Bow Church the people of Bow promised to acknowledge themselves as parishioners of Stepney and agreed to pay 24 shillings annually for repairs of the mother church, and to dispense with their attendance there, except on the feast of Saint Dunstan, and on the Wednesday in Whitsunweek, when they were to accompany the rest of the parishioners in procession to Saint Paul's Cathedral. In 1556 at Bow, during the reign of Mary I of England, and under the authority of Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, many people were brought by cart from Newgate and burned at the stake in front of Bow
The Great Terror trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of Western writers and had underlain books such as George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon". According to the book, the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges, which together with man-made famines had led to 20 million deaths according to his estimates. In the appendix of the original 1968 edition of "The Great Terror", Conquest estimated 700,000 "legal" executions took place during 1937 and 1938, which was roughly confirmed by the 681,692 executions found in the Soviet archives