ABSTRACT
The next market to which I directed my attention was the great fish market of Billingsgate. The true derivation of the word Billingsgate seems to have disturbed the repose of many antiquaries. "How this gate took that name," says Stowe, "or of what antiquity the name is, I must leave uncertain, as not having read any ancient record thereof, more than that Geffrey Monmouth writeth that Belin, a King of the Britons, about 400 years before Christ's nativity, built this gate and named it Belin's gate, after his own calling; and that when he was dead, his body being burnt, the ashes, in a vessel of brass, were set upon a high pinnacle of stone over the same gate."
