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

by Stephen Alford

  Modern archaeology describes a less exciting, though more believable story. On the site of modern London, Neolithic stone implements and metal objects and pottery from the Bronze Age have been unearthed, and there is plenty of evidence of Iron Age settlement all along the River Thames. But it was the Romans who founded the city we know as London, soon after the invasion of the armies of the Emperor Claudius in AD 43. The Roman historian Tacitus called it Londinium, and it served first as a trading centre, then as a military barracks and eventually as a capital for the remote province of Britannia. It suffered two early disasters. In AD 60 or 61 the first Londinium was destroyed in the uprising of Boudicca and her tribe the Iceni, and seventy years after that a second London was burned to the ground. We have the tenacity of the Romans to thank that the city was not only rebuilt but also thrived.

  John Stow picked up from Tacitus a few words full of significance for him and other Elizabethan citizens of London. Tacitus had described the town as ‘crowded with merchants and filled with merchandise’, for which Stow gave his own paraphrase: London was ‘most famous for the great multitude of merchants, provision, and intercourse [trade]’.3 Stow, the citizen son of a citizen father in trade, was quick to point to this reassuring continuity. Prosperous Elizabethan Londoners, proud of their traditions of citizenship and self-governance, embraced the idea of their ancient city of merchants.

  Still, Tudor Londoners would have been amazed if they had known what lay beneath their feet. Guildhall precinct was built above the site of London’s amphitheatre. There had been a grand Roman house under Lower Thames Street near Queenhithe, one of the great Tudor docks. The mysteries of the god Mithras had been performed in a temple close to the later site of the medieval church of St Stephen Walbrook. The remains of the Roman provincial governor’s house were below Candlewick Street and Thames Street. The officials of the senate and people of Rome transacted their public and private business in the great forum and basilica that lay beneath Gracechurch Street between Cornhill and Fenchurch Street. A few metres below Tudor London there was a kind of shadow city, the sights of which were lost and forgotten. And when the Romans left Britain, the city was reinvented all over again, with others coming to inhabit the shell of Londinium, doubtless wondering what to make of the ruins, like the Anglo-Saxon poet: ‘Splendid this rampart is, though fate destroyed it, / The city buildings fell apart, the works / Of giants crumble.’4 Over a thousand years, settlers and conquerors made it their own and gave it new names, though all were variations on that first syllable – ‘Lon’ or ‘Lun’ – whose meaning is lost.

  Yet the Roman stamp on London was so deep as in a sense to have become fixed. Where the River Thames gave Tudor London one of its two boundaries, the old Roman wall of the third century AD gave it the other. This much patched and embellished wall was far from what it once had been, neglected for generations, wrangled over by householders and the city government, and in Thomas Wyndout’s day only just about defensible. But it was still very much a part of the city’s identity.

  The fact that sixteenth-century London extended out further than the Roman wall meant that Londoners were always using the old gates through it – Ludgate, Aldersgate, Bishopsgate and Aldgate, with the medieval additions of Cripplegate and Moorgate. In Londinium these points of entry into the town had taken major Roman roads straight to the forum, fort and basilica. Roman efficiency was lost in the congested tangle of Tudor London, though the gates still marked the ends and beginnings of the big city thoroughfares – ‘the capital streets of Troynovant’, as Thomas Dekker called them – like Newgate, Cheapside, Bishopsgate Street and Aldgate.5

  London’s great natural boundary was the Thames, which divided the city proper on the north bank of the river from the suburb of Southwark on the south. The course of the Thames had changed considerably in over a millennium, but the Roman and Tudor ports were in approximately the same place. The river was one of the keys to London’s success as a trading centre. Wide and easily navigable – maps and views of the city show galleons sailing right up to London Bridge – it was protected from the storms of an exposed sea coast, and yet it was close enough to the sea to make it ideally situated for trade across the English Channel to France and, especially, to the Low Countries, as well as into the North Sea and on to the Baltic.

