London’s Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare’s City

by Stephen Alford

  Dress in the sixteenth century was a quick and effective way to identify and classify others. It would have been impossible to mistake a labourer or a craftsman for a freeman of a livery company. Aldermen and sheriffs wore gowns of scarlet and violet, with velvet hoods and furred capes. The codes of dress were clear – by law as much as by fashion – with sumptuary statutes setting out restrictions according to social rank, limiting to the elite the wearing of velvets, satins, damasks and furs. Merchants and their wives wore caps and long gowns often trimmed with fur, ruffs and elegantly worked gloves. The proper balance of taste and authority was neatly expressed in the merchant’s suit of black: modest, discreet and unostentatious, certainly, but also very expensive given the complicated process of dyeing black cloth.14

  By modern standards, Londoners owned very little. A London priest called John Haigh was comfortably off and in 1514 left a black gown to his mother, his horse to his brother Roger, and his best bow to a gentleman called Master Henry West. Haigh’s possessions were those typically listed in the wills and testaments of the time: gowns, jackets and doublets; a bed with bolster, pillow and coverlet; blankets, sheets and hangings. Possessions like these (or the single brass pot left by a London yeoman, John Gyllyke) were precious, and in their wills testators used them to honour friendships. For those who could afford them, mourning rings with a death’s head were especially popular.15

  London in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was in many ways a confederation of much smaller communities – the city’s electoral wards and, of more significance to ordinary Londoners, the city’s parishes.

  The sense of communal life could be powerful. There were times of festival and celebration, with bonfires in the streets and the ringing of church bells. The provision of charity by the wealthy helped a deeply unequal society to cohere – it also reminded the poor of who was in charge. Feasts were important events. When John Barnaby, the rector of St Matthew’s church near Cheapside, made his will in 1517, he left money for food and ale to be served at his burial service.16 London’s parish churches were expressions in stone of common belonging and the continuity of community life. They stood for ritual and routine, year in, year out: the auditing of parish plate and books, repairs to family pews, bell-ringing at funerals, provisions for the poor, the holly and ivy brought in at Christmas, the scouring out of the pissing place in the churchyard, the annual walking of the parish boundary followed by breakfast in a local tavern.

  Food and drink mattered, of course, and London was full of inns, taverns and beer gardens. Some Londoners bought food cheaply from cookshops: for the poor, without the utensils, fuel or money to cook their own food, a cookshop offered hot fast food. Early Tudor Londoners could dine out on a range of meats, fish, eggs, cheese and fruit, eating salmon, oysters, herring, sprats, lamb and rabbit, and drinking good wine, ale and beer. A Venetian merchant visiting London in 1562 wrote: ‘if anyone wishes to give a banquet, he orders the meal at the inn, giving the number of those invited, and they go there to eat.’ The inns were clean and hospitable, and women dined out just as frequently and publicly as men. Above all the merchant was staggered by the amount of meat Londoners consumed: ‘for those who cannot see it for themselves, it is almost impossible to believe that they could eat so much meat in one city alone.’17 It was mainly beef (the Tudor staple), with some lamb and mutton and a little pork. Even elite dining was not necessarily marked by refined table manners. At a dinner given for an embassy from the Holy Roman Emperor in 1567 – a banquet of bacon and salted or pickled cows’ tongues – there ‘was such eating and drinking that . . . the house was marvellously bepissed and bespewed to the great shame of those banqueters’.18

  They drank ale, beer and wine. A merchant’s cellar would have stored away casks and bottles of malmsey, sack, other white and red wines and claret from France and southern Europe. Ale, made out of malt, water and yeast, was the common and traditional drink. Hopped beer came to England from the Low Countries in about 1400, distrusted for a long time because of its foreignness, but a taste happily acquired over the course of the Tudor century.19 The Dutch were famed for both brewing and drinking beer, and it was no surprise that the city’s Dutch strangers ran many of London’s breweries. But if it was easy to tut at the drunkenness of foreigners, the English themselves were developing a reputation for drinking to excess. Some astute social commentators, like the dramatist Thomas Dekker, believed they saw a change in habits: ‘drunkenness,’ he wrote in 1606, ‘which was once the Dutchman’s headache, is now become the Englishman’s’.20

