ALL HALLOWS, BARKING.--ST. OLAVE'S.--ST. CATHERINE CREE'S.--ST. ANDREW
UNDERSHAFT
At the end of Great Tower Street is the church of All Hallows, Barking,
anciently known as "Berkynge Church by the Tower." The edifice, which is
situated close to Mark Lane Station on the Metropolitan Railway, ranks as
the oldest parish church with a continuous history as such in the city of
London. One hundred and fifty years before the union of the seven kingdoms
under Egbert, over four hundred years before the Conqueror and the
building of the White Tower, a thousand years before the boy Milton
visited its historic site, the foundation of the church was laid. For six
hundred years a close connection existed between the court and this church
when the Tower was a royal residence.
Some traces of old Norman work remain, but the present building belongs to
the Perpendicular type, and assumed nearly its present shape about one
hundred years before Milton's age.
From its nearness to the Tower, the church became the burial-place of some
of its victims. Here was placed the headless body of Lord Thomas Grey,
uncle of Lady Jane, who was beheaded in 1554 for taking part in the
rebellion under Wyatt. The heart of Richard the Lion Heart was once placed
under its high altar. After his execution on Tower Hill, the body of
Archbishop Laud rested here some years, and was "accompanied to earth with
great multitudes of people, whom love or curiosity or remorse of
conscience had drawn together, and decently interred ... according to the
rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, in which it may be noted as
a remarkable thing, that being, whilst he lived, the greatest champion of
the Common Prayer Book ... he had the honour, being dead, to be buried in
the form therein provided, after it had been long disused and almost
reprobated in most of the churches of London."
Two hundred and fifty years later an Archbishop Laud Commemoration was
celebrated here, and where the scaffold stood on Tower Hill services were
held.
The chief interest of the church for American visitors may be the
baptismal register, in which is recorded the baptism, during Milton's
early manhood, of Sir William Penn's infant son, the apostle of peace, who
was destined to found a great state in the New World. The Great Fire of
1666 touched the church so closely that Pepys tells us the "dyall and part
of the porch was burnt." Its interior is beautifully preserved. Its old
brasses attract so many who desire to make rubbings that a snug sum for
church purposes has been raised by the small fees charged. The church
possesses the oldest indenture for the construction of an organ known in
England. Its date is 1519.
On the south side of Tower Street, at number 48, was formerly a public
house painted with the head of the Czar of Muscovy. Here Peter the Great,
when he was studying the dockyards and maritime establishments of England
under William III., used to resort with his attendants and smoke his pipe
and drink beer and brandy. Near by is Muscovy Court, a present reminder of
the ancient name.
A little farther north, on Hart Street, once stood the richly decorated
timber house, called "Whittington's Palace." According to doubtful
tradition this was where the famous Dick Whittington, with princely
magnanimity, burnt the royal bond for a debt of L60,000, when Henry V. and
his queen came to dine with him. "Never had king such a subject," Henry
is reported to have said, when Whittington replied to the hero of
Agincourt, "Surely, Sire, never had subject such a king." This palace,
with its whole front of diamond-paned windows, stood in Milton's time.
Near by, on Hart Street, is the church of St. Olave, which with All
Hallows, Barking, escaped the Great Fire, and stands as it stood in
Milton's life. The tourist must time his visit to it on a week day to the
noon hour, as, unlike All Hallows, Barking, it is not open all day.
The monastery of the Crutched Friars must have covered in ancient days a
large part of the parish of this church. Its dimensions are of the
smallest--it is only fifty-four feet long. Its name takes us back to the
times of the Danish settlement, for St. Olave is but the corruption of St.
Olaf, the Norwegian saint who was the martyred king of the Northmen. The
body of this saint rests in the great cathedral at Trondheim, Norway. His
history is closely connected with the immediate region. As a boy of twelve
he started on his career as viking; later he fought with Ethelred against
the usurping Danes in London. The latter held the bridge which connected
the walled town with low-lying Southwark across the Thames. The struggle
waxed desperate, when the bold Norwegian at a critical juncture fastened
cables to the bridge, and then ordered his little ships, which were
attached to them, to row hard down stream. The piles tottered, the bridge,
which swarmed with the Danes, fell, and those that were not drowned were
driven away. When William the Conqueror sailed up the Thames a half
century later, the stories of the intrepid Olaf, who had become Norway's
king and had died in battle, must have been fresh in mind.
Not only this church, but others in the city were erected in his name. The
present structure was probably built about 1450, and was repaired about
the time that Milton returned to London from Italy.
During the Reformation, in 1553, St. Olave's had "a pair of organes."
