The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (7 page)

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 turn 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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!’
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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Age

Although the total size of the population is rapidly increasing, its structure is hardly any different from that of the Middle Ages. As you walk down an Elizabethan street, you will see the same high proportion of young people as in the fourteenth century. In twenty-first century England, the number of under-sixteen-year-olds is more or less equal to the number of over-sixties: 20 per cent of the population compared to 21 per cent. In Elizabethan England, boys and girls under sixteen account for 36 per cent of the entire population, and over-sixties for just 7.3 per cent. There are thus five times as many children in relation to old people as there are in the modern world. The effect on the social make-up is striking: the median age is twenty-two years, so half the population is aged twenty-two or under; in the modern world, it is almost forty. What is more, the men
look
younger too: the
age at which beards naturally begin to grow is considerably later than in the modern world – most men have no more than a few hairs by the age of twenty-two.
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Men look more like boys and behave more like reckless youths, with the greater energy, violence, eagerness and selfishness that you would expect.

All this raises the question of what it is like to be old in Elizabethan England. Thomas Whithorne describes his age of forty as ‘the first part of the old man’s age’.
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William Harrison declares that ‘women through bearing of children do after forty begin to wrinkle apace’.
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As with so many things, it is a matter of perspective. It goes without saying that a person of forty-five seems ‘old’ to a person of fifteen. But to be over sixty in Elizabethan times compares to being over seventy-five in the twenty-first century. Life expectancy at birth fluctuates between twenty-eight in the early 1560s and forty-one in the early 1580s; not until the late nineteenth century will it exceed this latter figure. Most people simply do not reach ‘old age’ in the modern sense – they never get the chance. In Stratford in the 1560s there are on average sixty-three children baptised every year – and forty-three children buried.
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Child mortality is greater in towns due to the spread of diseases, but even in rural areas 21 per cent of children die before they reach their tenth birthday, two-thirds of them in their first year of life.
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