THE GARDENERS
Incorporated by James I., 1606, for a Master, 2 Wardens, and 18 Assistants. There is no return of property; the Livery now consists of 44 members. They have no Hall. The gardens of London have always until the last two hundred years been a remarkable feature of the City, which, in its northern and less densely populated parts, was filled with gardens and trees, amidst which the industries of the City were carried on; and many of the crafts had their Halls. It is quite certain that some form of Fraternity or Gild must have been formed among the large class of gardeners who cultivated these grounds. Stow, however, gives no account of them. Their existence, however, is clearly indicated by Riley (Memorials, p. 228), when he produces the petition of the “Gardeners of the Earls, Barons, Bishops and Citizens” of London. The petition set forth that they were formerly entitled to stand in front of the Church of St. Augustine, by the gate of St. Paul’s, “there to sell the garden produce of their said masters and make their profit.” Were the Earls, Barons, and Bishops, then, market-gardeners? If not, did the gardeners cultivate the land for their own exclusive profit? “And they prayed permission to continue the custom.” The mayor and aldermen resolved in reply that they had made themselves so great a nuisance by their “scurrility and clamour” while the priests of St. Augustine were singing mass that the permission must be withdrawn, and that they must set up their market in the space between the south gate of St. Paul’s Churchyard and the garden wall of the Black Friars, in other words, on the space between Godliman Street and St. Andrew’s Hill, not nearly so central a spot as that which they had formerly used.
There are other references in Riley to gardens. There was one called the King’s Garden, near the Hermitage in London Wall. And in 1276 there is the case of a man who fell from a pear-tree in the garden of one Lawrence, in the parish of St. Michael, Paternoster Royal, then, as now, the most crowded part of the City. There is also given the lease of a “garden situate in Tower Ward, near London Wall.” Since there was an open space all along the wall in which houses were not allowed to be built, this space was without doubt mainly devoted to gardens, just as the north bank of the ditch became afterwards a row of what we should now call allotments, cultivated for vegetables and fruit.
- The Girdlers. See p. 67.