Aldgate was once the easternmost portal of London. Today it's a street 50 yards long with only two, albeit substantial, buildings. In 1977, subway excavations cut under the old Roman/medieval wall in this area near where the Aldgate once stood. Just inside the old Aldgate entrance once stood the Augustine Priory of Holy Trinity Aldgate, founded by Queen eventually known as Matilda in 1108. Matilda (or Maud nee Edith) was married to Henry I, the youngest son of William the Conqueror and the first Norman King fluent in the English language. A bureaucracy builder, he ruled 35 years after stealing the throne from his brother who was off on a Crusade. As a fourth son, he was expected to become a bishop and so received a lot more education than he needed to be king. (His nickname was Beauclerc, which means scholar. He wasn't just a scholar as he holds the record for most illegitimate progeny of an English king, somewhere between 20 and 25.) While her husband was fooling around, apparently Matilda had plenty of time to establish monasteries. She had been raised in one herself by her aunt/prioress, and there was some debate as to whether she could marry Henry since she may have taken permanent vows as a nun. The pope didn't want kings getting into even good habits.
Matilda was popular and her followers unsuccessfully tried to petition for sainthood after her death. While sainthood eluded her, she did establish the Holy Trinity Abbey and gave it three churches in the area plus the Aldgate portal itself. Altogether, it was one of the largest medieval complexes in London. Supposedly Matilda wanted to be buried there, but her husband refused.
Besides being the first religious house established inside London under Norman rule, Holy Trinity had another first: it was the first monastery to be dissolved by Henry VIII. (The place owed him a lot of money; typically kings taxed monasteries about 20% and Holy Trinity was struggling financially during Tudor times.) After that it passed into the Duke of Norfolk's possession during Elizabeth I's reign. Even before the dissolution, parts of the place were falling apart. Subsequent centuries were even less kind. Only two fragments of the monastery survive above ground today. One can be seen in the basement of the Towergate building.
Below is a display in the Aldgate tube station exit showing the Roman, monastery, and modern street levels contrasted with the Roman wall:
The red markings in the ceramic tile in the exit corridors of the Aldgate tube station correspond to the brickwork depicted at right on plaque # 6. The Roman ground level was 14 feet below modern street level. By the abbey's heyday, it had already risen 7 feet from Roman times. |
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Recent fact: The first bomb to explode on the London Underground in the 7/7/05 terrorist attacks was on the tube about to arrive at this station from Liverpool station in Bishopgate (next page). Previously the station was damaged by German bombs during WWII. Something there is that does not love a subway exit.
Besides containing the remains of the first monastery in Norman London, this area has another famous religious structure, this one still standing. For a century, Aldgate was London's Jewish area starting in 1181 and lasting until Edward I first exorbitantly taxed, then executed many, and finally expelled the rest of them in 1290. Oliver Cromwell, who attributed some of Holland's success to Jewish contributions and thought they would help England recover from its Civil Wars, welcomed them back 365 years later. (By then, many of them were secretly already there, having been driven out of Spain during the Inquisition. They pretended to be Christians to escape further problems. (American congressmen seem to have adopted that trick as well.) By Cromwell's day, England was the only European country without Jews. He allowed Spanish and Portuguese Jews to migrate back to this neighborhood, building Bevis Marks synagogue in 1698. That building, completed in 1702, is the only synagogue in Europe to remain continuously functioning for 300 years, despite a burnt roof in the 18th century and some damage by an IRA bomb in 1993. (View a picture of its interior by clicking here.)
Behind the synagogue runs Houndsditch road on the site of the moat the Romans built around their walls. In fact, Londoners kept re-digging this ditch as inhabitants kept filling it up with garbage, including dogs -- hence its name. During the great plague when 7000 people a week were dying in London, mass burial pits were dug alongside it near Bishopgate (where we travel next). During the 1665 plague, Londoners intentionally killed dogs and cats whom, they thought, were spreading the plague. This took away the natural predators of the city's rats whose fleas, of course, were the true spreaders. The plague took 20% of London's population until the Great Fire of 1666 eliminated most of the rats. Was the cure worse than the disease?
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