Moreover, within and without the walls, there were chapelries, and gardens, and places pleasant to the gazer’s eye. Orchards blossomed and apples grew where now are Paternoster Row and Ivy Lane, and to the north of Holborn, where, somewhat later, John de Kirkby built the palace for the Bishop of Ely; associated with the memory of John of Gaunt. Outside of Ludgate, and beyond the bridge that spanned the Fleet, and beyond the house of the Templars and Lincoln’s Inn, the town residence of the Lacies, was the Strand, overgrown with bushes and intersected with rivulets, having on one side the river, where barges floated and salmon leaped and swans glided; and on the other, gardens and fields, dotted with suburban villas, and stretching away in one direction to the chase and palace of Marylebone, and the hills of Highgate and Hampstead; and in another by Clerkenwell and Islington to the great forest of Middlesex, which was not, however, disforested till 1218, when the citizens had an opportunity of purchasing land and building houses and greatly extending the suburbs.
Many and various were the sports and recreations in which the ancient Londoners indulged on high days and holidays. It is to be feared that they did yield in some measure to the temptations of the maypole, the tavern, the cockpit, the bull-ring, and the gaming-house, and even found their way at times to “the vaulted room of gramarye,” in which the wizard exercised his art. But generally their recreations were of a manly and invigorating kind. They played football in the fields near the Holy Well, wrestled for the ram near Matilda’s Hospital, in St. Giles’s Fields, had horse-races and matches at quintain in Smithfield; and, when the Thames was frozen over, they tied sheep-bones to their feet--skates not having then come into fashion--and tilted against each other with staves in full career. Nor did they, at other times, neglect such aquatic exercises as were likely to train them to skill and hardihood. “A pole,” says the chronicler, “is set up in the middle of the river, and a shield made fast thereto. Then a young man, standing in a boat, which, being rowed by oars and driven by the tide, glides swiftly on, while he with his lance hits the target as the boat passes by, when if he breaks his lance without losing his own footing he performeth well; but if, on the contrary, the lance remains unbroken, he will be tumbled into the water, and the boat passes on. Nevertheless, there are always two boats ready to succour him.”