London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  Combats between men and women were also frequent-“I saw in Holbourn a woman engaged with a man … having struck her with the utmost force, he retreated back … the woman seized these intervals to fall upon his face and eyes with her hands … The Police take no cognizance of these combats of individuals.” By “the Police” is meant the watch in each ward, which took no notice of these fights because they were common and familiar. Yet it did not end there. “If a coachman has a dispute about his fare with a gentleman that has hired him, and the gentleman offers to fight him to decide the quarrel, the coachman consents with all his heart.” This pugnacity could, and often did, have fatal consequences. Two brothers fought, and one killed the other outside the Three Tuns Tavern-“His brother intending, it seems, to kill the coachman, who did not please him, this fellow stepped in and took away his sword, who thereupon took out his knife … and with that stabbed him.”

  A “diversion” of the English, according to many reports, was female combat in places of resort and amusement such as Hockley-in-the-Hole. It was recorded that the “women fought almost naked with two handled swords which, at the points, were sharp as razors.” Both combatants were frequently cut with these weapons, and retired briefly to have their wounds “sown up” without the benefit of any anaesthetic other than their own animosity. The fight continued until one of the participants swooned, or was so badly wounded that she could fight no more. On one occasion, one combatant was twenty-one and the other sixty. It became a highly ritualised, if bloody, affair. The two female warriors would bow to the spectators and salute each other. One was decked in blue ribbons, the other in red; each carried a sword, about three and a half feet in length with a blade approximately three inches wide. With these fierce weapons, and only a wicker shield for defence, they attacked each other. In one fight a swordswoman “received a long and deep wound all across her neck and throat”; some coins were thrown to her from the crowd, but “she was too badly hurt to fight any more.”

  The introductory “chaff” between the two women (one declaring, for instance, that she beat her husband every morning to keep her hand in) was also echoed in the advertisements or “notices” which preceded each fight. “I Elizabeth Wilson, of Clerkenwell, having had some words with Hannah Highfeld and requiring satisfaction, do invite her to meet me on the stage and box with me for three guineas, each woman holding half a crown in each hand, and the first woman that drops her money to lose the battle.” The coin was held to prevent the participants scratching each other. To which a reply was printed: “I Hannah Hyfeld, of Newgate Market, hearing of the resolution of Elizabeth, will not fail to give her more blows than words, desiring home blows and from her no favour.” The London Journal reported in June 1722 that “They maintained the battle with great valour for a long time, to the no small satisfaction of the spectators.”

  Men also fought one another with swords, each with a “second” bearing a large wooden club to ensure fair play, and again the struggle ended only when the participants’ wounds were too disabling for them to continue. On many occasions the audiences joined in the battle. “But Lord!” Pepys wrote, “to see in a minute the whole stage was full of watermen to revenge the foul play, and the butchers to defend their fellow, though most blamed him; and there they all fell to it, to knocking down and cutting many on each side. It was pleasant to see, but that I stood in the pit, and feared that in the tumult I might get some hurt.” This account emphasises the almost tribal loyalties engaged in civic violence, the effect of which could be witnessed in even the most “polite” circles. When the speculator Barebone engaged some workmen to build upon Red Lion Fields, the lawyers of the adjacent Gray’s Inn “took notice of it, and thinking it an injury upon them, went with a considerable body of one hundred persons; upon which the workmen assaulted the gentlemen, and flung bricks at them, and the gentlemen at them again; so a sharp engagement ensued.”

