As for gentlemen, they may be made good cheap in England [Sir Thomas Smith, a lawyer and government official, wrote in 1560]. For whosoever studieth the laws of the realm, who studieth in the universities, who professeth liberal sciences and, to be short, who can live idly and without manual labour and will bear the part, charge and countenance of a gentleman, he … shall be taken for a gentleman.5
After the gentry, in Harrison’s classification, came ‘citizens and burgesses … of some substance to bear office’, then ‘yeomen of the countryside’, men who did not bear coats of arms but might well be better off than gentlemen.
For the most the yeomen are farmers to gentlemen [Harrison explained]; and with grazing, frequenting of markets and keeping of servants … so come to great wealth, in so much that many of them are able to buy the lands of unthrifty gentlemen, and often setting their sons to the schools and to the universities and to the Inns of Court, or otherwise leaving them sufficient lands whereupon they may live without labour, do make them by those means to become gentlemen.6
Most yeomen, however, content with their lot, did not choose to become gentlemen. ‘A man may find sundry yeomen,’ wrote William Lambarde, the antiquary, son of a draper, ‘although otherwise for wealth comparable with the gentle sort that will not yet for all that change their condition, nor desire to be apparelled with the titles of gentry.’7 They preferred to spend their money on enlarging their holdings rather than on coats of arms. In Leicestershire, for example, between 1540 and 1600, as Dr Hoskins has shown, tens of thousands of acres were bought by yeomen, many of whom eventually became owners of the manors upon which their forebears had been tenant farmers a generation or two earlier.8
While the wealthy yeomen frequently preferred to remain yeomen despite their affluence, there was nevertheless widespread social mobility, with men of substance moving upwards by virtue of their wealth or occupation irrespective of their birth. It was no disgrace for a gentleman’s son to leave home to seek his fortune in trade; and his heirs were proud to read on his elaborate funeral monument some such description of him as ‘Citizen and Mercer’. Some ‘new men’ were undoubtedly brash. Asa Briggs has drawn attention to one arriviste, Thomas Dolman, who, in following a fashion for displaying classical mottoes over his mansion’s entrance porch, chose the arrogant text, ‘The toothless envies the eater’s teeth’.9 Such men delighted to put their money into country estates; and in four counties, widely separated from each other, Derbyshire, Essex, Somerset and Shropshire, more new country houses were built in the fifty years between 1570 and 1620 than in any other half century.10
The fourth class of people which Harrison identified were those who were destined ‘to be ruled and not to rule others’, who had no ‘voice or authority in our commonwealth’. These were ‘day labourers, poor husbandmen, and all artificers, as tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, and the like’. Yet these men were not ‘altogether neglected’, Harrison went on to explain, ‘for in cities and corporate towns, for default of yeomen, they are fain to make up their inquests of such meaner people. And in villages they are commonly made churchwardens, sidesmen, ale-conners, constables, and many times enjoy the name of headboroughs.’ Such official positions were often not welcome. The unpaid constable, for instance, was a hard-worked man expected to bring malefactors to justice, to raise the hue and cry, follow escaped prisoners, have vagrants whipped, supervise alehouses, and musters of the militia, superintend the morals of his fellow-parishioners, to ensure that fast days were observed, that church attendance was not shirked, and that proper wages as laid down by the justices were received and paid. Yet, for all the unwelcome duties the office of constable entailed, it did provide a man with a certain position in society; and enabled him, if he were so inclined, to look down upon those whom he considered beneath him, men considered unworthy of office. ‘In London the rich disdain the poor,’ wrote Thomas Nashe, the dramatist. ‘The courtier the citizen. The citizen the countryman. The merchant the retailer. The retailer the craftsman. The better sort of craftsman the baser. The shoemaker the cobbler.’11 And in the country there were more than a few members of old families who agreed with the Staffordshire reactionary Sampson Erdeswicke that it was a pity there were so many merchants and lawyers buying up property in the shires and taking over land that had formerly been in the hands of persons of more worthy pedigree.12
Social distinctions were marked in all kinds of ways, in the clothes people wore and the food they ate, but not in what was in the twentieth century to become the most telling distinction of all, the accent in which they spoke. The children of the gentry frequently attended the same local school as the sons of yeomen and husbandmen, and all would grow up speaking with the same strong regional accents, still using words unknown in other parts of the country, and in Cornwall speaking a different language altogether. When the Marchioness of Exeter signed a letter to her son, ‘your lowfyng mothar, Gartrude Exettar’, she wrote the words as she would have pronounced them; and Sir Walter Ralegh, who had been born to an ancient family in a Devon manor house and had been at Oriel College, Oxford, ‘spake broad Devonshire to his dying day’.13 So incidentally, did the Tory landowner, Lord Rolle of Stevenstone, who did not die until 1842.
