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

by Stephen Alford

  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

  We can only guess who else was standing at Thomas’s graveside on that cold Wednesday: Anne, their sons Peter, John and Thomas, their daughter Elizabeth. Thanks to Dauncer’s brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands, he had a whole squadron of nephews and nieces, as well as Anne Dauncer’s side of her family: in neat and tidy St Bartholomew’s there might have been a great gathering of Dauncers, Gostmans, Bradleys, Garnons and Malleryes, along with all the worthies of the Girdlers’ Company and Thomas’s friends and neighbours. But the plague had been devastating, with the rising number of deaths over the course of the year leading to a grim administrative process of recording mortality – matrons of the parish inspected the corpses of the dead and reports were then being sent on to the city government. The attendance at Thomas’s funeral was probably very much thinner than it would have been at other times and in other circumstances.

  To the officials in the Guildhall, Dauncer was a statistic, one of thousands of Londoners killed by the epidemic. To his family and former servants, he was the man who remembered, among others, his uncle John Bradley, then in Holland, and Robert Wattune, his gardener, as well as leaving money for London’s poor and imprisoned.

  And so near Christmas 1592, a few days before the theatres of Southwark reopened with a performance of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (the play was always popular with London’s theatregoers), Anne Dauncer began her life as a widow. Death was nothing new to her; she and Thomas had lost children in infancy and they were buried near to her husband in the chancel of the church. As a widow, she now had an identity of her own, making contributions of money to the vestry, and even in 1595 buying property – a house on Broad Street, near Austin Friars, with some land that once upon a time, probably before Anne was born, had belonged to the monastery of Our Lady of Grace near the Tower of London.

  But Anne Dauncer knew that she was merely the custodian of her husband’s fortune. Her responsibility was to look to the next generation, and she spoke in the last year of her life of her ‘natural cares’ for her children, her good friends and her kindred. John, their eldest son, would of course inherit the family’s principal home in the parish, which was next door to the church; certainly he was living there by 1602. For Thomas, one of John’s younger brothers, their mother provided the handsome sum of £300 to buy ‘some annuity or pension’. Anne’s daughter Elizabeth received money from the will, but also inherited what was perhaps her mother’s most precious possession: a gold ring set with a white sapphire which had been bequeathed to her by one Mistress Greene (a relative or a friend?) precisely on the condition that it would one day pass to Elizabeth. Anne’s was a house full (as so many mercantile houses were) of basins, ewers and standing cups and stocks of pillows, beds, bolsters and blankets; she was comfortable in her widowhood. The best of these things she would use to mark especially close relationships, like the gilt silver pot engraved ‘T A and D’ (for Thomas and Anne Dauncer) she gave to her sister, and a gold ring for her brother, as well as charitable obligations to the parish poor. The respectable matrons of St Bartholomew’s were not forgotten: Goodwife Peter and Goodwife Isaacke received in Anne’s will ten shillings apiece – a fortnight’s wages for a carpenter and thus a small fortune in hard times.20

  As much a part of parish life as the Dauncers was the family and household of Jacques Wittewronghele. They were different, of course: the Wittewrongheles were strangers and aliens. Jacques had been a successful notary in Ghent before bringing his Protestant family to the safety of London in about 1564. His was not the kind of émigré family that struggled on the margins of the city, out in Bishopsgate near the asylum of St Bethlehem’s Hospital, where many poorer stranger families congregated. The Wittewrongheles were living in the parish of St Bartholomew the Less by the early 1580s. It was a good place in which to settle: Jacques had only a short walk to Austin Friars (he was a member of the Dutch congregation), and he was even closer to the Royal Exchange, always a magnet for notaries and their clients.

  Jacques Wittewronghele did very well for himself in a new life in a foreign city. Ten years after leaving Ghent he was prosperous and comfortable: a man in his early forties, heavily built, with cropped auburn hair, a neatly trimmed beard and moustache and a keen eye, serious and purposeful.21 The family acclimatized themselves to London. Jacques’s eldest son Jacob was a little boy when they left Ghent, later going off to study in Oxford and then returning to London to run a successful brewing business; able neatly to bridge two identities, Jacob became a citizen of London as well as an elder at Austin Friars. And he made his mark on the parish, thanks to his naturalization as a subject of Queen Elizabeth I, doing his bit in 1591 and 1592 in the humble but necessary office of parish constable.22 It was a small mark of belonging, fixing Jacob to the identifiable cluster of streets in the great tangle of the city, a place with a name whose boundary was walked each year by its parishioners.

