Stories That Words Tell UsO'Neill, Elizabeth (Elizabeth Speakman)
History
Stories That Words Tell Us
O'Neill, Elizabeth (Elizabeth Speakman)
English language -- Etymology
Many London names come from churches and buildings which no longer
exist. The names help us to picture a London very different from the
London of to-day. One of the busiest streets in that part of the City
round Fleet Street where editors and journalists, and printers and
messengers are working day and night to produce the newspapers which
carry the news of the day far and wide over England, is _Blackfriars_.
This is a very different place from the spot where the Dominicans, or
"Black Friars," built their priory in the thirteenth century.
In those days the friars chose the busiest parts of the little English
towns to build their houses in, so that they could preach and help the
people. They thought that the earlier monks had chosen places for
their monasteries too far from the people. There were grey friars and
white friars, Austin friars and crutched friars, all of whose names
remain in the London of to-day.
There were many monasteries and convents in the larger London which
soon grew up round the City, and in the City itself we have a street
whose name keeps the memory of one convent of nuns. The street called
the _Minories_ marks the place where a convent of nuns of St. Clare
was founded in the thirteenth century. The Latin name for these nuns
is _Sorores Minores_, or "Lesser Sisters," just as the Franciscans, or
grey friars, were _Fratres Minores_, or "Lesser Brethren." And so from
the Latin _minores_ we get the name Minories as the name of a London
street, standing where this convent once stood.
The name of the street _London Wall_ reminds us of the time when
London was a walled city with its gates, which were closed at night
and opened every morning. Many streets keep the names of the old
gates, like _Ludgate Hill_, _Aldersgate_, _Bishopsgate_.
The great _Tower of London_ still stands to show us how London was
defended in the old feudal days; but _Tower Bridge_, the bridge which
crosses the river at that point, is a modern bridge, built in 1894.
The name _Cripplegate_ still remains, and the story it has to tell us
is that in the Middle Ages there stood outside the city walls beyond
this gate the hospital of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. It was a hospital
for lepers; but St. Giles is the patron saint of cripples, and so this
gate of the city got the name of Cripplegate, because it was the
nearest to the church of the patron saint of cripples.
This church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields no longer remains; but we have
_St. Martin's-in-the-Fields_, to remind us of the difference between
Trafalgar Square to-day and its condition not quite two hundred years
ago, when this church was built.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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