Copyright held by
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Further details of licences are available from our
Licences page. For more
information, contact the project director,
Born digital.
There were as many as four streets in early modern London called Maiden Lane (Ekwall 122). The Maiden Lane to which this page refers
was shared between Cripplegate Ward, Aldersgate Ward, and Farringdon Within. It ran west from Wood
Street, and originated as a trackway across the Covent Garden
(Bebbington 210) to St. Martin’s Lane.
Most
mol:
prefix and accessed through the web application
with their id + .xml
.
The molagas prefix points to the shape representation of a location on
Links to page-images in the Chadwyck-Healey
Links to page-images in the
The mdt (
The mdtlist (
_subcategories, meaning all subcategories of the category.
The molgls (
This molvariant prefix is used on
This molajax prefix is used on
The molstow prefix is used on
Our editorial and encoding practices are documented in detail in the Praxis section of our website.
There were as many as four streets in early modern London called Maiden Lane (Ekwall 122). The Maiden Lane located in Bread Street
ward ran east-west, and was actually called Distaff Lane, a corruption of Distar
Lane, which Stow says he read in record of a brewhouse, called the
Lamb in Distar lane, the sixteenth of
(Stow 1:351). Stow says that the street likely came
to be called Maiden Lane from a sign located
there, though he does not elaborate. Perhaps it referred to a tavern or store
with a maiden as its sign. There was a need for an alternate name for the
street, because another street also called Distaff
or Distar Lane ran south from Distaff - or Maiden -
Lane (Stow 1:351-52).
The Maiden Lane to which this page refers
was shared between Cripplegate Ward, Aldersgate Ward, and Farringdon Within. It ran west from Wood
Street, and originated as a trackway across the Covent Garden
(Bebbington 210) to St. Martin’s Lane.
Stow offers no explanation of the street’s name, though he mentions that it was
once called Ingenelane, or Inglane, which he also spells as Engain
Lane (Stow 1:298, 303).
Isaac D’Israeli, an English author and the father of nineteenth-century British
writer and prime minister Benjamin D’Israeli tried to explain the name by
postulating a statue of the Virgin here; a less genteel but more probable
explanation would be midden heaps
(Bebbington 210; see also Weinreb and Hibbert 505).
Important sites located in Maiden Lane were St. Michael’s Church, the Waxchandlers’ Hall on the south side of the street, and the Haberdashers’ Hall on the north side. The
Haberdashers Company was confirmed by
(Stow 1:298).
Though Maiden Lane was once a cul-de-sac, it was extended to link with Southampton Street in Victorian times so that the queen’s carriage would not have to turn around after leaving her at the Adelphi Theatre (Weinreb and Hibbert 505).