Although there had been times, during years of dearth or plague, when the numbers of deaths exceeded those of births, the population of the country had been steadily rising since the 1470s; and by 1600 there were probably well over 4 million inhabitants of England and Wales. Over half these were under twenty-five years of age and less than 10 per cent were over sixty. The great majority of the population still lived in the country, though towns, while still often rural in atmosphere, were growing fast; and in many of them, suburbs, where once the medieval poor had lived in hovels beneath the walls, were being developed as areas for the richer citizens to live in more peaceful and healthy surroundings than the busy and rowdy town centres could now offer.
20 Citizens, Masters and Journeymen
No town could be compared in size with London whose population increased enormously in the sixteenth century. Before the first official census of 1801, which was itself not very reliable, all estimates are essentially the results of guesswork. It seems likely, however, that the population of Roman London in the third century was between 45,000 and 50,000, that it dwindled away during the Dark Ages and that when the Tower of London was built shortly after the Norman Conquest there were some 14,000 to 18,000 people living there. By the end of the twelfth century the numbers had probably risen to about 25,000 and by 1340, largely owing to immigration from abroad and from other parts of England, to about 50,000, the estimated population of the Roman city. This was far more than the population of any other town in England; and it was not large by continental standards: Paris was much bigger, so were Venice, Naples and Milan. After the Black Death there was little increase in the size of London until the end of the fifteenth century; but thereafter there was a sharp rise in the population, again largely due to immigration but not so much of foreigners and of apprentices from elsewhere in England as of unskilled labourers and of the destitute in search of food and work. The government, alarmed by the numbers and by overcrowding, and fearing the spread of disease, fire, social unrest and outbreaks of violence, endeavoured to check the growth.
In the summer of 1580 a proclamation was issued prohibiting, within three miles of any London gate, the building of any new house where no former house was known to have existed within human memory. From that date onwards for over 100 years similar proclamations were repeatedly issued, prohibiting new buildings or the division of existing ones, defining punishments for builders and householders who transgressed the law and providing for the demolition of houses put up without licence. But it proved impossible to prevent overcrowding: the policy of prohibiting new building in the hope of keeping down the population merely served to cram the poor into houses already standing. Nor, despite their constant efforts, were the authorities successful in preventing new buildings from being
erected. Knowing that they might, if they were lucky, escape with a fine, builders continued to put up unauthorized houses; yet, knowing, too, that if they were not lucky their buildings might be pulled down, they took care to use the cheapest materials and to expend as little money as possible. Some builders went so far as to erect screens to hide their illicit buildings from the authorities: one man in Cursitor’s Alley, Chancery Lane, built high walls round a field where he claimed to be keeping tame rabbits but where he had, in fact, put up a row of squalid tenements. Many other builders selected the narrowest, darkest, most remote alleyways and courts to put together any sort of jerry-built shelter that would command a rent. Also, since additions to existing houses were allowed, it became common practice to patch up a derelict house, add the permitted extension, and dig beneath it a cellar to let as a shop, gaming-room, a ‘tippling house’ or even as lodgings to some improvident family. So the growth of London continued unchecked; new suburbs sprang up; and Westminster expanded rapidly. By the end of the century the population had risen to about 200,000 and was almost to double within fifty years.1
