by Lucy Inglis
Yet Londoners had got a taste for investment, and throughout the century the coffee houses remained centres of specific trades. Lloyd’s coffee house on Tower Street was a place where shipping merchants discussed insurance for their ships and cargoes. Soon the insurance deals began to dominate, and what had started in the coffee house became the Lloyd’s of London Insurance Market, finally moving to the Royal Exchange in 1774 as the Society of Lloyd’s. Jonathan’s, perhaps the most famous of all the London coffee houses, was opened by Jonathan Miles in 1680 and became one of the leading coffee houses for men who speculated in stocks and shares. Along with Garraway’s, it was frequented by City businessmen, although the ‘quality’ was thought to be better at the latter. John Castaing, a Huguenot broker who spent a lot of time at Jonathan’s, began to write up stock prices, bullion prices and exchange rates in 1698, publishing the sheet on Tuesdays and Fridays as The Course of Exchange and Other Things. Castaing’s prices were relied upon by many of the coffee houses in the City. His exchange rate was commonly used, and the publication continued for almost a century. Jonathan’s coffee house burned down in 1748, ending an era. A new Jonathan’s was built without delay, supported by various brokers, and soon took on the name of the Stocks Exchange. The coffee house was close to the site of London’s original livestock market, the Stocks Market. The two were soon combined, and the London Stock Market was born, where many a man traded ‘whose great ambition is to ride over others, in order to which, he resolves to win the horse, or lose the saddle’.
LONDON’S FIRST ZOO: THE TOWER OF LONDON
As the City moved increasingly towards its modern identity, one corner of it remained obstinately ancient. The Tower of London, sitting right on the eastern edge of the City for centuries, was still a political prison and an armoury. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was also a popular tourist destination. Occasionally it housed political prisoners, but by the seventeenth century it was already a valuable income-generating attraction.
It was traditional for foreign dignitaries to make gifts of the exotic creatures of their kingdoms to the countries they visited. Britain acquired a polar bear from Norway in 1252. He was at first allowed to roam about the Tower of London, but when he became huge his keeper was given a muzzle and a chain and they were sent to spend their days outside, fishing and bathing in the Thames, apparently happy in each other’s company. By the time England had begun to squabble over a fair proportion of the globe under Elizabeth I, the animals were arriving thick and fast, with some, at times, being quartered in the empty moat. Elizabeth improved the menagerie and had it opened to the public on high days and holidays. In 1603, James I overhauled the menagerie again, providing much larger cages for the animals, and running water ‘for the Lyons to drinke and wasche themselves in’. He also installed a viewing gallery so that visitors could look down upon them in safety.
During the Georgian period, the Tower contained up to eleven lions at any one time. The male lions were regarded as the tamer, and Samuel Pepys records going to the Tower on 11 January 1660 to see ‘Crowly, who is now grown a very great lion and very tame’. When young, all the lions were allowed out to play in the Tower grounds, much to the amusement of the visitors, who patted and played with them. The Duke of Sussex was particularly fond of a brother and sister who had been fostered by a goat, and he often went to see them. Also kept in the Tower were oddities such as cats and dogs born with more or fewer legs than they should have had. Ned Ward was unimpressed with such spectacle and thought:
… they should take as much care to feed the poor human cripples who were born with all their legs, and have lost one half in the nation’s service … were it as uncommon a thing to see a soldier or a sailor with but one leg, as ’tis to see a dog or a cat with no more than two, no questions but they would live as well and be taken as much notice of as these are.
In 1704, John Strype produced his new edition of Stow’s Survey of London, and the menagerie was then said to contain six lions, two leopards, three eagles, two Swedish owls (both called Hopkins), two ‘Cats of the Mountains’ and a ‘Jackall’. In 1728, when Gertrude Savile visited the menagerie, the lioness had given birth and the cubs had been taken away because: ‘They say if they did not take them from the lyoness, she would kill them upon any thing that frighted her … getting them from her she, to save it, took one in her mouth & gave it too kind a squeeze; kill’d it.’ Gertrude watched the surviving cubs being nursed in a room by the fire, and she also played with other adolescent lions in a room where they were free to run around.
