One first hears of the Domesday Book in the days when one has visions of a vast tome with some vague connection with the Day of Judgment. Not even _Little Arthur_ could dispel the prodigious respect and awe one felt for it. I confused it with the book in which one’s manifold sins are recorded, and even mature age does not prevent a little secret satisfaction that has nothing historical at the sight of those fat, brown hundreds-of-years-old books that we owe to William the Conqueror’s Norman love for exact accounts. The Domesday Books used to be kept in the Chapter House at Westminster and were only moved to the Record Office in 1839. NEVILL’S COURT “Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts.”--DR. JOHNSON. A stone’s throw from the east end of the Record Office is one of the most curious unnoticed corners of old London. Go up Fetter Lane, which is the next turning to Chancery Lane out of Fleet Street, and at No. 34, close to the Moravian Chapel, you will see a narrow passage called Nevill’s Court. This passage leads you straight into one of the oldest bits of London still existing, for here in the very heart of newspaper land are little ancient seventeenth-century houses with cottage gardens. They give one the same feeling of unexpectedness as those other queer little wooden houses with their high gables that you may see in Collingwood Street, just on the other side of Blackfriars Bridge (I think it is the third turning to the right). They stand beside the church, just as they stood nearly three hundred years ago, when the Thames washed right up to their doorsteps. At No. 6 Nevill’s Court, secluded in its walled garden, is a big seventeenth-century house, which must once have been inhabited by citizens of wealth and position. It is extraordinary that Time and the Vandal have left it still intact. I think the reason must be that they have never been able to find it, like those other old houses in Wardrobe Court near St. Paul’s, whose whereabouts certainly ought to be set as a problem in a London taxi-driver’s examination. But before seeking the house, there is something to notice in Nevill’s Court. The main entrance to the Moravian Chapel is in Fetter Lane, at No. 33. I once went to the service there at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon under the influence of the story of the messenger sent while Bradbury was preaching, to announce Queen Anne’s death and the safety of the Protestant succession. I hoped to find something to remind me of the chapel’s great age: it is the oldest place of Protestant worship in London, going back to Queen Mary’s day, when persecuted Protestants are supposed to have met in the sawpit of the carpenter’s yard on this site.