The Strand is the great street that connects Westminster and Whitehall to the city of London itself. You will see hundreds of lawyers and clerks walking along it from the city every morning and returning in the evening. But it is much more than just a street: it is where many of the most magnificent houses in London are situated. At the Whitehall end, just north of Charing Cross, is the royal mews, where the queen’s hunting falcons and her horses and carriages are kept. Beyond, backing on to the river, are Hungerford House, York Place, Durham Place, the Savoy Palace and Arundel Place – substantial mansions that are the homes of statesmen and bishops. The greatest lords have always preferred this area because it is quieter than the city itself, the air cleaner, there is plenty of space for the servants’ quarters and, most of all, the houses have river access. From here the lords and their guests can simply take a barge to their destination; they do not have to travel by road or risk the attention of the mob. Most of these great houses are built round a quadrangle, with the private residential parts overlooking the large garden leading down to the river. On the north side of the Strand there are smaller gentlemen’s houses. About halfway along is Cecil House, the grand London residence of Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley), the queen’s principal secretary. The house is far enough advanced in 1561 for him to entertain Elizabeth here in person. Beyond its garden, and running behind all the houses along this north side of the Strand, are the undeveloped fields of Long Acre and Covent Garden, which previously belonged to the monks of Westminster Abbey and are now the property of the earl of Bedford. The developers will start to move into the area in the next reign, when Drury Lane has been built up.
At the heart of London is the Thames. It is a major asset to those who live here. As the alleys and lanes of the city are so dank, dark and dangerous, and the streets so congested, many people cut through between the houses to the stairs down to the river, where they hire a wherry to take them upstream or down. Upstream from London Bridge you’ll find the wharf at Vintry, next to Queenhithe, with three cranes (Three Cranes Wharf) for lifting cargo that needs to be transported upriver, such as tuns of wine and timber. You will see hundreds of boats moored here of an evening. But far more important is the main port of London. This is made up of the twenty or so quays and wharves on the north bank of the river between London Bridge and the Tower of London, where deep-water ships can draw up and where cranes are able to hoist the goods ashore. Galley Quay, nearest the Tower, is a general lading place, but most of the others have designated purposes. Old Wool Quay is for wool and fells. Beare Quay is for traders coming from and going to Portugal. Sabbes Quay is for traders of pitch, tar and soap. Gibson’s Quay is for lead and tin. Somers Quay is for Flemish merchants. And so on. So many vessels are moored here that the Elizabethan writer and schoolmaster William Camden compares the wharves to wooded groves, ‘shaded with masts and sails’. In 1599 Thomas Platter notes that there is one large boat nose-to-stern all the way from St Katherine’s Wharf (just to the east of the Tower of London) to London Bridge: one hundred vessels in all.36
Although the majority of visitors to the city remark on the large numbers of swans on the Thames, you will probably be more impressed by the number of boats. These range from dung-boats to thousands of wherries and one glass boat: the royal barge. The river itself is wider and shallower than in modern times, with no high embankments. But one thing goes for all visitors: everyone talks about London Bridge. This magnificent ancient structure of twenty arches – more than 800ft long, 60ft feet high and almost 30ft wide – towers above the water. It is built on huge ‘starlings’: low flat pillars of stone, which are shaped like boats. These serve as both foundations and cutwaters; they also impede the flow of tidal water under the bridge. When the tide is going out it is impossible to row upstream. Similarly, it is dangerous to ‘shoot the bridge’ and risk yourself in the turbulent water when heading downstream. The starlings also act collectively as a form of weir, slowing the flow of the river, so that it sometimes freezes in very cold weather. In the winter of 1564–5 the ice is thick enough for some boys to play a football match on it. Everyone enjoys that occasion, even the queen, who leads her courtiers out on to the frozen river to shoot arrows for sport.
