Fleet Street in seven centuries : being a history of the growth of London beyond the walls into the Western Liberty, and of Fleet Street to our time / by Walter George Bell ; with a foreword by Sir William Purdie Treloar, Bt.

  • Bell, Walter George, 1867-1942.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fleet Street in seven centuries : being a history of the growth of London beyond the walls into the Western Liberty, and of Fleet Street to our time / by Walter George Bell ; with a foreword by Sir William Purdie Treloar, Bt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/712
    AUTHOR’S PREFACE “ No man can write the history of Fleet Street/' I read in a book recently published. Well, this is a history of the street, and the most that can be hoped is that it may serve until the fuller work—of, say, ten volumes—shall be produced. With Fleet Street itself I have been chiefly concerned ; not a long street, but with a record perhaps more ample than any other. Inevitably my task has expanded. London's history has been written in many aspects, but it is curious that hitherto no one has attempted a study of its growth beyond the walled city into the Liberties, or suburbs. Till near the close of Elizabeth’s reign Fleet Street was habitually referred to as “in the suburb of London.” It possessed many large gardens, and some open meadow land. Indeed, to this day part of its meadow has never been built upon. The Temple Gardens have so remained since the Knights Templars’ first settlement in the twelfth century. A fragment of Ficket’s Croft, the jousting-ground of the Knights Templars, has been restored to the public in the now sadly diminished gardens of the Law Courts, and further beyond Temple Bar a more substantial portion of this open ground survives in New Square, Lincoln’s Inn. If value of any kind attaches to this book, it is in the earlier chapters which contain the results of research into the con¬ ditions of the western suburb in mediaeval times, and its conversion to a closely built town area under Elizabeth and James the First. Despite all the change that later centuries have brought, it bears to-day upon its face the stamp of its origin ; and no part of my task has given me greater pleasure than that of showing how the byways and courts we know are largely a result, first of the settlement of ecclesiastics and religious Orders about the street, and afterwards of the building over of the gardens and fore-courts of their town dwellings. A valuable work for London’s topography lies before the student with time and patience to make himself familiar with the confiscations of properties of the religious houses by King Vll