Note 30 — Chapter V · THE MEDIÆVAL STUDENT (continued 2)

This is the old name (cattorum vicus) of the street which has now been made over to S. Catherine. A similar instance of the “genteel” tendency to eschew monosyllables and not to call things by their proper names is afforded by the attempts to call Hell Passage, S. Helen’s. This is not due to a love of Saints, but to the “refinement” of the middle classes, who prefer white sugar to brown. In the Middle Ages men called a spade a spade. The names of the old streets in London or Paris would set a modern reader’s hair on end. But they described the streets. At Oxford the Quakers (1654) first settled in New Inn Hall Street, but it was then known as the Lane of the Seven Deadly Sins.