To try to navigate the modern city with Elizabethan maps and views is an utterly dislocating experience: even someone with decent skills in map-reading and a fair sense of direction will find himself or herself wandering backwards and forwards, frustrated and disoriented. We have to work hard to get our bearings. Old street names both direct and deceive.
It should be possible, more or less. Even given all the alterations, whether by fire, bombs, routine demolition and all the changes that are bound to happen over centuries, a portion of the old city’s pattern and structure has survived, like the major bones of a skeleton upon and around which a new body has been built. When we do find small miracles of survival, like the city’s few medieval churches, they seem tiny and shrunken standing next to enormous office blocks. They have been tenacious in holding back modernity from total victory – or at the very least showing that there was once something else here – another world, other lives. It is hard not to feel the vast historical distance between then and now, and with it a twinge of melancholy.
The incongruity is striking. The church of St Helen, Bishopsgate, lies in the shadow of 30 St Mary Axe, better known by its nickname of ‘The Gherkin’. Very close by is the small church of St Andrew Undershaft. That, too, was a nickname, as John Stow explained: ‘because that of old time, every year on May day in the morning . . . an high or long shaft, or maypole, was set up there in the midst of the street’. It was a practice abandoned after the anti-alien riot of ‘Evil May Day’ in 1517.25 Stow’s last resting place is today just across the road from the vast Leadenhall Building. As Stow wrote at the beginning of his Survey, ‘What London hath been of ancient time men may here see, as what it is now every man doth behold.’26
It takes a very great effort now even to begin to imagine that such things might ever have happened in this place; what half a millennium ago was the tangle of townhouses, tenements, shops, halls and churches is now a topography of steel, concrete and glass – once a city on a human scale (though of course to its inhabitants fantastically huge) has become an impersonal megapolis. Now it has its own jostling life of bistros, restaurants, wine bars and preoccupied financiers, for whom money is in the abstract – on the screen and in the computer – and so often removed from the physical act of carrying commodities on ships across oceans and between continents. Just what would Elizabethan preachers, who found sin in something as innocuous as the merchant’s paper bill of exchange, make of it all?
It would be too easy, however, to imagine that the Elizabethan past was a happy and innocent place, to glorify with John Stow a lost merry England. The remnants of the Elizabethan city may look tiny when we see them sitting in the shadows of the headquarters and offices of global businesses and banks. But London in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was, as I hope this book has shown, a place of formidable dynamism. Elizabethans and Jacobeans tested the moral limits of money and fortune. In their world usury became interest, and investors put their money into ventures that pushed minds, men and ships to their limits: the physical stamina and endurance it must have taken to sail across oceans, to ride across continents and to plant new territories is staggering. Today it might take computers, lawyers and accountants to dominate the world – corporate, virtual or otherwise; nearly 500 years ago it took months or years of patience, effort and travail, and with no guarantee of success. That Elizabethans and Jacobeans were able to do what they did is by any measure extraordinary. Remarkable, too, is that out of a city whose elite prided itself on its stability and conservatism, there arose ground-breaking endeavours like the Muscovy, East India and Virginia Companies and many others like them.
And so time has moved on, as of course it does; and we have made what once belonged to others our own. Instead of Sir Richard Haddon’s ‘great place’ on Seething Lane, there is currently a great space – though London being London that will change soon enough. Today it is a building site, surrounded by a barrier decorated with the mysterious corporate slogan ‘Where the world meets the world’: meaningless in almost all contexts, but oddly appropriate for the site of what was once Muscovy House, that point of encounter between London and Russia, where London merchants planned embassies to Moscow and Anthony Jenkinson reported on his travels to the court of the shah of Persia.
