We may walk the streets of London during the long reign of Henry III (1216–72). There were great houses as well as hovels, fine stone churches against which were erected wooden stalls for passing trade. The contrast of fair and foul can be put in another context with the statistic that, out of forty thousand citizens, more than two thousand were forced to beg for alms. The richer merchants constructed halls and courtyards while the poorest shopkeepers might live and work in two rooms ten feet square; the more affluent citizens owned fine furniture and silver, while those of straiter means possessed only the simplest pottery and kitchen utensils together with the tools of their trade.
One examination of a murder, when a young man killed his wife with a knife, incidentally provides a household inventory of the “middling” sort. The unfortunate pair lived in a house of wooden construction with two rooms, one above the other, and a thatched roof. In the lower room which opened upon the street there were a folding table and two chairs, with the walls “hung about with kitchen utensils, tools and weapons.” Among them were a frying pan, an iron spit and eight brass pots. The upper room was reached by means of a ladder—here were a bed and mattress, with two pillows. A wooden chest held six blankets, eight linen sheets, nine tablecloths and a coverlet. Their clothes “which were laid in chests or hung upon the walls” consisted of three surcoats, one coat with a hood, two robes, another hood, a suit of leather armour and half a dozen aprons. There were a candlestick, two plates, some cushions, a green carpet, and curtains hung before the doors to keep out the draughts. There would also have been rushes on the floor, not included in any inventory. It was a small, but comfortable, residence.
Those in poorer situations lived in rooms built within tenements which could be found down the narrow alleys between wide thoroughfares. The upper floor of these small houses was known as the “solar,” which protruded into the street itself so that little of the sky could be seen between two overhanging solars. Many of the smaller houses had been built of wood with thatched roofs, still reflecting the appearance of Saxon or early Norman building; London retained in part the atmosphere of a much earlier city, with tribal or territorial connotations. Yet after the many fires that visited the city, particularly a great conflagration in 1212, ordinances compelled householders to build their walls of stone and their roofs of tiles. Broken tiles from this period have been found in cesspits, wells, cellars, rubbish dumps and the foundation stones of roads. So there was a general process of transition, not perfectly managed, in which new stone and old timber stood side by side.
The condition of the streets themselves can be ascertained from the extant documents of the period. In the pleas and memoranda of the Guildhall, for example, we read of the master of Ludgate putting dung into the Fleet to such an extent that the water was stopped in certain places; a common privy is “diffectif” and “the ordur therof rotith the stone wallys.” The taverners of St. Bride’s parish put their empty barrels, and slops, into the street “to nusauns of all folk ther passyng.” There were complaints about defective paving in Hosier Lane, while in Foster Lane the fourteen households had the habit of casting from their windows “ordure & vrine, the which annoyet alle the pepol of the warde.” The cooks of Bread Street were indicted for keeping “dung and garbage” under their stalls, while a great stream of “dong and water and other diverse filth” was known to pour down Trinity Lane and Cordwainer Street by Garlickhithe Street, and descend between the shops of John Hatherle and Richard Whitman before discharging itself into the Thames. A dung-hill in Watergate Street beside Bear Lane “is noyowse to all the commune people, kasting out in-to this lane ordour of Prevees and other orrible sightis.” There are reports of stinking fish and bad oysters, of common steps in disrepair and of thoroughfares being blocked up, of areas or “pryue places” where thieves and “money strumpettes” congregate.
But some of the best evidence for the condition of the streets comes in the many regulations which were, from the evidence of the courts, being continually flouted. Stallholders were supposed to set up their stands only in the middle of the street, between the two “kennels” or gutters on either side. In the narrower thoroughfares the kennel ran down the middle of the street, thus effectively forcing pedestrians to “take the wall.” The scavengers and rakers of each ward were ordered “to preserve, lower and raise the pavements, and to remove all nuisances of filth”; all such “filth” was taken by horse and cart down to the river where it was carried off in boats built for the purpose. Special arrangements were made for carting off the noisome stuff from the sites of butchery—the shambles, the Stocks Market and the market at East Cheap—but there were always complaints of foul odours. In More’s Utopia (1516) the killing of animals takes place outside the city walls; his pointed recommendation is evidence of the real disgust which many citizens felt about the proximity of this trade.
