Tweezer’s Alley, WC2R
These days Tweezer’s Alley which connects Arundel Street with Milford Lane, running along the back of what is now the British American Tobacco building, and into which Water Lane runs, is an unprepossessing lane in the warren of streets that make up that part of Lower Temple. Absent from the maps of John Stow and John Styrpe’s update, Tweezer’s Alley first appears in printed maps in 1676 but there is evidence that there were buildings in the area from at least the thirteenth century. It is likely to have been a track leading to or running alongside the river bank. Its claim to fame, though, is that it is the subject of one of London’s most ancient extant ceremonies.
Civic obligations such as the funding a levee of men to fight in the army was an expensive business for many and by the thirteenth century, at least, a system was developed whereby the requirement could be replaced by the payment of a sum of money. Walter le Brun was the owner of a forge on a corner of a field, used by the Knights Templar, in what is now Middle Temple. It was undoubtedly a profitable business with many a knight calling on its services to have their horses shod. It is thought that the forge occupied the land where Tweezer’s Alley now is and that the lane took its name from an invaluable piece of the smith’s equipment, the tweezer, used to hold metal to the flames.
There was a Quit Rent payable on the site, valued at eighteen pennies. In 1237 one Emma of Tewkesbury agreed to change the basis of payment to goods in kind, six horse shoes and sixty-one nails. The horse shoes were flatter, much bigger and heavier than the ones we know, intended to fit a Flemish warhorse, a far larger beast than the Shire horse we are familiar with. So large were its hooves that it needed ten instead of the usual seven nails to secure the shoe to each hoof. The extra nail paid as part of the quit rent tribute isn’t a spare as its design is slightly different from the other sixty.
At some point the City of London assumed the obligation to pay the quit rent for the forge, the precise date is lost in the mists of time although there are suggestions in the archives that they paid the tribute as early as 1235. They had also assumed the obligation to pay a quit rent, two knives, one blunt and one sharp, for 180 acres of land in the wilds of Shropshire, thought to be Moor House, on the eastern side of the River Severn at Hampton Loade, a rent originally paid by Nicholas de Morrs.
With elaborate ceremony, for which the City is justifiably famed, the quit rent is still paid today. On a date between St Michael’s Day (October 11th) and St Martin’s Day (November 11th) the Ceremony of Quit Rents is held at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. Officials from the City hand over the objects to the monarch’s Remembrancer, a position established by Henry II in 1164 to help him keep track on all the monies owed to him. The Remembrancer tests the knives, using the blunt one to score a tally on a stick and the sharp one to split it in half. Satisfied he says “Good service”. He then counts the horseshoes and once he knows there is a complete set, he says “Good number”.
Rather sportingly, the Remembrancer returns the shoes, nails and knives to the City to use again the following year. The horseshoes are thought to date back to 1361. The ceremony is open to the public if you fancy a peek at London’s mediaeval ceremonial past, although at the time of writing the 2019 date has not been finalised.
As for Tweezer’s Alley, whilst it survived the bombs of the Second World War, it has been rather knocked about by planners and developers in the 1960s and more recently. Looking at it now it is hard to think that it connects us with the metropolis’ taxation system.
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