During the Civil War in 1644, an ordinance was passed that all organs in
churches "should be taken away and utterly defaced." It is very certain
that the music-loving Milton, who joyed to hear
"... the organ blow, to the full-voiced choir below"
must have mourned this stern decree. In consequence of this, most organ
builders for sixteen years were obliged to work as carpenters and joiners.
The famous diarist, Pepys, who attended St. Olave's, writes on June 17,
1660: "This day the organs did begin to play at Whitehall Chapel, where I
heard very good musique, the first time that ever I remember to have heard
the organs and singing men in surplices in my life." On April 20, 1667, he
records: "To Hackney Church, and found much difficulty to get pews. That
which I went chiefly to see was the young ladies of the schools, whereof
there is great store, very pretty, and also the organ, which is handsome,
and tunes the psalms and plays with the people, which is mighty pretty,
and makes me mighty earnest to have a pair at our church"--which meant St.
Olave's.
About the time of Pepys's writing, a peal of six remarkably sweet-toned
bells was placed in the tower. In the church are quaint brasses and
monuments, the most interesting of which is the tomb of Pepys. An elegant
monument of alabaster, with a bust of Pepys, taken from his portrait in
the National Gallery, was unveiled in 1884. It bears the dates: "b. 1632,
d. 1703." The monument is near the door where Pepys used to enter the
church from Seething Lane.
Pepys, like Milton, was educated at St. Paul's School. His fame rests
chiefly on his diary, which was written in cipher, and not deciphered and
published until 1825. On the unveiling of his monument, James Russell
Lowell, in his address, spoke of Pepys as "a type perhaps of what is now
called a Philistine. We have no word in English which is equivalent to
the French adjective 'bourgeois,' but at all events, Samuel Pepys was the
most perfect type that ever existed of the class of people whom this word
describes. He had all its merits, as well as many of its defects." With
all these defects, perhaps in spite of them, Lowell maintained, Pepys had
written one of the most delightful books that it was man's privilege to
read in the English language, or in any other. There was no parallel to
the character of Pepys in respect of naivete unless it were found in that
of Falstaff, and Pepys showed himself, too, "like Falstaff, on terms of
unbuttoned familiarity with himself.... Pepys's naivete was the
inoffensive vanity of a man who loved to see himself in the glass." It was
questionable, he said, whether Pepys could have had any sense of humour at
all, and yet permitted himself to be so delightful. The lightest part of
the diary was of value historically, for it enabled us to see the London
of two hundred years ago, and, what was more, to see it with the eager
eyes of Pepys. It was not Pepys the official, the clerk of the acts and
secretary of the Admiralty, who had brought that large gathering
together--it was Pepys the diarist.
Pepys's diary was begun in 1660, when he was in his twenty-seventh year.
Ten years later, when he feared blindness, he ceased writing it. He
bequeathed it in six volumes, written in cipher as above stated, with his
library of three thousand books, to his old college, Magdalen, at
Cambridge, and it is now its greatest treasure. Pepys was no Puritan. His
comments on the Calvinistic teaching of his pastor, Daniel Mills, are
characteristic. In 1666, he writes: "Up and to church, where Mr. Mills, a
lazy, simple sermon upon the Devil's having no right to anything in this
world;" and again he writes: "Mr. Mills made an unnecessary sermon on
original sin, neither understood by himself nor the people." He writes
that when he invited the reverend gentleman to dinner on a Sunday, he "had
a very good dinner and very merry."
Among the notable men buried near Pepys is William Turner, an early
Puritan, who was educated under Latimer and died in 1568. He wrote the
earliest scientific work by any Englishman on botany. His great object was
to learn the _materia medica_ of the ancients throughout the vegetable
kingdom. But he wrote against the Roman Antichrist as well. The title of
one book illustrates the orthography of his day: "The Hunting and Fynding
of the Romish Fox: which more than seven years hath been among the
Bysshoppes of England, after that the Kynges Hyghnes, Henry VIII. had
commanded hym to be driven out of hys Realme." Of Sir James Deane, a
merchant adventurer to India, China, and the Spice Islands, it is recorded
that he gave generous bequests, and directed L500 to be expended on his
funeral, a vast sum for those days, yet probably no more than was
customary for wealthy men.
Of Sir John Mennes, who is buried here, Pepys tells us that "he brought
many fine expressions of Chaucer which he doats on mightily," and naively
adds, "and without doubt he is a very fine poet." Droll, lively, garrulous
Pepys! Who would have dreamed that this boyish writer was in reality a
great military authority, and in a large measure responsible for the care
of England's navy?
