were no
such things as shops. People bought and sold in markets, and the name
of the busy City street, _Cheapside_, reminds us of this. It was
called in early times the _Chepe_, and took its name from the Old
English word _ceap_, "a bargain."

At the end of Cheapside runs the street called _Poultry_, and this, so
an old chronicler tells us, has its name from the fact that a fowl or
poultry market was regularly held there up to the sixteenth century.
The name of another famous City street, _Cornhill_, tells us that a
corn market used to be held there. Another name, _Gracechurch Street_,
reminds us of an old grass market. It took its name from an old
church, St. Benet Grasschurch, which was probably so called because
the grass market was held under its walls.

_Smithfield_ is the great London meat market now; but its name means
"smooth field," and in the Middle Ages it was used as a cattle and hay
market, and on days which were not market days games and tournaments
took place there. Later its name became famous in English history for
the "fires of Smithfield," when men and women were burned to death
there for refusing to accept the state religion.

Many London names come from churches and buildings which no longer
exist. The names help us to picture a London very different from the
London of to-day. One of the busiest streets in that part of the City
round Fleet Street where editors and journalists, and printers and
messengers are working day and night to produce the newspapers which
carry the news of the day far and wide over England, is _Blackfriars_.
This is a very different place from the spot where the Dominicans, or
"Black Friars," built their priory in the thirteenth century.

In those days the friars chose the busiest parts of the little English
towns to build their houses in, so that they could preach and help the
people. They thought that the earlier monks had chosen places for
their monasteries too far from the people. There were grey friars and
white friars, Austin friars and crutched friars, all of whose names
remain in the London of to-day.

There were many monasteries and convents in the larger London which
soon grew up round the City, and in the City itself we have a street
whose name keeps the memory of one convent of nuns. The street called
the _Minories_ marks the place where a convent of nuns of St. Clare
was founded in the thirteenth century. The Latin name for these nuns
is _Sorores Minores_, o