  The tribalism of the city was manifested, in a no less unhappy way, with the exploits of a group of young people known as the Mohocks, named after “a sort of cannibals in India,” according to the Spectator, “who subsist by plundering and devouring all the nations about them.” These young Londoners would rush down the streets with linked arms for the pleasure “of fighting and sometimes maiming harmless foot passengers and even defenceless women.” Street-brawling has an ancient history within the city, and similar gangs of youths were known in previous generations as Muns and Tityre-Tus, then Hectors and Scourers, and then Nickers and Hawkubites. The Mohocks themselves began the evening by drinking too much, before tumbling on to the streets with their swords ready. The consequences are revealed in Walford’s Old and New London. As “soon as the savage pack had run down their victim, they surrounded him, and formed a circle with the points of their swords. One gave him a puncture in the rear, which very naturally made him wheel about; then came a prick from another; and so they kept him spinning like a top.” That is why they became known as Sweaters, and also as Slashers since in more ferocious mood they took pleasure “in tattooing, or slashing people’s faces with, as Gay wrote, ‘new invented wounds.’” Another poet of London has memorialised their exploits in more expressive verse:

  And in luxurious cities, where the noise

  Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,

  And injury and outrage, and when night

  Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons

  Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.

  So did John Milton place the violence of London within the context of myth and eternity.

  Within the context of the streets, the Mohocks were not alone in their depredations. In the 1750s William Shenstone wrote that “London is really dangerous at this time; the pickpockets, formerly content with mere filching, make no scruple to knock people down with bludgeons in Fleet Street and the Strand, and that at no later hour than eight o’clock at night; but in the Piazzas, Covent Garden, they come in large bodies, armed with couteaus, and attack whole parties.” Here is a graphic illustration of how at night the city, without an adequate police force, could become terrifying. Sir John Coventry had his nose slit by a street gang. A courtesan named Sally Salisbury, displeased by an admirer’s speeches, “seized a knife and plunged it into his body”; she was conveyed to Newgate, surrounded by plaudits. “Now it is the general complaint of the taverns, the coffee-houses, the shop-keepers and others,” wrote the City Marshal in 1718, “that their customers are afraid when it is dark to come to their houses and shops for fear that their hats and wigs should be snitched from their heads or their swords taken from their sides, or that they may be blinded, knocked down, or stabbed; nay, the coaches cannot secure them, but they are likewise cut and robbed in the public streets etc. By which means the traffic of the City is much interrupted.”

  “Traffic” is as much in goods as in vehicles, and this is one of the indications that the prosperity of the city was being threatened by the violent propensities of some of its citizens. In this period, too, the apprentices would “go to Temple Bar in the evening, set up a shouting and clear the pavement between that and Fleet Market of all the persons there. The boys all knew boxing, and if anyone resisted one or two would fall upon him and thrash him on the spot, nobody interfered.”

  James Boswell was very observant of the streets in the decade after Fielding’s death (1754). “The rudeness of the English vulgar is terrible,” he confided to his diary in December 1762. “This indeed is the liberty which they have: the liberty of bullying and being abusive with their blackguard tongues.” On many occasions he would have heard the familiar shouts of “Marry, come up!” and “Damn your eyes!” A month later he was reporting that “I was really uneasy going home. Robberies in the street are now very frequent” and then, in the summer of 1763, he recorded that “There was a quarrell between a gentleman and a waiter. A great crowd gathered round, and roared out ‘A ring-a ring.’” It may also be that in that cry there is a folk memory of the chant “A ring-a ring of roses
” which commemorated the period of the Plague when scarlet tokens upon the flesh were harbingers of death. In the streets of London, fear and violence are fatally mingled.

  In the eighteenth century there are accounts of mobs with lighted torches and sticks or clubs; their leaders would read out the names of people, or of specific streets, in order to direct the violence against local targets. Houses and factories and mills could be literally pulled down; looms were cut apart. Sometimes we can hear them shouting-“Green you bugger, why don’t you fire? We will have your heart and liver!” There is also a remarkable collection of threatening letters, which testifies to the spirited and violent language of Londoners when addressing one another, “Sir, Damn Your Blood if You do not Ryes Your Works Too 2 pence a Pair moor We Well Blow your Braines out For We will Bllow your Brans out if You Doo not Do itt You slim Dog We shall sett You Houes on fier … if you do not Lay the Money at the place that we shall mention we will set your House and all that belongs to you on fire for it is in my power for to do it … Mr. Obey, we gave you now an Egg Shell of Honey, but if you refuse to comply with the demands of yesterday, we’ll give you a Gallon of Thorns to your final Life’s End.”