As in All Hallows, Barking, and several old "city" churches, the visitor
will notice in St. Olave's the remarkable, wrought-iron "sword-stands,"
used in Elizabeth's reign and placed in the pews of distinguished persons.
The pulpit, with its elaborate carving, said to have been done by Grinling
Gibbons, is one that was removed from the "deconsecrated" church of St.
Benet.
St. Olave's had one of the churchyards in which the victims of the plague
were buried in great numbers, and of which Pepys writes: "It frightened
me indeed to go through the church, to see so many graves lie so high upon
the churchyard where people have been buried of the plague." The gruesome
skulls and crossbones, carved over its gateway, are a dismal reminder of
the horrors of that time. In the chapter on the "City of the Absent," in
his "Uncommercial Traveller," Dickens thus graphically describes his visit
to it: "One of my best beloved churchyards, I call the churchyard of Saint
Ghastly Grim; touching what men in general call it, I have no information.
It lies at the heart of the City, and the Blackwall Railway shrieks at it
daily. It is a small, small churchyard, with a ferocious strong spiked
iron gate, like a jail. This gate is ornamented with skulls and
cross-bones, larger than the life, wrought in stone; but it likewise came
into the mind of Saint Ghastly Grim that to stick iron spikes atop of the
stone skulls, as though they were impaled, would be a pleasant device.
Therefore the skulls grin aloft, horribly thrust through and through with
iron spears. Hence there is attraction of repulsion for me in Saint
Ghastly Grim, and having often contemplated it in the daylight and the
dark, I once felt drawn toward it in a thunder-storm at midnight. 'Why
not?' I said; 'I have been to the Colosseum by the light of the moon; is
it worse to go to see Saint Ghastly Grim by the light of the lightning?'
I repaired to the Saint in a hackney cab, and found the skulls most
effective, having the air of a public execution, and seeming, as the
lightning flashed, to wink and grin with the pain of the spikes."
In the chapter on "A Year's Impressions," in which Dickens depicts
repeated visits to the deserted churches of the London of the past, he,
with a deft touch, describes the commercial atmosphere which now
impregnates all of what poetry, history, and romance remain to-day.
"From Rood Lane unto Tower Street, and thereabouts, there was often a
subtle flavour of wine. In the churches about Mark Lane, for example,
there was a dry whiff of wheat, and I accidentally struck an airy sample
of barley out of an aged hassock in one of them. One church near Mincing
Lane smelt like a druggist's drawer. Behind the Monument the service had
the flavour of damaged oranges, which, a little farther down toward the
river, tempered into herrings and gradually toned into a cosmopolitan
blast of fish.... The dark vestries and registers into which I have
peeped, and the little hemmed-in churchyards that have echoed to my feet,
have left impressions on my memory, distinct and quaint. In all those
dusty registers that the worms are eating, there is not a line but made
some heart leap, or some tears flow, in their day. Still and dry now,
still and dry, and the old tree at the window, with no room for its
branches, has seen them all out. These churches remain like the tombs of
the old citizens who lie beneath them--monuments of another age. They are
worth a Sunday exploration, for they echo to the time when the City of
London really was London; when the Prentices and Trained Bands were of
mark in the state; when even the Lord Mayor himself was a reality."
In Milton's day, on the street of the Crutched Friars, named from the
ancient convent of Crossed Friars, was the row of almshouses built by Sir
John Milborne in 1535 in honour of God and the Virgin. In some way, the
relief of the Assumption of the Virgin at the entrance gate escaped
destruction by the Puritans, and remained with the almshouses to a late
period. To the American, to whom the word "almshouse" signifies the
English "workhouse,"--an institution of paupers where all live in
common,--little idea is conveyed of the comfortable, and usually quaint
and picturesque retreat which "almshouse" signifies to the English mind.
In many London suburbs one may see little rows of cottages within walled
gardens, where, in quiet and comfort and serenity, aged couples spend
their last days, in some ways the happiest of their lives, though it be in
an almshouse.
At 53 Fenchurch Street, in Milton's time, stood the Queen's Head Tavern,
where the Princess Elizabeth dined on pork and peas after her release from
the Tower in 1554. The modern building erected on the site bears a
commemorative statue of her.
Mincing Lane, in the vicinity, was named from houses which belonged to the
Minchuns or nuns of Saint Helen's. Near its entrance is the Hall of the
Clothworkers' Company, whose badge is a ram; within are gilt statues of
James I. and Charles I., which were saved from the Great Fire. Its garden
was once the churchyard of All Hallows, Staining, whose fine old tower,
which escaped the Fire, still stands as when Milton strolled past and
gazed on it. The church, which was demolished recently, was reputed to
have been the earliest stone church in the city. "Stane" is the Saxon word
for stone, and the word "Staining" indicates the fact mentioned above.
