ROUND ABOUT PICCADILLY.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

IN the olden times a universal fear was felt, both by the governors and the governed, that the large cities would overgrow themselves; and we find in the reign of Elizabeth, and even as late as that of Charles II., that various Acts of Parliament were passed in the vain attempt to prevent the increase of buildings in London. The erection of new houses was prohibited and new residents were not permitted to arrive. Country gentlemen were forbidden by proclamation to leave their family seats and take up their residence in the City; and these edicts were not allowed to become a dead letter, for, in 1632, a squire from the county of Sussex, and, moreover, a bachelor, was fined 1,000l. for stopping too long in London. Thomas Fuller showed himself wiser than his contemporaries when he wrote thus of the inevitable increase of the metropolis :-"Some have suspected the declining of the lustre thereof, because of late it vergeth so much westward, increasing in buildings in Covent Garden, &c. But by their favour (to disprove their fear) it will be found to burnish round about to every point of the compass, with new structures daily added thereunto." 1

The framers of these proclamations and Acts of Parlia

'FULLER'S Worthies, ed. 1840, vol. ii. p. 333.

ment would have cause for surprise now if they were allowed to walk again in the streets of London. If, in the sixteenth century, when it consisted of little more than the present "City," they thought it too large, what would their thoughts of it be now in the nineteenth? As some excuse for what appears to us an absurd fear, we must remember that London formerly was much larger in proportion to the other cities of the empire than it is at present.

Notwithstanding these restrictive laws, London continued to increase, and the City was gradually joined to Charing Cross and Westminster. The highway of the Strand was paved about 1385 from Temple Bar to the Savoy, but it went no farther till the latter part of Elizabeth's reign, when the grand old mansions by the side of the Thames were still considered out of town.

We constantly express surprise at the present rapid growth of the outskirts of London, but the transformation of the fields of St. James's into squares and streets was not less surprising; and when the relative numbers of population are considered, the increase of London in Tyburnia, Belgravia, and the outskirts, during the present century, can hardly be considered as exceeding in comparison the enormous growth of the whole western part of London, which began soon after the Restoratlon.

On the return of Charles II. to take possession of his kingdom, the noblemen and gentlemen who followed him found their old mansions unsuited to their wants, which had been largely increased by long residence abroad, and at once a strong tide set in towards the west. Lord Clarendon was one of the first to change his habitation, and he built his new house looking down upon the palace of St. James's. Large numbers followed him, and streets arose as if by magic.

2

As shown by Macaulay in his History of England, the population of London in the days of Charles II. was seventeen times greater than the population of Bristol or Norwich, which towns were then second in importance to the capital. It is now little more than six times the population of Manchester or Liverpool.

The district chosen for illustration in the following pages extends from the Haymarket in the east, to Grosvenor Place in the west, and Piccadilly may be considered as forming its backbone or main thoroughfare. The whole of this part of London was, previous to the Restoration, nothing but fields, and the streets, which are now crowded with traffic, were then but lanes or roads, running between green hedges.

If we look at Faithorne's map of London (1658), we shall find a country road marked "from Knightsbridge unto Piccadilly Hall,"-this is the present Piccadilly. South of this is a road from Charing Cross to St. James's Palace, now called Pall Mall, with two rows of trees on its north side in St. James's Fields, and an alley where was played the game of Pall Mall. St. James's Park is shown with trees dotted about it, and Goring House, and another house unnamed, at its west end, with the Mulberry Garden behind them. St. James's Street has a few houses at the south end of its east side, and its west side is occupied by the gardens of Barkeshire House. The Haymarket has a hedge on the west side, and walls on the east side. A few houses stand at the south-west corner, where it joins Pall Mall, and the GamingHouse is at the north-east corner. Opposite is Windmill Street, with houses on both sides, all the way up to "the way to Paddington," now Oxford Street.

We shall start upon our stroll along Piccadilly, turning into the streets which lie to the north and south of it, and then pass into Hyde Park and return along the Green and St. James's Parks to Pall Mall and St. James's Square. From this place we soon arrive again at the spot from which we first set out.

