ABOUT the commencement of the last century, when the workmen were digging a foundation for the existing church of St. Mary, they discovered at the depth of nineteen feet the virgin earth; forming, of course, originally the surface of the Strand, and a striking evidence of the derivation of the name of this great metropolitan thoroughfare. Where now all this crowding and bustle, this continual hurrying to and fro, not of chariots and horsemen, but of omnibuses and cabs, and all the many varieties of transport which luxury or necessity have devised, are incessantly going on, till one could fancy the very houses must be weary of the eternal din, and long to be what Wordsworth describes them as seeming-asleep; where all things speak to the eye and ear, and haply not unfrequently to the heart and mind also, of the presence of the busiest population perhaps of the globe, in its busiest aspect,-once was merely a bare and marshy shore; where doubtless the " hollow-sounding" cry of the bittern from its reedy nest has often broke upon the ear of the half-naked, but gaily ornamented, human wanderer from the neighbouring city of huts! And the very circumstance of the name being applied to this part of the banks of the Thames only seems to show

VOL. II.

L

that it remained as a Strand long after all other parts in the vicinity of the growing London had lost their native character and appearance. The first great cause of change in the Strand must have been the erection of Westminster Abbey by Sebert, King of the East Saxons, in the seventh century, and the consequent necessity of making the former a thoroughfare. The rebuilding of the Abbey and the establishment of a palace by the Confessor in the eleventh century must have also materially enhanced its importance. Buildings gradually arose in different parts of the line. Before the close of the thirteenth century the magnificent palace of the Savoy, the first church of St. Mary, and the hamlet of Charing were all in existence. Yet the state of the Strand continued to present a curious contrast to the edifices that here and there adorned it, and to the splendid pageants and processions that on occasions of high ceremony-such as the coronation or burial of a monarch, for instance-wound their slow length along through countless thousands of spectators. Here is a picture of it, so late as 1315. In a petition presented that year to Edward II., by the inhabitants of the neighbourhood of the Palace at Westminster, it is stated that the footway at the entrance of Temple Bar, and from thence to the Palace, was so bad that the feet of horses, and rich and poor men, received constant damage, particularly in the rainy season; at the same time the footway was interrupted by thickets and bushes. The petition was answered by an order appointing certain persons assessors for levying a tax on the inhabitants between Temple Bar and the Palace gate, to defray the expenses of the repairs desired. Such a tax was too unjust to be enforced; consequently, in 1353, during the reign of Edward III., a toll was levied on all goods carried either by land or water to the Staple at Westminster, to pay for the parts of the Strand where there were no houses, and, where there were, the owners, somewhat more reasonably, were to defray the charge; particularly as it was pointed out (and this is interesting as another cause of the progress of the Strand) "that the proprietors of the houses near and leading to that staple have, by means of the said staple, greatly raised their rents." Essex House, Durham Place, and the Inn of the Bishops of Norwich, afterwards York House, by this time spread out their extensive and embattled piles towards the Strand, and their gardens, and terraces, and water-stairs down to the river; but the openings between them, neither narrow nor far between, still left the river exposed to the passengers on the southern side, whilst on the north there was the open country extending toward the pleasant Highgate and Hampstead Hills, merely interspersed here and there with scattered buildings. Among the characteristic features of the way at this period were the bridges. "Bridges in the Strand!" we fancy we hear the reader exclaiming; yes, strange as it may seem, there were at least three between Charing Cross and Temple Bar, though the waters beneath them were neither very wide, deep, nor turbulent. They were, in short, so many water-courses gliding along from the meadows on the north, and crossing the Strand in their way to the Thames; though at the same time of sufficient importance to be bridged over. The sites of two of these bridges are marked out and permanently preserved by the names given to the lanes through which their channels found way,-Ivy-bridge Lane, and Strand-bridge Lane opposite the end of Newcastle Street, to which we shall have occasion to recur in connection with a highly important remain of antiquity. The

former was pulled down prior to the appearance of Stow's publication in the seventeenth century; but the latter was then still standing. The third bridge remained buried in the soil, its existence utterly unknown (the careful Stow does not mention it, so that it had long disappeared before his time), till 1802, when it was discovered during the construction of new sewers a little eastward of St. Clement's Church. It was of stone, and consisted of one arch about eleven feet long, very antique in its appearance, and of the most durable construction. Another feature of the ancient Strand was a stone cross, standing in front of the spot now occupied by St. Mary's, at which, says Stow, "in the year 1294, and diverse other times, the Justices Itinerant sat without London." Blount, in his Fragmenta Antiquitatis,' gives us an example of the nature of the business transacted on these occasions, when he mentions that a bargain was here settled between the King and one Laurence de Broke for his hamlet of Renham in Middlesex. After the disappearance of the cross the famous May-pole assumed its place.

