London’s Triumph

by Stephen Alford

  No one living in London in the 1590s could for a moment have doubted that the city all around them was changing. The social fabric was under strain; by temperament and long practice conservative and reactionary in matters of governance, London’s elite felt themselves to be at the dangerous edge of things. And rightly so: their city faced challenges that would test even a modern state with infinitely more resources. Between 1594 and 1597 there were four consecutive failed summer harvests; rising food prices, hunger and suspicions of grain-hoarding for profit were real and present. Before this, in the years 1592 and 1593, plague had killed thousands of Londoners – something like 14 per cent of the city’s population – and it returned in 1601 and 1603 to kill in even greater numbers. During these times, when London was ‘hot’ with the plague, the city was in quarantine; those able to abandoned it for safety.1 Thomas Dekker wrote in The Wonderfull Yeare (1603) that Death ‘marched even through Cheapside, and the capital streets of Troynovant’.2 For Elizabethans, those long Paul’s Cross sermons on London’s sin, and the judgement of God it invited, were not hollow rhetoric: the city, many felt, was being scourged by providence.

  And yet, for all this London’s population continued to grow unchecked: on balance it was better to take one’s chances in the city than to starve in the countryside. Between the haves and have-nots there were, needless to say, massive inequities. The have-nots were entering the city in great numbers, settling especially in the parishes outside the old walls; they were the outsiders, the strangers, the foreigners and the migrants, clinging on by their fingertips to some kind of existence. Even the securely established of London, the privileged citizenry of tradesmen, retailers and merchants with money and a voice in the affairs of the city, were feeling the sharp pinch of the times. In 1596 the city government wrote to the queen’s Privy Council:

  The great dearth of victual which hath been continued now these three years, besides three years’ plague before, which hath so impoverished the general estate of this whole city, that many persons, before known to be of good wealth, are greatly decayed and utterly disabled for all public service, being hardly able by their uttermost endeavours to maintain the charges of their private families in very mean sort: divers of them being enforced to relinquish their trades, and to dissolve their households, which public calamity is greatly increased by the decay of traffic in foreign countries.3

  Dearth, plague, impoverishment, fragile European trade: merchants were suffering. This cry of anguish was a response to a request by the royal government for money. In other decades it might be read as exaggerated special pleading by a comfortable elite. But the 1590s was a decade unlike any other, and the pain, though shared out unequally across London society as a whole, was felt by every Londoner.

  It seems remarkable that out of these conditions there came the kind of creativity that seems a world away from the grimness of late Elizabethan London. The plague years of the 1590s were a kind of enforced leave of absence for William Shakespeare. The theatres of Southwark were closed in 1593 a week after performances of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris. When a few months later they reopened, Shakespeare returned to London to give his audiences Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet over the years that followed.4

  Poverty was one of the greatest tests for London. The levels of impoverishment and deprivation in the city were profound, particularly in the large and overcrowded parishes outside the wall. Elizabethans inherited and deployed notions of the ‘impotent’ and idle poor that, mediated through the century of Charles Dickens, are still very much with us today. Some, poor through no fault of their own, deserved help and support, where others – those who chose to be idle – deserved only to be beaten into obedience and work. Elizabethans worried endlessly about ‘masterless’ men lurking outside the patriarchal hierarchy of family or trade, subverting the social order and cocking a snook at rank and degree. Henry Arthington, in his Provision for the Poore (1597), set out the criteria for deserving poverty in such a way as to suggest a checklist precision in being able to identify those who might be offered help. He held up the London stranger churches as examples for others to follow: ‘for they are so careful to keep their country people, both from idleness, and begging, that such as can work, neither want work, nor yet wages, and so soon as any fall in decay, their state is imparted unto their company’.5

