The Wards of Old London: Farringdon Within - Prisons, Friaries & Book-Stalls

By Mark Patton

In an earlier blog-post, I explored the City of London through the eyes of the 16th Century chronicler, John Stow. Stow lived through a period of tremendous change, but there is little in today's London that would be familiar to him apart from the street-pattern (and street names) and the wards, which still function as administrative units. Although medieval and modern London sit within the old Roman walls, the regular grid-pattern of the Roman streets was lost entirely as the medieval city developed piecemeal from the time of Alfred the Great.

1870 map of London wards.
Image: Doc77can (licensed under CCA).

Farringdon Within is the first intra-mural ward encountered by a visitor arriving from the west. Stow tells us that the whole district of Farringdon (the ward of Farringdon Without is much larger than Farringdon Within) was named after one William Farringdon, a goldsmith, who served as one of the Sheriffs of London in 1281. William and his son, Nicholas, also a goldsmith, between them represented the ward as Aldermen for a period of 82 years.

Farringdon Within encompasses two of the city's Medieval gates, Ludgate in the South, and Newgate in the north, neither of which survives today, but both of which served as prisons throughout the middle ages.

Newgate from the west in the 16th Century, as
imagined by the 19th Century artist, H.W. Brewer.
The gate itself is at bottom right, with the church at
the centre being that of the Franciscan friary.
The road following the right-hand edge is Newgate Street.

Beyond the walls on the western side flow the waters of the River Fleet, one of the larger tributaries of the Thames, now underground, but it was visible (and, perhaps more noticeably, smellable) well into the 19th Century. Alexander Pope describes it in his Dunciad of 1728:

To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams

Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames,

The king of dykes! Than whom no sluice of mud

With deeper sable blots the silver flood.

The mouth of the River Fleet in 1750
by Samuel Scott.

The Fleet Ditch in 1844.

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence for a Roman tidal mill on an island in the mouth of the Fleet, and also several shipwrecks: a Roman cargo ship; two 16th Century ships that are believed to have collided with one another; and a 17th Century freighter that seems to have been carrying stone for Sir Christopher Wren's rebuilding of Saint Paul's Cathedral.

Two of London's monastic houses were situated within the ward: the Franciscan Greyfriars (shown above), just inside Newgate, and the Dominican Blackfriars, just inside Ludgate. Greyfriars was an important centre of Medieval learning, with a library to rival that of Oxford University, but it lay at the centre of "St Nicholas's Shambles," a butchers' quarter whose streets must have been awash with blood and offal. Our visitor from the west, long before he or she entered the city, would probably have noticed a flock of scavenging black kites (a species almost never seen in Britain today) circling above the meat market, much as they can be seen above market towns in India to this day.

Black kites circling around the market of Kolkata, India.
Photo: J.M. Garg (licensed under GNU).

Almost nothing remains of either monastery today. Following Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, a hospital was established on the site of Greyfriars, and the Apothecaries Company were allowed to establish their hall on the site of the Blackfriars gatehouse.

The Apothecaries Hall,
rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666.
Photo: R. Sones (licensed under CCA).

Walking up Ludgate Hill from Blackfriars towards Saint Paul's, one has a clear sense of the underlying topography (rather unusually, within the city). To the south of Ludgate are a series of back-streets (Pilgrim Street, Cobbs Court, Carter Lane), in which the spirit of Restoration London can be experienced. Near here stood the Blackfriars Playhouse (destroyed, of course, in the fire), where the plays of Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson and John Fletcher were first performed, with Charles I and Henrietta Maria sometimes joining the audience. The congregation of the neighbouring church of Saint Ann's Blackfriars was, by this stage, staunchly Puritan and objected strongly to the presence of the theatre, which finally closed in 1642.

Playhouse Yard.
Photo: Basher Eyre (licensed under CCA).

In Stow's time, the ward of Farringdon Within extended as far east as Saint Paul's Cathedral, encompassing the cathedral school and part of the churchyard, where stationers and booksellers set out their stalls, and around which William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe would have browsed for the newly printed editions of Virgil, Ovid and Plutarch that would inspire their own works.

Old Saint Paul's Cathedral in 1560, as imagined in 1916.

Beyond the cathedral, at the point where Newgate Street becomes Cheapside, stood the Great Cross of Cheap, marking one of the resting spots of the funeral cortege of Queen Eleanor of Castile, as it moved towards Westminster Abbey in November of 1290. This prominent landmark was destroyed by the Puritans in 1643 (as was Charing Cross - London's other Eleanor Cross - the modern version of which is a Victorian recreation).

The demolition of Cheapside Cross,
as imagined in 1873, British Library.

In today's London of high finance and global retail franchises, a city in which church-bells struggle to be heard above the constant rumble of traffic, it can be difficult to imagine the density of people and animals in the London that Charles Dickens, let alone John Stow, took for granted. Many businesses, even highly significant ones, such as the book-stalls which, in the 16th Century, stocked the first English language translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, operated from just a few square feet of ground, rented by the day.

This is an Editors' Choice archive post, originally published on 2 November 2015

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Mark Patton has blogged regularly on aspects of history and historical fiction at http://mark-patton.blogspot.co.uk. His novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is currently working on a London-based trilogy, "The Cheapside Tales."

