The English king Alfred, who in 871 inherited the kingdom of Wessex, engaged in a series of attacks on the Danes which culminated in his taking London. In a settlement with the Danish leader, he declared the area to the east – the present-day East End – to be under the control of the Danes.
The Scandinavian presence had considerable influence on trade and politics, and in 1016 a Dane, Cnut, was crowned king of all England. On the death of his sons, however, the English king, Edward the Confessor, returned in 1042 to take the throne, and the invaders’ power ended. Once again London became the most important town in England, a position strengthened by the building of the abbey and royal palace at Westminster. But it was not until the coming of another wave of invaders that the next major change would occur in the East End.
When Edward died, in 1066, there were three claimants to the English throne; William of Normandy, of course, was victorious.
Not only did William the Conqueror build one of his impressive castles to the east of the city walls – the White Tower, which would later form the heart of the Tower of London – but Stepney, including in this period what is now Hackney, became the most important manor of the Bishop of London, an office which made the holder a man of national consequence. The people who lived in the hamlets beyond the wall found themselves the feudal tenants of their new episcopal lord, although they still owed military loyalty to the Tower, hence the name Tower Hamlets – an obligation retained until the nineteenth century.
By 1086, the time of the Domesday survey, the hamlet dwellers were occupied in providing food, fodder, fuel and building materials for the bishop’s manor, much of it from the great forest between Hackney and Tower Hamlets, and even creating sufficient surplus to sell for the profit of their master.
Further east, the Normans had taken an interest in the land between the forded rivers Lea and Roding, giving it the name of Hame, which would later become the separate communities of East and West Ham. The River Lea, important as a power source for the mills of Bromley and Stratford, and as a navigable route linking Hertfordshire with the Thames, was also prized for what its marshy riverside lands could yield to the city and the bishop’s estate.
In the early twelfth century, by the reign of Henry I, the settlements at Bromley and Bow experienced further expansion linked to the building of Bow Bridge. This opened it up as the major route through to the eastern parts of the country. But although industry was expanding, with milling and cloth fulling, baking and dyeing, the landscape was still one of river-side meadows, where boats passed grazing cows and roaming sheep.
During the next 400 years, medieval London rose to prominence as one of the most powerful cities in Europe, prospering culturally, economically and politically. Parallel to this transformation, of a place that had once been distinguished merely for providing an easy river-crossing into a major capital, were the changes taking place further east. With the increasingly hotchpotch development outside the safety and commercial protectionism of the city walls, what would one day be the East End continued along its own path of commercial development, the ongoing process of land drainage and clearance providing space for housing and workshops alongside the still-important business of agriculture.
Whitechapel became an early example of ribbon development, with the tiny hamlet expanding to service passing travellers in and out of London. By 1250, it would be sufficiently affluent to begin work on its eponymous chapel and, by 1338, its traders and craftsmen were worshipping within a parish in its own right.
Further east still, development continued at a more gentle if no less successful pace. The monks of the Abbey of St Mary, Stratford Langthorne, who had begun fanning the land in the West Ham area in the twelfth century, had managed, over the course of 300 years, to swell the abbey’s wealth until a large part of what is now Newham was under its authority.
Other religious houses also prospered. The Abbey of St Clare, familiarly called the Minories, a corruption of the name Sorores Minores – Little Sisters – by which the Franciscan nuns were known, whose estate almost butted on to the city walls, were gifted with many endowments and lands, and, although they took a personal vow of poverty, they became the richest order in all England.
The lack of restriction in this comparatively free eastern sector did not apply only to locals; there was also the opportunity for newcomers to settle and ply their trades close to the all-important river. These immigrants were of a rather more peaceable kind than the earlier invaders, often bringing with them new skills and trades, as well as making a willing addition to the labour force. They came as workers in the cloth and other craft industries; as merchants to trade; and as financiers to deal with the City.
This latter group were Jewish and had originally been encouraged by the Norman rulers as, unlike Christians, they were permitted to act as moneylenders. This, along with the taxes levied on them, did much to bolster the depleted royal exchequer. Yet, despite their usefulness, they still faced, as would generations of immigrants after them, constraints and prohibitions under which they were obliged to live and work. Although London never had a formalized ghetto as such, the Jewish newcomers were unable to own land in their own right, nor were they able to bear arms. Being visibly different in clothing and customs, they were easily targeted and experienced hostility which at times escalated into mob violence. There were those jealous of their financial success, angered by the rates they charged for their services or simply vexed by their supposedly favoured position. If any preferential treatment did ever exist, it rapidly disappeared once the Jews had been bled almost dry of their assets. Their usefulness at an end, they were finally expelled from the country by Edward I in 1290.
Prejudice against newcomers was not new, was not restricted to anti-Semites and was not exclusive to the thirteenth century. Leff and Blunden quote an eighteenth-century East London clergyman’s opinion of recently arrived Protestant Huguenots:
This set of rabble are the very offal and beggary from which they fled, and are to be fattened on what belongs to the poor of our own land and to grow rich at our expense.
