doubt then used as a landing-place for sea coal from the barges on the Fleet River; and in the Patent Rolls, 41 Henry III. (1257) mention is made of ship-loads of sea coal imported into London. These facts dispose of the assertion which has been made that sea coal was not used in London earlier than the time of Edward I. or II.-Riley Memorials, p. xvi. note 7. In the 17th of Edward III. (1343), "a piece of land in the lane called Secollane near the water of Flete," was granted upon lease to the Butchers of St. Nicholas Shambles, "for the purpose of there in such water cleansing the entrails of beasts . . . they paying yearly to the Lord Mayor, at the Feast of our Lord's Nativity, one boar's head" (Riley). In the reign of Henry IV. we find it again mentioned in a "Writ for the repair of one foot of Flete Bridge, towards Secollane.” 1 The she doctor that cured Abel Drugger of the effects of "fat ram mutton" supper, lived here. Yes faith-she dwells in Seacoal Lane,-did cure me, With sodden ale, and pellitory of the wall; Cost me but twopence.-Ben Jonson, Alchemist, Act iii. Sc. 2. "The Jest of George and the Barber," in The Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele, Gentleman, is said to have taken place "at a blind ale-house in Sealcoal Lane," where he found "George in a green jerkin, a Spanish platter-fashioned hat, all alone at a peck of oysters. "2 Searle Street. [See Serle Street.] Seething Lane, GREAT TOWER STREET (east end) to CRUTCHED FRIARS. The church of Allhallows Barking is at the corner in Tower Street. Sieuthenestrate, or Suiethenestrate, is mentioned in the City records as early as A.D. 1281; Stow's conjecture that it was originally Sidon Lane would seem, therefore, to be unfounded. Sir Francis Walsingham lived and died in this lane: Sidon Lane, now corruptly called Sything Lane. . . In this Sidon Lane divers fair and large houses are built, namely, one by Sir John Allen, some time mayor of London, and of council unto King Henry VIII.; Sir Francis Walsingham, Knight, principal secretary to the Queen's Majesty that now is was lodged there, and so was the Earl of Essex.-Stow, p. 50. The 6 of April [1590] about midnight deceased Sir Francis Walsingham, Knight, at his house in Seeding Lane, and was about ten of the clocke in the next night following, buried in Paules Church without solemnity.-Stow, by Howes, ed. 1631, p. 761. Walsingham's widow continued to live in Seething Lane, and at her house here Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was baptized by Lancelot Andrewes.3 Seething or Sything Lane runneth northwards from Tower Street unto Crutched Friars. It is now [1720] a place of no great account; but amongst the inhabitants some are merchants. Here is the Navy Office; but the chief gate for entrance is out of Crutched Friars.-Strype, B. ii. p. 53. Pepys lived at the Navy Office in this lane during the nine years, 16601669, over which his Diary extends. 2 Dyce's Peele, vol. ii. p. 271. 1 Liber Albus, p. 502. 3 Life of Bishop Andrewes, p. 34. July 4, 1660.—Up early and with Commissioner Pett to view the houses in Seething Lane belonging to the Navy, where I find the worst very good, and had great fears that they will shuffle me out of them, which troubles me.-Pepys. July 18, 1660.-This morning we met at the [Navy] Office: I dined at my house in Seething Lane.-Pepys. September 5, 1666.-About two in the morning my wife calls me up and tells me of new cryes of fire, it being come to Barking Church, which is at the bottom of our lane.-Pepys. May 9, 1667.-In our street, at the Three Tuns Tavern, I find a great hubbub and what was it but two brothers had fallen out, and one killed the other. And who should they be but the two Fieldings; one whereof, Bazill, was page to my Lady Sandwich; and hath killed the other, himself being very drunk, and so was sent to Newgate.-Pepys. It was Basil who was killed. They were sons of George Fielding, Earl of Desmond, and uncles of the father of Henry Fielding the novelist. Seething Lane has now many corn, wine, and general merchants among its inhabitants. Here are the Corn Exchange Chambers and Subscription Room. Pepys's Three Tuns Tavern has disappeared. [See Navy Office; Allhallows Barking.] Sepulchre (St.) in the BAILEY (Occasionally written ST. 'PULCHER'S), a church at the western end of Newgate Street, and in the ward of Farringdon Without. About a fifth of the parish of St. Sepulchre lies "without the liberties" of the City of London, and the church is in consequence in the anomalous position of having two sets of churchwardens. A church existed here in the 12th century; but the oldest part of the present edifice, the tower and south-west porch, is of the middle of the 15th century. The body of the church was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, and was rebuilt and the tower repaired, it is said, by Sir C. Wren, the works being completed in 1670. The fire itself was stopped at Pie Corner, a few yards north of the church. In 1338 William of Newcastle-under-Lyme bequeathed an estate to the parish for the maintenance of the fabric. With the process of time