  We know what Jacob Wittewronghele looked like in these years of the 1590s. He was slimmer than his father had been at much the same age, his hair was darker and greyer, though he wore the same style of beard and moustache and his eyes possessed the same steady quality as Jacques’s. Jacob’s portrait is as individual as it is commonplace: the standard suit of expensive black, the left hand holding beautiful gloves, his right resting on a skull, the clock on the wall ticking away time. The portrait of Jacob’s father twenty or more years earlier had conveyed the same message: ‘By the hour, thus life flees’, as Jacques’s clock had been inscribed.23

  Death in the 1590s was never far away. In a city always growing, plague could take friends and neighbours by the score. Life was uncertain; God’s judgement was present, and order and hierarchy seemed at times too fragile. A successful man like Jacob Wittewronghele would have known all this. Like so many citizens, he understood that riches were weighed in the balance. He was not insulated from the great shifts and challenges of his time – all about him the city was changing.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Change and Nostalgia

  About ten minutes’ walk from St Bartholomew the Less was Bishopsgate and the long road out to the village of Shoreditch and the countryside north of London. Just outside the city gate was the Dolphin Inn, popular with travellers, across the street from which was St Botolph’s church and next to that the complex of the Bethlehem Hospital. Close by the city ditch was Petty France, where many of London’s poor Dutch and French strangers settled themselves, and the point of reference when in 1603 Thomas Dekker wrote of ‘a Dutchman . . . who (though he dwelt in Bedlam) was not mad’.1 Near to the hospital lay the Moorfields.

  Moorfields did not enjoy a happy reputation. It was fen, a wet and marshy expanse of ‘waste and unprofitable ground’ that over the centuries had been drained with modest success.2 Various projects in the fifteenth century helped to turn the fields into a just about serviceable space for Londoners to walk and work; a fine copperplate engraving of Moorfields from about the time of the Muscovy Company’s founding in 1555 shows citizens promenading along its pathways, men practising archery and women pegging out great cloths and clothes on tenterhooks.3 But just as likely to be found in the fields were furtive criminals and spies, relishing so isolated a spot, and rogues a
nd vagrant soldiers. It could be a dangerous and threatening place: one has the impression at times of Moorfields as the setting for the great storm in King Lear, with Poor Tom borrowed from Bedlam. And perhaps there was a kind of doom in the fen damp. Falstaff, in 1 Henry IV (1598), speaks of ‘the melancholy of Moorditch’, the muddy sewer that drained the fields (I. ii. 77–8), and John Taylor wrote twenty years later of his mind ‘attired in moody, muddy, Moorditch melancholy’.4

  Moorfields was a meeting place between wealthy and comfortable citizens and the city’s prolific underclass. In 1616 Robert Anton imagined the poor haunting the footpaths through the fields: ‘walk Moorfields, / The shades of malcontents; whose causes [i.e. causeways] yields / Whole shoals of travellers’. Here, Anton continued, the poor might dream about the rich:

  Cast here and there with envious characters,

  On limping soldiers, and wild travellers,

  That sit a-sunning under some green tree,

  Wondering what riches are, or rich men be.5

  This was the outer limit of London psychologically as well as geographically; it was the place on the edge, the disconcerting shadow over the wall.

