Everyone lent a hand; even King Charles came down from Whitehall and worked hard beside his meanest subject--doing something useful for once in a way. But it was a case of saving what one could and fleeing. Some stacked their treasures in the churches (the booksellers of Paternoster Row stored their books in St. Paul’s), but of the churches nothing was left. Some buried their valuables underground and perhaps recovered them two years afterwards, when the last of the rubbish was cleared away. By the end of that fatal September the whole of the large district of Moorfields, north of the city, was one vast camp of the homeless, and there they stayed in shacks and shelters till the city was rebuilt, much as the unfortunate people of devastated France were living during the years of the Great War. The trade of London ceased for a time; there were no shops, the merchants had lost their goods, the warehouses were gutted, all records of debts and commercial transactions were destroyed, there were no schools, no almshouses. Yet in four short years the English, with the same dogged energy that they were putting recently into the making of trenches and dugouts, had practically rebuilt their capital city. The churches, of course, took a long time to finish; the beautiful and numerous halls of the City Companies were not replaced in a day, but nearly 10,000 houses were up, and since those seventeenth-century workmen were just Englishmen, with no foreigners at hand to tell them to “ca’ canny,” everything was in a fair way to completion. As for Sir Christopher Wren, that amazing architect who stamped the impress of his genius on the great city as we know it, who shall give him enough honour? He designed and erected over forty public buildings, amongst them the lovely and unique cluster of churches that lie around St. Paul’s, yet for this work he was rewarded by the miserable salary of £100 a year, with £200 a year for the rebuilding of the great cathedral. ST. BARTHOLOMEW THE GREAT “The citye of London that is to me so dere and sweete.” CHAUCER. Opposite St. Bartholomew’s Hospital is Smithfield, new and blatant, and smelling hideously of raw meat. Take courage and go on northwards, for in a few minutes you will come to the most wonderful old church in London--older than any other except the chapel in the White Tower. There is something about the almost primitive simplicity of its massive stone pillars that carries one back more directly to the times of the Norman conquerors than a thousand long descriptions gathered from history books.