St. Clement Danes
Today was a beautiful sunny windy day which we spent almost entirely inside preparing witnesses. I took a break at one point to go outside and find a candy bar. I got a fine dose of history in my ten minute outing.
First of all, as I'm sure most of you know, the Strand/Fleet Street/St. Paul's area is the oldest part of London. This is where Neanderthals rooted around in the riverside muck and this is where the Danes and the Saxons came and settled and conquered the Angles and the Mercians, etc., long before the Romans came. By the time William the Conqueror got here, the Romans had been long gone and the town was established, with walls and churches etc. Most of this town that William found was right around the current location of our office and hotel. Indeed, the old gate to London Town is just a few blocks east of here.
One of things William found when he got to this tiny riverside town was a church called St. Clement Danes. It was founded by the few Danes who remained in England after the rest of the Danes were expelled by Alfred the Great in 900 A.D. Speculation is that the Danes who remained were allowed to because they had married local girls. If you read the book London by Edward Rutherfurd, the church figures prominently in one of the early chapters. It is thought to have been named after Pope Clement who was Pope in 100 AD who was thrown into the sea by Emperor Trajan whilst tied to an anchor and thus instantly became the patron saint of the sea. These Danes had a penchant for the sea and so they became known as the St. Clement Danes. Their little church grew up outside the original gates of the town, I think because they were not Angles and thus were outcasts, but not I'm not 100 percent sure of that.
Something happened to this little church between 900 and 1066 and it fell down or something and when William the Conqueror came along he saw the dilapidated little wooden church outside the gates and rebuilt it. Ironically, some say the bones of King Harold (the King whom William defeated at the Battle of Hastings) are beneath the church. It is not clear whether William knew this at the time. The idea of William the Conqueror rebuilding something that was old enough to have already fallen down by 1066 shows how very old this part of town is. Of course, William must not have liked St. Clement Danes too much because he somewhat immediately began building the church at Westminster which is now Westminster Abbey -- and he would have been buried there if he hadn't exploded in his coffin in the north of France before he could get here (they waited a little too long after he died to get the process underway, I guess).
But I digress. Time passes and the Danes and the Normans all became part of the great Anglo-Saxon mass, and in turn, they all became British. The little church of St. Clement Danes prospered and the town grew well out beyond the original gates and Fleet Street and the Strand grew busier and busier and the little church ended up on an island in the middle of two very busy streets -- a virtual traffic island, one books says. In the Middle Ages, "you would still have s
een St. Clement's, though half engulfed in a rookery of ill-smelling, crazy old timbered houses, with so narrow a passage between that coachmen called it the 'Straits of St. Clement's.'"In 1692, the church was rebuilt again, this time by Christopher Wren -- who apparently did the work for free. Wren added bells to the church which chimes the nursery rhyme tune of "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's." The bells that nursery-rhyme actually referred to are not those of St. Clement Danes, but of the St. Clement's, Eastcheap, further to the east, which had been the historic center of the dried fruit trade. I don' t know how this St. Clement Danes got them instead. Perhaps the other St. Clement's has not survived? After Wren rebuilt the church it became quite fashionable, and Samuel Johnson was a parishioner. There is a statute of the man behind St. Clement's, facing down Fleet Street to St. Paul's.
St. Clements remained fashionable until WWII, when it was mostly destroyed by German bombs in 1941. Only the outer walls remained. If you walk by the Church now you can see the pitting and damage from the Luftwaffe still on the outer stone work. So it was rebuilt again, and in the 1950s, was fittingly dedicated as the RAF military chapel.
Nowadays, St. Clement Danes is right across the street from our London office, shrouded in very old, very tall London plane trees. Indeed, for much of the day I was in an office that overlooked the little church with traffic and double-decker buses and black London taxis streaming about it. This morning -- being Sunday -- the tiny space in front of the church between the two roaring streets of traffic was full of men in RAF uniforms and very somber women waiting for services. I overhead that the sermon had been about events in Iraq and the RAF men serving there. It was quite remarkable to sit here with my Blackberry and my cell phone and the Internet and all the technological prowess of this law firm and look at a church that has existed on that spot since 900 A.D., and which commemorates the entire history of England, from the pre-historic Expulsion of the Danes to the British military role in Iraq.
Oddly, no-one else on my trial team is particularly interested in this sort of information.
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