In the year 1236 the City received the new Queen with every outward sign of welcome, and, unfortunately for themselves, of wealth. What was Eleanor of Provence, what was the young King, to think of the resources of the city which could receive them with so brave a show? Thus writes Stow concerning this Riding:—
“The cittie was adorned with silkes, and in the night with lampes, cressets, and other lights without number, besides many pageants and strange devices which were shewed. The citizens rode to meete the king and queene, beeing clothed in long garmentes embrodered about with golde and silke of divers colours, their horses finely trapped in arraie to the number of three hundred and sixty, every man bearing golden or silver cuppes in their hands, and the king’s trumpeters before them sounding. The citizens of London did minister wine as butlers.” (Howe’s edition of Stow’s _Chronicles_, p. 184.)
In the year 1236 water was first brought into the City by pipes from the Tyburn, or from wells or springs in the district called Tyburn, now Marylebone. These pipes were of lead and discharged the water into cisterns which were afterwards castellated with stone. The most important of them was that in Chepe: there were in all, when other pipes had been laid down, nineteen conduits: and it became the custom, once a year, for the Mayor and Aldermen to ride out in order to inspect the Heads from which the conduits were supplied, after which they were wont to hunt a hare before dinner and a fox after dinner in the fields about Marylebone.
In the year 1238 a singular procession passed out of St. Paul’s Cathedral along Fleet Street and the Strand as far as Durham House, then the palace of the Legate. The procession consisted of a large body of ecclesiastics, Doctors in Divinity and Law, followed (or preceded) by a company of young men: they were ungirded, without gown, bareheaded and barefooted. There were the Heads of Houses, the Master and Students of the University of Oxford headed by Ado de Kilkenny, Standard Bearer to the scholars: they were on their way to pray the Legate’s pardon for a late lamentable outbreak in Oxford. It began with an Irish undergraduate, who went into the Legate’s kitchen to beg for food. The cook in reply took up a pot filled with hot broth and threw it in his face. A Welsh student, also come on the same errand, was so exasperated at the sight of the outrage that he killed the cook, there and then. After which the students rose in a body and attacked the house. The Legate fled for his life, taking refuge in a church steeple whence he escaped under cover of the night. As soon as he was safe he interdicted the University, and excommunicated all concerned in the riot. But on their submission he granted his forgiveness and removed the Interdict.