  It is perhaps significant, in the context of the violent language of London, that much Cockney dialect springs immediately from pugilism: “breadbasket” for stomach, “kisser” for mouth, “conk” for nose, “pins” for legs and “knock-aht” for a sensation. Many of the words for beating, such as “hammer,” “lick,” “paste,” “whack” and “scrap,” also derive from the ring, suggesting that the vernacular of confrontation and pugnacity remains very much to the taste of the Londoner.

  Fights took place off the streets as often as upon them, and the printed records testify to the fact that the “lower” drinking clubs and alehouses were characterised by violence as well as liquor. William Hickey reported upon his visit to a den called Wetherby’s in Little Russell Street off Drury Lane where “the whole room was in an uproar, men and women promiscuously mounted upon chairs, tables, and benches, in order to see a sort of general conflict carrying on upon the floor. Two she-devils, for they scarce had a human appearance, were engaged in a scratching and boxing match, their faces entirely covered with blood, bosoms bare, and the clothes nearly torn from their bodies. For several minutes not a creature interfered between them, or seemed to care a straw what mischief they might do each other, and the contest went on with unabated fury.” Here it is the indifference and callousness of the crowd that are most evident, an indifference which, it can be presumed, was carried over into their general demeanour at work or upon the streets. The phrase “Never mind it” was a frequent one. Another phrase in Hickey’s account, “promiscuously mounted,” also, if no doubt inadvertently, introduces the element of sexual excitement and sexual congress into this account of bloody combat; sex and violence are, in the city, indissolubly connected.

  Hickey watched another beating in a corner of Wetherby’s where “an uncommonly athletic young man of about twenty five seemed to be the object of universal attack.” Hickey then experienced, naturally enough, “an eager wish to get away” but was stopped at the door. “No, no, youngster,” he was told, “no tricks upon travellers. No exit here until you have passed muster, my chick”; not until he had paid his “reckoning,” in other words, or had his purse stolen. He was then called a “sucker,” a word which lingered for more than two hundred years. Hickey was literally imprisoned within “this absolute hell upon earth” which then itself became a very emblem of the city as a prison.

  no biography of London would be complete without reference to the most violent and widespread riot of its last thousand years. It started as a demonstration against legislation in favour of Roman Catholics, but quickly turned into a general assault upon the institutions of the state and the city.

  On 2 June 1780, Lord George Gordon assembled four columns of his supporters in St. George’s Fields, in Lambeth, and led them to Parliament Square in order to protest against the Catholic Relief Act; Gordon himself was a quixotic figure of strange and marginal beliefs, but one who managed to inspire the vengeful imagination of the city for five days. He always protested, in later confinement, that he had never meant to uncork the fury of the mob, but he never properly understood the moods and sudden fevers of the city. His supporters were described as “the better sort of tradesmen,” and Gordon himself had declared that for the march against Parliament they should be decent and “dressed in their sabbath days cloaths.” But no crowd in London remains unmixed for long; soon more violent anti-papist elements, such as the weavers of Spitalfields bred from Huguenot stock, merged with the general crowd.

