by Ian Mortimer
The other place you might go shopping is a fair. In the seventeenth century these are nearing the end of their long history, but some are still vibrant. They used to supply all the things that you couldn’t get in a market; effectively they were moveable towns that came to a locality for two or three days every year. Now they broadly fall into one of two sorts: those in which one or two major commodities are traded in bulk, such as wool, horses, cattle, sheep or cheese; and those that have become recreational fairs, where the principal commodities are drinking, dancing, sex and merriment. There are about ten or twelve of both sort in each county, all of which are held between Easter and early November.
Without doubt, the greatest fair in the country at this time is ‘Stir-Bitch’ or Stourbridge Fair, which takes place in early September on the banks of the River Cam, near Cambridge. It is a must-see: Daniel Defoe regards it as ‘not only the greatest [fair] in the whole nation but in the world’.70 The London publican and satirist Ned Ward puts it in terms that are both more poetic and earthier. According to him, it is
where vice, merchandise and diversion draw the Cambridge youth, London traders, Lynn whores and abundance of ubiquitarian strollers into a promiscuous assembly, all contributing something to either the pleasure or profit of one another; some coming to spend money, others to get it … I beheld such a number of wooden edifices, and such a multitude of gentry, scholars, tradesmen, whores, hawkers, pedlars, and pick-pockets, that it seemed to me like an abstract of all sorts of mankind, drawn into a lesser body, to show the world in epitome.71
Thomas Baskerville is equally astonished by the place:
It was, methought, a goodly sight to see the vast quantities of earthenware there spread upon the turf … here you shall see large streets and shops full of all the variety of wares that are to be sold in London, and great quantities of iron brought from several parts of the nation and elsewhere. The wool fair there to which they come from all parts of England at that time to be furnished is no less. Here you shall see carts laden with oysters; here you shall see great heaps of salt fish; and here you shall see on the bankside great heaps of coal to be sold; and the river thick set with boats for a mile or more in length with all sorts of provisions …72
You’ll also see traffic jams of coaches and hackney cabs on the road between Cambridge and the fair, carrying people each way for the price of 3d a head. Wandering through the fair itself, you’ll see the timber stalls and tents placed in rows like streets: Oyster Row, Garlic Row, Mercers’ Row and Cheddars’ Lane. The street called Cheapside is where the London retailers gather: the goldsmiths, toy makers, brass workers, turners, milliners, haberdashers, hatters, mercers, drapers, pewterers and china-goods importers. Interspersed amongst them are coffee houses, taverns, brandy shops and eating houses. Nearby there is a large square called the Duddery, where the wholesalers unload their packs and there is a pulpit for the clergy to preach on the Sunday during the fair. Near the Duddery you can buy woollen goods, brought by dealers from as far away as Yorkshire, Lancashire, Somerset and Devon; over the course of the week more than £100,000 of cloth will be sold here. You can buy Yorkshire kerseys, Manchester fustians, Kidderminster blankets, Norwich stuffs and Devon serges. In addition, immense sacks of wool called ‘pockets’, which weigh 25 hundredweight each (2,800lbs), are sold to mill owners. The trade in raw wool alone exceeds £50,000 at each fair. The hop business is no less impressive, with a significant proportion of all the hops in the country changing hands here. Other important markets within the fair are for wrought iron and brassware from Birmingham, edged tools and knives from Sheffield, and glassware and stockings from Nottingham and Leicester. Isaac Newton even manages to buy here the glass prisms he needs to prove that light splits into a spectrum of colours.73
For a keen observer like Ned Ward, the real delight lies not in the shopping but in the people. As he walks along Cheapside he comes across ‘linen drapers, silk men, ironmongers, leather-sellers, tobacconists, etc., who, swelled in their shops, looked as big above the rest of the petty dealers as the bluff well-fed senior fellows of a college do above the lean, thin-gutted poor sizers’. At the end of the street, he turns left and walks along by the river, where:
my nostrils were saluted with such a saline savoury whiff, as if I had been walking in a dry fishmongers shop in Thames Street; at last I came into a Dutch market of red and pickled herrings, salt-fish, oysters, pitch, tar, soap, &c. Next [to] these a parcel of wooden trumpery, ranged in as much order as a cupboard of plate, where bacchanalian students may furnish themselves with punch-bowls agreeable to their own bibacity, sots supply themselves with cans sizable to their own humours, and beggars accommodate themselves with spoons and porridge-dishes of any dimension, suitable to their own appetites. Adjoining to this place stand about a dozen suttlers’ [provisioners’] boozing-kens, distinguished by the name of the Lynn-booths; the good people that keep ’em being inhabitants of that town, and have so fair a reputation for the foul practice of venery that their sinful hovels have always maintained the character of being notorious bawdy-houses; the scholars, to encourage the old trade of basket-making, have great resort to these up-tail academies, where they are often presented with a Lynn fairing [a present from a fair], which brings ’em to thin jaws, and a month or two’s spare diet, as a penance for a minute’s titillation; giving many of ’em reason to say with a scholar under the same affliction, who being at chapel whispered to his chamber-fellow, ‘Chum, chum, though I have the Word of God in my mouth, to tell thee the truth on it, I have a Lynn devil in my breeches.’74
It takes all sorts to make a world, they say, and as Ward rightly remarks, you will find the world in epitome at Stourbridge Fair.
If you love shopping, London is the place for you. Whatever it is you seek, you will find it in abundance: whole lines of emporia selling not just every commodity but every variety of every commodity. Thames Street is known for its candlemakers’ shops, Canon Street is famous for its linen shops, Cheapside for its goldsmiths and drapers. Little Britain is where you go for second-hand books, St Paul’s Churchyard for new ones. At the junction of Fleet Street and Water Lane you will find Thomas Tompion’s shop selling clocks, watches and barometers; next door is the cabinet-maker and marquetry-layer Jasper Braem. Step into an apothecary’s shop and see the wall-mounted shelves with rows of coloured bottles, the spoons hanging on the wall, an apprentice grinding away at the mortar, and the hatted apothecary waiting to serve you behind his shop counter, beside a cabinet of drawers marked with Latin names. Or enter a cobbler’s shop and see all the fine leather boots and shoes hanging in their pairs from the ceiling, while the cobblers themselves work hunched over their lasts, with trimmings of shoe leather scattered across the tables. The baker stands behind his counter with shelves of loaves behind him and a few on the counter, the sweet smell of freshly baked bread tempting you to buy.
The most luxurious shops of all are in the four exchanges. The Royal Exchange in the heart of the city, rebuilt after the Fire, is still the great gathering place for merchants and news circulation. Advertisements are plastered all over the pillars of the four colonnades around the central square, and such is the noise of so many conversations that you have to shout to make yourself heard to your companion. As Ned Ward observes, the flat-hatted and richly dressed merchants do a fair bit of talking with their heads and hands, commonly sneezing with the snuff they take; and if they sit on one of the benches, they do so as if taking their place on a great saddle. For shoppers, the main attractions are not down here, but upstairs in the galleries of high-quality small booths, where you can buy draperies and high-value items, such as Chinese porcelain, musical instruments, tobacco pipes, clocks and watches, guns, lacquered cabinets from Japan, mathematical instruments, haberdashery and gold and silverware. The New Exchange, just to the south of the Strand, is a similar two-storey building containing galleries of small shops, largely attended by women selling hosiery and similar luxury goods to the Royal Exchange. The Middle
