CHAPTER II
CONTEMPORARY EVIDENCE
Let us supplement this discourse by contemporary evidence.
There is an anonymous map of London in the sixteenth century called “Londinium Feracissimi Angliæ Regni Metropolis.” It is in some respects more exact than the better known map attributed to Agas. The streets, gardens, and fields are laid down with greater precision, and there is no serious attempt to combine, as Agas does, a picture, or a panorama, with a map. At the same time, the surveyor has been unable to resist the fashion of his time to consider the map as laid down from a bird’s-eye view, so that he thinks it necessary to give something of elevation.
I will take that part of the map which lies outside the walls. The precinct of St. Katherine stands beside the Tower with its chapel, court, and gardens; there are a few houses near it, apparently farmhouses; the convent of Eastminster had entirely vanished. Nothing indicates the site of the Nunnery in the Minories; yet there were ruins of these buildings standing here till the end of the last century; outside Bishopsgate houses extended past St. Mary Spital, some of whose buildings were still, apparently, standing. On the west side St. Mary of Bethlehem stood, exactly on the site of Liverpool Street Station, but not covering nearly so large an area; it appears to have occupied a single court and was probably what we should now consider a very pretty little cottage, like St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford.
Outside Cripplegate the houses begin again, leaving, between, the lower Moorfields dotted with ponds; there are houses lining the road outside Aldersgate. The courts are still standing of St. Bartholomew’s Priory, Charter House, St. John’s Priory, and the Clerkenwell Nunnery; Smithfield is surrounded with houses; Bridewell with its two square courts stands upon the river bank; Fleet Street is irregular in shape, the houses being nowhere in line; the courts of Whitefriars are still remaining. The Strand has all its great houses facing the river; their backs open upon a broad street with a line of mean houses on the north side. On the south of the river there is a line of houses on the High Street; a line of houses along the river bank on either side; and another one running near Bermondsey Abbey.
Within the walls we observe that some of the Religious Houses have quite disappeared; Crutched Friars, for instance; there is a vacant space which is probably one of the courts of St. Helen’s; the Priory of the Holy Trinity preserves its courts, but there is no sign of the church; there are still visible the courts and gardens of Austin Friars; there is still the great court of the Grey Friars; but the buildings of Blackfriars seem to have vanished entirely.
BRIDEWELL PALACE AND THE ENTRANCE TO THE FLEET RIVER AS THEY APPEARED IN 1660
E. Gardner’s Collection.
But Sir Thomas More has left us a description of London in his time. It is a description in terms too vague, yet interesting. He calls the City Amaurote and the Thames he calls the Anyder.