And, a century after that, there was widespread fear that the 1851 Great Exhibition’s promotion of free trade with the world would result in ‘floods of aliens’ swamping the capital.
But, whatever the welcome, there are always newcomers eager to take opportunities in new lands, and the place of the expelled Jews was not left vacant for long as financiers from Lombardy – remembered today in Lombard Street in the financial sector of the City of London – rapidly took over as the principal moneylenders of the time.
Other peaceful arrivals also came to London: some as a result of royal or political allegiances, some because of imperial influence or command, but most because they were attracted by the trading and commercial opportunities in a city with an ever-widening sphere of influence.
German merchants were to become a group of particular consequence in medieval England, rising to great influence through the Hanseatic League, a unified trading consortium. This gave them, among all foreign traders, dominance in the highly valuable wool business, which, during the medieval period, was largely responsible for the capital’s thriving economy.
This massive increase in commercial activity was, however, not being matched by a growth in the pool of available labour. The East End, which would one day provide the major share of the labour force to work for their wealthier neighbours to the west, was still a very mixed community, with the working poor living alongside the likes of the eldest son of Edward III, the Black Prince himself, in his great palace at Poplar. Then, with the depletion of the population following a wave of epidemics, particularly the terrible Black Death, labour was at a real premium.
This novelty of being in such high demand saw those who survived the contagion questioning their traditional lot as goods owned by their lords. The disquiet grew and, when the king levied a poll tax to pay for the wars in France, dissatisfaction boiled over, encouraged by the likes of John Ball, one of t
he so-called hedge priests. His famous cry,
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
echoed round the land as Ball, and like-minded priests, spread their message of equality and resistance. It was in Kent that Wat Tyler heard a speaker declare that freedom would come only if people took it, and it was up to them to refuse the tax collectors who threatened them with penalties and punishments.
When Tyler’s wife was the target of such a threat, he decided to take the priest’s advice. He gathered a crowd and led them to Maidstone Castle, where they freed John Ball and the others being held for their subversive sermons. They then headed for London. It was June 1381 and the Peasants’ Revolt, commemorated to this day in a mural at Mile End, had begun.
The word spread and many thousands joined them, all with the shared intention of pleading with the new king, Richard II, to put an end to the impossibly high taxes and to their exploitation by the lords and nobles.
The rebels pitched camp on Mile End Waste, close to the site of the old Mann, Crossmann and Paulin Brewery, and waited. Richard, then a fourteen-year-old boy, eventually rode from the Tower to meet the rebels’ leaders: Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball.
Over the next few days negotiations were attempted, but the crowd was still inflamed and the clash which followed resulted in the deaths of Wat Tyler and other rebels. But the rebellion was a success in that the poll tax was abolished and the people discovered that even lowly peasants, if they banded together, could take over the streets of London itself. It was a lesson learned, and remembered, by both commoners and lords alike.
The reputation for rebelliousness among those outside the authority of the City was further enhanced in later years by the cockney taste for rowdy, popular entertainments, and in the area’s accommodation of wanton playhouses and brothels, but it was a reputation that was not always justified. In reality, the history of the East End has been one less often of anarchy than of hardship and struggle, in which filling empty bellies and finding shelter for the night took easy precedence over insurgence.
The Thames, having played a leading role in the creation of the capital city and the birth of its eastern suburbs, continued to influence developments in the hamlets downstream from the Tower. By the mid-sixteenth century, increasing industry on the river contributed to the emergence of Ratcliffe, Limehouse, Wapping and Blackwall as significant centres of ship-building, and, as complementary trades and services evolved, more traditional waterside occupations such as milling and fishing began to wane in importance.
Although it had originally been Stepney, with its port at Ratcliff, which was predominant among the riverside hamlets, when the newly founded East India Company – a commercial enterprise, chartered in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth, which was to form the germ of the British Empire – dug its ship-building dock at Blackwall Yard, nowhere else in the East End, for the next hundred or so years, would be so closely identified with trade on the river as Poplar-and-Blackwall, the most distant of the hamlets from the City. Here, all life revolved around the East India Company: school, work, worship, homes and even, towards the end of the employees’ lives, the company’s own almshouses.
Incongruously, the East End was gradually emerging as a focus of massive international trade. At this time, however, it was still only an embryonic version of the predominantly urban character with which east London would become totally identified during the coming upheavals of Empire and the Industrial Revolution.
The still-essentially agricultural nature of the majority of the area was reflected in the records of crimes committed, such as theft of wheat and crop damage, although, with the increasing prosperity coming from the new industries on the Thames, opportunities were beginning to present themselves for more urban categories of crime.
Pickpockets, and the more violent footpads, robbed unwary passers-by in early instances of what we would now call street crime or muggings, part of the illicit way of life, of both truth and legend, which would become inextricably linked with the East End. But crime will always be a risk, where the desperate or the immoral are in proximity to rich pickings, and the choice cargoes on the river certainly provided those.