Exchange, also on the Strand, which does business from 1671 to 1696, sells hosiery, jewellery and books. The fourth exchange is the Exeter Exchange, which opens in 1676; this also sells hosiery and luxury household items such as drapery and books, but it has an auction house on its upper floor. Note that even in these luxurious shops you will need to haggle. Pepys goes shopping for an instrument with which to measure timber in March 1663 and finds one, but cannot agree on the price. As for auctions, these are sometimes held ‘by the candle’. A candle an inch long is lit and the winning buyer is the one who shouts out his price last before the flame goes out.75
As you will see, many shops are staffed by women. In fact, the higher quality the goods, the prettier the woman who will serve you. Walking past the rich premises on Cheapside, you will see the merchants’ wives at their doors, beckoning you with a sweet smile. Enticement, flirtation and feminine pulchritude are tricks of the sales-man’s trade: sex sells, even in the seventeenth century. In fact, especially in the seventeenth century. The galleries of the Royal Exchange are attended by the most attractive young females, so much so that people call it ‘the merchants’ seraglio’. When he pays a visit to the Exchange, Ned Ward comments that
We went up where women sat in their pinfolds [pens], begging of custom, with such amorous looks, and affable tones, that I could not but fancy they had as much mind to dispose of themselves as the commodities they deal in. My ears on both sides were so baited with ‘Fine linens, Sir,’ and ‘Gloves and ribbons, Sir,’ that I had a milliner’s and a seamstress’s shop in my head for a week after.76
The real glory of London shopping for the modern observer lies in its markets. There is a plethora of these in the capital, and you will have to elbow your way through the crowds that throng them early in the morning just to see what they have on offer. Before the Great Fire there are two general markets in the city, Cheapside and Gracechurch Street. In addition there are many specialist markets, namely: Aldersgate Street (fruit and vegetables), Billingsgate (fish and coal), Bishopsgate (meal), Blackwell Hall (cloth), Eastcheap (meat), Fish Street Hill (fish), Leadenhall (skins, hides and meat), Newgate Street (meal), Old Fish Street (fish), Queenhithe (meal and flour), St Nicholas Shambles (meat), St Paul’s Churchyard (fruit and vegetables), Smithfield (cattle, horses, sheep and hay) and Stocks (meat and fish). After 1666, six of those are no longer held,77 but you can add instead Bear Key Market (for corn), and three more markets for general food supplies: Honey Lane, Holborn Bars and Butcher Row. In addition, to cater for the citizens in the rapidly expanding suburbs, you have many markets outside the city walls, several of which have recently been established in or near the great squares.78 Note that not all markets operate all days of the week: some do – such as Newgate, Covent Garden, Honey Lane and Stocks – but others are held on only one or two days.79 Leadenhall sells meat on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, leather on Tuesdays, and hides on Thursdays and Fridays. Hours vary from market to market, but most start selling around 3 a.m. in summer and 5 4 a.m. in winter, so that the majority of the trade is done before the retail shops open. Late-night opening, from 1674, is on Saturdays, when the markets can stay open to 10 p.m.80
Of all the London markets, Smithfield is the most dramatic. You might not think of a market in terms of drama but just you go and see it when they start doing business, sometimes as early as midnight. It is a huge space: five muddy acres are set aside for the trade in live animals. They all give voice loudly to their discomfort in the darkness, the cows lowing repeatedly in their pens in the centre of the area, the sheep bleating back at them. Braziers around the edge light the animals’ heads as they are lifted suddenly above the tide of the cattle. Here a black eye gleams in the light of your lantern; there a man with a flaming torch corrals yet more sheep into a pen, shouting at them all the while, and with his dog barking at the creatures as they veer this way and that. Other dogs join in with the canine cacophony. Pigs grunt angrily. Sheep accompany the din. Market traders call out, prodding the animals to show prospective dealers the quality of the beasts. And all this has the backdrop of music playing in the nearby alehouses around the perimeter, and people standing and laughing in their groups as they drink their beer.