Divisions of this sort must necessarily be arbitrary. The boundaries of a parish cannot well be followed, because we should then have to take one side of a street and to leave out the other; and so, when the arbitrary line has to be drawn, the reader must not be too critical and severe upon the writer who draws it.

Mr. Cunningham supposes that there were two places of

entertainment close together, namely, Piccadilly Hall and Shaver's Hall, but this I think very improbable. I believe that Piccadilly Hall was a private house and not a public place, but that the district, having obtained the name of Piccadilly, the Gaming-House was also called Piccadilly. The following are my reasons for forming this opinion:

Piccadilly Hall belonged to Robert Baker, of the parish of St. Martin's -in-the-Fields, whose last will was dated April 14, 1623, and the house was still in the possession of his widow in 1641 ; but in June, 1631, we find by the Calendar of State Papers that Lady Shrewsbury occupied the house: "June 24, 1631. Richard Wainwright and others to Sec. Dorchester. This day at Lady Shrewsbury's house, at Piccadilly Hall, in the parish of St. Martin, there was mass said by Capt. George Popham, priest. Richard Wainwright apprehended him, with the assistance of Edward Corbett, constable of the parish; carrying him to the AttorneyGeneral at Somerset House, he made an escape, and was received by the friars."3 Piccadilly was originally the name of a district, and not of a street; thus the Haymarket was described as being situated in Piccadilly, and so also was Windmill Street.

The origin of the name appears to be wrapt in impenetrable mystery, and the various attempts to solve it are nearly all alike unsatisfactory. The earliest conjectural etymology is to be found in Thomas Blount's Glossographia, of which the first edition was published in 1656. The passage is as follows:-" Pickadil (à Belg. Pickedillekens, i.e. Lacinia, Teut. Pickedel), the round hem, or the several divisions set together about the skirt of a garment, or other thing; also a kinde of stiff collar, made in fashion of a Band. Hence, perhaps, that famous ordinary near St. James, called Pickadilly, took denomination; because it was then the outmost or skirt house of the suburbs that way. Others say it took name from this that one Higgins, a tailor, who built it, got most of his estate by Pickadilles, which, in the last age, were much worn

3 Cal. of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1631-33, p. 89.

in England." In the second and later editions of his work, Blount omitted the passage which contained what was apparently his own conjecture, viz., "because it was then the outmost or skirt house of the suburbs that way." This is, I think, the most probable of the two derivations, for Higgins and his collars appear to have been a pure myth. We do not find any mention of them elsewhere, and we know that the house was built by Robert Baker, in whose possession, and in that of his wife, it remained for some years. It is possible, though not probable, that Baker may have had something to do with piccadils, but there is absolutely not a single tittle of evidence to connect the name of the place with that of the collar. Another theory has been started of late years, which is, that the name relates to the position of the ground on which the place is built, that it is, in fact, a peaked hill; and in support of this, it is said that the various places in the country that bear the same name are all on high ground.* This is a very unsatisfactory derivation, although it is certainly curious that there should be places in Wales, Lancashire, and the Chiltern Hills, with so strange a name as Piccadilly.

A question of much importance in the discussion is whether Piccadilly Hall took its name from the district, or the district from the Hall. In Cunningham's Handbook it is stated that the earliest mention of the place is to be found in the first edition of Gerarde's Herbal, which is dated as early as 1597. Now, had this been the case, it would have been a strong argument in favour of the former of the two hypotheses, because it is an earlier date than that of the first mention either of the collar or of the Gaming-House. I have looked for the passage referred to in the first edition of Gerarde; but it is not to be found there. It is, however, in the second and third editions, edited by Thomas Johnson, which are dated respectively 1633 and 1636, and occurs in the chapter on the Buglosse, in the following words :-"These do grow in gardens everywhere. The Lang de Beefe growes wilde in many places, as betweene Redriffe and Deptford, by the

Notes and Queries, 3rd Series, vol. 9. 1866.