In the Liber Albus there are also instructions that pigs and dogs be not allowed to wander through the city; more curiously, perhaps, it was decreed that “barbers shall not place blood in their windows.” No citizen was allowed to carry a bow for firing stones, and no “courtesans” were permitted to dwell within the city walls. This last ordinance was persistently flouted. There were elaborate regulations about the building of houses and walls, with special provisions applied for neighbours’ disputes; once again the impression is of a close compacted town. In the same spirit of good order it was decreed that the owners of the larger houses should always possess a ladder and a barrel of water in case of fire; since it had been ordained that tile rather than thatch should be the standard material of the roofs, the aldermen of each ward had the power to come with a pole or hook in order to remove any offending straw.
It is indicative of the close watch kept upon all citizens that there were also regulations about private and social arrangements. Every aspect of life was covered by an elaborate network of law, ordinance and custom. No “stranger” was allowed to spend more than one day and a night in a citizen’s house, and no one might be harboured within a ward “unless he be of good repute.” No lepers were ever allowed within the city. No one was permitted to walk abroad “after forbidden hours”—that is, after the bells or curfew had been sounded—unless he or she wished to be arrested as a “night-walker.” It was also forbidden that “any person shall keep a tavern for wine or for ale after the curfew aforesaid … nor shall they have any persons therein, sleeping or sitting up; nor shall anyone receive persons into his house from out of a common tavern, by night or by day.”
The curfew itself was rung at nine o’clock in the summer months, earlier in the darkness of winter. When the bell of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside rang curfew, followed by the bell of St. Martin’s, St. Laurence’s and St. Bride’s, the taverns were cleared, the apprentices left their work, the lights dimmed as rush or candle were put out, the gates of the city were locked and bolted. Some of these apprentices believed that the clerk of St. Mary-le-Bow kept them at work too long by ringing too late and, according to John Stow, a rhyme was issued against
Clerke of the Bow bell with the yellow lockes
For thy late ringing thy head shall have knocks.
To which the offending clerk responded:
Children of Cheape, hold you all still,
For you shall have the Bow bell rung at your will.
This exchange testifies to the close relationship between all the members of the city so that everyone, for example, knew the bell-ringer with yellow hair. But the most striking image is perhaps that of the dark and silent city, barricaded against the outer world.
That silence was sometimes punctuated by screams, shouts and cries. It was the citizens’ duty to “raise hue and cry” against any transgressor of the peace, for example, and any citizen “who comes not on such hue and cry raised” was heavily fined. London was a city where everyone was watching everyone else, for the sake of the spirit of the commune, and there are numerous reports of neighbours “crying shame” at the ill treatment of a
n apprentice or the abuse of a wife.
Yet it is to be expected that, in a mercantile culture, the greatest body of law should be concerned with commercial transactions. There are many hundreds of regulations in this period, controlling every aspect of trading life. It was ordered that the vendors of certain products like cheese and poultry “shall stand between the kennels in the market of Cornhulle so as to be a nuisance to no one” with other trades distributed in various sites in the city. No vendor could “buy any victuals for resale before prime rung at St. Paul’s.” From the twenty regulations applying to bakers alone, it might be noted that a baker of “tourte” or pan-baked bread was not permitted to sell white bread; every baker also was commanded to leave “the impression of his seal” upon each loaf of bread. It was decreed that “all kinds of fish brought into the City in closed baskets shall be as good at bottom of the basket as at the top,” and that “no stranger ought to buy of a stranger.”
