attain more dexterity and perfection the better to content her
Majesty” (Analytical Index to the Remembrancia). When
theatres were established the lord mayor took care that they
should not be built within the city. The “Theatre” and the
“Curtain” were situated at Shoreditch; the “Globe,” the
“Swan,” the “Rose” and the “Hope” on the Bankside;
and the Blackfriars theatre, although within the walls, was
without the city jurisdiction.
In 1561 St Paul’s steeple and roof were destroyed by lightning, and the spire was never replaced. This circumstance allows us to test the date of certain views; thus Wyngaerde’s map has the spire, but Agas’s map is without it. In 1566 the first stone was laid of the “Burse,” which owed its origin to Sir Thomas Gresham. In 1571 Queen Elizabeth changed its name to the Royal Exchange. The Strand was filled with noble mansions washed by the waters of the Thames, but the street, if street it could be called, was little used by pedestrians. Londoners frequented the river, which was their great highway. The banks were crowded with stairs for boats, and the watermen of that day answered to the chairmen of a later date and the cabmen of to-day. The Bankside was of old a favourite place for entertainments, but two only—the bull-baiting and the bear-baiting—were in existence when Agas’s map was first planned. On Norden’s map,[1] however, we find the gardens of Paris Garden, the bearhouse and the playhouse.
The settled character of the later years of Elizabeth’s reign appears to have caused a considerable change in the habits of the people. Many of the chief citizens followed the example of the courtiers, and built for themselves country residences in Middlesex, Essex and Surrey; thus we learn from Norden that Alderman Roe lived at Muswell Hill, and we know that Sir Thomas Gresham built a fine house and planned a beautiful park at Osterley. The maps show us much that remains somewhat the same as it was, but also much that has greatly altered. St Giles’s was literally a village in the fields; Piccadilly was “the waye to Redinge,” Oxford Street “the way to Uxbridge,” Covent Garden an open field or garden, and Leicester Fields lammas land. Moorfields was drained and laid out in walks in Elizabeth’s reign. At Spitalfields crowds used to congregate on Easter Monday and Tuesday to hear the Spital sermons preached from the pulpit cross. The ground was originally a Roman Cemetery, and about the year 1576 bricks were largely made from the clayey earth, the recollection of which is kept alive in the name of Brick Lane. Citizens went to Holborn and Bloomsbury for change of air, and houses were there prepared for the reception of children, invalids and convalescents. In the north were sprinkled the outlying villages of Islington, Hoxton and Clerkenwell.
6. Stuart (1603–1714).—The Stuart period, from the accession of James I. to the death of Queen Anne, extends over little more than a century, and yet greater changes occurred during those years than at any previous period. The early years of Stuart London may be said to be closely linked with the last years of Elizabethan London, for the greatest men, such as Raleigh, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, lived on into James’s reign. Much of the life of the time was then in the City, but the last years of Stuart London take us to the 18th century, when social life had permanently shifted to the west end. In the middle of the period occurred the civil wars, and then the fire which changed the whole aspect of London. When James came to the throne the term suburbs had a bad name, as all those disreputable persons who could find no shelter in the city itself settled in these outlying districts. Stubbs denounced suburban gardens and garden houses in his Anatomy of Abuses, and another writer observed “how happy were cities if they had no suburbs.”
The preparations for the coronation of King James were interrupted by a severe visitation of the plague, which killed off as many as 30,578 persons, and it was not till March 15, 1604, that the king, the queen and Prince Henry passed triumphantly from the Tower to Westminster. The lord mayor’s shows, which had been discontinued for some years, were revived by order of the king in 1609. The dissolved monastery of the Charterhouse, which had been bought and sold by the courtiers several times, was obtained from Thomas, earl of Suffolk, by Thomas Sutton for £13,000. The new hospital chapel and schoolhouse were begun in 1611, and in the same year Sutton died.
With the death of James I. in 1625 the older history of London may be said to have closed. During the reign of his successor the great change in the relative positions of London within and without the walls had set in. Before Social life. going on to consider the chief incidents of this change it will be well to refer to some features of the social life of James’s reign. Ben Jonson places one of the scenes of Every Man in his Humour in Moorfields, which at the time he wrote the play had, as stated above, lately been drained and laid out in walks. Beggars frequented the place, and travellers from the village of Hoxton, who crossed it in order to get into London, did so with as much expedition as possible. Adjoining Moorfields were Finsbury Fields, a favourite practising ground for the archers. Mile End, a common on the Great Eastern Road, was long famous as a rendezvous for the troops. These places are frequently referred to by the old dramatists; Justice Shallow boasts of his doings at Mile End Green when he was Dagonet in Arthur’s Show. Fleet Street was the show-place of London, in which were exhibited a constant succession of puppets, naked Indians and strange fishes. The great meeting-place of Londoners in the day-time was the nave of old St Paul’s. Crowds of merchants with their hats on transacted business in the aisles, and used the font as a counter upon which to make their payments; lawyers received clients at their several pillars; and masterless serving-men waited to be engaged upon their own particular bench. Besides those who came on business there were gallants dressed in fashionable finery, so that it was worth the tailor’s while to stand behind a pillar and fill his table-books with notes. The middle or Mediterranean aisle was the Paul’s Walk, also called the Duke’s Gallery from the erroneous supposition that the tomb of Sir Guy Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, was that of the “good” Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. After the Restoration a fence was erected on the inside of the great north door to hinder a concourse of rude people, and when the cathedral was being rebuilt Sir Christopher Wren made a strict order against any profanation of the sacred building. St Paul’s churchyard was from the earliest days of printing until the end of the 18th century the headquarters of the book trade, when it shifted to Paternoster Row. Another of the favourite haunts of the people was the garden of Gray’s Inn, where the choicest society was to be met. There, under the shadow of the elm trees which Bacon had planted, Pepys and his wife constantly walked. Mrs Pepys went on one occasion specially to observe the fashions of the ladies because she was then “making some clothes.”
In those days of public conviviality, and for many years afterwards, the taverns of London held a very important place. The Boar’s Head in Great Eastcheap was an inn of Shakespeare’s own day, and the characters he introduces Taverns. into his plays are really his own contemporaries. The “Mermaid” is sometimes described as in Bread Street, and at other times in Friday Street and also in Cheapside. We are thus able to fix its exact position; for a little to the west of Bow church is Bread Street, then came a block of houses, and the next thoroughfare was Friday Street. It was in this block that the “Mermaid” was situated, and there appear to have been entrances from each street. What makes this fact still more certain is the circumstance that a haberdasher in Cheapside living “’twixt Wood Street and Milk Street,” two streets on the north side opposite Bread and Friday Streets, described himself as “over against the Mermaid tavern in Cheapside.” The Windmill tavern occupies a prominent position in the action of Every Man in his Humour.[2] The Windmill stood at the corner of the Old Jewry towards Lothbury, and the Mitre close by the Mermaid in Bread Street. The Mitre in Fleet Street, so intimately associated with Dr Johnson, also existed at this time. It is mentioned in a comedy entitled Ram Alley (1611) and Lilly the
- ↑ This map of London by Norden is dated 1593, as stated above. The same topographer published in his Middlesex a map of Westminster as well as this one of the City of London.
- ↑ Various changes in the names of the taverns are made in the folio edition of this play (1616) from the quarto (1601); thus the Mermaid of the quarto becomes the Windmill in the folio, and the Mitre of the quarto is the Star of the folio.
