When a fire broke out in the Great Synagogue in the 1750s, Chaim Jacob Samuel Falk, the eighteenth-century mystic known as the Ba’al Shem of London (master of the secret names of God), is alleged to have extinguished it by inscribing on the jamb of the entrance the four Hebrew letters of God’s most-used name (Yahweh in English), supposedly causing the wind to change direction and the blaze to die down.
→ Falk in the East End, p. 55
HOLY TRINITY PRIORY ALDGATE, Mitre Square
The priory which opened in 1109 and soon became the grandest religious house in London, was the scene of one of the first recorded murders in London history. In 1530 Brother Martin, a priory monk, stabbed to death a woman praying at the high altar and then killed himself. The body of Catherine Eddowes, one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, was found on the same site more than 350 years later. Some Ripper experts believe Eddowes was killed elsewhere and the corpse placed there as part of a still unexplained ritualistic agenda.
After Henry VIII passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534 declaring himself head of the Church of England, he closed down establishments such as Holy Trinity. The priory surrendered its authority to the Crown by ‘mutual agreement’ and its incumbents were forced to embark on secular life. The buildings lay in ruins for some years and, even when the owners offered the stone free to any man who would take it down, there were no takers.
JEWRY STREET
The street was home in the sixteenth century to the first Jewish community allowed to live in the capital since Edward I expelled the Jews from Britain in 1291. Its number included Rodrigo Lopez, physician to Elizabeth I, who was once accused of participating in a plot to poison the queen and on whom Shakespeare partly based Shylock. Most of the new immigrant Jews came from Spain and Portugal, where they had been forced to convert to Christianity and were known by the insulting name marranos (Spanish for ‘swine’) due to their practice of hanging pigs outside their homes to show they had converted to Catholicism. After Oliver Cromwell officially allowed the Jews to return to the capital in 1656, this eastern edge of the City became the main centre of Jewish immigration into London. Their first new synagogue, on Creechurch Lane, has long been demolished.
JOHN WESLEY’S CONVERSION, Aldersgate Street by Ironmongers’ Hall
John Wesley, the early eighteenth-century preacher who founded Methodism, experienced an epiphany at Hall House, Nettleton Court on 24 May 1738. He later wrote that:
In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.
→ Wesley in Bolton, p. 220
THE MONUMENT, Fish Street Hill
The tall Doric column just north of London Bridge was built as a memorial to the 1666 Great Fire of London but has many religious connections. It was designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke in 1671–7, and decorated by the artist Caius Gabriel Cibber during his daytime parole from debtors’ prison. He designed a relief depicting a female figure (London) grieving in front of burning buildings to recall the fallen Jerusalem from the Book of Lamentations ‘sitting solitary as a widow [that] weepeth sore in the night, her tears on her cheeks’.
Because so many people believed Catholics were responsible for the Fire, the Monument was given an inscription in 1681 (not removed until 1831) which blamed the disaster on the ‘treachery and malice of the Popish faction, in order to the effecting their horrid plot for the extirpating the Protestant religion and English liberties, and to introduce Popery and Heresy’. And just in case there was anyone who hadn’t fully received the message, another inscription by Farriner’s bakery, where the blaze began, stated that ‘here by permission of heaven hell broke loose upon this Protestant City from the malicious hearts of barbarous Papists . . .’
A best-selling pamphlet published at that time urged Protestants to go to the top of the tower and imagine the consequences of popish rule: ‘The whole town in flames, and amongst the distracted crowd, troops of Papists ravishing their [the Protestants’] wives and daughters, dashing out the brains of their little children against the walls, plundering their houses and cutting their throats in the name of heretic dogs.’
The Monument is the tallest stone column in the world, its height, 202 foot, being the same as the distance between it and the baker’s shop on nearby Pudding Lane where the Fire started. The 202-foot measurement was not randomly chosen. The Monument is positioned so that an observer looking east in the morning and west in the afternoon on the day of the summer solstice can see the sun sitting directly on top of the flaming urn of gilt bronze that crowns its top. Ingeniously the Monument also stands a distance of 2,000 cubits (a biblical measurement often used by architects wanting to imbue their buildings with ‘divine protection’) from Christ Church Spitalfields, designed by Christopher Wren’s assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor, and 2,000 cubits from the western end of Wren’s own St Paul’s Cathedral.
MUGGLETONIANS’ BIRTHPLACE, Bishopsgate
A seventeenth-century sect of radical puritans now practically extinct, the Muggletonians were established by Lodowick Muggleton, a Bishopsgate-born tailor, in 1651. That year he claimed that God had appointed him and his cousin, John Reeve, the Two Last Witnesses, as foretold in the verse in the Book of Revelation: ‘I will give power unto my two witnesses and they shall prophesy one thousand two hundred and threescore days clothed in sackcloth.’
The main tenets of the Muggletonians’ creed were:
1. God and the man Jesus Christ are synonymous expressions.
2. The devil and human reason are synonymous.
3. The soul dies and rises again with the body.
4. Heaven is a place above the stars.
5. At present hell is nowhere, but this earth, darkened after the last judgement, will be hell.
6. Angels are the only beings of pure reason.
Reeve was obsessed with the notion of mankind’s impending doom, and claimed he knew whom God had chosen to be saved. He and Muggleton were sent to Bridewell Prison for cursing a vicar, Mr Goffin, who subsequently died. The teachings of the two founders were handed down from generation to generation, but as the Muggletonians did not believe in proselytising, the sect slowly died out. For instance, in 1697 some 250 supporters attended Muggleton’s funeral, but by 1803 they were down to just over a hundred members, and a hundred years later only seventeen attended the monthly meeting. According to an article in the Times Literary Supplement, in 1974 a handful of believers were left in Kent. By the end of the decade there were only two remaining Muggletonians who by now may have verified tenet Number 4.
→ The Quakers, p. 226
OLD JEWRY
Now a nondescript City street of company offices, this was the centre of medieval Jewish life in London, when the street was known as Jewry. A Jewish community began to take shape here after William the Conqueror invited Jews from Normandy to London in the 1070s to help him improve Britain’s primitive trading practices. The king needed an advanced monetary system – payments made in coin not through barter – and such knowledge was the preserve of Jews, barred from most professions and public office throughout the continent but experts in money, commerce and finance because the Church forbade Christians from practising usury.
According to most modern histories there were no Jews in London, or even England, before the Norman Conquest. However, Jews had been coming to Britain since King Solomon sent tin traders from the Holy Land to negotiate with the miners of Cornwall some time around the year 960