Fishermen laboured under hundreds of regulations about what they could catch, how they could catch, and where they could catch; the size and mesh of their nets were carefully measured. There was also an elaborate system of tolls and taxes, so that “Every man who brings cheese or poultry if the same amounts to fourpence halfpenny shall pay one halfpenny. If a man on foot brings one hundred eggs or more he shall give five eggs. If a man or woman brings any manner of poultry by horse and lets it touch the ground” he or she will pay more. It was an intricate system but its purpose was simply to ensure that the inhabitants of the city were adequately fed and clothed. It attempted both to pre-empt the extortionate demands of those who bought and sold, and to protect the rights of the citizens to trade in the city at the expense of “aliens” or “strangers.” The regulations had a further primary purpose, in the efforts to systematise trading so that there was little possibility of false measures, adulterated food or shoddy manufactures.
It is in the context of this thriving, colourful and energetic city that we can trace specific events which reveal the dangerous condition of the streets. In court records of the period we read of unnamed beggar women collapsing and dying in the street, of occasional suicides and constant fatal accidents— “drowned in a ditch outside Aldersgate … fell into a tub of hot mash.” We learn that “A poor little woman named Alice was found drowned outside the City wall. No one is suspected … a certain Elias le Pourtour, who was carrying a load of cheese, fell dead in Bread Street … a girl of about eight years old was found dead in the churchyard of St. Mary Somerset. It was believed that she was thrown there by some prostitute. No one is suspected.” Suicide in this age of piety, was considered a token only of madness. Isabel de Pampesworth “hanged herself in a fit of insanity” in her house in Bread Street. Alice de Wanewyck “drowned herself in the port of Dowgate, being non compos mentis.” Drunkenness was general, and there are continual references to citizens falling from their solars to the ground, falling down steps into the Thames, falling off ladders. The reports of these, and other fatalities, are to be found in The London Eyre of 1244 edited by Chew and Weinbaum. Other incidents are redolent of the period. “A certain man named Turrock” was found dead but “it was found that three men were lying in the deceased’s bed when he died … and they are in mercy,” the last phrase denoting that they had been acquitted of any charge. In another instance “Roger struck Maud, Gilbert’s wife, with a hammer between the shoulders and Moses struck her in the face with the hilt of his sword, breaking many of her teeth. She lingered until the feast of St. Mary Magdalen, and then died.”
This litany of death and disaster highlights the crude violence of the city streets; tempers are short, and life is held very cheap. “Henry de Buk killed a certain Irishman, a tiler, with a knife in Fleet Bridge Street, and fled to the church of St. Mary Southwark. He acknowledged the deed, and … abjured the realm. He had no chattels.” The quarrel of three men in a tavern by Milk Street led to a fatality when one was attacked with an “Irish knife” and a “misericord,” a merciful knife which was meant to guarantee a quick exit from this life; the fatally wounded man reached the church of St. Peter in Cheapside, but none of the bystanders offered to assist him.
The various trade guilds openly fought against each other in the streets; a group of goldsmiths, for example, fell upon a saddler and proceeded to lay open his head with a sword, chop off his leg with an axe and generally belabour him with a staff; he died five days later. When apprentices of the law rioted by Aldersgate, a citizen “amused himself” by shooting into the crowd an arrow which killed an unfortunate bystander. A “love-day,” designed to reconcile the coppersmiths and ironsmiths, turned into a general and murderous riot. When a group of unruly men entered a tavern one of the customers enquired, “Who are these people?” and was promptly killed with a sword. There were continual fights in the street, ambushes and arguments over nothing—or over “goat’s wool” as it was known. Games of “dice” or “tables” frequently ended in drunken fights, while it is clear that some of the owners of dicing taverns were engaged in wholesale fraud. It is a curious but instructive fact that the officers of the ward or parish were quick to tend to the religious needs of the maimed or dying, but there were few attempts to administer any form of medical treatment by physician or barber-surgeon. The injured were generally left to recover, or die, as providence intended.
