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Shoe Lane, or Shoe Alley as it was sometimes called in the
sixteenth century (Ekwall 110), was
outside the city wall, in the ward of Faringdon Without. It ran north-south, parallel to the course of
the Fleet River. Until
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Shoe Lane, or Shoe Alley as it was sometimes called in the
sixteenth century (Ekwall 110), was
outside the city wall, in the ward of Faringdon Without. It ran north-south, parallel to the course of
the Fleet River. Until
When the Dominican Black Friars (whose name eventually became attached to the
Blackfriars precinct inside the
city walls and later the hall theatre) first came to London, they took up
residence on the east side of Shoe
Lane at the Holborn end of the
lane, opposite St. Andrew Holborn.
They remained in this location from 1224–1278 (Richardson 28). Their house was purchased in
On the east side of the sixteenth-century street was one olde house called
Oldborne Hall
, which had been converted to divers Tenementes
(Stow 2:38). A Scholane
in
In the seventeenth century, the street housed sign-writers, designers of
broadsheets[,] and [a] cockpit
. The cockpit, a round amphitheatre-like
building where the bloodsport of cockfighting took place, was visited by
The origins of the street name are obscure, but all the historians agree that
the name does not refer to the manufacture of shoes. Some have suggested
that the street was named after the well called Showelle or Sho
well (Smith 190; Weinreb and Hibbert 784). However, it
is more likely that both the well and the street derived their names from a
tract of land named Shoeland Farm. Sholand-lane
and Sholand-welle
may have become Shoe Lane and Shoe Well by a process
of ellipsis (Ekwall 110–11). The farm
may have been on a piece of land resembling a shoe in shape
(110). Gillian Bebbington refers to
Eilert Ekwall’s work and wonders if the lane led to a shoe-shaped field
(301). Whatever the answer, it is
clear that the lane dates back to a remote time when this part of London was
still agricultural land.