The Wards of Old London: Holborn - London's Underworld

A visitor to London, exploring the Ward of Farringdon Without, and walking in a south-westerly direction along West Smithfield, arrives at Holborn Viaduct. He or she is, though there are few clues to this today, entering the course of the Fleet River, which flows south, from Hampstead and Highgate, to join the Thames at Blackfriars. The viaduct itself is the latest version of a bridge that has existed since Roman times, carrying Watling Street out from Newgate towards Westminster, the West Country, and, ultimately, Wales.

Holborn Viaduct. Photo: Chris Downer (licensed under CCA).

The stretch of Watling Street that passes through the Ward of Farringdon Without is named Holborn and, to the west, High Holborn. The coronation processions of Medieval and Early Modern monarchs passed along it, on their way from the Tower of London to Westminster Abbey, but the lanes and alleys leading off to the north and south had very different stories to tell. King Edward V, in 1483, gave orders to the City authorities " ... to eschewe the Stynkinge and Orrible Synne of lechery" in the district, whilst James I, in 1622, complained of " ... disorderly houses in Saffron Hill" (one of the roads leading north from the eastern end of Holborn), which "of longe tyme hath bene and is still much pestered with divers immodest lascivious and shameless weomen generally reputed for notorious common whores."

Staple Inn, Holborn, in 1866 (image is in the Public Domain). The building, which dates to 1585, and in which wool was once weighed and taxed, still stands.

Leather Lane, leading north from Holborn (image is in the Public Domain). 

The entertainments to be had in the area were not exclusively of a heterosexual nature. In 1726, the City authorities raided the home of a coffee-shop keeper named Margaret Clap, in Field Lane (very close to where Holborn Viaduct is today). It had been reported to them as a "molly house," a gathering place for homosexual men. They found forty men on the premises, three of whom were subsequently executed for sodomy. "Mother Clap," as she was known, was not operating a brothel, merely providing beds, and drinks which she fetched from a nearby tavern. She was, nonetheless, pilloried, and died later in the year.

The molly house never re-opened, but Field Lane retained its low-life reputation. It features in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, as the location of one of Fagin's dens:

"Near to the spot on which Snow Hill and Holborn meet, there opens, upon the right-hand side as you come out of the City, a narrow and dismal alley, leading to Saffron Hill. In its filthy shops are exposed for sale huge bunches of pocket-handkerchiefs of all sizes and patterns, for here reside the traders who purchase them from pickpockets."

Field Lane in 1840 (image is in the Public Domain).

Field Lane was swept away in the wave of civic improvements that saw the construction of Holborn Viaduct itself, but the wider area remained a magnet for people whose personal journeys were approaching their unhappy endings.

The Fleet Ditch, close to Field Lane, in 1844 (image is in the Public Domain). 

The opening of Holborn Viaduct in 1869 (image is in the Public Domain).

Many of them ended those journeys in the Shoe Lane Workhouse. Others preferred suicide. One such was the poet, Thomas Chatterton, who had come to London from his native Bristol with high hopes of making his fortune as a writer: he ended his life at the age of eighteen, with arsenic, in his lodgings in Brook Street, in the home of a sack-maker. The tragedy of his life would later be romanticised by more successful poets and artists.  

Street-map showing the location of Shoe Lane Workhouse (image is in the Public Domain). Although he was not an inmate, Thomas Chatterton was buried in its cemetery. 

"The Death of Chatterton," by Henry Wallis, 1856. Image: Tate Britain (Public Domain).

Holborn today is an extension of the modern City of London, a place of jewellery shops, insurance company headquarters, and smart hotels; but there are also taverns, many of which were once frequented by the whores and mollies, the pickpockets and their victims; and by those whose once bright hopes had been dashed, drowning their sorrows with one last drink.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is currently working on The Cheapside Tales, a London-based trilogy of historical novels.