  Using criteria like Arthington’s, London’s ‘impotent poor’ were helped by parishes and hospitals. More problematic for the city and its leaders were marauding bands of criminal vagabonds and apprentices who gathered in and around London. This at least was how they were characterized by the city elite and the queen’s government: ‘multitudes of a popular sort of base [low] condition, whereof some are prentices and servants to artificers [craftsmen] … and some others wandering idle persons of condition of rogues and vagabonds, and some colouring [disguising] their wandering by the name of soldiers returned from the wars’.6 Orders were given in 1595 and again in 1598 that such men, who evaded ordinary justice, should be summarily executed upon the gallows. Demobilized soldiers from the wars in the Low Countries and in France, especially those who feigned injury in order to beg, were a familiar sight in and around London.7 The plan concocted by the character of Brainworm in Ben Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour (1616) would have struck a chord with the playhouse audiences. Disguised as a soldier, Brainworm goes off to the insalubrious Moorfields, just outside the city wall, to lie ‘in ambuscado’ for his master and beg for charity. He plays his part well: ‘I am a poor gentleman,’ he says, ‘a soldier, one that (in the better state of my fortunes) scorned so mean a refuge, but now it is the humour of necessity, to have it so’ (II. iv. 44–7).

  Polite society feared those outside its boundaries as subversive of hierarchy and order. In 1598, Parliament’s Vagabonds Act gave local officials the powers to apprehend all kinds of wandering minstrels, actors, jugglers, tinkers, pedlars, chapmen, ‘Egyptians’ (Romany gypsies), ‘rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars’. The emphasis was on punishment in houses of correction or even banishment. But for most vagabonds, all the law prescribed was a sound whipping. The test of innocence was a willingness to work, the guilty ‘being persons able in body, using loitering, and refusing to work for such reasonable wages’. In dealing with such vagabonds and idlers, the parish had an important part to play, administering the whipping, completing the formal paperwork that followed it, and then sending the offender on to his or her home parish.8

  Youthful disorder also stalked the streets of London. Every so often disaffected apprentices or apprentice drop-outs congregated to cause trouble. There were frequent rumblings of threat and intimidation; riots took the form of organized gatherings advertised in advance. The victims of this kind of hostility were those on the outer edges of the city and its society, particularly the strangers; here was the still familiar pattern of the impoverished resenting the dispossessed. Anonymous libels threatening violence were taken so seriously that in 1593 the queen’s Privy Council authorized the use of torture in discovering their authors.9 In the play of Sir Thomas More (1600), Shakespeare and other dramatists were not afraid to challenge Londoners ‘in the ruff’ of this kind of anti-immigrant prejudice (II. iii. 85)..

  The big issues and the statistics suggest a city on the edge of collapse, near social breakdown. At times the whole hierarchy was felt by the city elite to be in danger, with the instruments of law and order likely to be overwhelmed. The stability of London’s society seemed so often to hang precariously. But that collapse never came.

  The secret of London’s robustness lay in part in the life of its parishes, that close patchwork of urban villages which made up the city. They, too, felt the weight of the times, raising money to pay for troops on service in France, the Low Countries and Ireland, and carrying the expense of looking after maimed soldiers as well as their own poor. The calls for money were especially insistent and regular: purse
s, as well as some old social bonds, were under strain. It was lucky that the prosperous and well-to-do kept up the long-established practices of charity.

  Yet for all of the stresses and strains, parish communities were tenacious. Elizabethan parishioners kept their city going, feeling their way through a decade of crisis, surviving against the odds, as people so often do. We know about these Londoners mostly from written accounts, but sometimes (if we are very lucky) also from pictures – revealing men and women, masters, mistresses and servants, the well-to-do and those in straitened circumstances, the young and the old, strangers and natives.

  The church of St Bartholomew the Less, or St Bartholomew near the Exchange as it came to be known, was a street away from Sir Thomas Gresham’s grand bourse. It was a parish packed full of all kinds of people, where in the early 1580s tax officials recorded a fair mix of prosperous Londoners (a city alderman, a number of well-to-do merchants, a wealthy widow), a rump of comfortably off tradesmen, and a handful of settled and busy strangers. Left off the record, however, were the parish poor.10

  The church itself was an early medieval foundation rebuilt in the fifteenth century, with a chapel added at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII by a lord mayor, Sir Giles Capel, to house his tomb. St Bartholomew’s was a typical city church – neat and well cared for, and packed with brasses and memorials that spoke to that familiar sense of long continuity over centuries, the rich and successful of London’s citizenry marking out their plots for eternity.