  The taverns and inns Londoners used were familiar parts of the city’s topography: the Angel on Bishopsgate, the Bear on Basinghall Street, the Bolt and Tun on Fleet Street, the Cardinal’s Hat on Lombard Street and the Mermaid on Bread Street. Supplying the taverns and inns were brewhouses like the Harts Horn in West Smithfield and the James brewhouse that made ale for the Castle, Bull and Swan taverns in Southwark.

  To keep London fed was a huge effort, especially in times of harvest failure, when the city’s needs trumped those of the surrounding countryside. Practically the whole of the south of England supplied the city with food, and the malt used to brew Londoners’ ale came from as far away as Norfolk. Londoners shopped and traded at Stocks Market for fish and meat, Smithfield for livestock, and Leadenhall for poultry and other commodities. The city government held huge stores of wheat, barley, oats and malt on London Bridge and at Bridewell hospital just in case of emergencies, and the lord mayor monitored and sometimes fixed the prices of essential foodstuffs.21 When there were shortages, Londoners were highly sensitive to rumours about the city authorities and private individuals hoarding grain for profit.22 Food could easily become a highly charged political topic.

  Life in the city was uncertain. Slum housing, contaminated water supplies and the physical hazards of the city meant poor health and accidents for a great many inhabitants. The number of houses and factories burning fuel in London meant that levels of sulphur dioxide in the city were about thirty times greater than those in the countryside.23 London was dirty: as one well-travelled English diplomat wrote in the middle of the sixteenth century, it was ‘such a stinking city, the filthiest of the world’.24 Effluence was a fact of city life, particularly for the occupants of London’s ‘rents’: in 1579, for example, only three privies served eighty-five people living on Tower Street, the occupants of tenements and others in alleys round about. Neighbourhood disagreements over cesspools and leakages were common.25 Given that the population of the city was at this point steadily marching up to 200,000 people, Pissing Alley was not merely a colourful name, but a fact of urban life. In about 1612 Ben Jonson, embracing the poetic possibilities of London’s stench, celebrated in mock-heroic verse the boat journey made by his friends up the toxic Fleet river, a tributary of the Thames that ran from Holborn to Bridewell Palace and Blackfriars. Unable to resist a pun of puns, Jonson rhymed ‘A-jax’ (Ajax, the hero of the Trojan war) with ‘a jakes’ (a flushing privy).26

  Epidemic disease was inevitably London’s regular visitor, for which Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton blamed the unwholesome country just outside the city walls:

  From bogs, from rank and dampish fens,

  From moorish breaths and nasty dens –

  The sun draws up contagious fumes

  Which, falling down, burst into rheums

  And thousand maladies beside,

  By which our blood grows putrefied.27

  Elizabethans had no proper understanding of what caused disease, and it was only by long experience that the city authorities and parishes learned to isolate those infected. Plague was the city-dweller’s grim familiar. In most years it claimed lives, and it was recorded by the parish clerks of St Botolph without Aldgate, one of the city’s poorest parishes, as the cause of a quarter of deaths for the years between 1583 and 1599.28 There were particularly brutal plague epidemics in 1563, 1593, 1603 and 1625.29 In 1551, Londoners had been killed in their thousands by
a sweating sickness which took its victims with terrifying speed.30

  The statistics give a sense of the scale of deaths. But Londoners saw the human cost to their own friends and families extending out over weeks and months. The records of St Olave, Hart Street, for 1563 show normal life almost at a standstill. In September and October of that year, five babies were baptized in the parish church and one or two couples married. But fifty parishioners were buried in September alone, and October was worse, with burials nearly every day and seventeen in a single week.31

  Whatever killed their families, friends, servants and neighbours, for all Londoners the words of burial service in the Book of Common Prayer were tangible and immediate: ‘In the midst of life we be in death: of whom may we seek for succour but of thee, O Lord?’32 Or as the poet Thomas Nashe wrote in 1593:

  Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss!

