He was accused by his enemies of holding that there was no such thing as free will; that all sin was inevitable; and that God could not have prevented Adam's sin, nor have pardoned it without the satisfaction of Christ.[614]
Fuller says of him: "Stage-poets have themselves been very bold with, and others very merry at, the memory of Sir John Oldcastle (Lord Cobham), whom they have fancied a boon companion or jovial roysterer, and yet a coward to boot, contrary to the credit of the chronicles, owning him to be a martial man of merit. Sir John Falstaff hath derided the memory of Sir John Oldcastle, and of late is substituted buffoon in his place; but it matters us little what petulant priests or what malicious poets have written against him."
The gallows had been removed from the Elms at Smithfield in 1413, the first year of Henry V.; but Tyburn was a place of execution as early as 1388.[615] The St. Giles's gallows was set up at the north corner of the hospital wall, between the termination of High Street and Crown Street, opposite to where the Pound stood.
The manor of St. Giles was anciently divided from Bloomsbury by a great fosse called Blemund's Ditch. The Doomsday Book contains no mention of this district, nor indeed of London at all, except of ten acres of land nigh Bishopsgate, belonging to St. Paul's, and a vineyard in Holborn, belonging to the Crown. This yard is supposed to have stood on the site of the Vine Tavern (now destroyed), a little to the east of Kingsgate Street.[616]
Blemund's Ditch was a line of defence running nearly parallel with the north side of Holborn, and connecting itself to the east with the Fleet brook. It was probably of British origin.[617] On the north-west of London, in the Roman times, there were marshes and forests, and even as late as Elizabeth, Marylebone and St. John's Wood were almost all chase.
The manor was crown property in the Norman times, for Matilda, daughter of Malcolm king of Scotland and the queen of Henry I., built a leper hospital there, and dedicated it to St. Giles. The same good woman erected a hospital at Cripplegate, and another at St. Katharine's, near the Tower, and founded a priory within Aldgate. The hospital of St. Giles sheltered forty lepers, one clerk, a messenger, the master, and several matrons; the queen gave 60s. a year to each leper. The inmates of lazar hospitals were in the habit of begging in the market-places.
The patron saint, St. Giles, was an Athenian of the seventh century, who lived as a hermit in a forest near Nismes. One day some hunters, pursuing a hind that he had tamed, struck the Greek with an arrow as he protected it, but the good man still went on praying, and refused all recompense for the injury. The French king in vain attempted to entice the saint from his cell, which in time, however, grew first into a monastery, and then into a town.[618]
This hospital was built on the site of the old parish church, and it occupied eight acres. It stood a little to the west of the present church, where Lloyd's Court stands or stood; and its gardens reached between High Street and Hog Lane, now Crown Street, to the Pound, which used to stand nearly opposite to the west end of Meux's Brewhouse. It was surrounded by a triangular wall, running in a line with Crown Street to somewhere near the Cock and Pye Fields (afterwards the Seven Dials), in a line with Monmouth Street, and thence east and west up High Street, joining near the Pound.
Unwholesome diet and the absence of linen seem to have encouraged leprosy, which was probably a disease of Eastern origin. In 1179 the Lateran Council decreed that lepers should keep apart, and have churches and churchyards of their own. It was therefore natural to build hospitals for lepers outside large towns. King Henry II., for the health of the souls of his grandfather and grandmother, granted the poor lepers a second 60s. each to be paid yearly at the feast of St. Michael, and 30s. more out of his Surrey rents to buy them lights. He also confirmed to them the grant of a church at Feltham, near Hounslow. In Henry III.'s reign, Pope Alexander IV. issued a bull to confirm these privileges. Edward I. granted the hospital two charters in 1300 and 1303; and in Edward II.'s reign so many estates were granted to it that it became very rich. Edward III. made St. Giles a cell of Burton St. Lazar in Leicestershire. This annexation led to quarrels, and to armed resistance against the visitations of Robert Archbishop of Canterbury. In this reign the great plague broke out, and the king commanded the wards of the city to issue proclamations and remove all lepers. It is strange that St. Giles's should have been the resort of pariahs from the very beginning.
Burton St. Lazar (a manor sold in 1828 for 30,000) is still celebrated for its cheeses. It remained a flourishing hospital from the reign of Stephen till Henry VIII. suppressed it. St. Giles's sank in importance after this absorption, and finally fell in 1537 with its larger brother.