 

John Price: The Executioner Executed

By Catherine Curzon

 “The execution of John Price, the late Hangman, in Bunhill-Fields, is put off till the latter End of this Week.”
Post Boy (London, England) 20th May 1718

This simple line, glimpsed in the pages of the Post Boy, caught my attention as I browsed through the Burney Collection in an idle moment. The mention of an executioner on the scaffold sparked my imagination as I wondered what could possibly have led to such a reversal of fortune as John Price, once the hangman, found himself on the wrong end of the noose. This tale is one of violent death and swift Georgian justice, as the executioner became the executed!

As a villain, John Price seems torn straight from the pages of sensationalist literature. Born in 1677 in St Martin’s in the Fields, following the death of his soldier father in Tangier, the family found itself plunged into poverty. Thanks to their situation, there was no question that Price might undertake any education and instead he began on the lowest rung of the rag selling trade, supplementing his income with any number of petty crimes. Of course,  this was no job for boy with a wanderlust and ambition and eventually the young man went into the navy, where he remained for the better part of twenty years.

Newgate

Upon his return to England, Price lived at first from the proceeds of petty crime, existing as a pickpocket on the streets of the capital and drinking his way into regular oblivion. He was in and out of trouble yet managed, for the most part, to avoid anything too serious, yet things were hardly going well. However, Price's years at sea had left him with a talent for knots and this was to come in very useful during his search for an honest wage. The gallows at Bunhill Fields in London needed a hangman and the former seaman was the ideal candidate for the role, which he assumed in 1713 at the age of thirty six. For approximately three years, it seemed, Price's life might be some way to being on track yet his weaknesses for drink and gambling were to prove ruinous.

There was nothing that Price liked more than to spend his wages in the alehouse and the more he drank, the more he gambled until, as sure as night follows day, his debts overwhelmed him. Thrown into Marshalsea, Price languished for two long years yet he would not be cowed and, after two years, he made good his escape by smashing a hole through the wall of the prison itself!

On 13th March 1718, Price found himself in Moorfields where Elizabeth White, a woman who sold baked goods and gingerbread on the street, was making her way home after a day of work. At ten o’clock that evening she had been out of the house for twelve hours and was, no doubt, ready for her bed before another long day of toil. Instead, Price accosted Elizabeth in the street and attempted to rape her. She resisted with a fierce might yet Price beat her mercilessly, leaving Elizabeth with broken bones, blinded in one eye and with a catalogue of horrific injuries.

The sound of the assault alerted Alexander Dufey, a passerby, to the crime and he found Price standing over Elizabeth’s body. At first Price claimed that she was simply drunk yet Dufey could see despite the night that she was seriously injured and half naked. The poor woman was rendered unable to speak by her injuries and could only groan in agony, though her assailant maintained that she was uninjured and drunk. Dufey's cry for help brought other witnesses running and Price was detained and taken into custody. In a sad twist, Elizabeth’s own son, a watchman, was at the watch house that night. He had gone back to the home he shared with his mother and found it locked up so returned to work, little guessing that he would find his own mother’s murderer there under arrest.

Thrown into Newgate, Price continued to maintain his innocence and, after lingering on for four agonising days, Elizabeth died without regaining consciousness. On trial at the Old Bailey, Price claimed that he had done nothing but find the woman in the street and was, in fact, attempting to help her as he believed she was drunk. The jury, however, disagreed, and John Price was sentenced to hang.

Taken to Newgate to await his death, Price turned to drink once more as he had throughout his life. He passed the days from court to gallows in a fog of insensibility, maintaining right until the day of his death that he was an innocent man. However, as he was prepared for his journey to the scaffold where he had once worked, Price confessed. Even now he could not bring himself to take full responsibility and pleaded that he had been drunk and was not in control of his own actions.

On 31st May 1718 John Price was hung before a crowd and told them, as the hood was placed over his head, that they should take a lesson from what had become of him. In his final moments he asked those who had gathered, perhaps optimistically, that they pray for his sorry soul.

References

Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 22 February 2015), April 1718, trial of John Price, the quondam Hangman (t17180423-24). Post Boy (London, England) 20th May 1718
Cawthorne, Nigel, Public Executions: From Ancient Rome to the Present Day, Arcturus Publishing (2006)
Nelson, John, The History and Antiquities of the Parish of Islington, in the County of Middlesex, T Lester (1829)
Wade, Stephen, Britain's Most Notorious Hangmen, Wharncliffe Books (2009)
Webb, Simon, Execution: A History of Capital Punishment in Britain, The History Press (2011) 

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Glorious Georgian ginbag, gossip and gadabout Catherine Curzon, aka Madame Gilflurt, is the author of A Covent Garden Gilflurt’s Guide to Life. When not setting quill to paper, she can usually be found gadding about the tea shops and gaming rooms of the capital or hosting intimate gatherings at her tottering abode. In addition to her blog and Facebook, Madame G is also quite the charmer on Twitter. Her first book, Life in the Georgian Court, is available now, and she is also working on An Evening with Jane Austen, starring Adrian Lukis and Caroline Langrishe.