“A third part of the City belonged to the Houses and the Church. Why, thousands of honest people lived by working for St. Paul’s and the parish churches and the monks and nuns. Look around you now.” We were close to Aldgate. Stow pointed to the south-east. Near the Tower stood a venerable church in a precinct surrounded by a stone wall and containing a cloister, houses round it, a garden, a school-house, and a burial-ground. “Behold the last of them!” he said. “St. Katherine’s, the smallest of all the Foundations, still exists; but changed—Ah!—changed. Where are the rest?” On the north of St. Katherine’s was another precinct marked out by a wall, and within it broken walls, broken windows, and rough timber store-houses. “There was once Eastminster,” said Stow. “Who is mindful of our Lady of Grace and her Cistercians? They are forgotten. Look Citywards. Yon ruins are those of the Crutched Friars. What is left to mark their abode of two hundred years and more? Their hall was converted into a glass-house and is burned down; their church contains now a carpenter’s shop and a tennis court. Turn your eyes more to the north. Those are the ruins of St. Helen’s Nunnery: their chapel is part of the parish church; their hall is now the Hall of the Leathersellers’ Company; their gardens also belong to that honourable Company. Or yonder, where you may behold the precinct of the Holy Trinity Priory. The Prior was also Alderman of Portsoken Ward and rode among the other Aldermen, but in habit ecclesiastical, as I myself have seen. The House kept open table for rich and poor; a noble and hospitable House it was, but in the end decayed by reason of too great hospitality. The church was pulled down and levelled with the ground—_Proh Pudor!_—the courts remain, but with other buildings; and now is that venerable and regal Foundation clean forgotten. Behold”—he pointed outside the Wall—“the place where the _Sorores Minores_, the sisters of St. Clare, lived for many years. The walls of their refectory still stand; on the site of their cloister is a fair and large store-house for armours and habiliments of war, with work-houses serving unto the same purpose. Alas! Poor Sisters! To this end has come their House of Peace and Prayer.” “Nevertheless, Master Stow, the City is more prosperous than before.”