Everyday life in Elizabethan London

Posted in Historical articles, History, Leisure, London, Trade on Friday, 14 March 2014

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This edited article about Elizabethan London first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 589 published on 28 April 1973.

Stalls in St Paul's,  picture, image, illustration

Young visitors see the buying and selling in Old St Paul's Cathedral by Peter Jackson

Elizabethan London, dirty, smelly and even a little shocking, was an exciting place for the two young country people who had come to explore its wonders with their uncle.

The sermon was rather boring and nobody was paying much attention to it. Many members of the congregation were strolling around chatting with friends. The twins, John and Joanna, up from Cambridge to stay with their lawyer uncle, were wondering how any preacher could manage to make himself heard above the din, for this was old St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1597, London’s chief meeting place until it was burnt down in the Great Fire of 1666.

Their uncle took them out of the magnificent building, telling them that a good preacher could hold his audience, especially if he was attacking the Government, but today’s speaker was far too quiet to still the multitude.

In the cathedral’s grounds, crowds thronged around a collection of market stalls. But the twins’ uncle led them to a gallery of bookshops, the largest in England, which lined the churchyard. They went into one called the Green Dragon (the twins liked its splendid painted sign) and their uncle bought a copy of “Richard III,” a very popular play by William Shakespeare, which had been a huge success for several years and was at last in print.

There was one more purchase to be made. Their uncle led them back into the cathedral to Paul’s Walk, where servants waited to be hired by gentlemen. These were not just any servants, but personal valets. Their uncle’s valet had died in the recent plague, and, after some bargaining, he hired a likely looking fellow, who agreed to join him the next day.

Before catching a boat back to his home in Chelsea, their uncle agreed to take them on a sightseeing tour. This was John’s and Joanna’s first trip to London. They had been born in Norwich, the second city of the kingdom and the centre of the cloth trade, where their father was a master glovemaker with four apprentices to help him run his shop and business. Since a law passed in 1563, every craftsman had to learn his craft for seven years, then, at 24, he was free to set up on his own, become a hired hand (a journeyman), or marry if he so wished.

Their father had prospered and had decided to move to Cambridge, where John was to go to the university at 16. He was 12 now and at a grammar school, but Joanna studied at home.

Cambridge was full of timber-framed shops as well as houses and university buildings, but the biggest shopping spree there was the three week fair in September, one of the greatest in England, where goods were brought by land and water from the north, the south, the Netherlands and the Baltic. There was plenty of fun to be had, singing and dancing and also plays by touring actors, along with a brisk trade in corn, fish, wool, cloth, furniture, carpets, curtains etc, but it was all on a small scale compared with the capital.

London had about 250,000 people. It was the largest city in Europe and the most important trading and banking centre as well. Every Londoner, unless he was very poor, must have thought it the most exciting place on earth. For all its dirt and smells, the twins were wildly excited by the city. They had come from Cambridge in an open cart owned by Thomas Hobson, the first man in England to hire horses to the public. He now controlled all transport in East Anglia.

Hobson always hired out his horses in strict rotation for their own good. This gave rise to the saying, still used today, “Hobson’s Choice,” or no choice at all, meaning in his case that you got the horse he gave you.

It had been a bumpy journey, for coaches and carts were unsprung in those days, and the twins wished they had ridden upon a horse, but at least all their luggage had travelled with them. It was the Easter Holidays and John had twelve days off school.

This was their third day in London. They had been on its main “road,” the River Thames, which was far easier to move about on quickly than the appalling, narrow streets, and they had explored London Bridge with its fine houses and shops. But today, after the sermon, they were to visit a unique shopping centre.

This was the Royal Exchange, built in 1568 by a wealthy merchant, Sir Thomas Gresham, for the use of merchants, and, unlike most of London, it was planned to the last inch. Gresham wanted to make the capital the centre of international finance and he succeeded. He also succeeded in building the first shopping precinct, for that was what the Royal Exchange was.

Having built a fine courtyard, he rented the shops around it to merchants and forbade traffic to enter it. The shops were the very first to be built as shops, as opposed to the converted fronts of craftsmen’s houses.

The riches of London at this time were extraordinary, even allowing for the plunder brought back from the Spanish Main by Elizabeth’s sea adventurers. Half-a-century earlier, Cheapside had boasted of 52 goldsmiths’ shops. Now merchants made the city still richer by risking their money on sending trading vessels to distant Russia or the farthest reaches of the Mediterranean.

As well as the goldsmiths, the twins noted the number of silk merchants there. It was certainly a more respectable sight than the one thing in St. Paul’s that had really shocked them, as it shocked many country folk: the sight of the tombs and the font being used as counters for the sale of drink and groceries!

Beggars and cripples abounded, as well as sham cripples. Pickpockets darted around, relieving shoppers of their purses: there were even schools for them – and for crooked gamblers. Harsh punishments were dealt out to criminals if they were caught in Elizabethan times, and healthy vagabonds fared little better. They were whipped and branded for a first offence, and hanged for a second.

Yet the Elizabethans showed mercy as well, especially as it was understood that prices had risen and the number of the poor had grown. Every parish was forced to provide work for able-bodied men, and hospitals and schools were built for the poor.

The twins’ uncle made one or two purchases himself that day, including a table knife, which he would sometimes take with him when he was a guest. He had not taken up the new-fangled fashion of using a fork yet, but in Cheapside he had spotted a very fine knife of Sheffield steel. Then he decided to buy some Venetian drinking glasses for the twins’ parents.

It was time to go home. Promising the twins that on another day they could go up the tower of St. Paul’s, one of the greatest tourist attractions of the day, they headed for the river. When they got home to Chelsea, their aunt had done some shopping, too, or, rather, her steward had, and the twins sat down to a feast at five that afternoon, consisting of rabbit, veal, lamb, bread and butter, beer and cheese, topped off by pasties and jellies.

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