The Wards of Old London: Smithfield - Slaughter and Tournaments

A visitor to London, exploring the Ward of Farringdon Without, and walking north from Saint Bartholomew's Hospital emerges into West Smithfield, a road running north-east to south-west, connecting Aldersgate Street with Holborn. Today, this quarter of London is dominated by Sir Horace Jones's meat market, which opened in 1868. The market sits above a network of tunnels, which made it possible for trains to bring an annual total of 220,000 cattle and 1.5 million sheep into London, to be slaughtered out of the sight, hearing and smell of the city's inhabitants, and the effluvia cleared away, before the cleaned and butchered carcasses were hauled up into the market itself.

Sir Horace Jones's Smithfield Market. Photo: James Ketteringham (image is in the Public Domain).

It had not always been like this. Before the construction of the Victorian market, and the beginning of the railway age, cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, ducks and turkeys were brought on foot to the capital from all corners of England Scotland and Wales. The drovers who brought them did not use the main roads, where the presence of so many animals would have been a considerable nuisance to human travelers: instead they followed a network of tracks, many of which had probably been in use since prehistoric times.

Montgomeryshire drovers, c 1885, National Library of Wales (image is in the Public Domain).

Stone bridge carrying a drovers' track over the River Dylif, Gwynedd. Photo: Tony Edwards (licensed under CCA).

In the pre-Victorian market of Smithfield, beasts were slaughtered and butchered in the open air, having previously been fattened by graziers in Islington or Bermondsey, and driven though the streets of the City itself. By the mid-Nineteenth Century, however, the presence of a beast-market in such close proximity to the metropolis was, in itself, recognised as a public nuisance.

Smithfeld in 1827, by John Greenwood. Image: Mark Annand (licensed under CCA).

"Of all the horrid abominations with which London has been cursed," complained Thomas Maslen, in 1843, "there is not one that can come up to that disgusting place, West Smithfield Market, for cruelty, filth, effluvia, pestilence, impiety, horrid language, danger, and every obnoxious item that can be imagined ... " Charles Dickens was among those who campaigned for its closure, which finally took place in 1855, the market moving out to Islington whilst Jones's state of the art facility was being built.

The last day of Old Smithfield, 1855, Illustrated London News (image is in the Public Domain).

New Smithfield Market in the Nineteenth Century (image is in the Public Domain).

The sale and slaughter of beasts had been carried on at Smithfield at least since the Twelfth Century. Nor was it only animals whose blood was spilled there. It had, in the Middle Ages, and in Early Modern Times, been a place of public execution. Lollards (proto-Protestants who argued for the translation of the Bible into English) were burned at the stake here under Henry V; as were Protestants under Mary I; and the Scottish rebel (or patriot, depending on one's point of view), William Wallace, had been hanged, drawn and quartered at Smithfield in 1305. Here it was, also, that Wat Tyler, the leader of the "Peasants' Revolt," had met his death at the hands of the City's Lord Mayor, in 1381.

Smithfield, as shown on the Agas Map of 1561. Image: Stephencdickson (licensed under CCA).

The death of Wat Tyler, from Les Chroniques de France et de l'Angleterre, by Jean Froissart. Image: British Library (Public Domain). The building in the background may be the Priory of Saint John, Clerkenwell. 

As an area of open ground beyond the City gates, Smithfield was also the venue for Medieval tournaments. The ageing Edward III held a seven day tournament in 1374, in honour of his mistress, Alice Perrers. Richard II held one in 1390, with Geoffrey Chaucer as master of ceremonies: this tournament had been announced by heralds the length and breadth of Europe, ensuring that the greatest knights of France, Flanders, and Germany, as well as England and Scotland, came to Smithfield to compete. Edward IV held a joust in 1467, as part of his strategy to win the support of Londoners for his regime.

Knights competing in Edward IV's joust at Smithfield in 1467 (image is in the Public Domain).

Whilst the wholesale meat market at Smithfield continues to function today, it does so on a much smaller scale than was the case only a few decades ago. The future of many of the area's historic buildings is currently uncertain, although the proposed relocation of the Museum of London to the former market (perhaps opening as early as 2021, if funding can be secured, offers some hope of sustainable regeneration.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is currently working on The Cheapside Tales, a London-based trilogy of historical novels.