  This world uncertain is:

  Fond are life’s lustful joys,

  Death proves them all but toys.

  None from his darts can fly;

  I am sick, I must die –

  Lord, have mercy on us!33

  London had a vibrant underworld of brothels, bowling alleys and gambling dens, as well as a more public life of inns, taverns and playhouses. The earliest theatres were in the suburbs north of the Thames like Shoreditch (the Theatre and the Curtain theatres), in Stepney and Whitechapel (the Red Lion and the Boar’s Head) and in Clerkenwell (the Fortune). South of the Thames in Southwark were the Rose, the Swan and the Globe.

  For fun, Elizabethan Londoners squeezed themselves into the playhouses of impresarios like Philip Henslowe and enjoyed the pleasures west of London Bridge on the south bank of the Thames. This was the city’s entertainment strip, where they went to watch bears and bulls being baited and killed. In Elizabethan maps and views, this stretch of the Thames has a rustic look of neat gardens, ponds and grazing cattle, close to the manor house and wooded parkland of Paris Garden. Innocently bucolic, however, it was not, for in Elizabeth I’s reign Paris Garden was a notorious haunt for secret agents, unscrupulous foreign ambassadors and conspiring Catholics, perfect for unobtrusive meetings and encounters thanks to a maze of passageways where the heavy planting of trees made it too dark to see anything even on an evening in high summer.34

  For the moralists, the popular entertainments of London invited God’s righteous anger. One great accident – a judgement of providence – stood out: on a Sunday in January 1583, while bear-baiting was taking place in Paris Garden, the gallery collapsed, killing and seriously injuring many. ‘When the scaffold cracked (as it did once or twice) there was a cry of “Fire! Fire!”, which set them in such a maze . . . so that as destitute of their wits, they stood still, and could make no shift for themselves, till the scaffold was overturned.’ Killed were a baker, a clerk, the wife of a pewterer and a number of servants, some from the city and some from Southwark. The injured, with broken legs, arms and backs, were carried over London Bridge in chairs or led by friends. This was what happened, the preachers said, when Londoners profaned the Sabbath. The cry from the pulpit was a familiar one: ‘O London repent’.35

  The preacher who celebrated the disaster in Paris Garden found moral desolation all about him: ‘There is gadding to all kind of gaming, and there is no tavern or alehouse, if the drink be strong, that lacketh any company: there is no dicing house, bowling alley or theatre that can be found empty.’36 But these spectacles were as much a threat to public order as they were an offence to God. The city’s government and the queen’s Privy Council saw in the playhouses the double menace of lower class disorder and infection.37

  Prostitution was very well established in the city. Tudor Southwark was famous for its ‘stewhouses’ or ‘stews’. For centuries the attitude of city and church authorities to sex for money was a balance of high morality and pragmatic acceptance. This changed with the Reformation, and a fear of moral contagion. In 1538 the city authorities complained about ‘the evil example of the gorgeous apparel of the common women of the [Southwark] stews to the great temptation of young maidens, wives and apprentices’, and by the reign of Elizabeth I there was an outright ban on all forms of commercial sex.38 Needless to say, London’s brothel-keepers, pimps and procurers, prostitutes and their clients stayed as busy as ever. Most of London’s prostitutes were young single women, many of whom were new arrivals in the city, facing a choice between crime and sex in order to survive. Their customers were mainly journeymen, servants, unmarried apprentices and the lower clergy. A brothel-keeper called John Shaw admitted in 1577 to dozens of clients in the London Steelyard, various servants, clothworkers, and even a son of the Lieutenant of the Tower of London.39

  And so Londoners turned on its head the upright morality of the godly minister. Crime, poverty, gambling, drink, sex and (from the late 1570s) theatrical entertainment were deeply embedded in the life of the city, offering (doubtless to the further righteous anger of the preacher) rich material for the stage. As Ben Jonson wrote in the Prologue to his play The Alchemist (1610):

  Our scene is London, ’cause we would make known

  No country’s mirth is better than our own.