  Ten years before Anton’s verse, the city fathers had decided to do something about Moorfields. The trees under which Anton’s maimed soldiers and masterless men dreamed of different lives were planted by citizens and gentlemen like John Sanderson, for most of his life a merchant out in the Levant, who put his own tree into the ground on Monday, 20 October 1606; close by, forming a triangle, were the trees of Sir Leonard Halliday and his son. Sanderson made a small sketch which shows a neat formal garden of walks, rails, trees and grass plots just outside out Bethlehem gate. ‘Be this’, he wrote, ‘for remembrance thereof.’ Halliday was lord mayor, and Sanderson, not surprisingly, wanted to mark the honour.6

  So here was a wild and troubling place now subdued and reclaimed: ten acres measured out, made level by a plough and enclosed with gardens.7 For a city so used to the sting of plague epidemics in the decade between 1593 and 1603, the new Moorfields project, to cleanse the noxious fen, was a prophylactic against infection. But it presented, too, an opportunity for London’s rich to enjoy themselves in a modest parcel of faux countryside, where they built, as one observer wrote rather sniffily, ‘many fair summer houses, and as in other places of the suburbs, some of them like midsummer pageants, with towers, turrets and chimney tops, not so much for use or profit, as for show and pleasure’.8 Just like the Royal Exchange, the new Moorfields was an opportunity for conspicuous display and (as for Ben Jonson’s Mistress Littlewit in Bartholomew Fair) fashionable promenading on fine summer evenings (I. ii. 5–6).

  At first this looks like privatization by the rich of the newly bucolic Moorfields, upon which London’s worthies stamped their own identities, marking it forever: the trees, for example, bore the names of those who had planted them.9 But the city fathers wanted to emphasize that Moorfields had been reclaimed for every decent Londoner. In 1607 Richard Johnson published The Pleasant Walkes of Moore-fields, dedicating his work to the right worshipful the knights and aldermen of London: ‘Those sweet and delightful walks of Moorfields . . . as it seems a garden to this city, and a pleasurable place of sweet airs for citizens to walk in, now made most beautiful by your good worships.’10 Johnson’s earnest dialogue between a country gentleman and a citizen of London explains how it all came about:

  GENTLEMAN: . . . of all pleasures that contents me, these sweet walks of Moorfields are the chiefest, and the causes thereof deserve much commendations.

  CITIZEN: Those be the worthy aldermen and common council of London, who seeing the disorder used in these fields, have bestowed this cost, and as occasion requires intends further to beautify the same. gentleman: In so doing, they purchase fame after death, and much pleasure to posterity. But to what use are these fields reserved?

  CITIZEN: Only for citizens to walk in to take the air, and for merchants’ maids to dry clothes in, which want necessary gardens at their dwellings.11

  If there is pride here, there is also still a whiff of the Moorfields’ old reputation. Welcome were the citizens and merchants’ servants going about their proper business; unwelcome were those who disturbed the recreation of respectable people. Why, Johnson’s country gentleman asks, are there stocks chained with iron to the wall? ‘Only as punishment for those that lay any filthy thing within these fields,’ the citizen replies, ‘or make water in the same to the annoyance of those that walk therein, which evil savours in times past have much corrupted man’s senses and are supposed to be a great nourishing of diseases.’12

  On the face of it, this new London was merely the old London, improved and beautified, whose ancient foundation made sense of contemporary grandeur. ‘Many things might be spoken of this famous city,’ wrote the cartographer John Norden in 1593: ‘It is most sweetly situate upon the Thames, served with all kind of necessaries most commodiously. The air healthful, it is populous, rich and beautiful; be it also faithful, loving and thankful.’13 But who really, in 1593, would have believed that? With the strains of poverty and war, vagrancy and riot, fears of grain-hoarding, famine and plague, Norden’s brief sketch of the city for that and the following years was simply a fantasy.

  All this happy complacency speaks in fact of a disquiet and anxiety lurking just beneath the surface commentary. London was growing. Suburbs menaced the city: the very word, used commonly in a neutral way to describe the topography of other cities, was for London laden with negative meanings. Suburbs meant vice and disease. Poets and playwrights knew this. In Catiline His Conspiracy (1611), Ben Jonson wrote of the ‘suburb-brothels’ of ancient Rome, a reference full of meaning for Elizabethan Londoners (II. i. 275). The same is true of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), where there is a proclamation by the authorities of Vienna for the suburbs to be ‘pluck’d down’. About to be put out of business, Mistress Overdone is horrified:

  MISTRESS OVERDONE: But shall all our houses of resort in the suburbs be pull’d down?