A History of the World in 50 Novels. 45 - "Birds of Passage," by Brian Castro

The Australian continent was among the last significant land masses on Earth to be "discovered" and colonised by Europeans, beginning with the voyages of the Dutchman, Willem Zamszoon, in 1606; and the English navigator, James Cook, who claimed the territory for the British Crown in 1788. Unlike other territories, such as New Zealand and Hawaii, Australia was developed by the British as a series of penal colonies, the "First Fleet" arriving in Botany Bay in 1788.

As with these other territories, however, the native population, which, in the case of Australia, had occupied the land for more than forty thousand years, was soon devastated by the diseases brought by the colonists; and the task of building the infrastructure and developing the economy of a new nation was too great to be accomplished by the European settlers on their own. The Australian colonies drew in migrant labour and, as in New Zealand and Hawaii, many of the immigrants were Chinese, driven from their homeland by a combination of poverty and political upheaval.

The discovery of gold in Victoria and New South Wales, in the mid-Nineteenth Century, became a major pull-factor. It is estimated that, in 1855, 11,493 Chinese immigrants arrived in Melbourne alone. Almost all of these were young men, keen to make their fortune (which few did), and return home (in Victoria's Bendigo Goldfield, in 1861, there were 5367 Chinese men recorded, and only to women).

Bendigo, a sketch-map of the newly discovered gold-field, William Sandback, 1851 (image is in the Public Domain).

Gold diggings at Ararat, Victoria, 1854, by Edward Roper. State Library of New South Wales (image is in the Public Domain).

Clashes broke out between Chinese prospectors, and those of English, Scottish and Irish ancestry, who, ironically, now considered themselves to be "native" Australians. The Chinese were regarded as better organised and harder working, but were also accused of being dirty, spreading disease, and "stealing" white women.

Anti-Chinese cartoon of 1886, National Library of Australia (image is in the Public Domain).

Anti-Chinese cartoon of 1886, National Library of Australia (image is in the Public Domain).

Banner used in anti-Chinese protests and riots at Lambing Flats, New South Wales, 1860-61 (image is in the Public Domain).

Australia's gold-rush was as short-lived as its counterparts in New Zealand, and those Chinese immigrants who did not return to China (as many did), found themselves a minority, frequently discriminated against in education and employment. The beginning of the Twentieth Century saw the implementation of the "White Australia" policy, with support from successive state and federal governments of both the right and the left. Its legacy persisted into the 1970s, and arguably still reverberates in aspects of Australian culture and politics today.

"White Australia" badge, 1910, produced by the "Australian Natives' Association" (image is in the Public Domain).

Brian Castro's novel, Birds of Passage, tells the story of an Australian-born Chinese man, Seamus O'Young (Sham Oh Yung) struggling to find his identity in post-Second World War Sydney. He suffers very modern forms of discrimination, but also discovers papers relating to his Nineteenth Century ancestor, Lo Yun Shan, who made the journey from China's Pearl River Delta to Australia in the 1850s, and eventually returned home, leaving his son in the care of his mother, a woman of Irish heritage.

"My passport lies open on the table. Its empty pages marked with the word VISAS tease my imagination. My stub of a pencil trembles over them for it is here that I will begin my journey. Beside me I have the fragments of a journal. I found them a long time ago, stuck to my memory like the remnants of a dream. I have read and re-read those words, translated and re-translated them, deciphering the strokes of the Chinese characters, building up their meaning, constructing and re-constructing their sense. I feel the closeness of the situation the author is describing; I feel I am the counterpart of this man who was writing more than a century ago."