Upon this tiny nook of the city, very close to the Tower of London, there lies a thick patina of a long history. It is still called Seething Lane. In St Olave, Hart Street, the naval civil servant and diarist Samuel Pepys worshipped and was buried; the memorial bust of Elizabeth Pepys, apparently animated in conversation, still looks down at their pew. During the Great Fire, Pepys and Sir William Penn (the father of the William Penn who founded Pennsylvania) helped to save this portion of the city by blowing up houses with gunpowder in order to make a fire break. The churchyard was Charles Dickens’s favourite in London, and in honour of its macabre gateway – one Samuel Pepys would have known well – he nicknamed it:
This gate is ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than the life, wrought in stone; but it likewise came into the mind of Saint Ghastly Grim, that to stick iron spikes a-top of the stone skulls, as though they were impaled, would be a pleasant device. Therefore the skulls grin aloft horribly, thrust through and through with iron spears. Hence, there is attraction of repulsion for me in Saint Ghastly Grim, and, having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn towards it in a thunderstorm at midnight. ‘Why not?’ I said, in self-excuse.27
St Olave, Hart Street, has been a lucky survivor. Severely damaged by bombing in 1940, it was pieced back together in the 1950s. Against all the odds, Sir Richard Haddon’s memorial survives, just to the south of the altar; his image within it has long disappeared, though his two wives, Anne and Katherine, still pray for his soul. Paul Bayning, splendid in scarlet with a high, neat Jacobean ruff, kneels in front of his brother Andrew. In life they looked to the Levant and the East Indies: in death Paul looks, with brow furrowed, earnestly to heaven.
Here the past exists encapsulated in the present: a history so easy to forget in the noise and busyness of today, and yet somehow the essence of the place, indelibly part of its texture, like the weave of the merchant’s cloth.
Notes
Manuscripts are cited by the call numbers in the relevant archive or library. In citing manuscripts (by folio or page) or printed books (by page or signature), series and journals, the following abbreviations are used:
Bannerman, St Olave The registers of St Olave, Hart Street, London, 1563–1700, ed. W. Bruce Bannerman (London, 1916)
Beaven The aldermen of the city of London, ed. A. B. Beaven, 2 vols (London, 1908–13)
BL British Library, London
Dekker, Plague The plague pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. P. Wilson (Oxford, 1925)
EcHR Economic History Review
EHR English Historical Review
Freshfield, Account books The account books of the parish of St Bartholomew Exchange in the city of London, 1596–1698, ed. Edwin Freshfield (London, 1895)
Freshfield, Minute books The vestry minute books of the parish of St Bartholomew Exchange in the city of London, 1567–1676, ed. Edwin Freshfield (London, 1890)
HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly
Jonson The Cambridge edition of the works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols (Cambridge, 2012)
Kingsford A survey of London by John Stow: reprinted from the text of 1603, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford, 1908)
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online or in print, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford, 2004)
PN1 Richard Hakluyt, The principall navigations, voiages and discoveries of the English nation, made by sea or over land, to the most remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth at any time within the compasse of these 1500. yeeres (STC 12625, London, 1589)
PN2 Richard Hakluyt, The principal navigations, voiages, traffiques and discoveries of the English na
tion, made by sea or overland, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth, at any time within the compasse of these 1500. yeeres, 3 vols (STC 12626, London, 1598–1600)
STC A short-title catalogue of English books, 1475–1640, ed. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson and Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols (Bibliographical Society, London, 1986–91)
Stow, Chronicles Three fifteenth-century chronicles, with historical memoranda by John Stowe, the
antiquary, ed. James Gairdner (Camden Society, second series, vol. 28, London, 1880)
Taylor, Geography E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor geography, 1485–1583 (London, 1930)
Taylor, Richard Hakluyts The original writings and correspondence of the two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor, 2 vols (Hakluyt Society, second series, nos. 76, 77, London, 1935, repr. 1967)
TRP Tudor royal proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin, 3 vols (New Haven, CT and London, 1964–9)
WP Richard Hakluyt, A particuler discourse . . . known as a Discourse of Western planting, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn (Hakluyt Society, extra series, no. 45, London, 1993)
Manuscripts preserved in the United Kingdom’s National Archives at Kew in London are quoted by the call number there in use. The descriptions of the classes referred to are as follows:
PC 2 Privy Council Registers
PROB 11 Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Registered Copy Wills
SP 1 State Papers, Henry VIII, General Series
SP 10 State Papers, Domestic, Edward VI
SP 11 State Papers, Domestic, Mary I
SP 12 State Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth I
SP 15 State Papers, Domestic, Addenda, Edward VI to James I
SP 68 State Papers, Foreign, Edward VI
SP 69 State Papers, Foreign, Mary I
SP 70 State Papers, Foreign, Elizabeth I (1558–77)
SP 91 State Papers, Foreign, Russia (from 1589)
SP 94 State Papers, Foreign, Spain (from 1577)
SP 97 State Papers, Foreign, Turkey (from 1577)
CHAPTER 1: A MERCHANT’S WORLD
1The originals of the murals have disappeared. Certainly The Triumph of Riches was destroyed by fire in Germany in 1752, though the original sketch for it survives in the Musée du Louvre (with a copy in the British Museum), as well as an etching published in Antwerp in 1561, now in the Kunstmuseum Basel. See Paul Ganz, The paintings of Hans Holbein: first complete edition (London, 1950), pp. 284–8; John Rowlands, Holbein: the paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger; complete edition (Oxford, 1985), pp. 223–4; Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven, CT, and London, 2004), pp. 130–37; and Susan Foister, Holbein in England (London, 2006), pp. 69–71.
