A FEW years ago, it seems, a tree grew, but even that no longer marks the spot, where stood of old the famous PAUL'S CROSS, towards the eastern extremity of the vacant space on the north side of the Cathedral. The greater part of this space appears to have been a burying-ground, and no doubt the chief one belonging to the City, from the most ancient times-from the erection of the first sacred edifice, whether Christian church or heathen temple, on the mount now crowned by St. Paul's, or possibly from the origin of London itself. Sir Christopher Wren, who dug deep into all parts of the ground in laying the foundations of the present cathedral, discovered no indications to confirm the tradition that the site had been originally occupied by a temple of Jupiter or Diana; the precious fragments of bucks' horns, ox-heads, and boars' tusks, that had so charmed the antiquaries, had all disappeared, or become transmuted, like fairy coin, into much more worthless ware-into bits of wood and shreds of pottery. But he found under the choir of the old building a presbyterium, or semicircular chancel, of Roman architecture-a structure of Kentish rubble-stone, cemented with their inimitable mortar-which proved that the first Christian church had been the work of the Roman colonists; and he also clearly ascertained that the northern part of the churchyard had been a depository for the dead from the Roman and British

D

times. Layer upon layer, there they lay-and still lie-the successive possessors of the land; uppermost, the graves of later generations; next under them, our Saxon forefathers from the days of Ethelbert and St. Austin, some more honourably and securely entombed within sarcophagi formed of great upright and horizontal flags, most embedded in cavities lined with chalk-stones-in either case the one enclosure serving for both grave and coffin; then, the Britons of the period between the departure of the Romans and the establishment of the Saxons, their dust mixed with great numbers of ivory and box-wood pins, about six inches long, the fastenings apparently of the now mouldered shrouds in which the bodies had once been wrapped; and, lowest of all, eighteen feet or more below the surface, other remains such as these last, but interspersed with fragments of Roman urns, revealing the burial-place of "the colony when Romans and Britons lived and died together.""

The churchyard appears to have been first enclosed, and that only in part, by Richard de Beaumeis, who was Bishop of London in the reign of Henry I. But we find no mention of the Cross till long after this time. Yet the earliest notice of it that has come down to us describes proceedings which have all the air of old usage, and, at any rate, are not likely to have originated in the age when we thus first hear of them, or in any preceding one since the Norman Conquest, although they may possibly have been then revived after having been discontinued from the time of that revolution.

Suddenly, in the latter part of the reign of Henry III., during the struggle between the King and the barons-in the midst, we may say, of the birth-throes of English liberty-Paul's Cross rises up before us, the central object of a picture as startling to our preconceptions of the time as of the place. The field of the dead is covered with an excited living throng, an assembly of the people met to pass judgment on their civic rulers, whom the King's minister, speaking from the Cross, charges with extortion and oppression. It is the Comitia of the citizens of

*Parentalia, p. 266.

London, held in their Forum, around the orator haranguing them from the Rostra.