The impressive bulk of London Bridge is greatly enhanced by the shops and four-storey houses constructed along it. These are the homes of prosperous merchants, so the bridge has all the appearance of a fine street. Towards the north end is a gatehouse, the New Stone Gate. Six arches from the south end is the drawbridge. This originally had two purposes: one was to allow larger ships access to the river beyond the bridge; the other was the defence of the city. A second gatehouse stands just to the north of this drawbridge, emphasising the latter purpose. However, the drawbridge has not been raised for many years; nor will it ever be used again. In 1577 the dilapidated drawbridge tower is taken down and replaced by Nonsuch House: a magnificent four-storey timber-framed house prefabricated in the Low Countries, shipped to London and erected in 1579. Built over the seventh and eighth arches, this magnificent brightly painted building straddles the entire bridge and enables traffic to pass through its centre by way of a great passageway. At the south end there is a third gatehouse, the Great Stone Gate, with drum towers of four storeys. After the drawbridge tower is removed, the Great Stone Gate is where traitors’ heads are displayed. Even after they have rotted, the skulls are left on spikes as a reminder of the fate that befalls those who dare oppose the monarch. At the end of the century, you can still see more than thirty skulls there. London Bridge is more than just a bridge: it is a symbol of London and a statement of royal authority.
There are many other landmarks to visit. The Tower dominates the eastern side of the city; you might be interested to see the medieval palace in the inner bailey, which still survives in Elizabeth’s reign. The fifteenth-century Guildhall is another important building that you might recognise: it houses the administration of the twenty-six wards of the city of London.37 Many locals will direct you to London Stone on your sightseeing journey: a large menhir standing in the middle of Candlewick Street (much larger than the fragment that survives in modern times in a nearby wall). For many people, this stone is the heart of London; they will tell you that it was erected by Brutus, the legendary founder of Britain. Here they swear oaths, agree deals and listen to official proclamations. Other sightseeing destinations will be completely unfamiliar to you, however. The cathedral, for example, was completed in the fourteenth century, and despite the loss of its dramatic spire, it is still worth visiting for its medieval antiquities, such as the Rose Window and the tomb of John of Gaunt. The medieval city walls are also intact, having been extensively repaired with brick in 1477.38 The ancient gates of Ludgate, Newgate, Cripplegate, Bishopsgate, Aldgate, Aldersgate and Moorgate similarly still stand. Baynard’s Castle is located at the western extreme of the ancient city walls, mirroring the Tower in the east. It is not a castle as such, but a palatial fifteenth-century house built round two large quadrangles, one with hexagonal towers at each corner. Another unfamiliar landmark is Paul’s Cross, the elevated octagonal preaching place with a lead roof in the north-east corner of the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral. Three days after Queen Elizabeth’s accession in November 1558, her chaplain preaches here. Sermons by him and other authorised preachers over the subsequent months attract thousands of Londoners and visitors to the city, who gather eager to learn how the Church is being reformed by their new monarch. It can also be a place of rioting, when a preacher upsets his audience. On one occasion in the last reign a dagger was thrown at a bishop preaching here. It stuck, quivering, in the timber beside him.
