A CHAPTER XIV THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY CERTAIN curious passage in Froissart's Chronicles sums up the whole history of England, and consequently of London, during the fifteenth century. "One day," it runs, "being on a visit to the Royal Family at Berkhampstead, whilst Edward III. and Queen Philippa came there to take leave of the Prince and Princess of Wales on their departure for Aquitaine, I sat me down on a bench and overheard an ancient Knight expounding some of the prophecies of Merlin to the Queen's ladies. According to him, neither the Prince of Wales nor the Duke of Clarence, though they were sons to King Edward, would wear the crown, but it would fall to the House of Lancaster." The English history of the fifteenth century unfolds the gradual verification of this prophecy through that great war of succession which bears the romantic name of the Wars of the Roses, and is a subject too well known and too intricate to be dealt with in these pages. So sturdy is our Anglo-Norman race that neither the ravages of the plague, which, after the great outburst in the reign of Edward III., recurred at almost regular periods of ten years, till finally rooted out by the Great Fire in Charles the Second's time, nor the devastations of French and Scottish wars, combined with the horrors of civil combat, arrested the prosperity of the capital. Though a good two-thirds of the population of England had perished during the preceding hundred years, the metropolis, by the end of the fifteenth century, counted between 100,000 and 180,000 inhabitants. To accommodate so considerable an increase of population, the city had perforce to overflow the circuit of the ancient walls; spaces, which in Chaucer's time had been blossoming gardens and orchards, were covered over, forty years later, by a net-work of narrow streets and alleys. In Edward the Third's day, there were very few houses between Ludgate and Chancery Lane, or Newgate and Holborn; half a century later this space was all built over, and St. Paul's, which had hitherto marked the extreme west end of the city, appeared, by the time Edward IV. ascended the throne, to rise out of its centre. Many open spaces were still left between Shoe and Fewter (Fetter) Lanes; a straggling row of houses already linked Holborn to Ely Place, with its fine episcopal palace and fair chapel dedicated to St. Etheldreda. The latter is still used as a Roman Catholic Church, being the only one in London which dates back to pre-Reformation times. The gardens of Ely Palace, the town residence of the Bishops of Ely, were famous for their strawberries; Shakespeare mentions them in Richard III.— Duke of Gloucester. My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn, I saw good strawberries in your garden there. I do beseech you, send for some of them. Bishop of Ely. Marry, and will I, my lord, with all my heart. At Ely Palace died, in 1599, that famous man, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; and here too, in later times, dwelt the Earls of Sussex and Warwick. In Queen Bess's day, Sir Christopher Hatton held Ely House on a lease from the Bishops of Ely, one of its stipulations being that they might walk in the garden, and "gather three and twenty basketloads of roses and no more." The rose grows no longer in Ely Place, any more than do the saffron and the vine at Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, or Vine Street, which were evidently so named from the fact that once the plants bloomed there in great abundance. These streets now produce, instead, diamonds and other precious stones, imported principally from South Africa and retailed thence over the known world. A large windmill, which was a familiar landmark in this neighbourhood for ages, finally disappeared in the seventeenth century. A little farther westward in Holborn, Sir William Furnival built himself, in Henry the Fourth's time, a fine mansion, leased by his heirs to a Society of Lawyers, the site of which is still known as Furnival's Inn. Its magnificent Gothic hall was demolished in the reign of Charles I. A pretentious, but none the less effective, red-brick building now replaces the quaint Caroline-cum-Georgian Furnival's Inn, familiar to so many who even now are barely past their youth. Beyond this immense block of buildings, was the splendid town-house of the Bouchiers, also built in Henry the Fourth's time, and known, after the head of that ancient family was created Earl of Bath by Henry vii., as Bath House. Down the centre of the now famous thoroughfare of Holborn, flowed the sluggish Old Bourne, to join the Fleet near Newgate. It was a navigable, though rather insignificant, stream, from which the locality obtained its name. Holborn, however, really signifies not the old bourne, or brook, but the brook in the "hole" or valley. A hamlet of two or three houses, which stood here in the Conqueror's time, is mentioned in Doomsday Book as Holebourne. Some attempt was made to keep the streets of London clean and tidy, even as early as the year 1389, when a proclamation was issued by order of Parliament ordaining "that no person whatever should presume to lay any dung, guts, garbage, offals, or ordure in any street, ditch, etc., upon the penalty of £20, to be recovered by an Information in Chancery." It was also arranged that carts should call at people's houses, and carry off their refuse in barrels, to be used in the country as manure. Henry v. revived this excellent system, and paid some attention to the vile condition of the pavements. Holborn, however, was in a very miry state, and being unsafe for the passage of carriages, was "paved and amended," when it became, as it has ever since remained, a very popular highway. There were no houses on the spot where in our day Tottenham Court Road (in which, by the way, stood a ruined house said to have been a palace of King John) joins Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. Far afield was Tyburn-its name derived from the Ayebourne or T'ayebourne, a rivulet which rose near Hampstead, and made its way, with the waters of several tributary streamlets, by Lower Brook Street and the foot of Hay Hill (Aye Hill) through Half Moon Street, emptied itself into a large pond |