a May-pole hung with garlands and ribbons; they elected a Queen of the
May, and they danced and sang about their pole. The London parishes vied
with each other in the height and splendor of the pole. One was kept in
Gerrard's Hall, Basing Lane (now swept away by the new streets). This was
forty feet high. A much later one, erected in the Strand, 1661, in
defiance to the Puritans, was 130 feet high. And there was the famous
May-pole of St. Andrews Under-shaft, destroyed by the Puritans as an
emblem of idolatry and profligacy. The girls came back from their quest
of flowers singing, but not quite in these words:
We have been rambling all the night,
And almost all the day,
And now returning back again
We have brought you a branch of May.
A branch of May we have brought you,
And at your door it stands;
It is but a sprout, but it's well budded out,
By the work of our Lord's hands.
And there was morris-dancing, with Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, Little John,
Tom the Piper, and Tom the Fool, with hobby-horses, pipe and tabor,
mummers and devils, and I know not what; and Chepe and Cornhill and
Gracechurch Street were transformed into leafy lanes and woodland ways
and alleys cut through hawthorn and wild rose. You may see to-day the
hawthorn and the wild rose growing in Epping Forest, just as they grew
four hundred years ago. But the forest has been miserably curtailed of
its proportions. A great slice, wedge-shaped, has been cut out bodily,
and is now built upon. Hainault Forest has perished these forty years,
and is converted into farms, save for a fragment, and of Middlesex
Forest nothing remains except the little piece enclosed in Lord
Mansfield's park. But in those days the forest came down to the hamlet
of Iseldun, afterwards Merry Islington.
And in the month of June there were the burning of bonfires to clear and
cleanse the air, and the marching of the watch on the vigils of St. John
Baptist and St. Peter.
Hear the testimony of Stow:
In the months of June and July, on the vigils of festival days and
on the same festival days in the evenings after the sun setting,
there were usually made bonfires in the streets, every man bestowing
wood or labour towards them; the wealthier sort also, before their
doors near to the said bonfires, would set out tables on the vigils,
furnished with sweet bread and good drink, and on the festival days
with meats and drinks plentifully, whereunto they would invite their
neighbours and passengers also to sit and be merry with them in
great familiarity, praising God for His benefits bestowed on them.
These were called bonfires as well of good amity amongst neighbours,
that being before at controversy, were there, by the labour of
others, reconciled, and made of bitter enemies loving friends; and
also for the virtue that a great fire hath to purge the infection of
the air. On the vigil of St. John the Baptist, and on St. Peter and
Paul the Apostles, every man's door being shadowed with green birch,
long fennel, St. John's wort, orpin, white lillies, and such like,
garnished upon with garlands of beautiful flowers, had also lamps of
glass, with oil burning in them all the night; some hung out
branches of iron curiously wrought, containing hundreds of lamps
alight at once, which made a goodly show, namely, in New Fish
Street, Thames Street, &c. Then had ye besides the standing watches
all in bright harness, in every ward and street of this city and
suburbs, a marching watch, that passed through the principal streets
thereof, to wit, from the little conduit by Paul's Gate to West
Cheap, by the stocks through Cornhill, by Leadenhall to Aldgate,
then back down Fenchurch Street, by Grass Church, about Grass Church
conduit, and up Grass Church Street into Cornhill, and through it
into West Cheap again. The whole way for this marching watch
extendeth to three thousand two hundred tailor's yards of assize;
for the furniture whereof with lights, there were appointed seven
hundred cressets, five hundred of them being found by the companies,
the other two hundred by the Chamber of London. Besides the which
lights every constable in London, in number more than two hundred
and forty, had his cresset: the charge of every cresset was in light
two shillings and fourpence, and every cresset had two men, one to
bear or hold it, another to bear a bag with light, and to serve it,
so that the poor men pertaining to the cressets, taking wages,
besides that every one had a straw hat, with a badge painted, and
his breakfast in the morning, amounted in number to almost two
thousand. The marching watch contained in number about two thousand
men, part of them being old soldiers of skill, to be captains,
lieutenants, sergeants, corporals, &c., whifflers, drummers, and
fifes, standard and ensign-bearers, sword-players, trumpeters on
horseback, demilances on great horses, gunners with hand guns, or
half hakes, archers in coats of white fustian, signed on the breast
and back with the arms of the city, their bows bent in their hands,
with sheaves of arrows by their sides, pikemen in bright corslets,
burganets, &c., halberds, the like billmen in almaine rivets, and
aprons of mail in great number; there were also divers pageants,
morris dancers, constables, the one-half, which was one hundred and
twenty, on St. John's Eve, the other half on St. Peter's Eve, in
bright harness, some overgilt, and every one a jornet of scarlet
thereupon, and a chain of gold, his henchman following him, his
minstrels before him, and his cresset light passing by him, the
waits of the city, the mayor's officers for his guard before him,
all in a livery of worsted or say jackets party-coloured, the mayor
himself well-mounted on horseback, the sword-bearer before him in
fair armour well mounted also, the mayor's footmen, and the like
torch-bearers about him, henchmen twain upon great stirring horses,
following him. The sheriff's watches came one after the other in
like order, but not so large in number as the mayor's; for where the
mayor had besides his giant three pageants, each of the sheriffs had
besides their giants but two pageants, each their morris dance, and
one henchman, their officers in jackets of worstead or say
party-coloured, differing from the mayor's, and each from other, but
having harnessed men a great many, &c.
