We may mention two other names of old London streets which take us back to the Middle Ages. In the City we have the street called _Old Jewry_, and this reminds us of the time when in all the more important towns of England in the early Middle Ages a part was put aside for the Jews. This was called the _Ghetto_. The Jews were much disliked in the Middle Ages because of the treatment of Our Lord by their forefathers; but the kings often protected them because, in spite of everything, the Jews grew rich, and the kings were able to borrow money of them. In 1290, however, Edward I. banished all the Jews from England, and they did not return until the days of Cromwell. But the name of the Old Jewry reminds us of the ghetto which was an important part of old London.
Another famous City street, _Lombard Street_, the street of bankers, got its name from the Italian merchants from Lombardy who set up their business there, and who became the bankers and money-lenders when there were no longer any Jews to lend money to the English king and nobles.
As time went on London began to grow in a way which seemed alarming to the people of the seventeenth century, though even then it was but a tiny town in comparison with the London of to-day. The fashionable people and courtiers began to build houses in the western "suburbs," as they were then called, though now they are looked upon as very central districts. It was chiefly in the seventeenth century that what we now know as the _West End_ became a residential quarter. Some parts of the West End are, of course, still the most fashionable parts of London; but some, like Covent Garden and Lincoln's Inn Fields, have been given over to business.
Most of the best-known names in the West End date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most fashionable street of all, _Piccadilly_, probably got its name from the very fashionable collar called a _pickadil_ (from the Spanish word _picca_, "a spear") which the fine gentlemen wore as they swaggered through the West End in the early seventeenth century. _Pall Mall_ and the _Mall_ in St. James's Park took their names from a game which was very fashionable after the Restoration, but which was already known in the time of Charles I. The game was called _pall-mall_, from the French _paille-maille_. After the Restoration Charles II. allowed the people to use St. James's Park, which was a royal park, and Londoners used to watch respectfully and admiringly as Charles and his brother James played this game.