The Church and Parish of St. Bride, Fleet Street. By
E. C. Hawkins, MA. (Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co.)—Mr. Hawkins has a very interesting subject in his parish of St. Bride. Every pariah is interesting in its way ; but it is not in every parish that there has been, to name one of the things with which Mr. Hawkins deals, any- thing like the Fleet Prison, with its liberties and the strange institu- tion of the Fleet marriages. The church—dating, of coarse, from after the Fire, though there is at least one trace of the older building —is a fine example of Sir Christopher Wren's style. Samuel Richard- son was buried there in 1761, by the side of his first wife. Another famous printer, Wynken de Worde, had been buried in one of the chapels of the earlier building. Bridewell is another famous belonging of the parish. First a royal palace, it was given to the City by Edward VI., as a place to "train up the beggar's child to virtuous industry, to succour the aged, diseased, decayed, and in- digent, and to compel the wretched street-walker and vagabond to honest labour." It is still used as a place for detaining refractory apprentices, over whom the Chamberlain of the City has jurisdiction. The Fleet marriages were at their height in the early part of the eighteenth century. Mr. Hawkins tells us that "between October 19th, 1704, and February 12th, 1705, no fewer than 2,975 of them were performed without banns or licence." (It must be understood that these dates must be reckoned by the old fashion, and include about sixteen months.) This gives 2,231 for the year, which would be the normal proportion for a population of 300,000. The whole of London could not have then contained twice as many, for in 1801 its popula- tion was lees than a million. Of course, the country contributed not a few couples. On the whole, we get the astonishing result that about a twentieth part of all the marriages in England took place in the Fleet. When we come to another statement, which Mr. Hawkins gives for what it is worth, that one John Garnham "is said to have married 6,000 persons in one year," our faith is staggered. The proportion is increased to about a fifteenth, and that by one man; and there were others doing a brisk trade. There must be something wrong about these figures. One curious incident of the trade was that marriage registers, with blank spaces, were for sale. Abatis was another undesirable institution of the St. Bride's of the past. The rights of sanctuary were abolished in 1697. Booksellers and printers have always abounded in the parish. We hear of one " Dionysia Bookbindere " as residing in it in 1311. It now contains the head- quarters of most of the London "dailies," and of several important "weeklies," Punch among the number.. Here, too, were some of the earliest banking-houses. It has bad famous coffee-houses. Some of these still exist, though much changed from their old state. Mr. Hawkins has made a most readable pamphlet out of his subject.
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