Back Mews to the south, and to the north by various yards and courts, opening out of Hedge Lane, and required for the accommodation of the horses and carriages of the nobility and gentry living in the Fields, most of which still exist very much in their primitive intricacy and closeness. It was between 1684 and '86 that the parishes of St. Anne's and St. James's were carved out of St. Martin's in the Fields, as St. Paul's Covent Garden had been in 1638, and as St. George's Hanover Square was in 1724. A dividing line ran diagonally across Leicester Square, of which the south and east sides were in St. Martin's, the north and west in St. Anne's. Between the date of this division of the parishes and 1700, the streets between the south of Leicester Fields and the Mews-St. Martin's Street from north to south, and Blue Cross Street and Orange Street from east to westwere opened. Strype (1720) describes St. Martin's Street as "fronting upon Leicester Fields, and falling into Hedge Lane; a handsome open place, with very good buildings for the generality, and well inhabited. At the upper end is Chapel Court, which hath a small passage

through an entry into Green Street, against Leicester Fields." One great reason, I believe, for the opening of these and other new streets in St. Giles's and Soho, about this time, was the influx of foreigners caused by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.1 The bulk of this foreign immigration which did not establish itself in Spitalfields gravitated to St. Martin's and St. Anne's. Leicester Fields had even before this been in great measure a foreign quarter, and the new comers were attracted to the same centre. Strype speaks of "the chapels in these parts for the use of the French nation, where our Liturgy, turned into French,

1 In the year 1687 no fewer than 13,509 of these refugees were sheltered in London alone, of whom there were about 500 families of the nobility, lawyers, divines, physicians and merchants, and the rest artizans and husbandmen. £40,000 were collected for them in one year; they received special privileges, as of entering British ports without paying duty on their goods and chattels, being naturalized without charge, and with all the rights of British citizens.

2 It was from the French chapel in Hog Lane, now Crown Street, St. Giles's, that Hogarth got the French congregation of his "Noon." M. Jouneau, Chesterfield's first master in languages and history, was one of these French refugee ministers; his chapel was in Berwick Street, Soho.