"I had to go for an interview. They were undecided about whether I was capable of being a teacher. They wanted to give me a reading test. (I later discovered that this was only given to foreigners) ... In the city I went to a bookstore and browsed among the shelves to kill time; I bought a copy of 'The Trial' by Franz Kafka ... I was called first ... 'Please read from the book in front of you' ... The heading at the top of the page said 'The Yellow Race.' I began to read. 'Before the discovery of gold there were relatively few of the Celestials in Australia. However, in the fifties, the yellow tide threatened to engulf the country. The white race was partially to blame for spreading rumours in Chinese ports that fortunes could be made here ...'"

The stories of the two men, descendant and ancestor, immigrant and Australian-born, both recounted, for the most part, in the first person, are interwoven, and combine to make up a poignant narrative of the search for individual identity in a nation that has yet to settle on is own, or to find a reconciliation with its past.

Australia Day, 2014 (Chinese Australians make up around 4% of the country's population. Photo: Chris Phutully (licensed under CCA).

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is currently working on The Cheapside Tales - a London-based trilogy of historical novels.

"Abhorred Erichtho" - Witchcraft and Necromancy from Rome to the Renaissance

In my Halloween blog-post last year, I introduced the ancient Roman witches, Canidia and Sagana, and suggested that they might well have had counterparts in Roman London. Roman literature, however, presents us with an even more terrifying witch, in the person of Erichtho, first referred to, it would seem, by Ovid, in his Heroides. Ovid places her in Thessaly, a rural province of Greece which seems to have been infamous for witchcraft long before his own time in the First Century BC.

The witch, Erichtho, by John Hamilton Mortimer (1740-79). Licensed under CCA.

Erichtho plays a much more prominent role in the work of a later poet, Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (Lucan), the nephew of the philosopher, statesman and dramatist, Seneca. Lucan's epic poem, Pharsalis, deals with the Roman Civil Wars of the First Century BC. In the poem, Sextus Pompeius, the disreputable son of the revered statesman and soldier, Pompey the Great, consults the witch on the eve of his father's defeat at the hands of Julius Caesar. She searches a battlefield for the corpse of a recently slain soldier, which she reanimates, to help her predict the future.

Denarius of Sextus Pompeius, depicting the lighthouse of Messina, and the monster, Scylla, believed to live in the straits. Photo: Classical Numismatic Group (www.cngcoins.com); licensed under CCA.

The Straits of Messina, between Italy and Sicily, where Sextus Pompeius had his naval base. The tidal flows are thought to have given rise to the legends of Scylla and Charybdis. Photo: NASA (image is in the Public Domain). 

"Sextus, unworthy son of worthy sire,
Who soon upon the waves that Scylla guards,
Sicilian pirate, exile from his home,
Stained by his deeds of shame the fights he won
Could bear delay no more; his feeble soul,
Sick of uncertain fate, by fear compelled,
Forecast the future: yet consulted not
The shrine of Delos, nor the Pythian caves ...
Abhorred Erichtho, fiercest of the race,
Spurned for their piety, and yet viler art
Practiced in novel form ...
She burned the fruitful growth, and with her breath
Poisoned the air else pure ...
 ... At length the witch
Picks out her victim with pierced throat agape
Fit for her purpose. Gripped by pitiless hook
O'er rocks she drags him to the mountain cave
Accursed by her fell rites that shall restore
The dead man's life ...

 ... Then the blood
Grew warm and liquid, and with softening touch
Cherished the stiffened wounds and filled the veins,
Till throbbed once more the slow returning pulse
And every fibre trembled, as with death
Life was commingled. Then, not limb by limb,
With toil and strain, but rising at a bound
Leaped from the earth erect the living man."

Erichtho reanimating the corpse. British Museum (image is in the Public Domain).

Erichtho is mentioned by Dante, in his Inferno, from which it is reasonably clear that he has read Lucan, as well as Ovid, but it was with the rise of printing in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries that the works of these classical authors found a wider readership, both in the original Latin, and in translation. Erichtho, together with Canidia and Sagana, is a lineal ancestress of the "weird sisters" of Shakespeare's Macbeth. The circulation of these texts is accompanied by a renewed interest in necromancy and witchcraft: the Oxford English Dictionary first records the word "necromancy" in 1456, and "Halloween" in 1556.

