REMAINS OF PRINCE RUPERT’S PALACE BEECH STREET
From a print published by J. Sewell, Dec. 1, 1791.
The projecting upper stories had disappeared; wooden houses and thatched roofs were no longer permitted; moreover, the hot breath of the Fire had burned up the infected soil, the noisome laystalls, and the plague-smitten churchyards; the wreck and rubbish of the Fire had choked the wells fed from the contaminated soil: these were not, for the most part, reopened. As for the churches, we know the date of the rebuilding of every one. In 1677 there were only about twenty rebuilt out of all the eighty-seven which were burned down; a white square space on the map indicates the site of a church not yet rebuilt.
The picturesqueness of London had been lost; gables, projecting stories, casement windows gave place to a straight façade, and flat square windows with sashes. In this map of 1677 we step from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. And the most ardent admirer of Wren will hardly aver that his cathedral and his churches were externally more beautiful, while they were much less venerable, than those which they replaced.
The demand for land and its value was shown in the curious way in which many of the churches were built. Some had houses beside and over the porch; some against the north or south side: as, for instance, the church of St. Ethelburga, which still has houses built before the west front; the churches of St. Peter Cornhill, St. Mary le Bow, and St. Michael, the church of St. Alphege, all hidden by houses. The old craft quarters had by this time almost disappeared. But there were still places which continued to keep what modern tradesmen call a “line.” Linen-drapers and toymen were found in Fleet Street; here also jewellers held raffles; mutton was sold in Newgate Market; beef in Leadenhall; veal at St. James’s; the cheesemongers set up their shops in Thames Street; second-hand booksellers round Moorfields; second-hand clothes-men in Monmouth Street: fruit was sold in Covent Garden; mercers were always faithful to Cheapside; bankers and money-lenders were found in Lombard Street; milliners had stalls in the upper rooms of the Royal and the New Exchange.
The frays and feuds between the crafts, which constantly arose during the earlier centuries, had almost become things of the past: but in 1664 the weavers and the butchers reminded the elders of the good old days by one more burst of brawling and fighting. It seems strange that so peaceful a creature as the weaver came oft victorious. The weavers marched triumphantly about the streets offering a hundred pounds for the production of a butcher, and the blue smocks stayed at home in the shambles of Newgate, inglorious and defeated. And a butcher, too! a man of blood and slaughter! The streets, with the exception of Cheapside and Ludgate Hill, were not used by ladies as a place of walking and meeting. The merchants met on ’Change; the lawyers had their Inns of Court; for social and convivial purposes there were the taverns. Nor were the streets used greatly for purposes of locomotion; if a man wished to go from the Tower stairs to Blackfriars or from the Temple to Westminster, he took a boat; the Thames was, and continued until the nineteenth century, the great highway of the City; thousands of boats and barges plied up and down the river; the old ferry—the ferry of St. Mary Overies—still crossed the river above the bridge; that called the Horseferry still crossed the river at Westminster. It was a great deal easier and shorter to take oars than to walk, to ride, or to take a “glass coach”: one of the newly invented machines which replaced the old coach, with its perforated sides for windows. No one thought it a scandal that the watermen on the river should exchange language which in these days would drive every decent man or woman from the boats for ever. It was natural that rough and coarse men, like the watermen, should use rough and coarse language. The ladies of Charles the Second’s time heard coarseness unparalleled from these fellows with much the same air with which ladies of our own time pass a group of working-men energetically strengthening every assertion with the universal adjective. They hear, but they do not hear.
St. Ethelburga. within Bishopsgate.
From a contemporary print.