By a deed of exchange the greedy king obtained forty-eight acres of land, some marshes, and two inns. Six years after the king gave St. Giles's to John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, High Admiral of England, who fitted up the principal part of the hospital for his own residence. Two years after Lord Lisle sold the manor to Wymond Carew, Esq. The mansion was situated westward of the church and facing it. It was afterwards occupied by the celebrated Alice, Duchess of Dudley, who died there in the reign of Charles II., aged ninety. This house was subsequently the residence of Lord Wharton. It divided Lloyd's Court from Denmark Street.
The master's house, "The White House," stood on the site of Dudley Court, and was given by the duchess to the parish as a rectory-house. The wall which surrounded the hospital gardens and orchards was not entirely removed till 1639.
Early in the fourteenth century the parish of St. Giles, including the hospital inmates, numbered only one hundred inhabitants. In King John's reign it was laid out in garden plots and cottages. In Henry III.'s reign it was a scattered country village, with a few shops and a stone cross, where the High Street now is. As far back as 1225 a blacksmith's shop stood at the north-west end of Drury Lane, and remained there till its removal in 1575.
In Queen Elizabeth's reign the Holborn houses did not run farther than Red Lion Street; the road was then open as far as the present Hart Street, where a garden wall commenced near Broad Street, St. Giles's, and the end of Drury Lane, where a cluster of houses on the right formed the chief part of the village, the rest being scattered houses. The hospital precincts were at this time surrounded by trees. Beyond this, north and south, all was country; and avenues of trees marked out the Oxford and other roads. There was no house from Broad Street, St. Giles's, to Drury House at the top of Wych Street.[619]
The lower part of Holborn was paved in the reign of Henry VI., in 1417; and in 1542 (33d Henry VIII.) it was completed as far as St. Giles's, being very full of pits and sloughs, and perilous and noisome to all on foot or horseback. The first increase of buildings in this district was on the north side of Broad Street. Three edicts of 1582, 1593, and 1602 evince the alarm of Government at the increase of inhabitants and prohibit further building under severe penalties. The first proclamation, dated from Nonsuch Palace, in Surrey, assigns the reason of these prohibitions:--1. The difficulty of governing more people without new officers and fresh jurisdictions. 2. The difficulty of supplying them with food and fuel at reasonable rates. 3. The danger of plague and the injury to agriculture. Regulations were also issued to prevent the further resort of country people to town, and the lord mayor took oaths to enforce these proclamations. But London burst through these foolish and petty restraints as Samson burst the green withs. In 1580 the resident foreigners in the capital had increased from 3762 to 6462 persons, the majority being Dutch who had fled from the Spaniards, and Huguenots who had escaped from France after the massacre of St. Bartholomew. St. Giles's grew, especially to the east and west, round the hospital. The girdle wall was mostly demolished soon after 1595. Holborn, stretching westward, with its fair houses, lodgings for gentlemen, and inns for travellers,[620] had nearly reached it. In Aggas's map, cattle graze amid intersecting footpaths, where Great Queen Street now is. There were then only two or three houses in Covent Garden, but in 1606 the east side of Drury Lane was built; in the assessment of 1623 upwards of twenty courtyards and alleys are mentioned; and 100 houses were added on the north side of St. Giles's Street, 136 in Bloomsbury, 56 on the west side of Drury Lane, and 71 on the south side of Holborn.[621] The south and east sides of the hospital site had been the slowest in their growth. After the Great Fire, these still remained gardens, but the north side, nearer Oxford Road, was already occupied. The first inhabitants of importance were Mr. Abraham Speckart and Mr. Breads, in the reigns of James I. and Charles I., and afterwards Sir William Stiddolph. New Compton Street was originally called Stiddolph Street, but afterwards changed its name when Charles II. gave the adjoining marsh-land to Mr. Francis Compton, who built on the old hospital land a continuation of Old Compton Street. Monmouth Street, probably named after the foolish and unfortunate duke, was also built in this reign.