  No clime breeds better matter for your whore,

  Bawd, squire [pimp], imposter, many persons more,

  Whose manners, now called humours, feed the stage

  And which have still been subject for the rage

  Or spleen of comic writers.40

  The ‘Rome’ of Jonson’s play Catiline, His Conspiracy (1611), with its suburb-brothels, bawds and brokers (pimps), was in reality the London his audience knew.

  The elite worried, as elites tend to do, about theft, robbery and begging. London’s pamphleteers gave entertaining and sensationalized accounts of an organized underworld that all at once mirrored, inverted and subverted ordered society. A pamphleteer, writing under the name of Martin Mark-All, set out what he called ‘the canters’ dictionary’, a whole criminal lexicon of theft, begging, prostitution, deception, drink, criminal law and punishment. Decent London society seemed a fragile thing indeed.41

  If crime was understood to be subversive of property and order, so too was deliberate and contrived poverty. London had charitable hospitals to look after those who could not be held responsible for their own straitened circumstances: St Thomas’s in Southwark, St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield and Christ’s Hospital. Bethlehem Hospital (better known as Bedlam) near Bishopsgate was a hospital for the insane. The thriftless poor of ‘rioters’, vagabonds and dissolute women went to Bridewell, a former royal palace next to the Fleet river, to be confined and disciplined.

  Some Londoners who fell on hard times found the help of others. They were the fortunate ones. Most fell through the flimsiest of social nets, often to find themselves on the wrong side of the law. By the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, parishes supported their deserving poor and maimed soldiers returning from war abroad, but they also saw to the whipping of vagabonds. Punishments for criminals were severe: the stocks and the pillory, with noses slit, ears cut and skin branded, or worse still the gallows. For many in the city, life was brutal and cheap. Walking around London was to be struck forcefully by contrasts. Poverty and wealth were obvious enough; they were neither disguised nor subtly coded. At times of greatest anxiety – in periods of food shortage, plague, war or disorder – the authorities cracked down ferociously hard on the poor. In the 1590s, out of fear of robberies and murders, vagabonds in London were put under martial law and those who evaded constables and justices were summarily executed.42

  When Hans Holbein the Younger made his two murals for the Great Hall of the Steelyard, he had only to look out of the window of his studio to find his subjects for The Triumph of Poverty and The Triumph of Riches. Every kind of type and character walked the streets of London, a city in which riches and poverty, success and failure, and life and death were shackled together. But the tableau was never fixed; Londoners kept living and dying.

  Some historians have argued that the
society of Tudor London was broadly stable and secure; others that the city was riven by deep rumblings of discontent and division. But somehow London defies neat categorization. F. Scott Fitzgerald once suggested that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the capacity to function: perhaps then the test of a first-rate city is to harness the opposing energies of unity and division and to make out of them something irrepressibly creative. And that was sixteenth-century London, a struggling mass of people fighting to live their own lives, out of which existential struggle a city was transformed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Landmarks

  Tudor Londoners believed that the origins of their city lay far back in the mists of recorded history. The story retold again and again was that London had been founded eleven centuries before the birth of Christ by Brute (or Brutus), descendant of the demi-god Aeneas. Brute had called it ‘Troynovant’ – the New Troy – in memory and celebration of the great city of King Priam, destroyed in the Trojan wars.1 The Brute myth was as familiar to the Elizabethan antiquary John Stow in the 1590s as it would have been to Thomas Wyndout a hundred years earlier. Stow, who knew Livy’s masterful history of Rome and the story of Romulus and Remus, understood that great cities needed to be able to boast of their founding by heroes.2