court is bounded on the east side by one of the few very old
buildings left in London. This was formerly the White Horse Inn, but is
now also part of the Mercers' School buildings.

Timbs quotes from Lord Eldon's "Anecdote Book," 1776, in which Lord
Eldon says he came to the White Horse Inn when he left school, and here
met his brother, Lord Stowell, who took him to see the play at Drury
Lane, where "Lowe played Jobson in the farce, and Miss Pope played Nell.
When we came out of the house it rained hard. There were then few
hackney coaches, and we both got into one sedan-chair. Turning out of
Fleet Street into Fetter Lane there was a sort of contest between our
chairmen and some persons who were coming up Fleet Street.... In the
struggle the sedan-chair was overset, with us in it."

The white boundary wall of the Mercers' School replaces the old wall of
the noted Swan Distillery (now rebuilt). This distillery was an object
of attack in the Gordon Riots, partly, perhaps, because of its stores,
and partly because its owner was a Roman Catholic. It was looted, and
the liquor ran down in the streets, where men and women drank themselves
mad. Dickens has thus described the riot scene in "Barnaby Rudge":

"The gutters of the street and every crack and fissure in the
stones ran with scorching spirit, which being dammed up by busy
hands overflowed the road and pavement, and formed a great pool
into which the people dropped down dead by dozens. They lay in
heaps all round this fearful pond, husbands and wives, fathers and
sons, mothers and daughters, women with children in their arms and
babies at their breasts, and drank until they died. While some
stooped their lips to the brink and never raised their heads again,
others sprang up from their fiery draught, and danced half in a mad
triumph, and half in the agony of suffocation, until they fell and
steeped their corpses in the liquor that had killed them."

Both the Holborn and Fleet Street ends of Fetter Lane were for more than
two centuries places of execution. Some have derived the name from the
fetters of criminals, and others from "fewtors," disorderly and idle
persons, a corruption of "defaytors," or defaulters; while the most
probable derivation is that from the "fetters" or rests on the
breastplates of the knights who jousted in Fickett's Field adjoining.

An interesting Moravian Chapel has an entry on the east side of Fett