  Some families had been in the parish for a very long time. James Wilford, sheriff in 1499, gave money in his will for a sermon to be preached on Good Friday for ever, and so every year the parishioners gathered between six and nine o’clock in the morning to hear the preacher talk about Christ’s passion, with the reward (other, of course, than spiritual nourishment) of a grand parish lunch. The church was full of Wilford family graves, and as late as 1598 the original Wilford bequest was still providing money to feed and clothe the worthy poor of the parish, thanks to the efficiency of the Merchant Taylors’ Company. Stripped of any flavour of Catholic idolatry (as Elizabethans would have called it), Wilford charity had been pared down to essentials to suit the new scrubbed and scoured post-Reformation world of bare walls, simple communion tables and plain glass.

  A parish like St Bartholomew’s gave its parishioners a degree of security in unsettling and uncertain times; it was a community and a neighbourhood with a broadly settled hierarchy. Its people and families were well known and acknowledged. They belonged: the church and parish fixed them. St Bartholomew’s jostled for its own identity in a great city, preserving its own space, something reaffirmed each year when the children of the parish were walked around its boundaries. This, once again, was an excuse for a good meal: after the parish circuit the parishioners went off together for breakfast, choosing in 1600 the Ship tavern as their venue.

  Each year, too, the wardens and other officials of the church took an inventory of its possessions, a necessary stocktaking of communion cups and a communion cloth, a cushion of green velvet and two surplices for the parson, a parish Bible, two Books of Common Prayer, the register of births, marriages and deaths, the account and vestry minute books, a book of homilies and the big volumes of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Paraphrases on the New Testament (which, given that the last edition was printed in 1549, were probably looking rather worn by the 1590s), as well as a cupboard full of buckets, ladders, hooks and baskets. This was part of the orderly conduct of the parish and there was some sense of common ownership here: the church as a place of community, busy attending to its parishioners in life and death, the steady rhythm of christenings, marriages, burials and bells – bells for funerals, bells for the queen’s birthday every 7 September, her accession to the throne on 17 November and the anniversary of her coronation each 15 January. The noise of the bells ringing out from the square tower of St Bartholomew the Less competed for attention with hundreds just like them across London.

  Every day there were jobs to keep the parish officers busy. There was always maintenance to be done: mending the pews, fixing locks, repairing the bells, cleaning windows, restocking candles and attending to the church’s hourglass. Holly and ivy were brought into the church each year for Christmas. For some of the jobs the churchwardens employed local plasterers, painters, joiners and smiths, but much of the day-to-day work was done by the humblest of the parish’s officers, the scavenger and the raker, whose tasks included cleaning the church, digging graves and carrying dead dogs and cats and rubbish out of the churchyard.

  Read John Stow’s description of St Bartholomew’s and its parish in the later 1590s and one might imagine that everyone and everything gleamed with the lustre of urban prosperity. Bartholomew Lane, at the southeast corner of which stood the church, was described as having ‘divers fair-builded houses on both sides’; here we might think that some of the glamour of the Royal Exchange and Austin Friars had long rubbed off on the parish.11 Stow was silent, however, on the parish’s network of small lanes, like Legg Alley, Potts Alley and Copthall Alley, and these were where the poorer parishioners lived, away from the grand thoroughfares. It was in these corners of the parish that plague, when it came, was felt the hardest. And the plague most certainly was felt on the streets and in the houses of St Bartholomew the Less: in 1603 it took away ninety-one parishioners.12