2PROB 11/12/28.
3Caroline M. Barron, London in the later middle ages: government and people, 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 346–8.
4John Guy, Thomas Becket: warrior, priest, rebel, victim (London, 2012), p. 1.
5Acts of court of the Mercers’ Company, ed. Laetitia Lyell and Frank D. Watney (Cambridge, 1936), p. 131.
6Acts of court, ed. Lyell and Watney, p. 130.
7Acts of court, ed. Lyell and Watney, pp. 125, 130–34.
8D. J. Keene and Vanessa Harding, Historical gazetteer of London before the Great Fire (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 351–63; Materials for a history of the reign of Henry VII, ed. William Campbell, 2 vols (London, 1873), vol. I, pp. 107, 182, 565, 570; vol. II, pp. 12, 342, 404, 438, 540; Alwyn Ruddock, ‘London capitalists and the decline of Southampton in the early Tudor period’, EcHR, second series, 2 (1949), p. 142; Beaven, vol. I, p. 130.
9Kingsford, vol. I, p. 252.
10John Weever, Ancient funerall monuments within the united Monarchie of Great Britaine, Ireland, and the Islands adjacent (STC 25223, London, 1631), pp. 402–3; Kingsford, vol. I, p. 252.
11‘For the buriall of Aldermen’, in The ordre of my Lord Mayor, the Aldermen & the Shiriffes, for their metings and wearynge of theyr apparell throughout the yeare (STC 16705.7, London, 1568), sig. B4-v.
12Anne F. Sutton, The mercery of London: trade, goods and people, 1130–1578 (Farnham, 2005), p. 382.
13PROB 11/15/41; Calendar of wills proved and enrolled in the Court of Husting, London, 1358–1688, ed. Reginald R. Sharpe (London, 1890), p. 611; John Watney, Some account of the hospital of St Thomas of Acon (London, 1906), p. 179; Acts of court, ed. Lyell and Watney, pp. 263, 273, 308–9.
14Sylvia Thrupp, The merchant class of medieval London (Chicago, 1948), p. 347; Sutton, Mercery of London, pp. 537–8.
15PROB 11/21/281; Sutton, Mercery of London, pp. 537–8.
CHAPTER 2: LONDONERS
1Jeremy Boulton, ‘London 1540–1700’, in The Cambridge urban history of Britain, 1540–1840, ed. Peter Clark (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 315–17.
2Caroline M. Barron, London in the later middle ages: government and people, 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 238–40.
3Steve Rappaport, Worlds within worlds: structures of life in sixteenth-century London (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 51, 68, 391–2.
4Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, p. 67; Boulton, ‘London 1540–1700’, pp. 316–17; Barron, London in the later middle ages, p. 239; Paul Slack, ‘Metropolitan government in crisis: the response to plague’, in London 1500–1700: the making of the metropolis, ed. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (Harlow, 1986), p. 62.
5Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, pp. 78–9.
6Kingsford, vol. II, p. 199.
7The city of London from prehistoric times to c. 1520, ed. Mary D. Lobel (Oxford, 1991), p. 83.
8The views of the hosts of alien merchants, 1440–1444, ed. Helen Bradley (London Record Society, vol. 46, Woodbridge, 2012), p. xxv.
9Charles Nicholl, The lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (London, 2008), pp. 186–7.
10Bannerman, St Olave, pp. 121, 123.
11The A to Z of Elizabethan London, ed. Adrian Prockter, Robert Taylor and John Fisher (London Topographical Society, no. 122, London, 1979), p. ix; John Schofield, Medieval London houses (New Haven, CT, and London, 2003), pp. 87–8.