  Connecting London to Southwark was London Bridge. Extending out beyond the old wall were other suburbs: Moorfields and the Barbican to the north, Smithfield and Holborn to the north-west, Fleet Street to the west, leading eventually to the Strand and the separate cityscape of Westminster. Today, even this extended London would seem tiny. Settlements that are now part of the city and its great conurbation – Paddington, Knightsbridge, Islington and Barking – were then mere villages in the country.

  London’s government was proud of the royal charters that allowed the lord mayor and corporation to govern the city. The city elite – of which, as alderman, Thomas Wyndout was a member – bristled at any effort to trespass on its jurisdiction. In a way, the proximity of Westminster only emphasized the privileges of London’s citizens. Westminster was the preserve of royal power, with great palaces like St James’s and Whitehall, and the ancient complex of Westminster Palace where the law courts sat and, when they were summoned, parliaments met. London’s government prided itself on the city’s loyalty to whichever monarch was on the throne. And yet London was different, set slightly apart. Its elite knew that theirs was a city of immense weight and consequence; they experienced not a moment of doubt as to their importance.

  To guide us in making sense of the sights and landmarks of the Tudor city, we are lucky to have the work of a Flemish-speaking artist called Anthonis van den Wyngaerde, who in about 1544 sketched on fifteen sheets of paper a great panoramic view of London. Looking north across the Thames from his vantage point in Southwark, he saw before him a city dense and compact, with row upon row of steeply pitched roofs of shops and houses, great halls and public buildings, and a skyline jagged with dozens of towers and steeples.6

  Wyngaerde’s sketches offer the contrast of city and countryside. This is probably the greatest surprise for someone used to today’s cities, where conurbations often stretch for tens of miles. Just outside London – a stone’s throw from one of the most heavily populated cities in Europe – were quiet villages. Wyngaerde visited them, sketching small settlements around Bermondsey: impressionistic rural scenes formed by movements of the pen whose effect is to contrast the angularity of London with the softness of the country. There he found the trees in full leaf, animals grazing in fields and a carter driving his team of horses. He saw houses; in one or two of them ghostly figures looked out at the artist from an upstairs window. As Marcus Gheeraerts’ later and glorious painting of an early Elizabethan fete in Bermondsey also shows, even the south bank of the river could feel a long way from congested London. But this was so much more an imaginative distance than a geographical one: densely packed city and countryside were separated only by a few hundred metres.

  Towering above London was St Paul’s Cathedral. In Wyngaerde’s panorama, the cathedral’s spire dominates the city: every Londoner lived in some sense in its shadow. Tudor St Paul’s was as different a building from Sir Christopher Wren’s baroque masterpiece as it is possible to imagine. It was huge: at nearly 600 feet in length, it was almost a third longer than the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, and from transept to transept nearly twice as wide. It was indeed a shade larger than Wren’s St Paul’s. Wyngaerde struggled to fit so massive a building on to his paper; he had to crop the nave from eleven to five bays to fit it on his sheet. Equally, the cathedral’s spire was in reality even taller than in Wyngaerde’s sketches. Yet what he was able to show speaks for itself: with its flying buttresses, transepts and a huge rose window in the eastern wall, St Paul’s was an ancient leviathan. Even the loss of its spire to a lightning strike in 1561 blunted its magnificence only a little.

  Cavernous St Paul’s was filled with chapels and altars dedicated
to apostles, saints and martyrs, one of whom, Thomas Becket, had been born in the cathedral’s shadow. But St Paul’s was also the great social centre and meeting place of the city, and Londoners had for centuries gone there to walk, talk, beg and exchange money, activities of which the church took a very dim view. Preaching after the fire of 1561, the Bishop of Durham discerned in the destruction of the steeple God’s sharp punishment for ‘the profanation’ of St Paul’s, ‘of long time heretofore abused by walking, jangling, brawling, fighting, bargaining etc’.7 Yet for Londoners, for whom the cathedral was a kind of Roman basilica or forum, it was a hard habit to break. As incongruous as it may seem, fashionable gentlemen even used St Paul’s as a kind of catwalk for the struttings and preenings so wonderfully satirized in The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie: Or, The Walkes in Powles (1604), a work attributed to Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton. Here, London is a city scarred by plague and pestilence, and death throws into ironic relief the vanities of well-dressed gentlemen like Signior Shuttlecocke and Signior Ginglespur: ‘But see how we have lost ourselves, Paul’s is changed into gallants, and those which I saw come up in old taffeta doublets yesterday, are slipped into nine yards of satin today.’8

