In the reigns of James I. and Charles I. a singular custom prevailed of
the idle and dissolute part of the community assembling in the naves or
other unemployed parts of large churches. The nave of St. Paul’s
cathedral bore the name of Paul’s Walk; and so little was the sanctity
of the place regarded, that if the description by an old author[517] is
not exaggerated, the Royal Exchange at four o’clock does not present a
greater scene of confusion. I carry the comparison no farther; the
characters assembled in the church appear to have been very different to
those composing the respectable assembly alluded to. The author referred
to thus describes the place: “The noyse in it is like that of bees. It
is the generall mint of all famous lies, which are here like the legends
popery first coyn’d and stampt in the church. All inventions are empty’d
here and not a few pockets.” “The visitants are all men without
exceptions; but the principal inhabitants and possessors are stale
knights, and captaines out of service; men of long rapiers and
breeches.”
From the following passage in Hudibras[518] I should judge that the
circular church in the Temple was the resort of characters of an equally
bad description:
“Retain all sorts of witnesses,
That ply i’ th’ Temples, under trees,
Or walk the _round_, with knights o’ th’ posts,
About the cross-legg’d knights, their hosts;
Or wait for customers between
The pillar-rows in Lincoln’s Inn.”
The cross-legged knights, it is almost needless to add, are the effigies
of the mailed warriors, which still remain in fine preservation. The
“pillar-rows in Lincoln’s Inn,” I apprehend, refer to the crypt, or open
vault, beneath Inigo Jones’s chapel in Lincoln’s Inn, originally
designed for an ambulatory.[519] It is singular to reflect on the entire
change in the public manners within two centuries. If coeval authorities
did not exist to prove the fact, who would believe in these days, that,
in a civilized country, men were to be found within the very seats of
law ready to perjure themselves for hire? or that juries and judges did
not treat the practice and the encouraging of it with a prompt and just
severity?