John Stow, the son of a tailor in a poor way of business on Cornhill, whose Survey of London and Westminster was published in 1598, much lamented the changes that had occurred in his lifetime. He disapproved of the way the gardens of so many big houses were being turned into bowling-alleys and dicing-houses, of the way in which so many rich men were encroaching upon common lands and open fields to build houses ‘like Midsummer pageants with towers, turrets and chimney-tops’. He regretted, too, the encroachments upon the precincts of churches and even upon roadways which were making the streets so narrow that they were constantly blocked by wagons, drays and barrows. Much of the Walbrook, now ‘worse cloyed and choken than ever it was before’, had disappeared beneath buildings which stretched across the stream from bank to bank. The medieval ditch, although still deep and 200 feet wide in places, was elsewhere a clogged and dirty channel, while between Aldgate and the Tower, where once the water had been deep enough to drown a horse, the moat had been filled up completely and covered with carpenters’ yards, kitchen gardens and tenements. In the markets in Eastcheap, Knightrider Street and in Faringdon Ward the traders had edged further and further forward, first building roofs over their stalls, then replacing their stalls with bigger sheds, and finally building houses which stretched out over the roadway where their customers had formerly walked.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries had exacerbated the problem. Numerous religious houses had passed into the hands of rich laymen who converted them into large mansions, selling off part of the gardens for building and either turning the chapels into parish churches, pulling them down or converting them to some other use. The chapel of the Crutched Friars was turned into a tennis court; that of St Martin-le-Grand became a wine tavern; the site of the Carmelite priory of the Whitefriars was soon occupied by small tenements, alehouses and poor men’s shops. Part of the property of the Austin Friars came into the hands of Thomas Cromwell, the brewer’s son who became Henry VIII’s Lord Great Chamberlain; and by his acquisition of this land be became a neighbour of John Stow’s father. Without giving the old tailor any warning, or offering him compensation, Cromwell had his house dug out of the ground, placed on rollers and pulled over twenty feet away from his own boundary so that he could extend his garden.
John Stow was also saddened by the appearance of the expanding suburbs to the east of the Tower along the roads to the villages of Whitechapel and Stepney, Shadwell and Limehouse and down by the waterfront to Wapping. Here there were continual streets and straggling passages, ‘with alleys of small tenements or cottages … inhabited by sailors’ victuallers’ which had destroyed the once beautiful ‘fayre hedges and long rows of elms’. All the way now from Radcliffe, past Goodman’s Fields – through which as a boy in the 1520s Stow had walked to fetch milk (at ½d for three pints) – to the ‘filthy cottages’ and laystalls around Aldgate, the ‘horrid entrance to the City’, there was a long, dirty ribbon development of brick and wood.2
To the west of the City the appearance of London was also being transformed. Covering acres of ground on the river front between Charing Cross and Westminster Hall was the new royal Palace of Whitehall, originally York Place which, although it belonged to the see of York and not personally to the Archbishop, the king had taken over, as he had taken over Hampton Court, from the enormously rich Cardinal Wolsey. To the west of it were the red brick walls of St James’s Palace, yet another of the thirteen palaces which the king owned within a day’s ride of his capital; and between the new Privy Stairs at Whitehall Palace and the mouth of the Fleet river there was an almost continuous line of rich men’s palaces for well over a mile. Adjoining Whitehall was Northumberland House, the immense town house of the Dukes of Northumberland. Further downstream were the medieval walls of the Palace of the Savoy and the huge Renaissance mansion built between 1547 and 1550 from monastic ruins by the Lord Protector Somerset. East of Somerset House were the palaces of the Earls of Arundel and Essex; then, before the banks of the Fleet were reached, appeared the rambling halls and courts of the Temple – once the premises of the religious order of the Knights Templar and now the haunt of lawyers – and finally the dark red walls of Bridewell. Behind these riverside palaces, on the other side of the Strand, were the houses of more great men, Craven House, home of the Craven family whose immense fortune had been founded by Sir William Craven, merchant tailor and Lord Mayor of London; Exeter House, the palace of Lord Burghley; and the valuable Covent Garden estate, once the property of the Abbot of Westminster, now in the hands of the Russell family, headed by the Earls of Bedford.
