church, then a chapel to St. Olave’s in the Jewry, now (7 Edward IV.) incorporated as a parish church” (Stow). It is situated on the west side of Coleman Street, near to the south end. It was consumed by the Great Fire and rebuilt by Wren. The earliest date of an incumbent is 1311.
The patronage of the church was in the hands of: The Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s, who granted it to the Prior and Convent of Butley; Henry VIII. seized it, and in the Crown it continued till Queen Elizabeth granted it, about 1597, to the parishioners, in whose successors it continued.
Houseling people in 1548 were 880.
The church is plain, long and narrow, without any aisles, measuring 75 feet in length and 35 feet in breadth. The steeple, which rises at the north-west, consists of a stone tower, a lantern, and small spire, the total height being about 65 feet.
Chantries were founded here by: William Grapefig, for which the King granted a licence, August 6, 1321, and to which John de Maderfield was admitted chaplain, June 23, 1324; Rodger le Bourser, for which the King granted his licence, August 1, 1321; Stephen Fraunford and John Essex, both citizens of London, of which John de Bulklegh was chaplain, who died in 1391: founded July 1361; Edward IV., who endowed it with lands, etc., which fetched £50 : 5 : 4 in 1548.
Anthony Munday, the dramatist, arranger of the City pageants and the continuation of Stow’s Survey, who died in 1633, was buried here.
A very large number of legacies and charitable gifts are recorded by Stow, amongst which are: £640, the gift of Christopher Eyre, for the building and maintenance of six almshouses; £100, the gift of Sir Richard Smith, for coals for the poor; £100, the gift of Hugh Capp, for lands for the poor; £400, the gift of Barnard Hyde, to purchase land for six poor people for ever.