3-011-409 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Old Charing-Cross, from Aggas's plan of London, 1864. 'Charing-cross, the large area at the meeting of the Strand, Whitehall, and Cockspur-street, with Trafalgar-square on the north, received the latter part of its name from the stone cross erected there (1291-94) to Eleanor, Queen of Edward I.; and was the last resting-place of her remains on the way from Northampton to their final repository in Westminster Abbey. The etymology of Charing remains unaccounted for. The fanciful notion that it owes its name to the circumstance above related, being derived from chère Reine [dear Queen], is manifestly erroneous from the fact that the place, then a small village quite apart from London, is entered under the name of Charing in "Doomsday Book." [In the 17th century,] the cross was destroyed by puritanical bigotry, being ordered to be razed by order of the Long Parliament as a relic of Papistry. Its demolition, in 1647, was celebrated by some of the wits of the time-by one of them in humorous strains'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.