Barbican Living
Cripplegate - a gate for creeping through
Barbican is part of the ward of Cripplegate Without. There were two wards, Cripplegate Within and Cripplegate Without. The original meaning of 'Without' is 'outside' - in this case, within or outside the original City wall marked by the Cripple Gate, which was the name of the gate in the northern City wall between Wood Street and Fore Street where London Wall is today. Its original Old English name was Crypel-Geat, which means a low gate (literally “a gate for creeping through”). The name was corrupted to Cripple Gate and folk came to believe it had something to do with cripples. Even an explanatory legend was provided: it was said that the body of Edmund the Martyr miraculously cured some cripples while being carried through the gate in 1010. When a church was built just outside the gate, it was dedicated to St Giles, the patron Saint of cripples.
In time, Cripplegate Ward was divided into Cripplegate Within and Cripplegate Without. Cripplegate Within stretched from Cheapside to the City wall (roughly where London Wall is today). Cripplegate Without was the populated area which grew up outside the wall. It was only in Elizabethan times that the population of the Outer Ward grew sufficiently to be treated as a separate Ward. Since 1569, the Ward of Cripplegate Without has had two Common Councilmen of its own, but the two Wards still share one Alderman between them, who has a Deputy Alderman to assist him.
London’s Jewish community was centred in Cripplegate Within which, as a result, was the heart of the City’s emerging banking system. In the years before Edward I banished all Jews from England, there were twenty two banking houses in the City, and ten were in Cripplegate. The area later known as Jewin Street (now covered by Defoe House) was the only place where Jews were allowed to be buried.
