As We Are and As We May Be - Walter Besant (most recommended books txt) 📗

by the Charity Commission--ancient Bibles and Prayer-books, muniment chests, embroidered palls, old registers with signatures historical--all these things are found in the vestry of the City church.

Then there are the churchyards. We are familiar with the little oblong area open to the street, surrounded by tall warehouses, one tomb left in the middle, and three headstones ranged against the wall, patches of green mould to represent grass, and a litter of scraps of paper and orange-peel. This is fondly believed to be the churchyard of some old church burned down or rebuilt. There are dozens of these in the City; it is sometimes difficult to find out the name of the church to which they once belonged. Every time a building is erected adjacent to them they become smaller, and when they happened to lie behind the houses they were shut in and forgotten, covered over and built upon when nobody was looking, and so their very memory perished.

It is curious to look for them. For instance, there is a certain great burying ground laid down in Strype's map of the year 1720. It is there represented as so large that to cover it up would be a big thing. No single man would dare to appropriate all at once so huge a slice of land. I went, therefore, in search of this particular churchyard, and I found a very curious thing. On one side of the ground stands a great printing office. As the gate was open I walked in. At the back of the printing office is a flagged court or yard. In the court the boys--it was the dinner hour--were leaping and running. Not one of them knows now that he is running and jumping over the bones of his ancestors. It is clean forgotten that here was a great churchyard. Another great burying ground long since built over lay at the back of Botolph's Lane in Thames Street. That is built over and forgotten. There is another where lies the dust of the marvellous boy Chatterton. I am due that of the thousands who every day seek this spot not one can tell or remember that it was once a burying ground. On this spot the paupers of the parish of St. Andrew's, Holborn, were buried--Chatterton, that poor young pauper! with them. And it is now a market, Farringdon Market--close to Farringdon Street--opposite the site of the Old Fleet Prison whence came so many of the bodies which now lie beneath these flags.

Or, a pilgrim may consider the City with special reference to the great Houses which formerly stood within its walls. There were palaces in the City--King Athelstan had one; King Richard II. lived for a time in the City; Richard III. lived here; Henry V. had a house here. Of the great nobles, the Beaumonts, Scropes, Arundells, Bigods all had houses. The names of Worcester House, Buckingham House, Hereford House, suggest the great Lords who formerly lived here. And the names of Crosby Hall, Basinghall, Gresham House, College Hill, recall the merchants who built themselves palaces and entertained kings.

Again, there are the City Companies and their Halls. Very few visitors ever make the round of the Halls: yet they are most curious, and contain treasures great and various. It is not always easy to see these treasures, but the conscientious pilgrim, who, by the way, must not seek entrance into these Halls on the Sunday morning, will persevere until he has managed to see them all.

As for the sights of the City--the things which Baedeker enumerates, and which foreign and country visitors run to see--the Tower, the Monument, the Guildhall, the Mansion House, the Royal Exchange, the Mint, St. Paul's, and the rest, I say nothing, because the pilgrim does not waste his Sunday morning over things to be seen as well on any other day. But there are some things to be seen every day which are best approached on Sunday, by reason of the peace which prevails and a certain solemnity in the air. I would, for instance, choose to visit the Charter House on a Sunday morning, I would sit with the Pensioners in their quiet chapel, and I would stroll about the peaceful courts of that holy place, venerable not only for its history but for the broken and ruined lives--often ruined only in purse, but rich in honour and in noble record--of the fifty bedesmen or pensioners who rest there in the evening of their days. And quite apart from its associations, I know no more beautiful place in the City or anywhere else than the ancient Charter House.

Again, we may wander in the City and remember the great men who have made certain streets for ever famous. Thus, to stand in Bread Street is to think of Milton. Here he was born, here he was baptized, here for a time he lived. Or we may visit Blackfriars and remember the Elizabethan dramatists. Here Shakespeare had a house--it was among the ruins of old Blackfriars Abbey, part of the foundations of which were found when some years ago they made an extension of the Times' printing office. Broad Street recalls the memory of Gresham, while that of Whittington lingers along Thames Street and College Hill and clings to St. Michael's Church. In that parish he lived and died. Here he founded the College of the Holy Spirit which still exists in the Highgate Almshouses; on its site the boys of Mercers School now study and play. His tomb was burned in the Great Fire and his ashes scattered, but the very streets preserve his name. Boas Alley, of which there are two, records the fact that Whittington brought a conduit or Boss of fresh water to this spot. It was he who paved Guildhall, he who built a hall for the Grey Friars, now the Blue Coat School, he who rebuilt Newgate; of all the merchants who have adorned the great City not one whose memory is so widely spread and whose example has so long survived his death. When country boys think of the City of London they still think of Whittington.