Say what you want about the palaces and castles, and the landmarks of London Stone, Old St Paul’s and London Bridge; the real soul of London is in the streets. You will pass through alleys so narrow and dark with overhanging houses, stinking so strongly of the privies emptying into cellars, that you will wonder how people can bear to live in such an environment. Yet you may tu
rn a corner and suddenly find yourself on a wide street with smart houses of four or five storeys, with brightly painted timbers and glass in all the windows. The Venetian Alessandro Magno is impressed on his visit to the city in 1562, remarking that ‘the houses have many windows in which they put glass clear as crystal’ – which is quite a compliment, coming from a man whose home city is one of the great centres of glass-making.39 In some narrow lanes you will find the clay of the street is damp all year round; in other areas the city authorities regularly place gravel down to provide a road surface. In July 1561 Henry Machyn records that the whole way through the city – from the Charterhouse, through Smithfield, under Newgate and along Cheapside and Cornhill to Aldgate, and on to Whitechapel – is ‘newly gravelled with sand’, ready for the queen’s progress.40 Most of the approach roads to the main gates to the city are paved for a short distance both inside and outside the walls, as are the Strand and Holborn High Street.41
On market days you will find it almost impossible at times to make your way along some thoroughfares. You won’t see so many people in one place anywhere else in England. The city engages all your senses: it is visible, audible and you can smell it. In Lothbury, in the north of the city, you hear the rasping on the lathe, the clanging, banging and hissing where the metal workers operate. In the markets you hear the yells of the street vendors. There are criers in the street delivering news and public announcements. A woman in an apron walks past calling, ‘Who will buy my fine sausage?’ Another approaches you with a basket on her head, calling, ‘Hot Pudding Pies, Hot!’ Stand still for any length of time and you will hear ‘Come buy my glasses, glasses, fine glasses’ from a woman walking along selling drinking goblets, or ‘Rosemary and bays, rosemary and bays’ from another carrying a basket of herbs. At dusk, as the markets are being cleared away, the lighters walk between the houses calling, ‘Maids, hang out your lights.’42 Passing the prisons of Newgate and Ludgate, you can hear the poor crying out through the grilles in the walls: ‘Bread and meat for the poor prisoners, for Christ Jesus’s sake!’43
Alongside all this activity, it is the speed of change that makes London unique. John Stow, describing the city in 1598, mentions the long street to the east of the Tower, which has become home for thousands of mariners; fifty years earlier, no one lived there. He is no less aware of the expansion to the north of the city: the lines of houses that now stand where windmills were situated at the start of the reign. All over the city old houses are being rebuilt. You would have thought the authorities would take the opportunity to widen the narrow alleys and make the city more splendid. But, despite London’s wealth, they cannot afford to do so. As the population of the city expands, the value of each house increases, and so every square foot of space commands a higher premium. Hence you see many houses rebuilt as six- or seven-storey buildings, even though there is nothing more solid than timber to support them.44 Like all the other towns and cities in the country, London is growing upwards as well as outwards.
Given that the roots of London’s wealth and exponential growth lie in trade, it is appropriate to end this brief description of the city with a word or two about the commercial centres. As you may have gathered from the street names already mentioned, many markets are held in the streets. Bread Street is termed thus because it originally housed the bread market. Fish Street, Milk Street, Hosier Lane, Cordwainer Street and many dozens of others are similarly named after the trades carried on in each location. But there is no place where all these trades can come together except the one great communal gathering place, St Paul’s. As you can imagine, a cathedral does not make an ideal place to trade; it is especially unsuitable for selling fish (although this does happen from time to time).45 Sir Thomas Gresham, the wealthy merchant and financier, is the man who decides to do something about this. He persuades the Corporation of the city to buy up eighty houses on Cornhill and sell them for the building materials alone, thus ensuring the demolition of the houses. The city loses out to the tune of more than £3,000, but in return Sir Thomas, at his own expense, builds the Royal Exchange in 1566–7. This is a three-storey structure of stone enclosing a paved quadrangle, based on the Bourse in Antwerp. The city’s merchants meet in the cloisters on the ground floor while upstairs (known as ‘the Pawn’) there are shops. Milliners, haberdashers, armourers, apothecaries, booksellers, goldsmiths and glass sellers all find it a profitable place to trade. It is London’s first purpose-built shopping centre.
No description of the city of London would be complete without some reference to Cheapside. If any street in the city deserves to be called London’s High Street, this is the one. It is the main market place, the widest street, the location for the lord mayor’s pageant and the main showplace for royal processions. If you leave the Royal Exchange and walk westwards from Cornhill, and through Poultry, you will soon reach it. The great hall of the Mercers’ Company can be found here. It is also the location of the Great Conduit, the large stone fountain where housewives, servants and water carriers alike queue up to fill their pails and water vessels. Ahead of you is the Standard: another public water fountain adjacent to a column surmounted by a cross. The Standard is also the place where the city authorities demonstrate their authority: here you can witness the cutting-off of hands for causing an affray. One row of fourteen shops and houses on your left will undoubtedly catch your attention. Running along Cheapside between Bread Street and Friday Street, these are the most handsome houses in the whole city: four storeys high and covered in gold. As the name indicates, the houses in Goldsmith’s Row are mostly owned by bankers and goldsmiths. They are faced, in the middle of the street, by the huge Cheapside Cross – one of the great three-tiered medieval crosses erected by Edward I to commemorate his late queen, Eleanor. The cross is much abused these days, and in 1581 the lowest tier of statues is badly vandalised by youths; the statue of the Virgin is pulled out of position and won’t be restored for another fourteen years. Continue on a little further and you come to West Cheap, where the market takes place and where the Little Conduit supplies water to the northern part of the city. Finally you come to St Paul’s and Paternoster Row, where the booksellers and stationers have their stalls. If you carry on westwards, you can leave the city by way of Newgate, and if you continue along the road to the gallows at Tyburn and the road to Oxford you will eventually return to Stratford.