Passing north to Aldgate, Milton must have seen the great gate, which was
not destroyed until 1760. It was the chief outlet to the eastern counties
from the time of the Romans until its destruction.
In the dwelling over the gate, according to Loftie, the poet Geoffrey
Chaucer lived in 1374. This gate, however, was pulled down just before
Milton's birth, and rebuilt the year after he was born, in 1609. When he
saw it, a gilded statue of James I. adorned its eastern side, and on the
west were statues of Peace, Fortune, and Charity.
Aldgate to-day is the entrance into that sordid, dismal region, known as
Whitechapel, where within easy walking distance from the site of the
ancient gate is its chief attraction to all tourists. On Commercial
Street, standing in a group, are the little church of St. Jude, and close
beside it that Social Settlement, reared in memory of the gentle Oxford
scholar and philanthropist, Arnold Toynbee. This is one of the few
beautiful oases in a desert of squalor and commonplaceness, which the name
Whitechapel now signifies to most readers.
[Illustration: ST. CATHERINE CREE CHURCH IN 1736
The steeple dates from about 1505. The old church was pulled down in 1628,
and the present one finished in 1630. Cree Church is a corruption of
Christ-Church.
_From an old engraving._]
But for Milton's haunts, we need not wander farther east than Aldgate; for
though Whitechapel Street was thickly lined with houses for some distance
even in his day, little of interest remains. Turning back through
Leadenhall Street, one sees a little gray stone church, with a low tower
and round-arched windows, known as St. Catherine Cree's. This was rebuilt
in Milton's youth in 1629, and consecrated two years later by the
ill-fated Archbishop Laud. The ceremonies which he used on this occasion
savoured so much of Popery, however, that they were later brought
against him, and helped to accomplish his downfall. In an older church,
upon this site, the famous Hans Holbein, to whom we are indebted for his
portraits of Henry VIII., Sir Thomas More, and other famous Englishmen,
was buried in 1554, after his death by the plague. Within the church may
be seen the effigy in armour of a man who played an important part in
England when Milton's father was a boy. To-day, only the historian recalls
the name of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, whose daughter married Walter
Raleigh, who was chamberlain of the exchequer, ambassador, and chief
butler of England. The stories of his fruitless embassy to Mary Queen of
Scots to prevent her marriage with Darnley, and the records of his trial,
imprisonment, and death of a broken heart must have been as familiar to
the youth of Milton's time as the life of Disraeli or Joseph Chamberlain
is to Cambridge youth to-day.
Above the gateway, in the churchyard, is a ghastly memorial to the builder
of it in the form of a shrouded skeleton on a mattress. In Shakespeare's
time, within this churchyard, which is now much smaller than it was then,
and is concealed by modern buildings, scaffolds were erected on all sides,
and religious plays were performed on Sundays.
Every year, on October 16th, the "lion sermon" is preached within the
church in memory of an ancient worthy, who in 1648 gave it the sum of
L200, in remembrance of his delivery from a lion's paws in Arabia. As at
St. Olave's, the noon hour, when daily service is performed for the
benefit of the one or two worshippers who may stray in, is the time to
visit this historic church.
The first edition of "Paradise Lost" bears the imprint: "Printed, and are
to be sold by Peter Parker, under Creed Church near Aldgate, 1667." "Creed
Church" was this same Catherine Cree's.
A little north of Leadenhall, at the entrance to the ancient street called
St. Mary Axe, stands the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, another of the
churches which remain, of those that Milton saw within the city walls. Its
name recalls the ancient English custom of the May-day dance. A lofty
May-pole, higher than the tower of the church, once stood beside it, and
was pulled down on "Evil May Day," in the reign of Henry VIII., about the
time the church was built, 1520-32. It is a gray stone edifice, well
preserved, and well worth a visit if for no other end than to see the tomb
of the learned and devoted chronicler, Stow--a name dear to every student
of ancient London and of English history. Of his "Survey," Loftie says:
"It was a wonder even in the age which produced Shakespeare."
Stow was bred a tailor, but in middle life retired on a modest competence,
and for forty years almost immediately preceding Milton's birth had with
unparalleled industry studied the history of his city and native land. His
collection for the Chronicles of England, now in the British Museum, fills
sixty quarto volumes. Every street of London and prominent building, every
church, and almost every monument and inscription, are faithfully recorded
in his volumes on London and Westminster. To him and to his editor,
Strype, who has continued his work until a later period, modern London,
and all who love her and her long history, owe an incalculable debt of
gratitude.