South of the river, Southwark, still frequented by whores and whoremongers, by visitors to bear-gardens, cockpits and bull-baiting rings, was still growing apace; and it was only to the north that large-scale building was inhibited by problems of water supply and by the heavy clay which made it impossible for householders to enjoy any satisfactory and reasonably cheap system of drainage. Yet, even in the north, suburbs were developing. Clerkenwell, Smithfield and Spitalfields were all growing, due in part to the arrival of so many Huguenot refugees; and there were long rows of houses on both sides of the road at Hoxton.3
The life of the city had changed little since the days of Richard Whittington. There were the same pageants and processions, the same quarrels and occasional riots, the same sports and pastimes. Young men still tilted at the quintain on Cornhill, still practised archery to the uproarious accompaniment of drums and flutes in Islington, Finsbury and Moorfields, although John Stow noted a growing and worrying interest in artillery which was leading to a sad decline in the trade of the bowyers, fletchers and bowstring-makers in Grub Street and turning the archery ground in Bishopsgate Without into a smoky waste where the gunners from the Tower fired their brass cannon into butts of upturned earth.
Men could still drink sack for less than 4d a pint, and still get drunk at Bartholomew Fair. Pirates were still hanged in chains downstream from the Tower as they had been since Roman times; the heads of traitors were still displayed on London Bridge until blown down on a windy night; the markets, bigger than ever, ‘unmeasurably pestred with the unimaginable increase and multiplicity of market-folkes’, still continued as before, six days every week.
The largest market was Cheapside which was opened at dawn in winter and six o’clock in the summer by the ringing of a bell. Further east was the sprawling Leadenhall Market, the place to go for the best poultry and milk, leather and cloth, kitchen pans and tools. The butcher’s markets were in Eastcheap and Newgate Street; the fish market on Fish Street Hill; and there were other markets in Cornhill, in King Street, Westminster, at Smithfield and Southwark, and on the quays at Queenhythe, Billingsgate and Bear Key.
The noise was tremendous as the market people shouted the price and merit of their wares above the din of rumbling carts, bellowing cattle, haggling, laughing, quarrelling and banter. Carts shod with iron were not allowed i
n London streets and the fore-horse was supposed to be led, but, as John Stow said, ‘these good orders’ were not observed. Coaches and wagons were driven along without regard to the convenience of pedestrians who were forced into doorways, splashed with mud or covered with dust; and not a day passed when a street was not blocked by vehicles parked or entangled between the overhanging houses.
There squeaks a cart wheel, here a tumbrel rumbles,
Here scolds an old bawd, there a porter grumbles,
Here two tough carmen combat for the way.4
From the markets and the streets, the stalls, and the shops which were piled high with merchandise and outside which apprentices and maidservants ran to catch the attention of the passers-by, the cries went up: ‘What do you lack? Do you buy, sir? See what you lack? Pins, points, garters, Spanish gloves, silk ribbons. Crabs! Pears! Shoes! Small coal! Writing ink!’
Even in St Paul’s Churchyard, where the booksellers congregated, carrying on business beneath heavy painted hanging signs depicting ships and mermaids, black boys and bishops’ mitres, brazen dragons and saracens’ heads, the noise and shouting was just as loud and intense: ‘What do you lack, gentlemen. See, a new book come forth, sir, buy a new book, sir … Perils of the deep, chronicles and sermons!’ And it was just the same at the Royal Exchange which had been built between Cornhill and Threadneedle Street in the 1560s by the rich mercer, Thomas Gresham, as a bourse, like Antwerp’s, where merchants from all countries could meet and discuss their business. There were rows of shops on the upper floor, mostly apothecaries, armourers, booksellers, goldsmiths, milliners and drapers selling,
Such purses, gloves and points
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