Piracy, thievery and, consequently, the gallows became almost commonplace and, in 1798, the river police – now known as Thames Division, the oldest civilian police force in the world – was created specifically to deal with everything from petty pilfering to major theft on the water.
The incidence of crime on the Thames was exacerbated by the vulnerability of the cargoes, which were held on board ship in the middle of the river, sometimes for weeks on end, until they were unloaded on to lighters and then ferried over to the unsecured quays, all giving plenty of scope for the criminally inclined to help themselves. Eventually, the West India Company had enough; their Caribbean shipments were far too precious and, in 1802, they opened their own secure dock. With the novelty of the ease and security which this accorded, other companies soon followed suit and numerous docks appeared along the riverside. The blind, forbidding walls, rising massively above the sea of crowded streets, alleyways and courts, became a familiar part of the East End landscape, which would be changed only by the terrible destruction of the Second World War, and would finally disappear with the transformation of the docks into Docklands.
It wasn’t exclusively the river which brought change and prosperity; having the wealthy city dwellers and merchants as their close neighbours, the poorer people of the hamlets had a ready-made market for the goods and services they could provide. But the story of the East End, as the working-class, slum-ridden, overcrowded, industrialized quarter of London, is as closely linked to the upheavals following the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries as it is to the river or to the development of trade and industry.
The power of the early Church and the wealth of the monastic estates that had thrived beyond the city walls had been barriers to any further eastward spread of the capital. The situation altered radically with Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and nunneries in the 1530s, when his confiscation and selling off of Church lands both helped fill the crown’s coffers and opened the way for changes in land use and ownership and, subsequently, for much opportunistic redevelopment outside the jurisdiction of the City authorities.
Happening at a time when the population of London had increased from around 50,000 to somewhere in the region of 200,000 people – partly caused by recovery after the famines and plagues that had so depleted earlier generations, but also by Henry’s encouragement of selective European immigration as an aid to the development of industrial techniques and skills – the opportunity was pounced upon.
Sold off by the crown, the eastern approaches to the City underwent a revolution in land use. Urbanization and overcrowding of the area had begun, the negative effects of which, as always, being worst for the poorest inhabitants. The poor were already suffering from the disappearance of the monasteries and nunneries, as the alms and medical help traditionally provided by the religious orders also disappeared. Only St Katharine’s by the Tower, an order long benefiting from royal protection, was permitted to survive and to continue with its charitable works.
Descriptions of this remarkable process of change are vividly chronicled in his Survey of London by John Stow, a man who spent all his life (1525–1605) in Aldgate. Although he approved of the increasing prosperity which he observed, he wrote about many of the changes with obvious apprehension.
From having boyhood memories of being sent for milk to Goodman’s Field – Goodman being a Tudor dairy farmer, still remembered today in various building and place names around Whitechapel – and of walks through green pastures, Stow watched as the Tower Hamlets were transformed. By the end of his life, many of those fields had been supplanted by streets and houses.
The potential for expansion was still blocked to the west by the boundaries of the City, to the south by the river, and by non-monastic farms, nursery gardens and estates t
o the north, but could now proceed towards the east without hindrance. The road from Essex, leading across Bow Bridge and linking Whitechapel to Aldgate, had long been where town met country, but it was paved over in 1542, just two years after the final abbey fell to the crown; the drovers no longer steered their animals to slaughter through a country lane past fields and meadows but along a bustling High Street, past crowded coaching inns, thriving tradesmen and the elegant homes of wealthy merchants.
Alongside the burgeoning river – and ship-related enterprises, and the businesses set up to service the needs and demands of the wealthy, the nuisance trades, or stink industries, were flourishing. The prevailing winds were now giving the cockneys’ neighbours to the more salubrious west the added advantage of remaining upwind of the stench of not only metalworks and slaughterhouses but increasing numbers of breweries, gunworks, tanneries, lime kilns, glue, soap and candle works, and the rest of the disagreeable or dangerous trades, whose reek and polluting fumes were now wafting downstream towards the estuary.
The subsequent pressure on housing, to hold this growing working population, was met, in the rapidly developing Whitechapel, by the building of what was described most disparagingly by Stow as no more than a shanty town. But still the area was home to a social mix of rich and poor, and just about every other social level in between, in a way that is hardly conceivable when the Victorian East End is conjured in the imagination.
Stow considered the details of these developments in the Tower Hamlets, observing how, during his lifetime, the rural was so quickly becoming urban. The rapidity of change would nowadays, perhaps, seem almost leisurely, but in those days must have seemed astonishing. In his 1908 introduction to the Survey, Charles Lethbridge Kingsford neatly sums up the impact of this moment in history by saying that the author was witnessing ‘the passing of medievalism and the birth of the modern capital’.
Stow cites a petition to Queen Elizabeth which points to the overcrowded East End as not only a potential health hazard for its better-off neighbours but a threat to the queen herself. This led to a royal order for the limitation of building there, but the result was contradictory in that more people simply squeezed into less space, making the housing even more overcrowded and insanitary than ever.
My East End Page 3
