The various mews, now stables, about London, derive their name from the enclosure where falcons in the Middle Ages were kept to mew (_mutare_, Minshew) their feathers. The King’s Mews stood on the site of the present Trafalgar Square. In the 13th Edward II. John de la Becke had the custody of the Mews “apud Charing, juxta Westminster.” In the 10th Edward III. John de St. Albans succeeded Becke. In Richard II.’s time the office of king’s falconer, a post of importance, was held by Sir Simon Burley, who was constable of the castles of Windsor, Wigmore, and Guilford, and also of the royal manor of Kennington. This Sir Simon had been selected by the Black Prince as guardian of Richard II., and he also negotiated his marriage. One of the complaints of Wat Tyler and his party was that he had thrown a burgher of Gravesend into Rochester Castle. The Duke of Gloucester had him executed in 1388, in spite of Richard’s queen praying upon her knees for his life. At the end of this reign or in the first year of Henry IV., the poet Chaucer was clerk of the king’s works and also of the Mews at Charing; and here, from his fluttering, angry little feathered subjects, he must have drawn many of those allusions to the brave sport of hawking to be found in the immortal _Canterbury Tales_. The falconry continued at Charing till 1534 (26th Henry VIII.), when the king’s fine stabling, with many horses and a great store of hay, being destroyed by fire, the Mews was rebuilt and turned into royal stables, in the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary.[396] M. St. Antoine, the riding-master, whose portrait Vandyke painted, performed his caracoles and demi-tours at the Mews. Here Cromwell imprisoned Lieut.-Colonel George Joyce, who, when plain cornet, had arrested the king at Holmby. An angry little Puritan pamphlet of four pages, published in 1659, gives an account of Cromwell’s troubles with the fractious Joyce, and how he had resolved to cashier him and destroy his estate. The colonel was carried by musqueteers to the common Dutch prison at the Mews, and seems to have been much tormented by Cavalier vermin. There he remained ten days, and was then removed to another close room, where he fell sick from the “evil smells,” and remained so for ten weeks, refusing all the time to lay down his commission, declaring that he had been unworthily dealt with, and that all that had been sworn against him was false. There was at the Mews gate a celebrated old book shop, opened in 1750 by Mr. Thomas Payne, who kept it alive for forty years. It was the rendezvous of all noblemen and scholars who sought rare books. It may be remarked, by the way, that booksellers’ shops have always been the haunts of wits and poets. Dodsley, the ex-footman, gathered round him the wisest men of his age, as Tonson had also done before him; while, as for John Murray’s back parlour, it was in Byron’s and Moore’s days a very temple of the Muses.