In 1694, in the reign of William III., a Mr. Neale, a lottery promoter, took on lease the Cock and Pye Fields--then the resort of gambling boys, thieves, and beggars, and a sink of filth and cesspools--and built the neighbouring streets, placing in the centre a Doric pillar with seven dials on it; afterwards a clock was added.[622] This same Mr. Thomas Neale took a large piece of ground on the north side of Piccadilly from Sir Thomas Clarges, agreeing to lay out 10,000 in building; but he failed to carry out his design, and Sir Walter Clarges, after great trouble, got the lease out of his hands, and Clarges Street was then built.[623]
In 1697 many hundreds of the 14,000 French refugees who fled from Louis XIV.'s dragoons after the cruel revocation of the Edict of Nantes settled about Long Acre, the Seven Dials, and Soho. In Strype's time (Queen Anne's reign), Stacie Street, Kendrick Yard, Vinegar Yard, and Phoenix Street, were mostly occupied by poor French people; indigent marquises and starving countesses.
In the reign of Queen Anne, St. Giles's increased with great rapidity--St.
Giles's Street and Broad Street from the Pound to Drury Lane, the south-east side of Tottenham Court Road, Crown Street, the Seven Dials, and Castle Street were completed; the south side of Holborn was also finished from Broad Street to a little east of Great Turnstile, and, on the north side, the street spread to two doors east of the Vine Tavern.[624] The Irish had already begun to debase St. Giles's; the French refugees completed the degradation and hopelessness, and spread like a mud deluge towards Soho.
In 1640 there are in the parish books several entries of money paid to soldiers and distressed men who had lost everything they had in Ireland:--
Paid to a poor Irishman, and to a prisoner come over from Dunkirk 0 1 0
Paid for a shroud for an Irishman that died at Brickils 0 2 6
In 1640, 1642, and 1647, there constantly occur donations to poor Irish ministers and plundered Irish. Clothes were sent by the parish into Ireland. There is one entry--
Paid to a poor gentleman undone by the burning of a city in Ireland; having licence from the lords to collect 0 3 0
The following entries are also curious and characteristic:--
1642.--To Mrs. Mabb, a poet's wife, her husband being dead 0 1 0
Paid to Goody Parish, to buy her boys two shirts; and Charles, their father, a waterman at Chiswick, to keep him at 20 a year from Christmas 0 3 0
1648.--Gave to the Lady Pigot, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, poor and deserving relief 0 2 6
1670.--Given to the Lady Thornbury, being poor and indigent 0 10 0
1641.--To old Goodman Street and old Goody Malthus, very poor ------
1645.--To Mother Cole and Mother Johnson, xiid.
a-piece 0 2 0
1646.--To William Burnett, in a cellar in Raggedstaff Yard, being poor and very sick 0 1 6
To Goody Sherlock, in Maidenhead-fields Lane, one linen-wheel, and gave her money to buy flax 0 1 0
There are also some interesting entries showing what a sink for the poverty of all the world the St. Giles's cellars had become, even before the Restoration.
1640.--Gave to Signor Lifecatha, a distressed Grecian ------
1642.--To Laylish Milchitaire, of Chimaica, in Armenia, to pass him to his own country, and to redeem his sons in slavery under the Turks 0 5 0
1654.--Paid towards the relief of the mariners, maimed soldiers, widows and orphans of such as have died in the service of Parliament 4 11 0
These were for Cromwell's soldiers; and this year Oliver himself gave 40 to the parish to buy coals for the poor.
1666.--Collected at several times towards the relief of the poor sufferers burnt out by the late dreadful fire of London 25 8 4
In 1670 nearly 185 was collected in this parish towards the redemption of slaves.
After 1648 the Irish are seldom mentioned by name. They had grown by this time part and parcel of the district, and dragged all round them down to poverty. In 1653 an assistant beadle was appointed specially to search out and report all new arrivals of chargeable persons. In 1659 a monthly vestry-meeting was instituted to receive the constable's report as to new vagrants.
In 1675 French refugees began to increase, and in 1679-1680, 1690 and 1692 fresh efforts were made to search out and investigate the cases of all new-comers. In 1710 the churchwardens reported to the commissioners for building new churches, that "a great number of French Protestants were inhabitants of the parish."
Well-known beggars of the day are frequently mentioned in the parish accounts, as for instance--
1640.--Gave to Tottenham Court Meg, being very sick 0 1 0
1642.--Gave to the ballad-singing cobbler 0 1 0
1646.--Gave to old Friz-wig 1 6 0
1657.--Paid the collectors for a shroud for old Guy, the poet 0 2 6
1658.--Paid a year's rent for Mad Bess 1 4 6
1642.--Paid to one Thomas, a traveller 0 0 6
To a poor woman and her children, almost starved 0 5 6
1645.--For a shroud for Hunter's child, the blind beggar-man 0 1 6