But so little was his invaluable service recognised in his day that his
great collection of books aroused suspicion in some quarters, and his
outspoken words on public questions stirred up the jealous and malevolent,
as his biographer shows. He was reduced to poverty in his old age, for he
had spent his substance in his great enterprise. Like a genuine historian,
he sought original sources, and "made use of his own legs (for he could
never ride), travelling on foot to many cathedral churches and other
places where ancient records and charters were; and with his own eyes to
read them." He studied the records in the Tower, and was expert in
deciphering old wills and registers and muniments belonging to
monasteries. He seems to have been somewhat conservative; perhaps, as his
biographer suggests, "being a lover of antiquity and of the old Religious
Buildings and monuments, he was the more prejudiced against the Reformed
Religion, because of the havoc and destruction those that pretended to it
made of them in those days." One instance of Protestant fanaticism that
tended to make him more opposed to zeal without knowledge was that a
curate of St. Paul's, which was his parish, inveighed "fervently against a
long Maypole called a Shaft in the next Parish to his, named St. Andrew
Undershaft, and calling it an Idol; which so stirred up the devotion of
many hearers that many of them in the afternoon went, and with violence
pulled it down from the place where it hung upon hooks; and then sawed it
into divers pieces, each householder taking his piece as much as hung over
his door or stall, and afterward burnt it."
Sir Walter Besant, in a delightful chapter in his "London," describes an
imaginary visit to the learned man, and a stroll with him through the town
five years before Milton opened his eyes in Bread Street: "I found the
venerable antiquary in his lodging. He lived--it was the year before he
died--with his old wife in a house over against the Church of St. Andrew
Undershaft. The house itself was modest, containing two rooms on the
ground floor, and one large room, or solar, as it would have been called
in olden time, above. There was a garden at the back, and behind the
garden stood the ruins of St. Helen's Nunnery, with the grounds and
gardens of that once famous house, which had passed into the possession of
the Leathersellers' Company.... I passed within, and mounting a steep,
narrow stair, found myself in the library and in the presence of John Stow
himself. The place was a long room, lofty in the middle, but with sloping
sides. It was lit by two dormer windows; neither carpet nor arras nor
hangings of any kind adorned the room, which was filled so that it was
difficult to turn about in it, with books, papers, parchments, and rolls.
They lay in piles on the floor, they stood in lines and columns against
the walls; they were heaped upon the table. I observed too that they were
not such books as may be seen in a great man's library, bound after the
Italian fashion, with costly leather, gilt letters, golden clasps, and
silken strings. Not so; these books were all folios for the most part;
their backs were broken; the leaves, where any lay open, were discoloured,
many of them were in the Gothic black letter. On the table were paper,
pens, and ink, and in the straight-backed armchair sat the old man
himself, pen in hand, laboriously bending over a huge tome. He wore a
black silk cap; his long white hair fell down upon his shoulders. The
casements of the window stood open, and the summer sunshine poured warm
and bright upon the scholar's head."
In an age of many elaborate and tasteless monuments, Stow's is singularly
interesting and tasteful. An almost life-size figure of him is seated,
dressed in a long robe, before a table on which rests a book in which he
is writing. The whole is placed within a niche in the tomb; upon the
sculptured sides, the artist has carved, among other devices, a beggar's
wallet, indicative of Stow's poverty, for which James I. in his old age
issued him letters patent permitting him to solicit aid. These letters
grant "to our loving subject, John Stow, who hath to his own great charge,
and with neglect to his ordinary means of maintenance, for the general
good of Posteritie, as well as the present age, compiled and published
diverse necessary books and chronicles, and therefore we in recompense of
his painful labours, and for the encouragement of the like ... authorise
him and his deputies to collect among our loving subjects their
contributions and kind gratuities." Thus was the man who has chiefly
contributed to our knowledge of ancient London allowed in his extreme
old age to live in unappreciation and neglect.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. ANDREW UNDERSHAFT IN 1737
_From an old engraving._]
The visitor cannot but query, as he surveys the handsome monument erected
to him by his wife, how this was paid for, but there are many explanations
that suggest themselves.
Many a time may Milton as a boy and man have stood before this tomb, and
viewed the fine timber roof and the late Perpendicular windows, which
to-day remain just as he saw them. If the modern visitor would study the
fashions of his day, he can do no better than inspect such monuments as
the costly Hammersley erected here. The date thereon is 1636, when Milton
was a young man of twenty-eight. The absence in the life-size kneeling
figure of the huge stiff crinoline on the tombs of a little earlier date
shows that the fashions changed as sharply as in the latter half of the
nineteenth century. The date of the handsome organ is 1695.