Along Cheapside you might notice a tavern on your left: The Mermaid. It is here that Mr Edmund Coppinger and Mr Henry Arthington seek shelter from the London crowds in 1591. It also happens to be a drinking haunt of William Shakespeare of Stratford.46 In this street wealth rubs shoulders with poverty while philanthropy watches on. City dwellers meet country folk. It is a place of announcements, public demonstrations and business. For the goldsmiths who live here, and the rich merchants who attend meetings at Mercers’ Hall, it is a place of professional achievement and pride. For the chronicler John Stow, it is a place of antiquity and great dignity. For the well-dressed, it is an opportunity to show off. For Mr Coppinger and Mr Arthington, it is a place of reckoning. And for the poet from Stratford, it is a chance to observe it all, with a ‘pot of good double beer’ in his hand.
2
The People
Population
Population growth is one of the biggest topics of conversation in the Elizabethan age. From Cornwall to Kent you will hear remarks about the burgeoning numbers. Townspeople see the new housing spreading out beyond the town walls; country dwellers are suspicious of the numbers of paupers on the roads. But how fast is the population expanding? How can one tell?
Statistics are rarely collated in Elizabethan England, and it is very unlikely that you will find anyone who has a good idea of the actual population. It is ironic, but it is considerably easier for historians in the modern world to measure sixteenth-century population fluctuations than it is for those alive at the time. Today we know that contemporary impressions of population expansion are correct. At the end of the reign, England has a
population of about 4.11 million – an increase of 30 per cent from the 3.16 million at the beginning. These are startling figures; the country will see nothing like it until the even greater population expansion at the end of the eighteenth century.1 It is even more shocking when you realise that the population has been well below three million for the previous two centuries, having never properly recovered from the Black Death of 1348–9. It is not surprising therefore that contemporaries feel that their numbers are increasing significantly.
Why is this happening? In 1594 in Kent, William Lambarde offers this explanation: ‘nowadays not only young folks of all sorts but churchmen also of each degree do marry and multiply at liberty, which was not wont to be, and … we have not, God be thanked, been touched with any extreme mortality, either by sword or sickness, that might abate the overgrown number of us’.2 Richard Carew, writing in Cornwall a few years later, agrees, associating the increase with the relaxation of the rules against priests marrying, people marrying younger than they did in earlier ages, and a long absence of wars and plague.3 But as you might expect, the real reasons lie far deeper than these gentlemen’s intelligent guesses. Wars do not make much of a dent in the population for the simple reason that they do not reduce the number of fertile women at home. Or, to put it another way, the market for husbands is not limited by romantic ideals of the perfect man, but by the availability of men of adequate quality and means; and even the loss of 8,000 men in war (1 per cent of the adult male population) results in only a very slight lowering of standards – it doesn’t create a host of permanently grieving brides. If you want to know the real reason for the population expansion, look for it in the availability of food, and its effect on marriage and fertility. To put it simply, if there is an abundance of food, then its price drops and people’s health, welfare and security improve. More people marry who might not have married in leaner times. Confident of feeding a family, a servant will leave his employer, begin a trade, set up his own household, marry and take care of his wife and children. Obviously, if food is scarce and expensive, then such a move is potentially fatal. It is the availability of food across the whole country at an affordable price for the marginal families that is thus the cause of population expansion.4
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England Page 5