There were many assaults upon women; in the transcripts there are cases of female Londoners being beaten or kicked to death, or callously murdered in premeditated fashion. Lettice accused Richard of Norton, vintner, of “raping and deflowering her” but the case did not proceed to trial. Wife-beating was common and went largely unremarked; but the brutalised women themselves could then in turn become brutal. A drunken woman started howling out insults to certain builders who were working on the corner of Silver Street—she called them “tredekeiles,” which might be translated as “lousy slobs,” and promptly started a fight in which one man was stabbed in the heart. Women could also be exponents of justice, rough even by London standards: when a Breton murdered a widow in her bed, “women of the same parish come owte with stonys and canell dong, and there made an ende of hym in the hyghe strete.”
The aldermen and watch of each ward had other duties which cast an intriguing light upon the customs of medieval London. They were instructed, for example, to arrest anyone wearing a “visor or false face” in the streets; to be masked was to be considered a criminal. The Court Rolls suggest that they were also given power to remove the doors and windows from any house of dubious reputation; there is a record of their “entering the house of William Cok, butcher, in Cockes Lane and tearing away eleven doors and five windows with hammers and chisels.” It is significant that the name, trade and street of the offender are conflated in characteristic medieval manner; it is an indication of how one activity, in this case the slaughter of poultry, can imbue an entire area of the city. Other incidents may also be representative, although less violent. The watch arrested certain apprentices who had filled a barrel with stones and then rolled it downhill from Gracechurch Street to London Bridge “to the great terror of the neighbours.”
There were more salacious, or intimate, events noted in the judicial records of a slightly later date; in their striking immediacy we might almost be in the same chamber with these early Londoners. “Will’m Pegden saieth that one Morris Hore broughte one Cicell and the saide Colwell had the vse of the bodie of the saide Elizabeth and the saide Alice Daie burned [gave a venereal disease to] the saide Cicell … And then the saide Alice daie came vppe Imediatlie, and lepped vppon the bed & said Cicell with hir kissinge together, and laying hir legges so broade that a yoked sow might go betwene.”
The crimes could be egregious, but the punishments had a distinctively communal aspect. It has often been suggested that the officials of the medieval city were more lenient than their successors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and there is a partial truth to this. Punishments such as amputation were often commuted. But the civi
c spirit could be violent indeed, at least when it was threatened, and there are many records of hanging or beheading for offences against the city’s peace. The fatal penalty was almost always imposed upon rebels and upon those offenders who had in some other way touched the king’s majesty; one man was hanged, for example, for tampering with the royal seal. The heads of rebels and traitors were boiled and placed upon London Bridge, sometimes adorned with a crown of ivy as a final theatrical touch in the drama of punishment. At times of tension or disorder within the city, also, the mayor and aldermen resorted to capital punishment as the most expeditious way of controlling the populace. Murder was always a hanging offence (except when committed by a woman who could prove herself to be pregnant) but, in more peaceful time, the prison and the pillory were the common remedies for crime. Walter Waldeskef was charged “with being addicted to playing knucklebones at night”; he was described in the report as “a night walker, well dressed and lavish of his money, though no one knew how he got his living.” In the year after his arrest he was stabbed in Lombard Street and died in the church of St. Swithin at Walbrook. Agnes de Bury was imprisoned “for selling old fur on Cornhill,” while Roger Wenlock was committed to prison “for selling beer at 2d a gallon.” John Mundy, baker, “was set vpon the pyllery in Cornhill for makyng and sellyng of false breed,” and in the same month Agnes Deynte was also put in the pillory for selling “false mengled buttur.” Many and various frauds were also detected and punished. One baker cut a hole upon his moulding board; when the customer brought in his dough to be cooked, part of it was removed by a member of the baker’s family crouched beneath the counter. In another instance a former servant of a law officer, dismissed, travelled to various taverns and pretended to confiscate ale; the good tavern wives paid him to leave them alone. Eventually he was caught, and placed in the pillory.
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