Here lies buried Thomas Yken, Skinner.
"In Hodnet and London
God blessed my life,
Till forty and sixe yeeres,
With children and wife;
And God will raise me
Up to life againe,
Therefore have I thought
My death no paine."
JOHN WILKES. (From an Authentic Portrait.)
A fair monument of Queen Elizabeth had on the sides the following verses inscribed:—
"If prayers or tears
Of subjects had prevailed,
To save a princesse
Through the world esteemed;
Then Atropos
In cutting here had fail'd,
And had not cut her thread,
But been redeem'd;
But pale-faced Death;
And cruel churlish Fate,
To prince and people
Brings the latest date.
Yet spight of Death and Fate,
Fame will display
Her gracious virtues
Through the world for aye,
Spain's Rod, Rome's Ruine,
Netherlands' Reliefe;
Heaven's gem, earth's joy,
World's wonder, Nature's chief.
Britaine's blessing, England's splendour,
Religion's Nurse, the Faith's Defender."
The Poultry Compter, on the site of the present Grocers' Alley, was one of the old sheriff's prisons pulled down in 1817, replaced soon after by a chapel. Stow mentions the prison as four houses west from the parish of St. Mildred, and describes it as having been "there kept and continued time out of mind, for I have not read the original hereof." "It was the only prison," says Mr. Peter Cunningham, "with a ward set apart for Jews (probably from its vicinity to Old Jewry), and it was the only prison in London left unattacked by Lord George Gordon's blue cockaded rioters in 1780." This may have arisen from secret instructions of Lord George, who had sympathies for the Jews, and eventually became one himself. Middleton, 1607 (James I.), speaks ill of it in his play of the Phœnix, for prisons at that time were places of cruelty and extortion, and schools of villainy. The great playwright makes his "first officer" say, "We have been scholars, I can tell you—we could not have been knaves so soon else; for as in that notable city called London, stand two most famous universities, Poultry and Wood St., where some are of twenty years standing, and have took all their degrees, from the master's side, down to the mistress's side, so in like manner," &c.
THE POULTRY COMPTER. (From an Old Print.)