In 1729, the cost of entry to the lions was threepence, a figure that rose to ninepence by the end of the century. Dead cats and dogs were used to supplement the feed of the big cats, and free entry could be had for anyone bringing one of either. In 1741, the guide to the Tower included an introduction to the lion Marco, his wife, Phillis, and their son, Nero. The lions roared with hunger at dawn, a sound which echoed throughout the east of the City and outside the wall. Their feed consisted of eight to nine pounds of raw beef daily, excluding any bones and any dogs or cats. On Sunday, the Tower was closed to visitors, and the keepers noted that the lions would often roar all day until someone came and paid them some attention.
There were also tigers. Dicka was recorded as a cub in 1741. Leopards such as Willa, ‘hunting-leopards’ (as cheetahs were known), lynx and ocelot were also recorded. Visitors agreed that the ocelot was the prettiest cat, but that the cheetah was the most affectionate. The cheetahs were led about the grounds on leashes in pairs for exercise and as a spectacle. In the same year, the first educational guidebook to the menagerie was introduced, aimed at children: ‘The wild creatures that are shewn are all kept in strong dens, so that you need not be under any fear of danger from them.’ The guidebook also included information on the animals’ diets.
Lions, Tigers, Panthers and Leopards, are fed sheeps heads and plucks [offal] twice a day, of which a Lion eats four or five in a day; but Leopards, Panthers, and Tigers, are much fonder of raw dogs-flesh. They drink as often as they please. Usually several times in a day; each having a stone trough in his den.
By the time the guidebook was published, exotic animals were no longer the creatures of myth and legend. Surveys conducted in London between the 1730s and 1750s by George Edwards and Eleazer Albin show that ownership of unusual pets was spread across the social classes, with around a third owned by the artisan classes, including Mr Bradbury the apothecary with his mongoose, Mr Scarlet the optician with his jerboa, and Mrs Kennon the midwife with her ring-tailed lemur and marmoset. It’s impossible to know if they flourished in their domestic settings, but some seem to have defied early deaths long enough to become treasured companions. Back in the menagerie in the 1750s, the big cat cubs survived into adulthood. However, the keeper of the King’s animals, John Ellys, made an arrangement that the surgeon John Hunter was to have first refusal on the bodies of all the menagerie animals, so that they might be dissected.
In about 1767, John Wesley visited the Tower with a flute player, requesting that the man play for the animals whilst he watched for any sign of a soul. Animals that did not show any such response included the dangerous grizzly bear, Old Martin, who was an old man by 1823 but still regarded his keepers as ‘perfect strangers’. Old Martin died in 1838, allegedly over a hundred years old, but he was probably Old Martin mark two or three. Other dangerous animals included the hyena and the jackals. The disconsolate solitary mongoose was made happy by the addition of a friend, and the two slept together, interlacing ‘their limbs and tails in a singular fashion’ so that each could see over the other’s back, ‘and like that fall comfortably asleep’.
The School of Monkeys lay in an outer yard near the Lion Tower. In 1753, the guidebook issued a warning about one of the baboons who had become expert in throwing missiles and would ‘heave anything that happens to be within his reach with such Force as to split Stools, Bowls and other Wooden Utensils in a Hundred Pieces’. One young
baboon was deemed unfit for polite company as ‘by his Motions when Women approach him, [he] appears to be lecherous to a surprising Degree’. The monkeys were not a huge success, and were removed in 1810 for ‘one of them having torn a boy’s leg in a dangerous manner’.
There was usually an Indian elephant in the menagerie. They were largely judged to be inferior to a dog or a horse in understanding, yet they were observed to play by spraying things with water from their trunks. Mr Cops, one of the better keepers at the Tower, was convinced of their ‘wisdom’. Quite how they found out that elephants are ‘fond of wine, spirits and other intoxicating articles’ is best consigned to the past, but the elephant rations contained a gallon of wine daily.