  Charles Dickens, in Barnaby Rudge, has given an account of the riots; the novel is fired by his interest in violence and by his fascination with crowds but it is also conceived after much reading and research. From the Annual Register of 1781, for example, he could have learned that the day was “intensely hot, and the sun striking down his fiercest rays upon the field those who carried heavy banners began to grow faint and weary.” Yet they marched in the heat three abreast, the main column some four miles in length, and when they converged outside Westminster they raised a great yell. The heat now inflamed them, as they invaded the lobbies and passages of Parliament. So great was the crowd that “a boy who had by some means got among the concourse, and was in imminent danger of suffocation, climbed to the shoulders of a man beside him and walked upon the people’s hats and heads into the open street.” Now this great multitude threatened the government itself; their petition was carried into the chamber of the House of Commons while, outside, the crowd screamed and yelled in triumph. They even threatened to invade the chamber but, even as they threw themselves against the doors, a rumour spread that armed soldiers were advancing in readiness to confront them. “Fearful of sustaining a charge in the narrow passages in which they were so closely wedged together, the throng poured out as impetuously as they had flocked in.” In the ensuing flight a body of Horse Guards surrounded some of the rioters and escorted them as prisoners to Newgate; this removal was, as events demonstrated, an unfortunate one.

  The mob dispersed, among a hundred rumours which resounded through the city, only to gather itself again as evening approached. Doors and windows were barred as the nervous citizenry prepared itself for further violence. The crowd had diverted its energies from Westminster to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where a notorious “mass house” was situated; it was in fact the private chapel of the Sardinian ambassador, but no diplomatic nicety could assuage the temper of the mob which burned it down and demolished its interior. According to a contemporary report “the Sardinian Ambassador offered five hundred guineas to the rabble to save the painting of our Saviour from the flames, and 1,000 guineas not to destroy an exceeding fine organ. The gentry told him they would burn him if they could get at him, and destroyed the picture and organ directly.” So opened a path of destruction which would burn its way across London.

  The next day, Saturday, was relatively quiet. On the following morning, however, a mob met in the fields near Welbeck Street and descended upon the Catholic families of Moorfields. There they burned out houses and looted a local Catholic chapel. On Monday the violence and looting continued, but now it was also directed against the magistrates involved in confining some of the anti-Catholic rioters to Newgate as well as against the politicians who had inaugurated the pro-Catholic legislation. Wapping and Spitalfields were in flames. It was not a “No Popery” protest now but a concerted assault upon the established authorities.

  Yet in promoting disorder they had themselves fallen out of all order or preconcerted arrangement. When “they divided into parties and ran to different quarters of the town, it was on the spontaneous suggestion of the moment. Each party swelled as it went along, like rivers as they roll towards the sea … each tumult took shape and form from the circumstances of the moment.” Workmen, putting down their tools, apprentices, rising from their benches, boys running errands, all jo
ined different bands of rioters. They believed that, because they were so many, they could not be caught. Many of the participants were in turn motivated “by poverty, by ignorance, by the love of mischief, and the hope of plunder.” This is again according to Dickens, but he was one who knew the temper and atmosphere of London. He understood that, once one breach had been made in the security and safety of the city, others would follow. The city enjoyed a very fragile equilibrium, and could be rendered unsteady in a moment. “The contagion spread like a dread fever: an infectious madness, as yet not near its height, seized on new victims every hour, and society began to tremble at their ravings.” The image of distemper runs through London’s history; when it is combined with the imagery of the theatre, where each incendiary incident becomes a “scene,” we are able to glimpse the complicated life of the city.

  On Tuesday, the day of Parliament’s reassembly, the crowds once more gathered at Westminster. It is recorded in “Lord George Gordon’s Narrative” that when the members of the Commons were informed that “people from Wapping were just then arriving with large beams in their hands and seemed determined to make an attack upon the soldiers” it was decided that the session should be adjourned. There were now mobs all over the city; most citizens wore a blue cockade to signal their allegiance to the rioters, and houses displayed a blue flag with the legend “No Popery” inscribed upon their doors and walls. Most of the shops were closed, and throughout London there was fear of violence “the like of which had never been beheld, even in its ancient and rebellious times.” Troops had been stationed at all the major vantage points, but they also seemed to be sympathetic to the cries and demands of the mob. The Lord Mayor felt unable, or was unwilling, to issue direct orders to arrest or shoot the rioters. So fires and destruction started up in various areas.