the estate has increased in value, and now yields, it is said, nearly £2000 a year. The consequence has been frequent repairs and restorations, by the last of which the church has been thoroughly transformed. Large repairs were done in 1738. The body of the church. was in a great measure rebuilt and a new roof put on in 1837. In 1863 and following years considerable alterations were made; but the most material were effected in 1875 and 1878. In 1875 the tower and porch a separate building of three floors, projecting from the tower on the south-had new window tracery inserted, pinnacles to the tower rebuilt, a new oriel on the south front of the porch, where Popham's statue stood, and the whole refaced and completely restored, the architect being Mr. W. P. Griffith. In 1878-1880 the body of the church was restored under Mr. Robert Billing, architect. New windows filled with tracery of a very florid type were inserted, new buttresses, battlements, and pinnacles added, and the interior made conformable. The church is now Gothic throughout, but Gothic of the last quarter of the 19th century. The tower was 152 feet 9 inches to the cap of the pinnacles; as restored it is 149 feet 11 inches. The organ, a very fine instrument, originally built by Renatus Harris in 1670, was repaired and enlarged by the elder Byfield about 1730. Subsequently improvements have been made, and new stops added by Hancock, and by Gray and Davison in the present century. The case is attributed to Grinling Gibbons. It is now entirely remodelled and placed in St. Stephen's Chapel. For many years past it has been the custom for the organist to give a recital after the Sunday evening service. The church is 150 feet long by 62 wide, and with St. Stephen's Chapel 81 feet. A tablet is preserved in the church with a list of charitable donations and gifts, containing the following item : 1605.-Mr. Robert Dowe gave for ringing the greatest bell in this church on the day the condemned prisoners are executed, and for other services for ever, concerning such condemned prisoners, for which services the sexton is paid £1:6:8 .· • £50 0 0 This has now been appropriated by the Charity Commissioners. It was the custom formerly for the clerk or bellman of St. Sepulchre's to go under Newgate on the night preceding the execution of a criminal, and ringing his bell to repeat the following verses :— All you that in the condemned hold do lie, This is further explained by a passage in Munday's edition of Stow : Robert Dowe, citizen and merchant taylor of London, gave to the parish church of St. Sepulchre's, the somme of £50, that after the several sessions of London, when the prisoners remain in the gaol as condemned men to death, expecting execution on the morning following: the clarke of the church should come in the night time, and likewise early in the morning to the window of the prison where they lye, and there ringing certain tolls with a hand-bell, appointed for the purpose, he doth afterwards (in most Christian manner) put them in mind of their present condition, and ensuing execution, desiring them to be prepared therefore as they ought to be. When they are in the cart, and brought before the wall of the church, there he standeth ready with the same bell, and after certain tolls, rehearseth an appointed prayer, desiring all the people there present to pray for them. The Beadle also of Merchant Tailors' Hall hath an honest stipend allowed him to see that this is duly done.-Munday's Stow, ed. 1618, p. 25. Hatton has printed (New View, p. 707) the "Exhortation" and "Admonition" used on this occasion. The former he calls "The Words said in the Gateway of the Prison the night before Execution;" the latter, "The Words said in St. Sepulchre's Churchyard as the prisoners are drawn by [to Tyburn] to be executed." Dowe is buried in the church of St. Botolph, Aldgate, where there is a portrait-monument to his memory. Another curious custom observed at this church was that of presenting a nosegay to every criminal on his way to Tyburn. One of the last given was presented from the steps of St. Sepulchre's to Sixteen-stringed Jack, alias John Rann, executed in 1774 for robbing the Rev. Dr. Bell in Gunnersbury Lane, on the road to Brentford. He wore it in his button-hole. The clock of St. Sepulchre's still regulates the execution of criminals in Newgate. John Rogers, the Marian protomartyr, was vicar of this church. On April 11, 1600, William Dodington, a brother-in-law of Sir Francis Walsingham, and an officer in the Exchequer, threw himself from the tower and was killed. "If I do break my neck," said Bacon to Queen Elizabeth, "I shall do it in a manner as Mr. Dodington did it, which walked on the battlements of the church many days, and took a view and survey where he should fall." 1 Saturday, April 12, 1600.-Dorrington, rich Dorrington, yesterday morning, went up to St. Sepulchre's steeple, and threw himself over the battlement, and broke his neck. There was found a paper sealed, with this superscription, "Lord save my soule, and I will praise thy name."-Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sydney, vol. ii. p. 187. It was that William Dodington that wilfully brake his neck by casting himself down headlong from the battlements of St. Sepulchre's steeple, upon the sight of certain depositions touching a cause in controversy between him and one Brunker in Chancery.-Marginal Note to a letter from Dodington to Hatton, p. 362. Eminent Persons buried in St. Sepulchre's. - Roger Ascham (d. December 30, 1568), author of Toxophilus (1545) and The Schoolmaster (1570); William Gravet, vicar of St. Sepulchre's, watched over him as he was dying. When Elizabeth was told of his death she said she would rather have lost ten thousand pounds than her old tutor. Captain John Smith, author of the General History of Virginia (fol. 1626), (d. 1631); his epitaph in doggrel verse is no longer legible: it is printed in Strype and elsewhere. Sir Robert Peake, the engraver, Faithorne's master, and Governor of Basing House for the King during the Civil War under Charles I. (d. 1667). Fleetwood, the Recorder of London, writes to inform Lord Burghley, July 1585, that when Awfield was executed at Tyburn for "sparcinge abrood certen lewd sedicious and traytorous bookes," his body "was brought to St. 'Pulchers to be buryed, but the parishioners would not suffer a traytor's corpes to be layed in the earthe where theire parents, wyeffs, chyldren, kynred, maisters, and old neighbours did rest," and so "his carcase was retourned to the buryall grounde neere Tyborne." A century and a half later the parishioners, less scrupulous, permitted the body of Sarah Malcolm, the murderess, to be buried, 1733, in their churchyard. Thomas Lord Dacre was beheaded at the Tower and his body buried in this church. "2 The churchyard, till the middle of the 18th century, extended on the south side far into the street, and was bounded by a high wall, leaving no footway for passengers. 1760 the wall was removed and a portion of the churchyard levelled. When the Holborn Viaduct 1 Cooper, Ath. Cant., vol. ii. p. 164. In 2 Ellis's Letters, vol. ii. p. 298. was formed, 1871, a further portion was laid into the street, the bodies exhumed being reinterred in the City Cemetery at Ilford, where a monument was erected to their memory. Since then the churchyard has been levelled and planted as a flower-garden. In Johnson's Highwaymen (fol. 1736) is a characteristic view of St. Sepulchre's; it is entitled "Jonathan Wild going to the place of Execution." Payne Fisher, "Paganus Piscator," 1616-1693, was buried in the churchyard. Serjeants' Inn, CHANCERY LANE; Serjeants' Inn, FLEET STREET, houses of law originally set apart for the Honourable Society of Judges and Serjeants-at-Law. The serjeants always addressed one another as "brother." One of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims is a "serjeantof-law." No person could be made a justice of the Queen's Bench. or Common Pleas who was not "of the degree of the coif"; a phrase taken from the peculiar cap which was the distinctive badge or emblem of the serjeant-at-law. When, as of late years was commonly the case, a justice was appointed who was not of the degree of the coif, before taking the oaths as judge he went through the ceremony of admission as a serjeant, and at the same time received a retainer from his own inn to plead as their serjeant. First I was made a serjeant, and then my patent writ as Chief Justice was handed to me, and, having taken many strange oaths, my title to hang, draw, and quarter was complete. Brougham tried to play me a dog's trick, by running away with my fee of ten guineas as a retainer to plead when become a serjeant for the Society of Lincoln's Inn. I made him disgorge. I have dined twice at Serjeants' Inn, my admission to which cost me near £700.-Lord Campbell (Letter and Journal, November 1850), Life, vol. ii. pp. 274, 276. ... Mr. Foss, following Dugdale, is of opinion that the Chancery Lane Inn was not an Inn for Serjeants before the 2d of Henry V. (1414-1415), and that it was earlier occupied by serjeants than the inn in Fleet Street.1 The Fleet Street Inn appears to have been a private dwelling in the reign of Henry VIII. It ceased to be occupied by the serjeants towards the end of the 18th century. The hall was purchased by the Amicable Assurance Society, and the rest of the inn rebuilt as private houses. The Fleet Street front of the building is now occupied by the Norwich Union Office. On one of the houses in the square behind (No. 9) is a stone with a coat of arms, S. I. and the date 1669 cut on it. No. 13, occupied by the Church of England Sunday School Institute, has a handsome elevation. The Chancery Lane Inn was retained till the dissolution of the Society in 1876. The premises, including the hall, a spacious and lofty dining-room,— lighted by five painted glass windows,-chapel and robing rooms, were sold by auction, February 23, 1877, for £57,100, the proceeds being divided amongst the members, a transaction which gave rise to some comment at the time. The portraits, twenty-six in number, of eminent members of the inn, including Lord Chancellors King, 1 Foss, Judges, vol. iv. p. 247. |