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Description: | The original white chapel was the Church of St Mary Matfellon, built in the 13th century but demolished in 1673.
Being a main thoroughfare into London, Whitechapel was well provided with "good inns for the reception of travellers and for horses, coaches, carts and wagons" according to John Strype, born the son of a silk merchant in 1643.
There was a hay market three times a week. Sheep and cattle were herded down the street for slaughter at the butchers’ shops that lined the south side - one of several trades considered too much of a nuisance in the City and moved just outside to Whitechapel.
The bustle of traders and travellers meant easy pickings for petty criminals, and sometimes worse. "Have a great care of the butchers’ hooks at Whitechapel," warns a character in Beaumont and Fletcher’s "Knight of the Burning Pestle’, "they have been the death of many a fair ancient."
Behind the shop fronts, Whitechapel was already one of the poorest areas east of London by the mid-17th century. Horwood’s map shows the workhouse set ominously beside the burial ground. By the 19th century, Whitechapel would become the overcrowded sink of poverty and crime that so appalled Victorian reformers – and a hunting ground for Jack the Ripper. | License: | http://www.bl.uk/services/copy/permission.html | Rights holder: | British Library | Source: | Collect Britain | Identifier: | http://www.collectbritain.co.uk/personal... | Language: | en-GB | Go to resource |
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