Bucklersbury was the centre and headquarters of the London drug trade,
at least from the Tudor to the Hanoverian periods. Shakespeare in “The
Merry Wives of Windsor” makes Falstaff refer to “the lisping hawthorn
buds that come like women in men’s apparel, and smell like Bucklersbury
in sample time.” Stow (1598) says of this thoroughfare that “This
whole street on both sides throughout is possessed of grocers and
apothecaries.” Ben Jonson calls it “Apothecarie Street.” This dramatist
in “Westward Ho!” makes Mrs. Tenderhook say “Go into Bucklersbury and
fetch me two ounces of preserved melons; look there be no tobacco taken
in the shop when he weighs it.” Later in a self-asserting poem to his
bookseller, Ben Jonson says of one of his books, objecting to vulgar
advertising methods,
If without these vile arts it will not sell,
Send it to Bucklersbury, there ’twill well.
In Charles II’s reign Mouffet speaks of Bucklersbury being replete with
physic, drugs, and spicery, and says it was so perfumed at the time of
the plague with the pounding of spices, melting of gums, and making of
perfumes, that it escaped that great plague. A quotation from Pennant
in Cassell’s “Old and New London” shows that in the reign of William
III Bucklersbury was the resort of ladies of fashion to purchase teas,
furs, and other Indian goods; and the king is said to have been angry
with the queen for visiting these shops, which appear from some lines
of Prior to have been sometimes perverted to places of intrigue.
The street acquired its name from a family called the Bokerells or
Buckerells, who lived there in the thirteenth century. Stow gives a
different account. He states that there was a tower in the street named
Carnet’s Tower, and that a grocery named Buckle who had acquired it
was assisting in pulling it down, intending to erect a goodly frame of
timber in its place, when a part fell on him, which so sore bruised him
that it shortened his life.