56 TILE MODEL MERC LL ANT 



tliat prison, agreeably to tho will of Sir Richard Whittiagton, late 

 Lord Mayor of London, and the petition being granted the work was 

 performed under the inspection of Sir Richard's executors. " This," 

 says a writer quoted in the Antiquarian Repertory," " appears from 

 preceding circumstances to have been a most necessary charity, as only 

 eight years before, viz., in 1414, the keepers of Ludgate and 2^ewgate 

 died, and prisoners in the latter prison, to the number of sixty-four, 

 merely from disorders occasioned by improper accommodation and air. 

 His executors, to their great credit, wishing to give full effect to the 

 pious intentions of the deceased, which were, to administer all possible 

 comfort to those confined, petitioned Parliament '' for power to enforce a 

 former legacy of Sir John Pouuteney's, which had been withheld in 

 consequence of the fulfilment of this part of Whittington's will." 



Xewgate is thus described in the quaint language of the time : — 

 " Yat hit was febel over litel, and so contagious of eyre yat hit caused 

 the deth of many men." ' The new structure, built by Whitting- 

 tou's executors, was that on which they placed his statue with his 

 Cat.-^ Nor docs it at all invalidate our theory that M. Thiele, (according 

 to Kcightley) says that "there is a carving still to be seen over the 

 east door of Ribe Cathedral, in Jutland, representing a cat and four 

 mice ; and a story is told there of a poor sailor who had made his 

 fortune in a similar way by the sale of a cat in a foreign island, whose 

 inhabitants were grievously plagued with mice." But it is not only tlie 

 prisoner and the oppressed who occupy AVhittington's attention, the 

 ignorant and uneducated also come in for a share of his solicitude. One 

 of his most anxious cares was for those who, like himself iu his younger 

 days, had lacked that blessing which doubles a man's joys, I may say 

 doubles his existence, viz., the blessing of a good education. 



" In 1421 Whittington began the foundation of the Library of the 

 Grey Friers Monastery, in Newgate Street. This noble building was 

 c Antiquarian Ecpertory, vol. 2, p. 3'13, &c. 



(I Ilcnricus Sextus Rex. Pio. Ao. " Thya ycre Newgate was now made by 

 Richard Wyttyntonc and he dyde the same yeTc"—Chron. of Grey Friers, p. 15. 

 e Grafton saya it was before a most ugly and loathsome prison. 



/ Even Kcightley, in a note, admits that the figure of Whittington, with a Cat 

 in his arms, carved in stone, was over the archway of the old prison that went 

 across Newgate Street. It was taken down, he says, in 1780. 



ff Stow's Si/rtr;/ of London. Antiquarian Repertory, vol. 2. p. 313. 



