The Square, where stands the memorial to the Martyrs, is between the
market and St. Bartholomew's Hospital, the oldest institution of its
kind in London and one of the wealthiest. Rahere, the favourite of Henry
I., founded it in 1123, and it has been restored in parts and enlarged
many times. You can see above the west gate the statue of Henry VIII.
where it was set when the gate was built in 1702. Close by in the wall
is a commemorative tablet that recites the burning of the Protestant
martyrs. Many world famous men have been connected with the Hospital.
Sir Richard Owen, noted as an anatomist was a surgeon here, and so was
Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood.
St. Bartholomew the Less is the name of the church inside of the walls
of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. This church was built by Rahere, but has
been modernized several times and partly rebuilt in 1824. It was here,
that Inigo Jones, the great architect, was baptised.
Quaintly picturesque in its location is the mediæval burying ground of
St. Bartholomew the Great; its monuments crumbling to decay, its
greenery growing rank--a strangely hidden spot, hemmed in by church
walls, and on one side by tottering, hundreds-of-year-old buildings
whose seething humanity makes the place the more ancient by contrast.
The church of St. Bartholomew the Great, of which this is the old time
burying ground, lies hidden beyond the West Smithfield houses, hemmed in
by the overcrowded human hives of Little Britain and Cloth Fair. From
some points, just a glimpse can be had of its ancient red brick tower.
This church is very old, next to the chapel in the Tower the oldest in
London, founded by Rahere in 1123. Entrance to it is through an Early
English gateway between the houses of West Smithfield, and so past the
mouldering graveyard. The overhanging houses of Cloth Fair seem to have
turned their backs on this home of long dead people.
Like a wraith of bygone romance is dingy Cloth Fair, with its
lath-and-plaster houses and the tottering remains of the grandeur of
other days. Once the habitation of merchant princes and their wealthy
neighbours, it has degenerated into the abode of swarming small
tradesmen and day workers whose scant means find expression in ugliness
and penury. In this street, in times when the Bartholomew Fair held
yearly sway in Smithfield, the quaintly named "Court of Pie Powder" was
held, where licenses were granted for the Fair and where weights and
measures were corrected.
[Illustration: Exterior of the Dining Hall, Charterhouse]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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