Stories That Words Tell Us

ch have kept their old names) in our old towns are full of stories. Especially is this true about London, the centre of the British Empire, and almost the centre of the wor

und in what we now call "the City," meaning the centre o

n in the Middle Ages, and even so late as the eighteenth century, was not at all like the London we know to-day. London now is really a county, and stretche

hief City streets, the Strand and Fleet Street, help to show us something of what London was like in its earliest days. A few years ago, in a famous case in a court of law, one of the lawyers asked a witness what he was doing in the Strand at a certain time. The witness, a witty Irishman, an

in this way, and several of them are used as sewers to carry away the sewage of the city. There is a Fleet Street, too, in Hampstead, in the nort

what is now called King's Cross, and here its banks were so steep that it

s there were no such things as shops. People bought and sold in markets, and the name of the busy City street, Cheapside,

there up to the sixteenth century. The name of another famous City street, Cornhill, tells us that a corn market used to be held there. Another name, Gracechurch Street, r

and hay market, and on days which were not market days games and tournaments took place there. Later its name became famous in Eng

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

ach and help the people. They thought that the earlier monks had chosen places for their monasteries too far from the people.

t 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 F

city with its gates, which were closed at night and opened every morning. Many st

. 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

n's-in-the-Fields, to remind us of the difference between Trafalgar Square to-d

nsions in what is now the West Central district of London. The north side of Queen Square, Bloomsbury, was left open, so that the people who lived there could enjoy the view of the Highgate and Hamp

n, the hero of the great victory of Trafalgar. The grea

the last of the nine beautiful crosses which King Edward III. set up at the places where the coffin of his wife, Eleanor, was set to rest in the long journey from Lincolnshir

emains to remind us of the sanctuary in which, as in many churches of the Middle Ages, people could t

ch King Henry VIII. brought to an end because the monks would not own that he was head of the Church instead of the Pope. They suffered a dreadful death, being hanged, drawn, and quartered as traitors. The monast

use of Carthusians, a very strict order of monks, w

This was, in the Middle Ages, a chapel used by the Bishop of Ely when he came to London, and

es its name from the Latin name of the "Our Father," or Lord's Prayer, got its name from the fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many selle

Ave Maria, or "Hail, Mary!" being the words used by the angel Gabriel to the Blessed Virgin at

for the country again. The present Church of St. Mary-le-Bow was built by Sir Christopher Wren, the great seventeenth-century architect, who built St. Paul's and several other of the most beautiful London churches after they had been destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666. But underneath the present Church of St. Mary-le

Knights Templars in the twelfth century. These knights were one of those peculiar religious orders which joined the life of a soldier to that of a monk, and played a great part in the Crusad

s put aside for the Jews. This was called the Ghetto. The Jews were much disliked in the Middle Ages because of the treatment of Our Lord by their forefathers; but the kings often protected them because, in spite of everything, the Jews grew rich, and the

ian merchants from Lombardy who set up their business there, and who became the bankers and m

nd courtiers began to build houses in the western "suburbs," as they were then called, though now they are looked upon as very central districts. It was chiefly in the seventeenth century that what we now know as th

fine gentlemen wore as they swaggered through the West End in the early seventeenth century. Pall Mall and the Mall in St. James's Park took their names from a game which was very fashionable after the Restoration, but which was already known in the time of Charles I.

because of a fountain which stood there, and which was so arranged that when a passer-by trod by accident on a c

(which took its name from one of the many hospitals which religious people built in and near medi?val London) and Whitechapel also filled up, and became centres of trade and manufacture. The games and sports which amused the p

od for people's health, and these have given us some of the best-known London names. Near Holywell Street there were several of these wells; and along Well Walk, in the north-west suburb of Hampstead, a procession of gaily-dressed people might regularly

Avenue, opening off Trafalgar Square, takes its name from Northumberland House, built there in the time of James I. Arundel Street, running down to the Embankment from the Strand, is so called in memory of Arundel H

group of buildings put up there in the middle of the eighteenth century by the two famous brother architects Robe

us an idea of how the district must have changed since then. Farm Street, in Mayfair, has its name from a farm which was still there in the middle of the eighteenth century. The ground is

entury Londoner could come back and talk to us to-day he would not know what we meant by this word. For the great system of underground railways to which it refers was only made in the later years of the nineteenth century. The Twopenny Tube was the name of one of the first lines of thes

oo Railway, because it runs from Baker Street to Waterloo. It certainly makes us thi