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necessary.” Parliament met at once, and on the 18th September passed an Act for a court of judicature to hear and determine all disputes, and to ascertain the limits of landed property. This Act was shortly followed by an elaborate Act (19 Car. II. cap. iii.), drawn by Sir Matthew Hale, touching the rebuilding of the City. It prescribed the number of storeys in the several orders of houses, the kind of roofs, the construction of flues (clear of timber), the strength of scantling, the use of oak for doors and windows, and other structural details. The 23d clause enumerates what streets may be opened and enlarged: these were chiefly certain parts of the two lines of streets from Fleet Street and Newgate respectively to the Exchange, which were of unequal width. The 24th clause permits the making of a new street from the Guildhall to Cheapside (King Street). The 26th clause brings in the principle of betterment, then called melioration: “And forasmuch as the houses now remaining, and to be rebuilt, will receive more or less advantage in the value of rents by the liberty of air, and free recourse for trade and other conveniences, by such regulation and enlargement”—the jury of the court of judicature were to assess the owners of land in consideration of such improvement and melioration, the moneys so assessed to be paid to the chamberlain of the City, and wholly employed towards payment and satisfaction of such houses and ground as shall be converted into streets, passages, markets, and other public places aforesaid.

One instance is known in which the question of betterment arose. On the 3d of December 1667, Pepys enters in his Diary that the ground for the new street from Guildhall to Cheapside is already most of it bought: a man owned a piece of ground in the line of the new street, for which he demanded £700, and to be excused paying anything for betterment in respect of the sites of houses that would remain to him on either side after the street was made through his ground. The court decided to pay him £700, but not to waive the claim for betterment; whereupon they agreed that he would excuse the City the £700 that he might have the benefit of the melioration without paying anything for it. “So much,” says Pepys, will some get by having the City burned. Ground by this means, that was not worth 4d. a foot before, will now, when houses are built, be worth 16s.” But where houses were to be rebuilt on the old foundations, the ground-rent was usually one-third of the former rent of house and ground together.

Sir Matthew Hale’s Act of 1667 entirely ignored the comprehensive and novel plans of Evelyn and Wren for the rebuilding of the City, which had been submitted to the king before the Act was passed. It practically assumed that London was to be rebuilt on the old lines of its streets, lanes, and alleys. Besides King Street, from the Guildhall to Cheapside, the only new streets referred to in the Act of 1667, or in the additional Act of 1670, were Queen Street, on the opposite side of Cheapside from King Street, which was an enlargement of Soper Lane to Thames Street, and Princes Street, which was a narrow and crooked lane connecting the Poultry with Lothbury. It was specified to be 14 feet wide, and does not look in the maps to be