Lucan's Pharsalis, a Latin edition of 1592 (image is in the Public Domain).

Lucan's Pharsalis, frontispiece to a French edition of 1657 (image is in the Public Domain).

Shakespeare's contemporary, John Marston, includes Erichtho herself as a character in his play, Sophonisba, or The Wonder of Women, and transforms her into a sexual predator, luring young men to her bed under cover of darkness, so that they are unaware that they are copulating with a monstrous hag. Although rarely performed today Sophonisba, which premiered at Blackfriars in 1606, was as much a commercial success in its day as many plays by Shakespeare or Ben Jonson.

The image of the witch as both hag and sexual predator, a seducer of men of previously good character, became far more familiar from this time: there were many more witch trials (mostly of women) between 1580 and 1650 than there had been throughout the supposedly "superstitious" Middle Ages. In a Christian world, however, these latter day "witches" had acquired a dimension that the Classical Erichtho, Canidia and Sagana never had: as agents of the Devil in a war for Christian souls.

Witches, by Hans Baldung, 1508 (image is in the Public Domain).

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is currently working on The Cheapside Tales, a London-based trilogy of historical novels.

A History of the World in 50 Novels. 44 - "Hawaii," by James A. Michener

The volcanic islands of the Hawaiian Archipelago are spread out over 1500 miles of the Pacific. They are among the most remote land masses on Earth, and among the most recently settled by humans. The first Polynesian settlers seem to have arrived in around 124 AD, but most indigenous Hawaiians are descended from a later wave of voyagers who set sail from Tahiti in around 1200, bringing with them pigs, chickens and dogs; taro, breadfruit, bananas, coconuts and sugar-cane.

Hawaii from Space. Photo: NASA (image is in the Public Domain). 

A Polynesian double-hulled "vaka," of the sort used in the initial colonisation of Hawaii. Photo: Teinessavaii (licensed under CCA).

Captain James Cook visited the islands in 1778, and went on to lose his life there the following year, in the course of a dispute with the native people. From Cook's crew, and from subsequent interactions with Europeans, the Hawaiians acquired firearms, which were used by King Kamehameha I (1736-1819) in the forcible unification of the disparate island communities under his sovereignty.

The Hawaiian ritual site of Kailua-Kona in 1819, by Jacques Arago (image is in the Public Domain).

Unlike many other territories in the Pacific, Hawaii was not forcibly settled by an imperial power. Protestant missionaries came peaceably from the United States from the 1820s, and, in their wake, came commercial settlers. The American, William Hooper, in 1835, leased 980 acres of land from King Kamehameha III, and developed the islands' first commercial sugar plantation. Others followed, to establish pineapple plantations. Within a few decades, much of Hawaii's land was in the control of a handful of intermarried Haole (white) families, all of them descended either from missionaries or from businessmen from the United States.

A pineapple field near Honolulu in 1907. Photo: California Historical Society (image is in the Public Domain).

Pineapple canning in Hawaii, 1928. Photo: US National Archives & Records Administration, NWDNS-86-G-5F (8) - image is in the Public Domain.

The indigenous population, meanwhile, had been devastated by diseases, including smallpox, measles and chickenpox, brought to the islands by the American settlers, whose plantations became increasingly dependent on immigrant labour. Between 1852 and 1920, 50,000 Chinese, and 200,000 Japanese, men, women and children made their way to Hawaii, the Chinese bringing with them yet another deadly disease, leprosy.

A Chinese family in Honolulu in 1893. Photo: Hawaii State Archives (image is in the Public Domain).

"Plantation," by Joseph Dwight Strong, 1885, showing Japanese labourers in a sugar plantation (image is in the Public Domain) 

By 1893, the indigenous population had become so weakened, and the five largest American companies on the islands so powerful that, with limited assistance from the United States Navy, the commercial interest was able to stage a coup d'etat, deposing the last native Queen, Lili'uokalani. The "Republic of Hawaii" that replaced her monarchy was entirely dominated by white American oligarchs.