Kangaroos and emus wandered about freely in the grounds. The Royal Park at Windsor had quite a stock of roaming kangaroos, and they were breeding successfully at the Tower before 1820. An aside in an account of the Tower menagerie of this period notes that there were various parklands around England where kangaroos were present in some quantity.
My favourite account of an animal in the Tower is from the 1820s, when a zebra was recorded in the menagerie. Zebras are stubborn, and remain wild under all but the most confined circumstances. The Tower zebra had retained her character, suffering the indignities of her confined state with a tolerably good nature, provided she got her reward.
The subject of the present article, which has now been about two years in the Menagerie, will suffer a boy to ride her about the yard, and is frequently allowed to run loose through the Tower, with a man by her side, whom she does not attempt to quit except to run to the Canteen, where she is occasionally indulged with a draught of ale, of which she is particularly fond.
The menagerie was much improved by Mr Cops, and during his tenure it became clear that it was no longer acceptable to house animals in such conditions as the Tower afforded. The menagerie housed 280 creatures by 1832. It was closed in 1835, when the animals formed the basis of the collection for London Zoo in Regent’s Park.
2. The Margins
The City represents the heart of Old London, and it remained the hub of the growing metropolis. At the beginning of the Georgian era it was newly built and cleaner than it had ever been, full of ideas and urgency. And money. If the people were not sophisticated, displaying only commercial taste, they were solid and prosperous.
We now leave the tightly packed mercantile streets, smelling of fish, whale oil, animals and coffee, and head for the lawless urban sprawl outside the walls; the haunt of restless apprentices, homosexuals and forgers, writers, refugees and rebels. A place where anything might happen.
As early as the reign of Elizabeth I, London had ‘got a great way from the streame [of the Thames]’. Living outside the City rapidly became an attractive option for many, particularly merchants who wanted grand gardens rather than enclosed courtyards, artisans whose trades required space and freely running water, and those who could not afford to live in the Square Mile. However, from the moment the urban sprawl began to creep round the eastern walls of the Tower it became a place for poor immigrants and the marginalized.
The jagged arc of the City boundary begins in the east, beyond the Tower. Up against the Tower of London was the church of St Katharine and its associated hospital. In 1598, the historian John Stow described it as ‘pestered with small tenements’ and wrote that there was a large number of ‘strangers’ living there. St Katharine-by-the-Tower and St Botolph-without-Aldgate hold a significant amount of records for baptisms and burials of black members of the local community during the eighteenth century. Their entries are annotated with ‘Black’ or ‘Blackamoor’. In May 1827, St Katharine’s was pulled down so that the area might be redeveloped as part of the new London docks. More than a thousand small tenements were cleared to make way for the docks, displacing over 11,000 inhabitants with compensation only for freeholders. The first of the docks was to sit immediately in the space the church had occupied for seven centuries.
Just north of St Katharine’s was ‘Rag Fair’, the nickname for Rosemary Lane ‘where old clothes and frippery are sold’. A later account reveals:
There is no expressing the poverty of the goods, nor yet their cheapness. A distinguished merchant, engaged with a purchaser, observing me look on his with great attention, called out to me, as his customer was going off with his bargain, to observe that man, For, says he, I have actually cloathed him for fourteen pence.
On 14 February 1756, The Public Advertiser recorded that Mary Jenkins, a second-hand clothes dealer in Rag Fair, had sold a pair of breeches to a woman ‘for sevenpence and a pint of beer’. In the pub, the purchaser found eleven Queen Anne gold guineas and a banknote dated 1729 sewn into the waistband. The woman was apparently illiterate, and she sold the banknote to another customer for a gallon of ‘twopenny purl’ (a powerful mixture of hot beer, sugar, ginger and gin) before being told that the note’s value was £30. Elsewhere:
Jews used to go about the streets with bags full of wigs, crying out, ‘A dip for a penny.’ … It would happen that the man fished up a wig too big or too small, or a black-haired man got a red wig, or the reverse; or a most outrageous fit, in which no decent citizen or artisan could appear.
