Stories of the weird and wonderful people and places in London's history!
Tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the traffic on Holborn, one can find a side street of preserved Georgian terraces with a gated entrance and a guard house. This is Ely Place, so called because between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries this area was the London home to the Bishops of Ely. The houses were built in 1772, and the businesses that occupy the street still enjoy a bit of pomp and circumstance about the place with their barrier and their security guard. Just to add to the pomposity, he is not called a guard, but a Beadle, which was the name for a parish watchman before the introduction of the modern police force.
The Bishop’s home, known as Ely Palace, ran along the eastern side of the street. In 1546 the Earl of Ormond and his retinue came to visit the palace. The Earl had made an enemy of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, the most important man in that country after only the King himself. Ormond and seventeen of his household were poisoned whilst dining here; it’s widely assumed that the Lord Deputy was the man responsible. It’s a distinct possibility that George RR Martin heard this tale and adapted it for one of his Game of Thrones storylines.
In David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Ely Place is where David’s love Agnes lodges. Ely Palace and gardens were also mentioned twice in Shakespeare. In Richard II, Ely Palace is where John O’Gaunt delivers his famous speech, “This royal throne of kings, this sceptre’d isle…this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”: in reality Gaunt lived at Ely Palace after his own Savoy Palace was destroyed during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. In Richard III, Richard says to the Bishop of Ely:
My lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn
I saw good strawberries in your garden there;
I do beseech you, send for some of them.
The gardens of Ely Palace were famous for its strawberries, and to this day there is a church hidden away halfway down the street that still holds a strawberry fayre every June.
This is St Eltheldreda’s Church. Etheldreda was a seventh century Saxon queen, one of the founding abbesses of Ely Monastery, and is today the Patron Saint of Ely. This church was the private chapel of the Bishops of Ely, and dates from as far back as the thirteenth century. It was also once an embassy chapel: by the seventeenth century Catholicism was firmly outlawed in England, but the upper chapel at St Eltheldreda’s was granted to the Spanish ambassador so that he could practice Catholic mass whilst in the country. The ambassador somewhat took advantage of his host’s hospitality however, and invited all secret English Catholics to join him for mass, which rather annoyed the English government. Because the church was an extension of the Spanish embassy the English authorities could not enter, so instead they stationed troops outside the door of the church and arrested every English person who came out. The Catholic Church did eventually acquire the building however, purchasing it in 1874, and today it is the oldest Catholic building in London and the second oldest in the entire country.
Next door to St Etheldreda's is a building named Audrey House, so named because Audrey is the modern day equivalent of the name Etheldreda - although I think there must have been a few stops to get from one to the other. The name Audrey is also the origin of the word 'tawdry'. In Ely was once manufactured a good known as St Audrey's Lace, which was a pretty naff form of neckgear. Over time the name was contracted to Tawdry Lace, and being a not very good quality of material, it became a byword for a tacky product of low quality. So if you know anybody called Audrey, feel free to berate them for having a tawdry name. (And I'm usually very sceptical whenever anybody tells me an etymology like this, but if you look it up in a dictionary you will see it is indeed true).
There is an oft-peddled myth that because Ely Place was once owned by the Bishops of Ely it came under the jurisdiction of Cambridgeshire. Therefore, if the police were chasing a suspect and he ran into Ely Place, the authorities had to halt at the gates and give up on their pursuit. This story, however, is total codswallop. The Church sold the land for Ely Place in 1772, long before the founding of the Metropolitan Police in 1829, and its officers have always been able to pursue suspects beyond the line of the Beadle's gatehouse.
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