_Smithfield_ is the great London meat market now; but its name means "smooth field," and in the Middle Ages it was used as a cattle and hay market, and on days which were not market days games and tournaments took place there. Later its name became famous in English history for the "fires of Smithfield," when men and women were burned to death there for refusing to accept the state religion.
Many London names come from churches and buildings which no longer exist. The names help us to picture a London very different from the London of to-day. One of the busiest streets in that part of the City round Fleet Street where editors and journalists, and printers and messengers are working day and night to produce the newspapers which carry the news of the day far and wide over England, is _Blackfriars_. This is a very different place from the spot where the Dominicans, or "Black Friars," built their priory in the thirteenth century.
In those days the friars chose the busiest parts of the little English towns to build their houses in, so that they could preach and help the people. They thought that the earlier monks had chosen places for their monasteries too far from the people. There were grey friars and white friars, Austin friars and crutched friars, all of whose names remain in the London of to-day.
There were many monasteries and convents in the larger London which soon grew up round the City, and in the City itself we have a street whose name keeps the memory of one convent of nuns. The street called the _Minories_ marks the place where a convent of nuns of St. Clare was founded in the thirteenth century. The Latin name for these nuns is _Sorores Minores_, or "Lesser Sisters," just as the Franciscans, or grey friars, were _Fratres Minores_, or "Lesser Brethren." And so from the Latin _minores_ we get the name Minories as the name of a London street, standing where this convent once stood.
The name of the street _London Wall_ reminds us of the time when London was a walled city with its gates, which were closed at night and opened every morning. Many streets keep the names of the old gates, like _Ludgate Hill_, _Aldersgate_, _Bishopsgate_.
The great _Tower of London_ still stands to show us how London was defended in the old feudal days; but _Tower Bridge_, the bridge which crosses the river at that point, is a modern bridge, built in 1894. The name _Cripplegate_ still remains, and the story it has to tell us is that in the Middle Ages there stood outside the city walls beyond this gate the hospital of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. It was a hospital for lepers; but St. Giles is the patron saint of cripples, and so this gate of the city got the name of Cripplegate, because it was the nearest to the church of the patron saint of cripples.