‘Some Chris-tian peo-ple all give ear, Un-to the grief of us: Caused by the death of three Chil-dren dear. The which it hap-pened thus.’”]
“Thank ye, thank ye, honest Master Geoffrey Barbican,” said my visitor, as I concluded; “my thanks to you, both for your music and poetry; for I verily think as you do, that the verses which you have repeated relate to this conflagration of 1633, although there was the difference of a month between the actual fact, and your rhyming record of it. It appears to me, too, as if I recognized in the 16th stanza,--where the last words of the drowning victim are uttered by his head in broken accents,--the original of Gay’s description of the death of Doll, the Pippin-woman, contained in the 2nd book of his ‘_Trivia_,’ since she died in much the same place and manner.
“The rental of the Bridge House was, doubtless considerably lessened by this destructive fire; but in the printed document of the Bridge-Masters’ Accounts, there is not any notice of the amount of rents for some years after it. In 1636, however, we are informed that the salaries, horsekeeping, and liveries, of John Potter, and David Bourne, the Wardens, amounted to £71. 3_s._ 4_d._ each; and in the following year the rental is stated to have been only £1836. 7_s._ 6_d._, whilst the fees, &c. of John Hawes and Noadiah Rawlins amounted to £72. In that Manuscript treatise on the payment of Tythes, which I have mentioned to you as being in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth, Cornelius Burgess, the then Rector of St. Magnus, observes that ‘the best third part of the Parish was consumed by the late fire on London Bridge: yet no part of the annual charges lying on the Parsonage is abated. And it is yet capable of a large improvement, by reason that a good part of it being Citty land, provisions have been accordingly made to keepe downe the tithes generally throughout the Parish to vnreasonable low proportions, some very few houses excepted.’ According to Newcourt, in his ‘_Repertorium Ecclesiasticum_,’ volume i., page 396, these tythes before this conflagration amounted to £109. for 90 houses, of which about 40 houses were destroyed; though, in the Manuscript valuation of 1638, they are reduced to £81. 12_s._ 8_d._