Queen Lili'uokalani in 1898 (image is in the Public Domain).

The Provisional Government of Hawaii in 1893. Photo: Hawaii State Archives PP-28-7-012 (image is in the Public Domain).

In 1898, US President William McKinley annexed Hawaii as an overseas territory, appointing one of the oligarchs, Sanford B. Dole, as its first (Republican) governor. During the decades that followed, indigenous, Chinese and Japanese Hawaiians struggled to achieve equality, both politically and in the workplace, with their white neighbours. In 1954, following a wave of strikes and civil disobedience, the stranglehold of the oligarchy was finally broken, the Democrats beating the Republicans in territorial elections. In 1959, Hawaii became the 50th State of the Union, and, in 1993, President Bill Clinton formally apologised for the coup of 1893.

James A. Michener's novel, Hawaii covers the whole period of the islands' human history, from initial settlement down to the time of the book's publication in 1959. Its six inter-related story-lines deal with the environment; and with the lives of several generations of an indigenous family; an American missionary/commercial family; a Chinese family; and a Japanese family; before bringing these stories together in an exploration of post-Second World War Hawaii.

"In 1946, when Nyuk Tsin was ninety-nine years old, a group of sociologists in Hawaii were perfecting a concept hose vague outlines had occupied them for some years, and quietly among themselves they suggested that in Hawaii a new type of man was being developed. He was a man influenced by both the west and the east, a man at home in either the business councils of New York or the philosophical retreats of Kyoto, a man wholly modern and American yet in tune with the ancient and the Oriental. The name they invented for him was the Golden Man."

"In 1946, when the war had ended and Hawaii was about to explode belatedly into the twentieth century, Hoxworth Hale was forty-eight years old; and one morning, when the trade winds had died away and the weather was unbearably sticky, he happened to look into his mirror while shaving, and the thought came to him: 'This year I am as good a man as I shall ever be in this life ... ' as the hot, muggy day closed in on him he was forced to inspect the two areas in which he was no longer so good a man as he once had been. First, there was the gnawing, never-ending pain that started when his son Bromley was shot down during the great fire of Tokyo in 1945, when the air corps practically destroyed the city ... he picked up the thoughts that is son had laid down: 'We live in a web. Sugar cane, Hawaiian ghosts, pineapple, ships, streetcar lines, Japanese labour leaders, Aunt Lucinda's memories.' The web became most tenuous, and at the same time most cruelly oppressive, when it involved the upstairs rooms where several of the great families kept the delicate women whose minds had begun to wander past even the accepted norm, and in one such room Hoxworth's own wife passed her days."

"Hong Kong thought of himself as pure Chinese, for his branch of the family had married only Hakka girls, and whereas there were a good many Kees with Hawaiian and Portuguese and Filipino blood, he had none, a fact of which he was quietly proud. Of course, from past adventures of the Kee hui Hong Kong's ancestors had picked up a good deal of Mongolian blood, and Manchurian, and Tartar, plus a little Japanese during the wars of the early 1600s, plus some Korean via an ancestor who had traveled in that peninsula in 814, augmented by a good deal of nondescript inheritance from tribes who had wandered about southern China from the year 4000 BC on, but nevertheless he thought of himself as pure Chinese, whatever that means."    

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is currently working on The Cheapside Tales, a London-based trilogy of historical novels.

The Wards of Old London: St Bartholomew - Physick and Surgery in the City

A visitor to London, walking up the Great North Road (Aldersgate Street) can take any one of a number of small passages leading to the west, and thus pass from the Ward of Aldersgate Without into that of Farringdon Without. Such a visitor should, however, allow time for the possibility of getting lost in the confusing maze of alleys and passages, with names more evocative than most of the surviving buildings (the area was badly hit by bombing during the Second World War): Half Moon Court; Cloth Fair; Bartholomew Place; before arriving in a quarter of the City that did not entirely survive the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, but did, for the most part, survive the Blitz of the Twentieth.