It appears that about the beginning of the year

1258, Henry, having found, or pretending to have found, in the royal wardrobe at Windsor, a roll of parchment sealed with green wax, and filled with a number of accusations against the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London, though no one could tell whence it came, commanded John Mansell, who is called one of his Chief Justices, forthwith to summon a Folkmote at Paul's Cross, and there to read the document to the citizens. The word is Saxon-Folkmote, a people-meeting, as Witenagemote is a legislative assembly, a meeting of wise men or counsellors. And the thing also was probably a relic of the old Saxon freedom, though whether now, or when first revived, if ever lost, no record tells. But the assembling of a folkmote on this occasion is not mentioned as if it were something unheard of, or even new to that time. Only one day's notice is stated to have been given: the day was the 26th of January, the morrow of the festival of St. Paul; and when Mansell made his appearance, accompanied by the Earl of Gloucester, the other Chief Justice Henry de Bathon, and others of the King's Council, both the people and their magistrates were there to meet him. Mansell, having first ordered the charges to be read aloud, so that all might hear them, then called upon the people to inform him who those rich men were that, as asserted by the unknown accuser, had been favoured in the collection of the late tallage exacted by the king from his good subjects of the city of London; and whether the mayor and aldermen had applied any part of the tax to their own use. The old civic chronicler, Fabian, himself an alderman, and a great venerator of his order, makes the impeached functionaries, in indignant consciousness of innocence, to have shown the boldest of fronts-in fact to have driven Mansell from the field with disgrace; and, certainly, the extortion and oppression have quite as much the look of being on the king's part as on their's. At least, if they had been fleecing their fellowcitizens of the commonalty, his majesty was clearly resolved that, by hook or by crook, he should have his share of the plunder. And first he set to work by crook, making loud profession of his regard for nothing so much as the rights and interests of the most numerous class of his subjects, and seeking to effect his despotic purpose by the aid of the most popular institution in the country, perhaps that he might both gain his end and damage the institution at the same time. In the course of the affair, which it does not belong to our present subject to relate in detail, several other public meetings were held both at Paul's Cross and in the Guildhall, at which the people were addressed by Mansell and others of the King's ministers. On one of these occasions it is insinuated that the multitude which gathered around Paul's Cross did not properly deserve to be considered a meeting of London citizens-of those entitled to attend a folkmote; many strangers, or foreigners, non-freemen, and even servants or bondmen, having joined the assemblage. An irregularity this which would be apt to occur when there was anything very interesting to be discussed or transacted at these

popular open-air diets. In the end, after the accused aldermen, deserted by their fellow-citizens, had been coerced or terrified into the payment of handsome sums by way of ransom or bribe, the business was settled by the calling of another folkmote at Paul's Cross, on the day before the feast of St. Leonard, at which the king himself was present, with the chief men of his court; and where such of the aldermen as had not previously made their peace were formally taken back into the royal favour, and reinstated in their offices-Henry even professing to be now satisfied that there never had been any ground for the charges made against them! Thus the sponge, having been squeezed, was set down again, nothing the worse, in its old position, to suck up more moisture for the next occasion.

But whatever may have been the amount of practical abuse, we see from this account that, in so far at least as concerned the city of London, the government of England, in the thirteenth century, was by no means either a pure despotism, or even a monarchy merely counterbalanced by an aristocracy. There was also a living and active element of democracy in the constitution, which, however unenlightened, yet required to be constantly managed and propitiated, and served at any rate to preserve the instinct of popular liberty in men's minds and hearts throughout the worst times. It may be presumed, both from the name and from the notices that have been preserved of its proceedings, that the London Folkmote was composed of the entire free commonalty of the city-of all that portion of the male inhabitants constituting what was properly called the Folk or People, as distinguished from the resident strangers or natives of other countries (the Metoikoi, as they would have been called at Athens), and also from persons in a servile state, whose condition throughout England at this date much more nearly resembled that of the slaves among the Greeks and Romans than that of those we now call servants. It was evidently not an assembly of delegates, like the Common Council of the city at the present day; but a body like that now called a Common Hall, or assembly of the whole Livery or freemen, of which, indeed, the Folkmote seems to have been the original form. The district meetings of the Livery are still called Wardmotes, as they appear to have been in the time of Henry III.*

Fabian records another Folkmote, or Folmoot, as having been called at Paul's Cross by King Henry III., after the feast of Candlemas, 1259: "where," says the chronicler, "he in proper person, with the King of Almain (that is, his brother Richard, Earl of Cornwall, who had got himself many years before this elected King of the Romans, or Emperor of Germany), the Archbishop of Can