  The whole site of the cathedral was more or less rectangular, bounded on its four sides by the city’s streets. There was Old Change and Little Carter Lane in the east and to the south Paternoster Row. Ave Mary Lane and Creed Lane entered the cathedral’s precinct (known as the Atrium) at its west end. Nearby was the Bishop of London’s palace and all the administrative buildings for the cathedral, as well as the chapter house and cloister, and its various churchyards. Snug against the cathedral’s south-west corner was the small parish church of St Gregory by St Paul’s.

  Also in the cathedral’s shadow was the churchyard of St Paul’s Cross, more generally and colloquially known as St Paul’s Churchyard. This too was a popular city meeting place, and had been for generations. It was to Paul’s Churchyard that medieval Londoners had been summoned by the bell of the Jesus Steeple to the Folkmoot, the city’s early consultative assembly, but by the sixteenth century that was long gone. What endured was the pull of the churchyard as a place to walk, buy, sell, loiter and beg, as well as two other activities – to listen to sermons and buy books.

  Paul’s Churchyard was famous amongst other things for Paul’s Cross, the octagonal pulpit from which were preached the great sermons of the day. From Paul’s Cross clergy earnest about saving Londoners’ souls addressed matters of faith and God and the sins of a decadent city, as well as – given the close relationship between religion and politics in Tudor England during the fraught decades of Reformation – urgent questions of national politics and the affairs of monarchs. These portentous sermons were often printed, and Londoners could buy them from the printers’ and stationers’ stalls and shops within earshot of the pulpit. One example was Bishop Pilkington’s sermon upon the lightning strike of 1561, which was sold from William Seres’s shop near the west end of the cathedral, marked out from all the other shops by the sign outside of a hedgehog.

  Indeed, Paul’s Cross churchyard became the bookselling centre of London. By 1620 there were many hundreds of titles to choose from on all kinds of topics. What a contrast this was from the days of Thomas Wyndout, when only a handful of pioneers had set up their workshops in the city – printers like William Caxton, Richard Pynson and the wonderfully named Wynkyn de Worde. Even by the 1550s the London book trade was transformed, with dozens of printers and stationers busy in and around the churchyard. They organized themselves into a trade body called the Stationers’ Company, whose headquarters was just to the south of the cathedral.

  The printers of Tudor London are the unacknowledged heroes of sixteenth-century England. Without them and the books that came off their presses we would understand only a tiny fraction of the life and culture of their times. It was a trade demanding skill and labour: imagine setting by hand the individual letters of a folio volume of 500 pages, possibly in different languages set out on the same page (English, Latin, perhaps some Greek or even Hebrew), and one has an idea of just how huge and intricate a task printing a book was. Not surprisingly, the more important printers employed large teams of highly skilled craftsmen, a fair number of whom were Dutch strangers who settled in London in the 1540s and 1550s, bringing with them experience gained in Antwerp and other towns. London’s printers were craftsmen, scholars, linguists and businessmen all rolled into one.

  The printers’ shops, like those of other businesses, were identified by colourful signs: there was Seres’ hedgehog, for example, or the mermaid, the sun, Our Lady of Pity, and the Bible. (Londoners had a highly visual mental map of all kinds of shops and residences – there were, after all, no street directories for the city, and probably no obvious signs, so topographical familiarity and memory were essential.) London’s printers produced books for their readers, not for twenty-first-century scholars (something perhaps modern scholars tend to forget), and they had a canny eye for the market. In a highly competitive trade, they effectively copyrighted their productions by securing exclusive licences to print titles they had registered, naturally for a small sum of money, with the Stationers’ Company. Any book too controversial might be censored and suppressed by the Bishop of London or even the monarch’s Privy Council: ‘Seen and allowed’, words which commonly appear on the title pages of Elizabethan books, really meant something in a trade which was as heavily regulated as it was brilliantly innovative.

