The knights who fought for a strip of mud outside the wall

A guild of knights won this ground by jousting

A guild of knights called the Cnichtengild won a strip of land east of Aldgate from the Saxon king Edgar the Peaceful. The chronicler John Stow later wrote down how they got it. They kept the land free of tax in exchange for one duty: they had to joust for the king, regularly, whenever he called for it.

The land was called a "soke," a old word for the right to collect fines and dues from the people living on it. Whoever held the soke held the income. The Cnichtengild held this one for generations, passing it down as a kind of fighting men's inheritance.

You stand near the middle of what they were given. Aldgate High Street and St. Botolph Street cross close by, and the ward still carries the guild's old name, worn down over a thousand years into "Portsoken."

A queen's priory absorbed the knights' inheritance

Matilda of Scotland, wife of King Henry I, founded a new priory near Aldgate in 1107. She called it Holy Trinity, and staffed it with canons brought in from Colchester. It grew fast, with royal favor behind it.

Sometime around 1120 or 1121, the descendants of the old jousting knights handed their entire soke over to Matilda's priory. The exact date wasn't recorded even at the time. What is recorded is the deal: the Cnichtengild's land, tax privileges and all, became church land, and stayed church land until Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries four hundred years later.

The prior of Holy Trinity took a seat on the City's own council as alderman for Portsoken, a seat the priory held for as long as it existed. A church built on a knight's gift ran this stretch of London for four centuries.

The Tower of London swallowed the ward's southern reach

The ward the priory took over ran further than it does now. It reached south, past where you stand, all the way down toward the Thames.

That changed as the Tower of London grew. Disputes over land, and the Tower's own expanding footprint, cut into the southern reach of the parish and the ward alike. By around 1200, that southern strip was gone, absorbed into what became the Tower's own separate liberty. What was left was the smaller Portsoken you can trace today, hemmed in against the old city wall, its jousting knights and their priory both long since folded into somebody else's ground.

Plague filled a churchyard pit with a thousand bodies

The priory's ground kept swallowing the dead the way it once swallowed the knights' fields. Parish clerks at St Botolph without Aldgate logged 4,253 deaths between 1583 and 1599 alone. Plague took almost a quarter of them.

That toll only got worse. During the Great Plague year of 1664 to 1665, this one parish recorded 284 plague deaths, more than double almost anywhere else in London. Starting 6 September 1665, the churchyard beside you took the overflow. A single pit here received more than a thousand bodies before the outbreak burned out.

The ground kept giving them back. Diggers at Three Nuns Court, a narrow alley by the church, hit a wall of human skulls and bones two meters down in 1859. In 1870 the earth simply gave way in the old burial ground across from the church, opening another pit from 1665. Workers cutting the tunnels for Aldgate station in the 1860s and 1870s hit the same bones, in such quantity that some tunnels had to be sealed off and rerouted.

Refugees built a synagogue still holding services today

A different kind of arrival found room here forty years later. Jewish families fleeing the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions had been holding services in a small synagogue on Creechurch Lane since 1657, once Oliver Cromwell allowed Jewish resettlement in England. By the 1690s the congregation had outgrown it.

They commissioned a new building off Bevis Marks, a short walk from where you stand, and hired a Quaker builder named Joseph Avis to put it up. Avis is said to have declined his full fee, on the grounds that it was wrong to profit from building a house of God. The synagogue opened in 1701. Sermons there were preached in Portuguese until 1833, tracing the community's roots back to refugees still arriving from Lisbon and Porto as late as 1790.

Bevis Marks Synagogue still stands. It is the oldest synagogue in Britain in continuous use, and the only one in Europe to have held regular services for more than 320 years.

A famous pump poisoned drinkers with bone-tainted water

A well near the old gate had been drawing water since the reign of King John. By the 19th century it marked something else: the symbolic start of the East End, right where Aldgate High Street meets Fenchurch Street and Leadenhall Street.

Its water was once praised as bright and sparkling. That reputation had a grim cause. The stream feeding it ran down from Hampstead through north London's crowded cemeteries, picking up calcium leached from buried bones on the way. During the cholera years, tests found the pump's water carrying five times the normal load of solid contamination. It was moved a short distance west in 1876 and finally hooked up to clean mains water, ending its run as the ward's most dangerous drinking spot.