  POMPEY: To the ground, mistress.

  MISTRESS OVERDONE: Why, here’s a change indeed in the commonwealth! What shall become of me?

  POMPEY: Come; fear you not; good counsellors lack no clients. Though you change your place, you need not change your trade . . . (I. ii. 95–108)

  Shakespeare’s fictional Vienna was really the city he and everyone knew: ‘houses of resort’ were the kinds of brothels familiar throughout London, by reputation to be found especially in its outer reaches.

  What troubled the rulers of Elizabethan London, apart from the sin, was the sense of their city spreading almost beyond control. John Stow, whose great Survey of London was first printed in 1598, wrote nostalgically of the earliest medieval city suburb of houses, gardens and trees, pastures, meadows and water mills – a graceful blending of town into country. How different that was to the suburbs 400 years later, when

  the beauty of this city on that part [outside Aldgate, near the Tower of London], is so encroached upon, by building of filthy cottages, that . . . in some places it scarce remaineth a sufficient highway for the meeting of carriages and droves of cattle, much less is there any fair, pleasant, or whole way for people to walk on foot.14

  By the end of the sixteenth century, every possible space in and around the city was being used. Near the Tower, the city ditch, once so deep that some unwary riders and their horses had drowned in it, was filled in and let out, Stow observed, ‘for garden plots, carpenters’ yards, bowling alleys and divers houses’. Of the once wide ditch there was practically nothing left but a small channel ‘and that very shallow’.15

  The first instinct of both city and royal government was to prohibit any new building in London, threatening to fine or even imprison builders and workmen. But new building was only part of the problem. Existing buildings were being divided up and let out for rent. The very poor, living in tiny chambers, were ‘heaped up together, and in a sort smothered with many families of children and serva
nts in one house or small tenement’.16 Always packed with people, especially during the law terms, London was at the best of times exposed to plague and sickness. At the same time it was – and for centuries had been – a city of temporary lodgings, especially for country gentlemen.17 Poverty only heightened the danger. For decades those in authority wrestled with what they knew would be the consequences of growing numbers of people crammed into every square inch of London. Disease, poverty and crime stalked the elite. In 1596 the queen’s Privy Council called the attention of local magistrates to the ‘great number of dissolute, loose and insolent people harboured in such and the like noisome and disorderly houses, as namely poor cottages and habitations of beggars and people without trade, stables, inns, alehouses, taverns, . . . dicing houses, bowling alleys and brothel houses’.18

  The reality for many thousands of Londoners was a tenement life of overcrowded squalor in a city where all available buildings – former monasteries, churches, grand townhouses – were subdivided up into tiny apartments and chambers over and over again. The story of one former religious house, the priory of the nuns of Holywell, not so far from Bishopsgate, was true of so many others like it across the city. Founded by a medieval bishop, rebuilt in the fifteenth century by one of Henry VII’s chief advisers, it was surrendered to Henry VIII in 1539. By 1598 it had been gutted and put to new use in a city under strain: ‘The church thereof being pulled down, many houses have been builded for the lodgings of noblemen, of strangers born, and other.’19

  For the poor, exploitation by landlords, violence, theft and prostitution flourished. Privacy, too, was a rare thing in circumstances where servants lived with families, chambers and beds were shared, and moral lapses were the business of parishes and church courts. Local resentments prickled with anger. In Katherine Wheel Alley on Thames Street, close to the river, nine tenements once occupied by ‘honest citizens’ were converted after 1584 into forty-three tenements. Locals complained about overcrowding and the dangers of infection: ‘The poor tenements . . . receive many inmates and other base and poor people of bad conditions to the great trouble and annoyance of the honest neighbours.’ Reputable parishioners wanted ‘the reformation of the said alley by plucking down such unnecessary buildings’ – doubtless a phrase spoken and heard over and over again by ‘honest’ Londoners when they moaned about the nuisance of squalid tenements.20 Citizens worried about disease, disorder and the amount of parish charity that was being consumed by the begging poor. The wealth of decent citizens, after all, would stretch only so far.