Lothbury—Its Former Inhabitants—St. Margaret's Church—Tokenhouse Yard—Origin of the Name—Farthings and Tokens—Silver Halfpence and Pennies—Queen Anne's Farthings—Sir William Petty—Defoe's Account of the Plague in Tokenhouse Yard.
Of Lothbury, a street on the north side of the Bank of England, Stow says: "The Street of Lothberie, Lathberie, or Loadberie (for by all those names have I read it), took the name as it seemeth of berie, or court, of old time there kept, but by whom is grown out of memory. This street is possessed for the most part by founders that cast candlesticks, chafing dishes, spice mortars, and such-like copper or laton works, and do afterwards turn them with the foot and not with the wheel, to make them smooth and bright with turning and scratching (as some do term it), making a loathsome noise to the by-passers that have not been used to the like, and therefore by them disdainfully called Lothberie."
"Lothbury," says Hutton (Queen Anne), "was in Stow's time much inhabited by founders, but now by merchants and warehouse-keepers, though it is not without such-like trades as he mentions."
Ben Jonson brings in an allusion to once noisy Lothbury in the "Alchemist." In this play Sir Epicure Mammon says:—
This night I'll change
All that is metal in my house to gold;
And early in the morning will I send
To all the plumbers and the pewterers,
And buy their tin and lead up; and to Lothbury
For all the copper.
Surly. What, and turn that too?
Mammon. Yes, and I'll purchase Devonshire and Cornwall,
And make them perfect Indies.
And again in his mask of "The Gipsies Metamorphosed"—
Bless the sovereign and his seeing.
* * * * *
From a fiddle out of tune,
As the cuckoo is in June,
From the candlesticks of Lothbury
And the loud pure wives of Banbury.
Stow says of St. Margaret's, Lothbury: "I find it called the Chappel of St. Margaret's de Lothberie, in the reign of Edward II., when in the 15th of that king's reign, license was granted to found a chauntry there. There be monuments in this church of Reginald Coleman, son to Robert Coleman, buried there 1383. This said Robert Coleman may be supposed the first builder or owner of Coleman Street; and that St. Stephen's Church, there builded in Coleman Street, was but a chappel belonging to the parish church of St. Olave, in the Jewry." In niches on either side of the altar-piece are two flat figures, cut out of wood, and painted to represent Moses and Aaron. These were originally in the Church of St. Christopher le Stocks, but when that church was pulled down to make way for the west end of the Bank of England, and the parish was united by Act of Parliament to that of St. Margaret, Lothbury (in 1781), they were removed to the place they now occupy. At the west end of the church is a metal bust inscribed to Petrus le Maire, 1631; this originally stood in St. Christopher's, and was brought here after the fire.
This church, which is a rectory, seated over the ancient course of Walbrook, on the north side of Lothbury, in the Ward of Coleman Street (says Maitland), owes its name to its being dedicated to St. Margaret, a virgin saint of Antioch, who suffered in the reign of Decius.
Maitland also gives the following epitaph on Sir John Leigh, 1564:—