clxxxviii Journal of Proceedings.
chancel with north and south chapels and aisles, built of stone and brick,
and with a perpendicular west tower of greystone seventy-five feet high,
containing a peal of ten bells. It was restored in 1.865, and the surfaces
of the older walls were then found to be covered by distemper paintings
which were carefully examined and described by my friend Rev. R. H.
Clutterbuck, then curate at Plaistow, in the Essex Arch. Trans. There
are some good monuments; one to Sir Thomas Foot, Lord Mayor of
London, 1050, with life-size effigies of himself in robes and his lady in
dress decorated with lace ; another with white marble figures of Sir
James and Lady Cooper, 1743. These are now on the east wall, but
were formerly on the north of chancel.
Many other monuments are there ; one, an ancient tomb with no
inscription remaining, but with the arms of the Rooke family, of Upton ;
others to the Smyths, Knights and Baronets of Upton ; and of later date
to Sir John Henry Pelly, F.E.S., 1852. On the chancel floor, one in
memory of the accomplished Elizabeth Toilet, the friend of Sir Isaac
Newton ; and in the churchyard, the old monuments to the Pragell
family, 1679-1680 ; another, interesting to us as naturalists, in memory
of George Edwards, F.E.S., 1773, who lived at Stratford and Plaistow;
the author of the ' History of Birds,' and ' Gleanings of Natural
History,' 1764 ; Librarian to the Royal College of Physicians, the friend
of Dr. Mead and Sir Hans Sloane, the friend and correspondent of
Linnaeus.
Stratford is now a large and populous place of some 38,000
inhabitants, with a fine Town Hall and three churches. In the
churchyard of St. John's in the Broadway, is the Martyrs' Memorial,
put up in 1879 to the memory of eighteen Protestant martyrs who were
burned close by in the reign of Queen Mary, 1556. But in older days
Stratford owed its importance to the Abbey of Stratford Langthorne,
founded 1135, by William de Montefichet, for Cistercian monks. This
abbey and its precincts occupied about sixteen acres, about a mile
south-west of West Ham Church, and was moated, but being in the
marshes it was often flooded by the overflowing of the River Lea and
Channel-sea (an artificial course cut by King Alfred) on which the lands
abutted ; and then, as Leland tells us, the monks removed " to a celle or
graunge longyne to it callyed Burgestede in Essex, a mile or more from
Billerica " ; but later on they returned.
At the dissolution the Abbey was very wealthy, and amongst their
other possessions had not only the adjoining manors of West Ham, East
Ham, Playze, Leyton, Little Ilford, &c., but holdings in other parts of
Essex, and in Buckhurst alias Monk Hill, in Woodford and Chigwell.
The whole of the buildings have, however, disappeared for many
years, the last remains being an old scone doorway or cloister arch, with
foliated capitals, which adjoined the " Adam and Eve." This I remember
well, but it was pulled down in 1871. Inside was a stone with matrix
of a brass. The arch has often been engraved, and a fine etching of it