  Wander along the streets bounded by Throgmorton Street and Broad Street in the middle 1590s and we find at work the busy parishioners of St Bartholomew’s. Some were humble but keen to do their bit, like the three women who cared for an illegitimate baby girl whose welfare was parish business – Goodwife Williamson, Goodwife Bramley and Goodwife Preston. For punishment, the little girl’s mother, Katheryne Wrench, was put in the parish stocks and sent to Bridewell Hospital for correction at parish expense: she, for one, felt the shame of breaking all the moral norms.13 There was little leeway in London society to reject the social conventions of the day: men and women – perhaps especially women – had to take the consequences of their actions. There is little doubt that the matrons of St Bartholomew’s would have spent much of their time gossiping about local goings on and remonstrating with wayward neighbours. Few private affairs were left unexamined by the parish ‘goodwives’ of high morality. In the vestry records, there was no more neighbourly appreciation of the local standing of poorer parishioners than the prefixes ‘Goodwife’ (or ‘Goody’) and ‘Goodman’ – forms of polite and respectful address used for otherwise modest and very ordinary Londoners.

  The parish tried to support its own. Out of the parish chest, kept topped up by regular assessed contributions from the wealthiest parishioners (as well as their gifts and posthumous bequests), came support for the deserving elderly. The poor received food, clothes and, in the especially harsh winters at the turn of the seventeenth century, an allowance of coal to heat their rooms. Parishioners were also keen to help one of their young men at Cambridge University. He was John Preston, the son of Goodwife Preston, and after studying at St Paul’s School, he went off to Peterhouse at Easter 1594 as a sizar, the poorest class of scholar. The parson of St Bartholomew’s, Dr Dix, had taken John under his wing, recommending to the vestry meeting that a sum of money would help him to take his bachelor’s degree. A couple of years later, still in Cambridge and studying for his MA, John was given a further grant, recorded by the vestry as a gift from all the parishioners. This clever son of the parish, the boy of a highly respectable mother who looked after foundling children, went on to a Cambridge fellowship and a career as a minister, thanks in part to the generosity of people he had grown up with.14 Likewise, young Thomas Becke, Goody Becke’s son, was fortunate enough to be given sufficient money out of parish funds to pay for a new suit of clothes in order to set him up in service.15

  And so the parish moved steadily through that punishing last Elizabethan decade, diligently recording the decisions made by the local worthies who held the keys to the parish chest. They looked after l
ost children and sick beggars found in the precincts of the Royal Exchange. They dealt, too, with the wandering idle of the city streets just as the law prescribed. In May 1598, when a meeting of the parish vestry agreed unanimously to pave the street around the church, they also consented to ‘a new post to be set up for the punishing of rogues at the church wall’, a response to Parliament’s Vagabonds Act. Whoever did the whipping was to receive a fee of sixpence; flogging was, after all, hard work.16 Thanks to the book of Parliament’s most recent statutes bought by the parish for two shillings and sixpence, no one would have missed the precise wording of the law: the offender was to be ‘stripped naked from the middle upwards, and shall be openly whipped until his or her body be bloody’.17 One example is that of Elizabeth Justice, who was punished outside the church in 1600 before being moved off to the parish of her birth.18 Though showing Christian charity to those unfortunates who could not help themselves, the goodmen and goodwives and worshipful of St Bartholomew’s are unlikely to have had very much sympathy for Elizabeth: in a city marauded by vagrants, they would have said, the idle got what they deserved.

  Thomas Dauncer was an assiduous attender of parish vestry meetings. He was a substantial man, a citizen and a liveryman, a proud freeman of the Girdlers’ Company. He was also a God-fearing man, ‘a sinful wretch and a mortal creature of the creation of Almighty God, my saviour and redeemer’, as he put it in his last will and testament. He died, probably of plague, in the winter of 1592, and was put into his grave in St Bartholomew the Less five days before Christmas. If his testament was followed to the letter – and there is little doubt that his wife Anne did everything that he expected of her – then his corpse was attended to its grave by sixty poor men dressed in specially made gowns of ‘comely cloth’ priced at five shillings and sixpence a yard. Even faced with eternity, Dauncer maintained his eye for detail to the end.19