* Mansell, the chief justice, whose high-handed style of going through with his work, and skill withal in wielding the fierce democracy, Henry found so serviceable in the above contest with the London magistrates, was, like many of the most eminent statesmen and lawyers of those days, a churchman. He is sometimes designated the King's Chaplain; but for munificence of spirit, as well as for the place which he held in the King's favour, Mansell may be styled the Wolsey of the thirteenth century. The following notice is given by Stow, in his 'Survey,' on the authority of Matthew Paris :-" In the year of Christ 1256, the fortieth of Henry III., John Mansell, the King's counsellor and a priest, did invite to a stately dinner the kings and queens of England and Scotland, Edward the King's son, earls, barons, and knights, the Bishop of London, and divers citizens; whereby his guests did grow to such a number that his house at Tothill could not receive them, but that he was forced to set up tents and pavilions to receive his guests; whereof there was such a multitude, that seven hundred mess of meat did not serve for the first dinner." In his Annals,' Stow adds-" The like dinner had not been made by any chaplain before." Mansell is affirmed, in the Chronicle of Mailros, to have held three hundred benefices in

the English Church.

terbury, and many other nobles came, when the king commanded unto the mayor that every stripling of the age of twelve years and above should before his alderman be sworn, the day following, to be true to the king, and to his heirs, kings of England, and that the gates of the city were [should be] kept with armed men, as before by the King of Romans was devised." Henry was at this time preparing, under the advice and with the support of his brother, to break through the trammels imposed upon him by the assembly of the barons held about a year before at Oxford, commonly called the Mad Parliament. The next year he sent to Rome for an absolution from the oath he had then been compelled to take; and in 1262, on the second Sunday in Lent, "he caused to be read at Paul's Cross a bull obtained of Pope Urban the Fourth, as an absolution for him and for all his that were sworn to maintain the articles made in the parliament of Oxford."+

From a writ of quo warranto of the year 1287, the 15th of Edward I., it appears, according to Dugdale, that the ground on which Paul's Cross stood, described as lying eastward from the church, and as that on which the citizens of London had been anciently wont to hold their Folkmotes, was claimed as belonging to the king, and had only newly come to be used for the interment of the dead. The people, it is stated, used to be summoned to the folkmote by the ringing of a bell, hanging in a tower which stood on the ground. This tower is conjectured by Dugdale to be the same that is mentioned in the time of Henry I., in a charter of Bishop Richard de Beaumeis, in which the bishop grants to one Hugh, the schoolmaster, and his successors, the habitation at the corner of the turret where William, the dean, had already placed him by his (the bishop's) command; "doubtless," says Dugdale, writing in 1658, "the place where the schoolmaster of Paul's school dwelleth at this day." This tower was called the Clochier, or Bell Tower; and in another document of the beginning of the reign of Henry III., which Dugdale quotes, it is described, under the Latin name of the Clokarium, as situated in the corner of the greater cemetery of St. Paul, towards the Forumfor such is the classical term here applied to the part of the churchyard appropriated to the holding of the Folkmote. Stow, in whose younger days this tower was still standing, gives the following account of it:-"Near unto this school (St. Paul's), on the north side thereof, was, of old time, a great and high Clochier, or Bell-house, four-square, builded of stone; and in the same a most strong frame of timber, with four bells, the greatest that I have heard: these were called Jesus bells, and belonged to Jesus Chapel; but I know not by whose gift. The same had a great spire of timber, covered with lead, with the image of St. Paul on the top; but was pulled down by Sir Miles Partridge, knight, in the reign of Henry the Eighth. The common speech then was, that he did set one hundred pounds upon a cast at dice against it, and so won the said Clochier and bells of the king; and then causing the bells to be broken as they hung, the rest was pulled down." "This man," adds Stow, with evident satisfaction, "was afterward executed on the Tower-hill, for matters concerning the Duke of Somerset, the 5th of Edward the Sixth."+

In 1285, two years before the issue of the above-mentioned writ of quo warranto, the churchyard was, apparently for the first time, completely walled round,

* See also Stow's Annals, eod. an.

† lb.

↑ Survey.