Ely Place, off Holborn, is little known to hasty tourists who have not time to leave the beaten track of sightseeing. But any one who has a quiet hour to spend in the exquisite little church of St. Etheldreda, and to recall the glories of the past which its Gothic walls have witnessed, will be well repaid.
Ely Place, a rectangle of dull, commonplace houses, at its entrance gives no glimpse of the chapel, which is shrinkingly withdrawn a little among the interloping walls that now replace the gardens and the palaces of Milton's day. In Chaucer's lifetime, the Bishop of Ely built this very chapel to the Saxon saint, the daughter of the king of the West Angles, who was born about the year 630. She took part in the erection of the Cathedral of Ely amid the morasses of the "Fen" country, and was chosen as its patron saint. In 679 she died, the abbess of the convent of Ely. Singularly enough, this modest lady gave the origin to the word "tawdry," so Thornbury declares. For her name was sometimes called St. Audry, and some cheap necklaces sold at St. Audry's fair at Ely were known as "tawdry" laces, whence the name was applied to other cheap and showy ornaments.
After long continuance in the hands of Protestants, the church has again reverted to the faith of those who built it. It is the only instance of a "living" crypt in London, _i. e._, one in which tapers burn and kneeling worshippers assemble before shrines. On any week day, one may in three minutes turn from Holborn into its mediæval quiet and seclusion and tell one's beads, either in the upper or lower sanctuary, or gaze at the glorious decorated east window, and on the chaste proportions of an unspoiled Gothic structure. Its wealth of windows remotely reminds one of the Sainte Chapelle of good King Louis, whose jewelled windows in their slender lofty frames are one of the marvels of the island in the Seine.
In the Plantagenet and Tudor period, vineyards, kitchen garden, and orchard surrounded the magnificent buildings of Ely Place. Hither, at the Duke of Gloucester's bidding, as Shakespeare, following history, records, the bishop sent hastily for the strawberries for which his garden was famous.
"My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn I saw good strawberries in your garden there; I do beseech you send for some of them."