The Rag Fair would migrate to what became known as Petticoat Lane, where by the Victorian period there were ‘between two and three miles of old clothes … it is a vista of dinginess, but many-coloured dinginess, as regards female attire’.
Nearby, in Goodman’s Fields, house numbers were introduced to London in 1708. However, London continued to work on a system of large and elaborate signboards and descriptions, such as ‘At the Naked Boy and Three Crowns Against the New Church in The Strand’. To the north and west, the Huguenot refugees invaded the earlier textile-making settlement, sticking close to the charity of their mother church in Threadneedle Street and their soup kitchen, ‘La Soupe’. Where Broadgate passes Liverpool Street Station and becomes Norton Folgate, the City’s jurisdiction ended; the area had been a place to find cheap lodgings since Christopher Marlowe took a room there. At the beginning of the period it was a scraggy patchwork settlement but by the end was occupied by more commercial buildings. It is still a discordantly odd area now, pummelled by heavy traffic, dotted with gritty nightclubs and cornershops where all the biscuits are out of date. To the west of Norton Folgate were the huge open spaces of Moorfields, perhaps the most symbolic of all of east London’s open spaces.
Through Aldgate and Bishopsgate passed the roads to Whitechapel and Shoreditch, taking rural traffic at the beginning of the period and suburban commuters at the end. Between them ran Houndsditch, just outside the City walls where ‘dead dogges were there laid or cast’ for centuries. Further west was Bethlem Hospital, crouched upon the southern edge of Moorfields. Commonly known as Bedlam, it was where the insane poor were housed. Moorfields itself played host to the City’s leisure time as well as her protests, and acted as a refuge during times of terror. On its western edge was Grub Street, where poor scribblers huddled in frozen garrets and broadsheets fluttered on washing lines, drying in the wind. ‘On lines stretched from tree to tree, slips of ballads fluttered in the breeze.’
At Cripplegate there were noisy coaching inns, such as the Catherine Wheel and the Bell, which catered for all classes of customers in their warren-like interiors. Clerkenwell played host to the artisan as goldsmiths, horologists and cabinetmakers set up workshops around the Green. Many were poorly paid pieceworkers, exempt from the apprenticeships enforced within the City. Holborn was where the richest merchants had moved a century earlier to build large houses strung out along the road. Behind them were courts and fields, mixed with large gardens that were getting ever smaller as the weight of population encroached. Most of the houses were by now subdivided into cheap tenements. Behind lay Chick Lane, a street of brothels and shops selling second-hand goods and clothes.
To the south-west Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Temple acted as London’s universities, full of bright and affluent youn
g men away from home. In the late seventeenth century, it became a small town of regular squares and passages with gardens opening on to the river, gulls wheeling overhead. Solidly middle class in both occupation and occupant, it was not immediately apparent that the Inns were busy haunts of prostitution and, sometimes, violence. Between Temple and the City was Alsatia, also known as the Liberty of Whitefriars, named after the white clothing of the Carmelites who had once inhabited the area. It was a ‘dull, narrow, uninviting lane sloping from Fleet Street to the river … a debtors’ sanctuary and thieves’ paradise, and for half a century its bullies and swindlers waged a ceaseless war with their proud and rackety neighbours of the Temple’. Close by was the Bridewell Prison. Originally a palace for Henry VIII, it had been given over to the correction of ‘disorderly women’, and soon Bridewell became London’s byword for prison.
These ragged margins of the City did not remain for long. The Georgian period saw them appear, flourish in their extraordinary ways and then die as London leached into the surrounding villages.
THE ‘MOTLEY ASSEMBLAGE’ OF MOORFIELDS
Moorfields is gone, much of it hidden beneath the vast Barbican complex whose myriad water features recall something of the marshy swamp concealed beneath. For Moorfields was a moor. It was boggy, and a danger to those who did not know their way around it in the late seventeenth century. It was so wet that Stow spoke of the necessity for ‘Cawswaies’ across it. The Moor Fields lay half in and half outside the City boundary. This marginality defined the area’s role in the London subconscious of the eighteenth century.