Other terrible things the gateway saw:  the burning of heretics.  Not infrequently did these fires of persecution rage.  One of the first of these martyrs was John Bedley, a tailor, burnt in Smithfield in 1410.  In Fox’s Book of Martyrs you can see a woodcut of the burning of Anne Ascue and others, showing a view of the Priory and the crowd of spectators who watched the poor lady die.  Not many days afterwards the fair-folk assembled, while the ground was still black with her ashes, and dogs danced and women tumbled and the devil jeered in the miracle play on the spot where martyrs died.

We should need a volume to describe all the sights of this wondrous fair, the church crowded with worshippers, the halt and sick praying for healing, the churchyard full of traders, the sheriff proclaiming new laws, the young men bowling at ninepins, pedlars shouting their wares, players performing the miracle play on a movable stage, bands of pipers, lowing oxen, neighing horses, and bleating sheep.  It was a merry sight that medieval Bartholomew Fair.

[Illustration:  An Old English Fair]

We still have Cloth Fair, a street so named, with a remarkable group of timber houses with over-sailing storeys and picturesque gables.  It is a very dark and narrow thoroughfare, and in spite of many changes it remains a veritable “bit” of old London, as it was in the seventeenth century.  These houses have sprung up where in olden days the merchants’ booths stood for the sale of cloth.  It was one of the great annual markets of the nation, the chief cloth fair in England that had no rival.  Hither came the officials of the Merchant Tailors’ Company bearing a silver yard measure, to try the measures of the clothiers and drapers to see if they were correct.  And so each year the great fair went on, and priors and canons lived and died and were buried in the church or beneath the grass of the churchyard.  But at length the days of the Priory were numbered, and it changed masters.  The old gateway wept to see the cowled Black Canons depart when Henry VIII dissolved the monastery; its heart nearly broke when it heard the sounds of axes and hammers, crowbars and saws, at work on the fabric of the church pulling down the grand nave, and it scowled at the new owner, Sir Richard Rich, a prosperous political adventurer, who bought the whole estate for L1064 11s. 3d., and made a good bargain.

The monks, a colony of Black Friars, came in again with Queen Mary, but they were driven out again when Elizabeth reigned, and Lord Rich again resumed possession of the estate, which passed to his heirs, the Earls of Warwick and Holland.  Each Sunday, however, the old gate welcomed devout worshippers on their way to the church, the choir having been converted into the parish church of the district, and was not sorry to see in Charles’s day a brick tower rising at the west end.