that to William Waldegrave and his wife, who died, the latter in 1595, the former in 1616. A century ago West Ham was one of the most {79} picturesque villages of Essex, with many charming old mansions belonging to the wealthy City merchants in its immediate vicinity, but it is now a densely populated town, with scarcely anything about it to recall the olden times. The much modernised church of All Saints, however, retains its original foundations, a Norman clerestory and an early English nave, with which, unfortunately, the modern brick chancel and aisles are quite out of character. Some of the ancient monuments have also been preserved, notably the fifteenth-century tomb of a certain Robert Rook, that of Sir Thomas Foot, who was Lord Mayor of London in 1650, and that of William Fawcett, who died in 1631. [Sidenote: Upton] Not far from West Ham is the village of Upton, and near to it are some fine old houses, including that known as The Cedars, once the home of the famous Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, the enthusiastic advocate of prison reform, who was the sister of Mr. Samuel Gurney, a true, kindred spirit, almost as well known for his disinterested work for the poor and oppressed. The latter lived in what was known as Ham House, which was pulled down soon after his death in 1856, and eighteen years later the park in which it used to stand was bought for the people, partly by the Gurney family and partly by the corporation of London. East Ham is another town of rapid growth, the nucleus of which was not long ago a charming village, still in close touch with the long ago. In early Norman times it was a dependency of Westminster {80} Abbey, and the much modernised parish church, dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene, retains portions of the ancient building that dated from about the eleventh century, whilst the old manor-house, now a farm, is still standing. There remains, however, a certain rural charm about the dependent hamlets of Flasket and Green Street, the former retaining an ancient mansion, in which Elizabeth Fry lived for many years before her removal to The Cedars, and the latter still priding itself on its ancient manor-house, now an agricultural training home for boys, that was once the seat of the noble Nevill family, to whom there is a good monument in the church. The home bears the inappropriate name of Anne Boleyn's Castle, because of a tradition, for which there is no historical information, that the ill-fated second wife of Henry VIII. was wooed in it, and, by a strange irony of fate, shut up in it later, to await the day of her execution, after her condemnation to death. [Sidenote: Barking Abbey]