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XI.—The London Charterhouse and its old water supply

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2011

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Extract

It is written in the fifth volume of the Minute Books of the Society that on Thursday, 1st May, 1746:

Mr. Birch brought an old draft in a Parchment Roll done in the year 1511 of all the Stone-Wells then at Clerkenwell. This Mr. Vertue was desired to take home and give some account to the Society the next meeting: the Roll is the property of Francis Godolphin, Esq.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1902

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References

page 293 note a Vol. v. 167.

page 294 note a Vol. iii. 309-331.

page 295 note a It was so called because it had belonged to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, from whom Sir Walter Manny bought it.

page 296 note a Madox, Thomas, Formulare Anglicanum (London, 1702), 267.Google Scholar

page 297 note a In 1899.

page 297 note b Vol. Ivi. 251-256.

page 299 note a These wells ov fontes seem to have served as settling tanks before the water reached the head conduit.

page 299 note b The parts in brackets are torn away and supplied from the copy.

page 301 note a A suspiral was no doubt in the first place a vent or breathing-hole (spiramen or spiraculum) to let the air out of a conduit, to avoid a supposed danger of the pipes being burst by the compression of the air within; and in that sense the Promptorium Parvulorum has “Suspyral, of a cundyte. Spiraculum vel Suspiraculum.” (At Durham the word was shortened to “susper.”) But in the drawing under notice the suspirals seem to have served the further purpose of settling tanks, and as a means of relieving the pipes from the pressure of the water. This must have been considerable, there being a fall of about 64 feet from the White Conduit to the distributing cistern in the great cloister of the Charterhouse, a distance of almost exactly a mile.

page 302 note a “Wind vent” here seems to be applied to what in other places would be called a snspiral. See note on preceding page.

page 304 note a Above this note a much longer one has been crossed out and then erased.

page 305 note a The course of the St. John's pipe remains in outline as far as the lower edge of the membrane, with traces of a suspiral above. The course of the nuns' pipe may be similarly traced. But in tinting the drawing the limner has discontinued the nuns' conduit before reaching the crossing of the pipes, and roughly daubed in th e St. John's pipe as following the same direction as the other.

page 307 note a For a valuable paper on “The Ancient Buildings of the Charterhouse,” by Mr. G. Wardle, see Archaeological Journal, xliii. 231242Google Scholar.

page 307 note b The building is drawn as if hexagonal, but the accompanying description says it was eightsided.

page 308 note a An erasure here.

page 308 note b Written over an erasure.

page 308 note c The word “age,” meaning apparently the distributing cistern of a conduit, seems to be identical with the Latin augea, a word used in grants relating to the water-supply of London in the fifteenth century. Thus the Abbot and Convent of Westminster in March 1439-40 granted to the Mayor and Commonalty “unum capud simul cum quibusdam fontibus…una cum augeis sesperalibus fontibus et cisternis congruis ac convenientibus ad includendam recipiendam. et habendam aquam salientem ac emanentem in quodam clauso nostro vocato Oxlese infra terram et precinctum Manerii nostri de Padyngton…erigere construere ponere et habere valeant imperpetuum” (Patent Roll, 21 Henry VI. pt. 2, m. 2). Another grant to the Major and Citizens by the King in June 1443 refers to the building of “quandam Crucem spectabilem in Westchepe dicte civitatis pro quadam augea eisdem conductibus tanquarn mater deservitura” (Ibid. m. 14).

The former of these quotations occurs in an inspeximus of Henry VI., dated 24th June, 1443, printed in Rymer's Fædera (xi. 29-33), on whose authority Du Cange has the following: “Augea Ventosa, Spiramentum, Gall. Ventouse. Dicitur de canalibus fontium, quibus parvum additur foramen, quo interclusi venti elabantur, a Gallico Auge, Alveus, canalis: Augece Ventosæ, suspirales fistulæ, pipæ et aliæ; machinæ, per quas tota aqua, veniens et discedens a capitibus et fontibut prædictis, recipitur et currit…dictas Augeas Ventosas, suspirales fistulas, pipas et alias machinns… perscrutari, mundari et reparari, apud Rymer, torn. 11, pag. 29.” [Glossarium Mediæ et Infimce Latinitatis (Niort, 1883), i. 476,Google Scholar s.v.] In the text as entered on the Patent Roll there is no such punctuation as has misled Du Cange, the words reading: “nonnulle augee ventose suspirales fistule pipe et alie machine,” etc.

Crabb's, Universal Technological Dictionary (London, 1823)Google Scholar gives: “Augea (Archæol.) a cistern for water.”

page 309 note a At Mount Grace, where the arrangement of the pipes must have been similar, every monk had a tap fixed, in a small arched recess in the wall on the cloister side of his garden, usually under a penntise.

page 310 note a A small tank has lately been uncovered in one of the gardens at Mount Grace.

page 311 note a The Elms and the Hart's Horn were probably two taverns without the gate.

page 311 note b i.e. value.

page 312 note a It stood on the site of a row of houses in the parish of Holy Trinity, Islington, on the south side of the street now (1902) called Denmark Road, but formerly White Conduit Street. See the map, engraved in 1841, in The History and Topography of the parish of St. Mary, Islington, by Lewis, S., junior (Islington, 1842),Google Scholar where the “White Conduit House” itself is shown. It had, however, been destroyed in 1831 (op. cit. 396).