It seems that, in the Twelfth Century, a man named Rahere, who was certainly both a priest (a Canon of Saint Paul's from 1115) and a courtier (his counsel greatly valued by King Henry I), and who may also, according to some accounts, have been a jester and minstrel at some point in his life, made a pilgrimage to Rome. On the way, he was taken ill, and experienced a vision of Saint Bartholomew, who told him that, on his return to London, he must build a hospital. This he did, in 1123, and the hospital, part of an Augustinian priory dedicated to the saint, was London's first.

The tomb of Rahere, in the Church of Saint Bartholomew the Great. Photo: Mike Dunn (licensed under CCA).

The priory itself, like London's other religious houses, was suppressed under Henry VIII, but he re-established the hospital as a secular institution. Elements of the Medieval priory, however, are preserved in two parish churches, Saint Bartholomew the Great, and Saint Bartholomew the Lesser.

Saint Bartholomew the Great, one of London's best preserved Medieval churches. Photo: David Iliff (licensed under CCA; CC-BY-SA 5.0).

Saint Bartholomew the Lesser. Photo: ChrisO (licensed under GNU).

The professions of medicine ("physick") and surgery ("chirugery") were quite separate from one another in the Medieval and Early Modern eras. The most famous medical director of "Barts," as the hospital is still known, William Harvey (1578-1657), was a physician trained at the Universities of Cambridge and Padua, and laid down rules that chirugians (who learned their trade by apprenticeship) should operate only under the strict supervision of physicians.

William Harvey, by Daniel Myters (1627), National Portrait Gallery (image is in the Public Domain).

Harvey, who acted as personal physician to James I and Charles I, conducted pioneering research into the human circulatory system, and took his students into the nearby slaughterhouses of Smithfield, so that they could observe the parallels between the circulation of blood in humans and animals, as the last drops bled from the bodies of cattle, sheep and pigs. In an age in which human corpses for dissection were hard to come by, each student could examine, in detail, the hearts and other organs of a freshly killed beast.

Harvey's illustration of veins in the human arm. Image: Wellcome Collection (licensed under CCA).

Four generations later, one of the hospital's most eminent surgeons, Percivall Pott (1714-88), noted an unusually high incidence of scrotal cancer in chimney-sweeps, making him the first to identify environmental factors as potential carcinogens.

Percivall Pott, by Edward Hedges, after Nathaniel Dance-Holland (image is in the Public Domain).

The hospital buildings that can be seen today were built in Pott's lifetime, and William Hogarth, one of the leading artists of the day, was commissioned to decorate them with murals.

The main entrance to Bart's Hospital. Photo: Nevilley (licensed under GNU).

William Hogarth's mural of Christ at the Pool of Bethseda. Photo: Nevilley (licensed under GNU.

Plan of Bart's Hospital in 1893. Image: Wellcome Trust (licensed under CCA).

When, back in the Twelfth Century, Henry I had lent his support to Rahere's plan to build a hospital, he also instituted an annual fair within the precincts of the priory, to help with fundraising. "Bartholomew Fair" took place every August, initially over three days, but this increased to two weeks under Charles II: it was a cloth fair, attracting merchants from all across Britain, but it was also an occasion for much rowdy revelry. Because Saint Bartholomew's lay outside the city walls, the gates could be closed at the normal times, containing the revelers without.

Bill for a puppet-show at Bartholomew Fair, 1700. Image, Houghton Library, Harvard University, TS 555.1 (Public Domain).

Bartholomew Fair, 1721. Image: Wellcome Collection, V0014666 (Public Domain).

By 1855, however, with most of the City's gates demolished, this containment was no longer possible. The fair was abolished by the City authorities, but the medical tradition continued, and "Bart's," where the functioning of the human heart was first explained in detail, now supports one of the most important coronary care units in Europe.  

An operation at Bart's in 1908. Photo: Wellcome Collection, L0018253 (licensed under CCA).

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is currently working on The Cheapside Tales, a London-based trilogy of historical novels.