By the time of Edward VI. the Strand had become pretty well closed up on both sides, on the south or river side by the walls of the long line of noble and episcopal mansions, and on the north by a single row of houses. Holywell Street, and its continuation Butcher Row, extending near to Temple Bar, were now middle-aged and certainly highly respectable houses. Some of the buildings recently pulled down in the first-mentioned street were, we learn from excellent authority, above three hundred years old; and the fleurs-de-lis on the front of many of the houses in this neighbourhood carried back the thoughts of the spectator to the glories of the fifth Henry, the conqueror of Agincourt, whose triumphal return to his countrymen these ornamental decorations are supposed to have commemorated. From this time, indeed, it began to be found that the Strand had progressed too fast for the comfort of passengers through it; it became choked up with the evidences of its prosperity; and later times have had to undo much of what was now done, as in the case of the removal of this very Butcher Row, and, still more recently, of Exeter 'Change. Its very soil had grown so valuable, that the earls and bishops, its original owners, could no longer afford to occupy so large a share as they required for their respective residences; so they pulled them down, and thus prepared the way for the erection of a hundred houses where one had stood before. Durham Place changed its stables into an Exchange in 1608; later in the century York House became the streets now known under names which perpetuate the designation and rank of him who worked the metamorphosis-" George" "Villiers,” “Duke” “Of” “ Buckingham;" Essex House and Arundel House did not long survive the fall of their old aristocratic neighbours; whilst the Savoy, though it still managed for a time to keep off destruction, by becoming a garrison in one part and a prison in another, was finally swept away, with the important exception of the chapel, during the present century, on the building of Waterloo Bridge. Gay thus commemorates the earlier of these changes :

"Come, Fortescue, sincere, experienc'd friend,
Thy briefs, thy deeds, and e'en thy fees suspend;
Come, let us leave the Temple's silent walls;
Me business to my distant lodging calls;

Through the long Strand together let us stray;
With thee conversing, I forget the way.

Behold that narrow street which steep descends,
Whose building to the slimy shore extends;
Here Arundel's fam'd structure rear'd its frame:
The street alone retains the empty name.
Where Titian's glowing paint the canvas warm'd,
And Raphael's fair design with judgment charm'd,
Now hangs the Bellman's song, and pasted here
The colour'd prints of Overton appear.

Where statues breath'd, the works of Phidias' hands,
A wooden pump, or lonely watch-house, stands.
There Essex' stately pile adorn'd the shore,

There Cecil's, Bedford's, Villiers',-now no more."*

With another picture by the same hand, and representing the same time, the early part of the seventeenth century, we conclude these preliminary notices of the Strand:

"Where the fair columns of St. Clement stand,

Whose straiten'd bounds encroach upon the Strand;
Where the low penthouse bows the walker's head,
And the rough pavement wounds the yielding tread;
Where not a post protects the narrow space,
And, strung in twines, combs dangle in thy face;
Summon at once thy courage, rouse thy care,

Stand firm, look back, be resolute, beware.

Forth issuing from steep lanes, the collier's steeds

Drag the black load; another cart succeeds;

Team follows team, crowds heap'd on crowds appear,

And wait impatient till the road grow clear."

The features here described-the low penthouse, rough pavement, and the combs dangling in the face of every passer-by-remained till within a few years ago on the south side of St. Clement's: the north having been previously arranged as we now find it, through the spirited efforts of an alderman of London; and as to the "black load," who is there that does not know there is as much and as frequent cause for impatience as ever, if one has no eyes for, or apprehension of, the beauty of the magnificent horses that draw it, and one by one issue so proudly forth from these steep and miserable-looking lanes?

We cannot better commence our walk through the Strand than by a notice of the improvements just referred to. "On the north side, or right hand, some small distance without Temple Bar, in the High Street, from a pair of stocks there standing, stretcheth one large middle row or troop of small tenements, partly opening to the south, partly towards the north, up west to a stone cross, now headless, over against the Strand." Stow here refers doubtless to the Cross we have before mentioned; and, consequently, the existing Holywell Street must have formed a portion of the Middle Row he describes. The remainder was Butcher Row, granted by Edward I. to Walter de Barbier, for the residences of "foreign butchers," as they were called, but who were, in fact, country butchers only, who brought their meat in carts, and offered it for sale just without the civic jurisdiction. The principle of competition in reducing price seems to have been thus early acted on as well as understood. In reference to Butcher Row Malcolm observes-" A stranger who had visited London in 1790 would, on his return in 1804, be astonished to find a spacious area (with the church

*Gay's Trivia, b. ii.

nearly in the centre) on the site of Butcher Row, and some other passages undeserving of the name of streets, which were composed of those wretched fabrics, overhanging their foundations, the receptacles of dirt in every corner of their projecting stories, the bane of ancient London, where the plague, with all its attendant horrors, frowned destruction on the miserable inhabitants, reserving its forces for the attacks of each returning summer." The pulling down of all these "wretched fabrics" was undertaken in pursuance of a plan suggested by Alderman Pickett, and the existing Pickett Street soon rose in their room. Unfortunately for the success of the plan, the stream of traffic flowed round the southern side of the church; and the houses, being found too large for ordinary inhabitants, were under-let, and the consequence is a very marked dissimilarity between the appearance of the opposite portions of this fine area. Butcher Row, however miserable

its aspect in the days of its decline, had many interesting reminiscences. Here was the residence of the French ambassador, in which the Duke de Sully was a resi

dent for a single night, the first of his temporary abode in London, whilst the palace of Arundel was being prepared for him. Like most of those fine picturesque-looking mansions which characterised ancient London, the house consisted generally of small and low rooms, many of them on the same floor. The ceilings were traversed by large rude beams, and a well staircase, lighted by a skylight from the top, extended from the ground to the roof. Roses, crowns, fleurs-de-lis, dragons, &c., formed the ornaments of its front. The house bore the date of 1581. The half-insane, half-inspired dramatic poet Lee resorted here; and it was, says Oldys, "in returning from the Bear and Harrow in Butcher Row,