Perhaps you are afraid that the preparation, the reading, for such a walk about the City would be dull. I have never found it so. I do not think that anyone who has the least love for, or knowledge of, old things would find such reading dull. There are, to be sure, some unhappy creatures who love nothing but what is new, and esteem everything for what it will fetch. These are the people who are always trying to pull down the City churches. They are at this very moment pulling down another, the poor old church of St. Mary Magdalen. The tower is down, the roof is off the windows are all broken, in a week or two the church will be razed to the ground, and in a year or two its very memory will have perished. Why, we vainly ask, do they pull it down? What harm has the old church done? To be sure its congregation numbered less than a dozen, but then we must not estimate an old church by a modern congregation. There has been a church here from time immemorial. It is mentioned in the year 1120. It was, therefore, certainly a Saxon church. Edward the Confessor probably worshipped here--perhaps King Alfred himself. One of its Rectors was John Carpenter, executor of Whittington, and founder of the City of London School; another was Barham, author of the 'Ingoldsby Legends.' The loss of St. Mary Magdalen is one more link with the past absolutely destroyed, never to be replaced. These destroyers, for instance, are the kind of people who pulled down Sion College. As often as I pass the spot where that place once stood I mourn and lament its loss more and more. It was the college of the City clergy, they were its guardians, it was their library, it contained their reading hall; formerly it held their garden, and it had their almshouses. There was hardly any place in the City more peaceful or more beautiful than the long narrow room which held their library. It was a very ancient site--formerly the site of Elsing's Hospital, the oldest hospital in the whole City. Everything about it was venerable, and yet the City clergy themselves--its official guardians--sold it for what it would fetch, and stuck up the horrid thing on the embankment which they call Sion College. There they still use the old seal and arms of the college. But there is no more a Sion College--that is gone. You cannot replace it. You might as well tear down King's College Chapel at Cambridge and call Dr. Parker's City Temple by that honoured and ancient name. Well, for such people as the majority of the City clergy who can do such things, there can be no voice or utterance at all from ancient stones, the past can have no lessons, no teachings for them, there can be no message to them from the dead who should still live for them in memory and association. For them the ancient City and its citizens are dumb.

Now that we know what to expect and what to look for, let us take together a Sunday morning ramble in a certain part of the City. We will go on a morning in early summer, when the leaves of those trees which still stand in the old City churchyards are bright with their first tender green, and when the river, as we catch glimpses of it, shows a broad surface of dancing waves across to the stairs and barges of old Southwark. We will take this walk at the quietest hour in the whole week, between eleven and twelve. All the churches are open for service. We will look in noiselessly, but, indeed, we shall find no congregations to disturb, only, literally, two or three gathered together.

I will take you to the very heart of the City. Perhaps you have thought that the heart of the City is that open triangular space faced by the Royal Exchange, and flanked by the Bank of England and the Mansion House. We have taught ourselves to think this, in ignorance of the City history. But a hundred and fifty years ago there was no Mansion House, three hundred years ago there was no Royal Exchange, and the Bank of England itself is but a mushroom building of the day before yesterday.

In the long life of London--it covers two thousand years--the chief seat of its trade, the chief artery of its circulation, has been Thames Street. Along here for seventeen hundred years were carried on the chief events in the drama which we call the History of London. Its past origin, its growth and expansion, are indicated along this line. Here the City merchants of old--Whittingtons, Fitzwarrens, Sevenokes, Greshams--thronged to do their business. To these wharves came the vessels laden from Antwerp, Hamburg, Riga, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Venice, Genoa, and far-off Smyrna and the Levant. This line stretches across the whole breadth of the City. It indicates the former extent of the City, what was behind it originally was the mass of houses built to accommodate those who could no longer find room on the riverside. It is now a narrow, dark, and dirty street; its south side is covered with quays and wharves; narrow lanes lead to ancient river stairs; its north side is lined with warehouses, the streets which run out of it are also dark and narrow lanes with offices on either side. It is no longer one of the great arteries of the City. Those who come here use it not for a thoroughfare but for a place of business. When their business is done they go away; the churches, of which there were once so many,