Smithfield Market — West Smithfield

Smithfield Market in West Smithfield, London, is a historic livestock market and former execution ground where Scottish knight William Wallace was executed in 1305. In 1381, Lord Mayor Sir William Walworth killed rebel leader Wat Tyler on the site. Designed by Tower Bridge architect Horace Jones, the current market building opened in 1868 and conceals an 800-square-meter network of sealed Victorian vaults.

London · from the walk “Monks, Martyrs & Marxists” · audio ~3 min · Generated

West Smithfield, London EC1A 9PS

Who killed rebel leader Wat Tyler at Smithfield Market in London in 1381?

You are standing on London's most blood-soaked patch of earth. Welcome to Smith-field.......... The name sounds industrial, doesn't it? Like a blacksmith's yard. But no. This was once simply the "smooth field"... a flat, open meadow just outside London's medieval walls, stretching down to the River Fleet. In eleven seventy-four, a clerk named William Fitzstephen described it as a celebrated meeting place where fine horses, pigs, and cattle were traded every Friday. For nearly a Thousand years, livestock were bought and sold right here.......... But Smithfield had another purpose. This was London's oldest execution ground... a place called "The Elms," after the trees that once shaded its gallows.......... On the twenty-third of August, thirteen oh five, the Scottish knight William Wallace was dragged naked behind a horse from the Tower of London all the way here. He was hanged until nearly dead, then cut down while still conscious. What followed was... unspeakable. His head was dipped in tar and placed on a spike atop London Bridge. His limbs were sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling, and Perth... as a warning. A memorial plaque on the wall of Saint Bartholomew's Hospital, just steps from here, was unveiled in nineteen fifty-six. To this day, Scots leave thistles and flowers beneath it.......... Seventy-six years after Wallace, in thirteen eighty-one, the peasant rebel Wat Tyler rode here to negotiate with the young King Richard the Second. The meeting went badly. The Lord Mayor of London, Sir William Walworth, drew his blade and struck Tyler down on the spot... ending the Peasants' Revolt in a single, violent moment.......... And then came the fires. During the reign of Queen Mary the First, over two hundred Protestants were burned alive at the stake here at Smithfield. But here is a detail most people never hear. On November the seventeenth, fifteen fifty-eight, several Protestants stood bound, awaiting their execution... when a royal messenger came galloping in. Queen Mary had just Died. Under English law, the death warrants required the monarch's signature. And the new queen, Elizabeth the First, would not sign them. Those prisoners walked free.......... And then there is the legend. In sixteen fifty-four, a pamphlet described a ghost haunting Smithfield... dressed in a lawyer's gown with Horns on its head and a meat cleaver in its hand. It appeared every Saturday night, pulling joints of meat from the butchers' stalls. The butchers swung at it with cleavers and chopping knives, but could feel nothing but air. The ghost was said to be a lawyer named Mallet, who had died from eating poisoned meat... and returned to take his revenge on every butcher in London.......... And through All of it... the jousting, the executions, the fires, the ghost... the market endured. The beautiful Victorian building you see today was designed by Horace Jones, the same architect who gave London Tower Bridge, and it opened in eighteen sixty-eight. Beneath it, railway lines delivered meat from across the country directly to the market floor. And just recently, construction workers preparing the site for the new London Museum discovered a massive network of sealed Victorian vaults, stretching over eight hundred square meters... forgotten for decades, full of rats, but magnificent even in shadow.......... Smithfield. Where the blood of martyrs and the blood of livestock have flowed across the same ancient ground for nine hundred years.

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