Upward from this site, towards Holborn, the lane divides and the eastern fork is turned into New Fetter Lane. But the old Fetter Lane still pursues its course northward, albeit now with difficulty. Its whole eastern side has been demolished, as the foundations of taller and greater buildings are sunk within the ever receptive London earth. The former Public Record Office is still visible, to the west of the statue of John Wilkes down Rolls Buildings, while closer to Holborn the Mucky Duck and the Printer’s Devil have survived as public houses. Three mid-nineteenth-century houses remain, as if they were some ancient terrace preserving the memory of the street, and their ground floors are now occupied by coffee shops and sandwich bars.
And where did Fetter Lane get its name? John Stow, who knew it well, believed that “Fetter” was “so called of fewters (or idle people) lying there, as in a way leading to gardens.” Others, however, have suggested that the word is derived from the Norman defaytor “defaulter.” Some prefer another French origin in foutre, “blackguard.” But there are other possibilities. Fetter may derive from the feuriers, or felt-makers, who are deemed to have inhabited the street in the fifteenth century. Or it may spring from the name of the landlord Viteri or Viter who lived there a century earlier. More ingenious antiquarians have in turn suggested that the name sprang from fetor or “offensive smell,” on the face of it unlikely in an area surrounded by gardens and orchards-unless the fewters, or foutres, or defaytors, were in some way responsible for the stink. Another connection has been made with frater, “brother,” which was a characteristic address between the men of law who frequented the area. A more simple connection has been made with the workshops of the street which manufactured fetters or lance vests for the Knights Templar who also congregated in the vicinity. The confusion and speculation will never be resolved, and the obscurity of Fetter Lane’s derivation serves only to demonstrate the unknowability of many London names. It is as if the city was striving to conceal its origins. Yet, as G.K. Chesterton once remarked, “The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon: every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums.” It might also be suggested that every object, every doorway, throws a light upon the ancient territory of which the present Fetter Lane is now the custodian.
A Roman urn filled with coins was found beneath the surface of the lane, confirming Stow’s observation that an old Roman road had been located in the immediate vicinity. There was a wooden bridge over the Fleet here, too, so the early inhabitants of Fetter Lane and its environs had the advantage of living beside a swiftly flowing river. A ninth-century sword handle was also discovered within the depths of the lane. Its manufacture and material were of fine quality, indicating that it was employed for ceremonial rather than sanguinary purposes. It may then have some connection with a charter of 959 by which King Edgar of Wessex granted the neighbouring land to the monks of Westminster Abbey, one boundary of which was marked by a line parallel to Fetter Lane.
Throughout its history Fetter Lane acted as a boundary, or has been recorded as frontier territory; it was where the Great Fire stopped, and it marks the area where the City’s influence ceases. It is also the area where two parishes, St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and St. Dunstan’s in the West, meet. We may find, in turn, that it has attracted those who live upon “the edge.”
At the beginning of the fourteenth century its present contours emerged. In 1306 it was known as the “neu strete” but in 1329 it is styled as “a new lane called Faiteres Lane.” The earliest records suggest, however, that it had already acquired an ambiguous reputation. There is a report on one “Emmade Brakkele, a harlot,” living in Fetter Lane. A keeper of a house harbouring “prostitutes and sodomites” was noted as living in “fayters lane.” Yet it must already have been a “mixed” neighbourhood in a thoroughly medieval spirit, since there is a tradition of an “Inne or Court” in “Fewter Lane” and the fact that Clifford’s Inn was established here in 1345 suggests that some original foundations may have been maintained here even before Fetter Lane appeared in the public records. The religious establishments in the immediate vicinity will also have provided some measure of extra-mural control with St. Dunstan’s to the south, St. Andrew’s and Ely Place to the north. In 1349, John Blakwell, “Cetizen of London,” purchased with his wife property in “Faytourslane,” and Henry VI is recorded as collecting rents from the dwellings there. This in itself is not necessarily a guarantee of respectability, but these bare records suggest that throughout the medieval period it was a well-known and well-documented “subarbe” of London. By the early fifteenth century there was a famous tavern on the corner of Fetter Lane with Holborn, known as Le Swan on Le Hope, which contained rooms for travellers. There were complaints about its overhanging roof, and some “barriers which had been erected outside the inn and so distracted the roadway,” but it survived until the middle of the eighteenth century under the revised name of the Black Swan. A few yards down the lane there now stands the Mucky Duck as a plaintive reminder of a more graceful presence.
On a mid-sixteenth-century map Fetter Lane is clearly marked with fifteen houses down its eastern side and twelve down its western; the topography may not be entirely accurate, but it is in contrast to “Liver Lane” (Leather Lane) to the north which proceeds among gardens and open fields. At the northern end of Fetter Lane Barnard’s Inn can be seen and, down towards Fleet Street, Clifford’s Inn is already visible; a stone archway spanning the lane, almost at its midway point, has also been marked. The map is less than accurate in one respect, however, since it does not convey the continual encroachment of new buildings in and around the lane itself; on land once owned by St. Bartholomew’s “ten tenements with gardens” were erected by 1555 and by 1580 a further thirteen “illegal new houses” had been constructed. Neither does the map reveal the narrow yards and alleys, like Fleur de Lys Alley and Crane Court, which ran off the main thoroughfare and which exist still.
Like other areas of London, it had its share in fires and executions. Both entries to the lane were in fact customary sites for the gallows. There are records of Catholic recusants, in 1590, being hanged and quartered at the Fleet Street end; it is, according to one Catholic history, Catholic London by W.D. Newton, “one of our sacred spots.” The melancholy Catholic composer John Dowland, who died in 1626, had been living in Fetter Lane. In 1643 two plotters against Parliament were hanged at the Holborn end, having arranged their conspiracy in a lodging in the lane, and for two centuries this spot was often a place of execution. It has been the site of death in more than one form, however. There was a distillery on the corner of Fetter Lane and Holborn in the mid-eighteenth century; it was on the site of the Black Swan, formerly Le Swan on Le Hope, and so had a long association with drink. During the most violent days of the Gordon Riots in 1780, with the mob’s cry of “No Popery!” rising through the streets, it was rumoured that the owner of the distillery was a Catholic. So it was ransacked and fired, with fatal results. “The gutters of the street, and every crack and fissure in the stones, ran with scorching spirit, which being dammed up by busy hands, overflowed the road and pavement, and formed a great pool, into which the people dropped down dead by dozens.” This account is written by Charles Dickens, who like many Londoners was obsessed with fiery death, but his version is authenticated by several contemporary sources. So by Fetter Lane “some stooped with their lips to the brink and never raised their heads again, others sprang up from their fiery draught, and danced, half in mad triumph, and half in the agony of suffocation, until they fell, and steeped their corpses in the liquor that had killed them.” Others, leaving the distillery with their clothes on fire, actually rolled in the spirit mistaking it for water until they “became themselves the dust and ashes of the flames they had kindled, and strewed the public streets of London.” They became part of Fetter Lane.