12London consistory court wills, 1492–1547, ed. Ida Darlington (London Record Society, London, 1967), pp. 102–6, 114–16, 117–18.
13Bannerman, St Olave, pp. 1–2.
14Tarnya Cooper, Citizen portrait: portrait painting and the urban elite of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales (New Haven, CT, and London, 2012), pp. 76–8.
15London consistory court wills, ed. Darlington, pp. 2, 60.
16London consistory court wills, ed. Darlington, pp. 44–5.
17Martha Carlin, ‘“What say you to a piece of beef and mustard?”: the evolution of public dining in medieval and Tudor London’, HLQ, 71 (2008), pp. 199–217, at pp. 199, 214; A bioarchaeological study of medieval burials on the site of St Mary Spital, ed. B. Connell, A. G. Jones, R. Redfern and D. Walker (London, 2012), p. 161.
18Stow, Chronicles, p. 142.
19Andrew Boorde, Hereafter foloweth a compendyous Regyment or a dyetary of Helth (STC 3378.5, London, 1542), sig. F2-v.
20A. J. Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and foreigners in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries (London and Toronto, 1992), p. 115.
21English historical documents, 1558–1603, ed. Ian W. Archer and F. Douglas Price (London and New York, 2011), pp. 735–8; BL, Cotton MS, Faustina C.II, fos. 170–87v.
22TRP, vol. III, p. 182.
23St Mary Spital, ed. Connell, Jones, Redfern and Walker, pp. 149–54.
24Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, Cecil Papers 151/144.
25Ernest L. Sabine, ‘Latrines and cesspools of mediaeval London’, Speculum, 9 (1934), pp. 306, 307.
26A reference I owe to the kindness of Professor Martin Butler: ‘And I could wish for their eternized sakes / My muse had ploughed with his that sung A-JAX’: ‘On the Famous Voyage’ (c. 1612), in Jonson, vol. V, pp. 190–98, at p. 198.
27News from Gravesend: Sent to Nobody by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, in Thomas Middleton: the collected works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lava
gnino (New York, 2007), p. 140, lines 537–42; Newes from Graves-end: Sent to Nobody (STC 12199, London, 1604), sig. C4.
28Thomas Rogers Forbes, Chronicle from Aldgate: life and death in Shakespeare’s London (New Haven, CT, and London, 1971), pp. 100, 124–35.
29Slack, ‘Metropolitan government in crisis’, p. 62. See also the Corporation of London’s Analytical index to the series of records known as the Remembrancia, 1579–1664 (London, 1878), pp. 329–38.
30John Caius, A boke, or counseill against the disease commonly called the sweate, or sweatyng sicknesse (STC 4343, London, 1552), fo. 8v (sig. A8v).
31Bannerman, St Olave, pp. 1, 105–6, 247.
32The booke of Common Prayer, and administracion of the Sacramentes, and other Rites and Ceremonies in the Churche of England (STC 16293.3, London, 1559), sig. U1v.
33Thomas Nashe, ‘In Time of Pestilence 1593’, in Forbes, Chronicle from Aldgate, p. 133.
34SP 12/125, no. 21.
35John Field, A godly exhortation, by occasion of the late judgement of God, shewed at Parris-garden (STC 10844.8, London, 1583), sigs. C1v–C4v, at sig. C4-v; BL, Lansdowne MS 37, fo. 8.
36Field, Godly exhortation, sig. B5v.
37Corporation of London, Remembrancia, p. 337.
38Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘The regulation of brothels in late medieval England’, Signs, 14 (1989), p. 420; Paul Griffiths, ‘The structure of prostitution in Elizabethan London’, Continuity and Change, 8 (1993), p. 43. See also Henry Ansgar Kelly, ‘Bishop, prioress, and bawd in the stews of Southwark’, Speculum, 75 (2000), pp. 342–88.
39English historical documents, ed. Archer and Price, pp. 711–13.
40Jonson, vol. III, p. 562.
41The Elizabethan underworld, ed. A. V. Judges (London, 1965), pp. 407– 10, at p. 410.
42TRP, vol. III, pp. 196–7.
CHAPTER 3: LANDMARKS
1Wynkyn de Worde, Here begynneth a shorte & a breve table on these cronycles (STC 9996, Westminster, [1497]), sig. c2r.
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