Finally, we return to Covent Garden. Whereas in 1660 it is still an elegant residential square, with aristocrats’ carriages setting down or picking up their noble cargoes, over the rest of the decade flower traders start to set up stalls around its perimeter. Then the vegetable sellers join them. The wealthy residents try at first to clear them off but in 1670 the earl of Bedford decides that the potential revenue from the area is just too great, positioned as it is between the old city and the fashionable West End, and he obtains a charter for the burgeoning market. Within a very short time it grows to become the pre-eminent place in London to buy fruit and vegetables. Booths are set up along the south side: wooden arcades where men and women call out their wares from behind the most colourful food displays you’ll see anywhere. Walking beneath Inigo Jones’s covered walkway at the end of the century, you will look out on a pullulating mass of people drawn in by the arrangements and by exotic new plants and vegetables. Women especially cherish this hour or so of freedom from the household to exchange the day’s gossip and buy amid a profusion of produce, or to meet a secret admirer, while buying a few herbs or some gingerbread to explain where they have been. Men stroll through the centre discussing business on their way to and fro between the workplace and the coffee house, or on the lookout for flirtatious young women. It is as if all the pleasure gardens, herb gardens, vegetable patches, fields and orchards of the kingdom – and many from abroad – have come to this magnificent square to offer the greatest delight to the housewife, the cook, the epicure and the botanist. No one can hope to visit the Garden of Eden but, on a fine day, the Garden of London is a most satisfying substitute.
6
What to Wear
It seems that people in all times have an irresistible urge to develop a particularly ridiculous garment that marks out the fashion of their generation to those who come after them. Shoes with toes so long you cannot climb stairs, cuffs that hang so low you could trip over them, horned headdresses, codpieces, skirts so wide that you have to turn sideways to walk through doorways, and ruffs – all these garments make you scratch your head and wonder how on earth they came to be so popular. Surely, you think to yourself, people in the Restoration period – the age of Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution – have grown up and are above all that nonsense? But as soon as you think it, you just know that some friend of the king’s is going to come up with something else even more bizarre. And you would not be wrong. This is the period when the male elite decided it was a good idea to cut off their hair and start wearing cascading wigs.
Restoration fashionistas come up with quite a few odd garments, actually. Gentlemen might have difficulty dealing with petticoat breeches covered in ribbons, and little matching skirts just below their knees. Ladies might be reluctant to start wearing patches on the face – and just wait until you hear about the ‘fontage’. But before delving into such specific matters there are some general points about Restoration appearances that you need to bear in mind, if you want to fit in.
The first thing is that unless you are small, ‘fitting in’ is going to be tricky: Restoration men on average are just 5ft 7 inches (1.70m) and women 5ft 1 inch (1.55m); it will not be until the nineteenth century that people start to reach their modern average heights.1 Most Restoration people who are on the tall side are likely to come from the well-nourished sectors of society – the great, the rich and the middle sort – so if you are tall and you dress in the clothes of the working trades, the country people and the poor, you are likely to stand out all the more. The second point is that, when it comes to fashion, the whole ‘Island Story’ of British history is fundamentally misleading. English fashion closely follows French and Dutch fashions in the seventeenth century, just as it followed French and Spanish styles in the si
xteenth. The fascination with the wig starts in France. The surge in the silk-weaving industry in England is partly triggered by Louis XIV’s expulsion of the Huguenots in 1685. One word from the king and suddenly the whole court can be sent scurrying to find tailors to produce fashionable new clothes – and the inspiration for such alternative directions nearly always comes from abroad.
A third point you need to bear in mind is that changes in fashion do not affect just the great and the rich; they have a knock-on effect throughout most of society, including the poor. Clothes that are out of date are generally handed down by the wealthy to their servants. Men and women of the ‘middle sort’ – who tend to copy the fashionable dress of the gentry – realise that they too must constantly change style. Not only do they want to be seen dressed in the latest fashions, but they really don’t want to be mistaken for a servant. This can happen quite easily, even to a prosperous gentleman like Samuel Pepys: in March 1667 he accompanies his wife to church and is mistaken by the verger for Mrs Pepys’s servant. The passing down of clothing explains why the clothes regarded as suitable for a maidservant in the 1690s are based on the court fashions of about 1680. The materials are not the same, of course, but if you come to grips with the fashions of the wealthy, you will also understand the developing dress sense of the rest of society.