  By 1550 it was possible for only a few pennies or shillings to pick up in Paul’s Churchyard hundreds of titles on all kinds of subjects, including bibles, big chronicle histories, poetry and drama, sermons, law books and so on. Much more popular – and more ephemeral – were the cheap prints of songs and ballads, lurid tales of murder and sensational wonders of nature. Elizabethans loved a good story told with pace, colour and drama, just as they enjoyed the woodcut illustrations and images to complement the heavy black-letter gothic typeface of so many of their books. Books like these offered Londoners realms of new imaginative possibility; they spoke to a city that was beginning to encounter and make sense of the wider world. A bibliophile walking from shop to shop in Paul’s Churchyard in 1620, for example, would find books as diverse as the first translation into English of Boccaccio’s Decameron, Sir Francis Bacon’s philosophical study of nature, and an account of the nurture of silk worms and mulberry trees in the English colony of Virginia.

  Only a very small minority of Elizabethans could read and write, and education for most people was limited. But given the size and density of the city, few Londoners would have missed out on the news and information offered by the city’s booksellers. The most important pronouncements, the city and royal proclamations, were read out loud across London, and copies of books of parliamentary statutes, bibles and martyrologies were kept – sometimes chained – in the city’s parish churches.

  For the lucky few, there were schools: for boys of course, and not girls, though generally boys from poor to middling families for whom the private tutors of the elite were not a possibility. Some of London’s parishes paid for schools to be set up, or at least allowed schoolmasters to teach children in church porches. Sometimes a parish might support a boy at a boarding school or at university. Close to Paul’s Churchyard was St Paul’s School, founded in 1512 by John Colet, dean of the cathedral. One of the leading humanist scholars of his day, a friend of Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam, Colet was the son of Thomas Wyndout’s master Henry Colet; Thomas and John knew each other well. Other schools in or near London were Christ’s Hospital, Westminster and Charterhouse, each one giving in return for a spartan life the kind of education that might prepare a boy for Cambridge or Oxford.

  Catering for the education of other boys were freelance tutors in the city who taught grammar, mathematics and foreign languages – teachers like Pierre du Ploiche, a French refugee who lived on Trinity Lane near Queenhithe at the sign of the rose, or later his fellow coun
tryman Claudius Hollyband (Claude de Sainleins), who taught for a time in a printing-shop in Paul’s Churchyard and then at the sign of the golden ball. Du Ploiche published a French and English phrasebook perfectly suited to the young Londoner off on his travels abroad:

  Neverthelesse it is good to have company and lighte, especially in the nighte; you cannot tell whoo you may mete.

  Toutesfois, il est bon d’avoir compagnie, et lumiere especiallement de nuict; vous ne scavez pas quy povez rencontrer.9

  For those engaged in trade, modern languages like French, Italian and the various ‘Dutch’ dialects of the Low Countries and Germany were essential; no European would think of speaking English. Latin was the international language of European religious debate, the universities and diplomacy, though most boys would have had at least a foundation in Latin grammar (and boys fortunate to have had a full grammar school education, like Shakespeare, would have known Latin to what we would understand as degree standard). Typically, a boy destined for trade and the mercantile life would be educated up to the age of about thirteen and then sent off to work as an apprentice to a merchant’s factor (or representative) in London or Antwerp: it was an invigorating and tough vocational training in the ways of the world.

  From his vantage point in Southwark, Anthonis van den Wyngaerde saw the spires and towers of over a hundred churches in London. The ringing of their bells would have been one of the defining sounds of the city.

  St Lawrence Jewry and St Mary le Bow were two of these churches, both landmarks of London – the first close to Guildhall, the second on Cheapside – enjoying the patronage of wealthy parishioners and the livery companies. By contrast, Holy Trinity the Less on Knightrider Street was by 1600 in such a poor state of repair and so in danger of falling down that it was propped up with stilts.10 Less precarious but undoubtedly modest were other little churches like All-Hallows-on-the-Wall, St Peter Le Poor and St Gregory’s by St Paul’s, each at some point on a scale between the inconspicuous and the anonymous, tucked away in corners of the city or built abutting far grander foundations.