This day in London’s history: on 2 February 1709, British sailor Alexander Selkirk is rescued after being marooned on a desert island for five years. He was the inspiration behind Daniel Defoe’s most famous work, the novel Robinson Crusoe. In Mitcham, near Tooting, there is a Friday Road commemorating, along with Crusoe and Island roads, the fact that Daniel Defoe lived in the area.
Friday appears to be the only day of the week represented in London street names, and there are a few of them, including Friday Street in the City of London. This may have taken its name from Frigdaeges, an Old English name, but most people plump for John Stow’s theory that it was “so called of fishmongers dwelling there and serving Friday’s market”.
In Catholic England, meat would have been forbidden on Friday – in fact, one man was burnt to death on Tower Hill in 1430 for eating meat on Friday. Fish stalls would, therefore, have been popular for the shoppers buying their groceries along the lanes of Cheapside.
There was a famous tavern that stood in Bread Street but had a side entrance on Friday Street: the Mermaid tavern. It was here, tradition holds, that Sir Walter Raleigh (or Ralegh) instituted the Mermaid Club, the “Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen’, which met, appropriately, on the first Friday of every month.
Grave doubts have been cast, from many quarters, on the truth of the club’s existence, the assertion that Raleigh formed such a club, and that the club included Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare among its members. Leaving aside such wet-blanketism, it is certain that Jonson was an habitué of the Mermaid, and at least possible that he was joined on occasion by Shakespeare.
There was a contrastingly named Wednesday Club, formed in Friday Street by William Paterson, a 17th-century Scottish merchant famous for being the founder of the Bank of England – and infamous for originating the Darien scheme (or Darien Disaster). This was an unsuccessful attempt by the Kingdom of Scotland to become a world trading nation by establishing a colony called Caledonia on the Isthmus of Panama on the Gulf of Darién in the late 1690s.
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5 responses to “Crusoe, Friday Street, and the Bank of England”
[…] Bank of England, founded by William Paterson, a 17th-century Scottish merchant, is located on Threadneedle Street and the derivation of that […]
[…] the City of London, near Friday Street and Bread Street is a street popular with canoodling couples who like to pose next to the […]
[…] Edward I decreed in 1302 that bakers could sell bread only from Bread Street. Before that, the “leprous women of St James’s” were allowed a tenement here in 1204; part of the street was later destroyed by fire in 1263. The street also became famous (or infamous) for its prison, or compter. The warden was so harsh on his prisoners that he was sent to Newgate Prison. The poet John Milton was born in this street and one entrance of the famous Mermaid Tavern led onto Bread Street while the other was on Friday Street. […]
[…] Friday Street: It may have taken its name from Frigdaeges, an Old English name, but most people plump for John Stow’s theory that it was “so called of fishmongers dwelling there and serving Friday’s market”. There was a time in Catholic England when eating meat on Friday was forbidden and, at least one meat eater was executed for that crime. Friday is, it seems, the only day of the week represented in London street names. […]
[…] Friday Street, the only day of the week to be represented in London street names, may take its name from Frigdaeges, an Old English name. There is also John Stow’s theory that it was “so called of fishmongers dwelling there and serving Friday’s market”. There was a famous tavern that stood in Bread Street but had a side entrance on Friday Street: the Mermaid tavern. […]