On the Feast of St. Bartholomew there were wrestlings, foot-races, and
shooting with the bow for prizes. On Holyrood Day (September 14th) the
young men and the maidens went nutting in the woods. At Martinmas
(November 1st) there was feasting to welcome the beginning of winter.
Lastly, the old year ended and the new year began with the mixture and
succession of religious services, pageants, shows, feasting, drinking,
and dancing, which the London citizen of every degree loved so much.
Then there were the City holidays. St. Lubbock had predecessors. There
were Christmas Day, Twelfth Day, Easter, the day of St. John the
Baptist, on June 24th, and of St. Peter and St. Paul, on June 29th. On
the last two days, to discourage the people from keeping it up all
night, the vintners had to close their doors at ten.
The City of London has always been famous for the great plenty and
variety of its food. Beef, mutton, and pork formed then, as now, the
staple of the diet; small beer was the drink of all, men, women, and
children. When, for instance, the Franciscans first set up their humble
cells, the small beer being short in quantity, they did not drink water,
but mixed water with the beer, in order to make it go round. There were
so many fast-days in the year that fish was as important a form of food
as mutton or beef. They ate lampreys, porpoise, and sturgeon, among
other fish. Ling, cod, and herring furnished them with salted fish.
Peacocks and swans adorned their tables at great banquets. Their dishes
were sweetened with honey, for sugar was scarce, but spices were
abundant. By the thirteenth century they had begun to make plentiful use
of vegetables. They were fond of pounding meats of different kinds, such
as pork and poultry, and mixing them in a kind of _rissole_. At a
certain great banquet, the menu of which has survived, there appears
neither beef nor mutton, probably because those meats belonged to the
daily life, but there are great birds and little birds, brawn, rabbits,
swans, and venison for meats, soup of cabbage, then the _rissoles_ just
mentioned, and various sweetmeats. Their drink was strong ale for
banquets, hot spiced ale with a toast, the loving-cup of hypocras, and
for wines, Rhenish, sack, Lisbon, and wine of Bordeaux.
Since every man in the City who practised a trade must be a freeman and
a member of a company or trade guild, and since every company looked
after its livery, there should have been no poor in the City at all. But
performance falls short of promise; laws cannot always be enforced;
there was, it is quite certain, a mass of poverty and worthlessness in
the City even in those days. Perhaps the City proper, with its wards,
was tolerably free from rogues and vagabonds, but there were the suburb
of Southwark, that of the Strand, that already springing up outside
Cripplegate, and the city of Westminster. Plenty of room here for rogues
to find shelter. There were also the trades of which the City took no
heed, of minstrels, jugglers, and actors, and all those who lived by
amusing others; also the calling of servant in every kind, as drover,
carter, wagoner, carrier, porter (not yet associated), and so forth. And
there were the men who would never do any work at all, yet wanted as
much drink and food as the honest men who did their share. For all these
people, when they were hungry, there were the charities of the great
men, the bishops, and the monasteries. For instance, the Earl of Warwick
allowed any man to take as much meat as he could carry away on a dagger;
the Bishop of Ely (but this was later, in the sixteenth century) gave
every day bread, drink, and meat to two hundred poor people; the Earl of
Derby fed every day, twice, sixty old people; thrice a week all comers;
and on Good Friday 2700 men and women. In the year 1293, being a time
of dearth, the Archbishop of Canterbury fed daily four or five thousand.
In 1171, Henry II., as part of his penance for the murder of à Becket,
fed 10,000 people from April till harvest. In the reign of Edward III.
the Bishop of Durham bestowed on the poor every week eight quarters of
wheat, besides the broken victuals of his house.
The almshouses, of which there are so many still existing, belong for
the most part to a later time. The citizens founded hospitals for the
necessitous as well as for the sick; they rebuilt and beautified
churches; they endowed charities, and gave relief to poor prisoners. The
first almshouses recorded were founded in the fourteenth century by
William Elsing, mercer, who, in 1332, endowed a house for the support of
a hundred blind men, and by John Stodie, citizen and vintner, Mayor in
1358, who built and endowed thirteen almshouses for as many poor
citizens. In 1415 William Sevenoke, citizen and grocer, founded a school
and almshouses in his native place, and two years later Whittington
founded by will his college and almshouses. The college has been
swallowed up, but the almshouses remain, though transferred to Highgate.
After this the rich citizens began to remember the poor in their wills,
choosing rather, like Philip Malpas, Sheriff in 1440, to give clothing
to poor men and women, marriage dowries to poor maidens, and money for
the highways than to bequeath the money for the singing of masses or the
endowment of charities.
One more amusement must be mentioned, because it is the only one of
which the honest Londoners have never wearied. It is mentioned by the
worthy Fitz Stephen. It still continues to afford joy to millions. The
craftsman of the fourteenth century found it at the Mermaid in Cornhill,
or the Three Tuns of Newgate, or the Swan of Dowgate, or the Salutation
of Billingsgate, or the Boar's Head of London Stone. He found it in
company with his fellows, and whether he took it out of a glass or a
silver mazer or a black jack, he took it joyfully, and he took it
abundantly. Tosspots and swinkers were they then; tosspots and swinkers
are they still.
To set against this eagerness for pleasure, this avidity after sports of
every kind, we must remember the continual recurrence of plague and
pestilence, especially in the fourteenth century,[14] when the love of
shows and feasting was at its highest, and when the Black Death carried
off half the citizens. Is it not a natural result? When life is so
uncertain that men know not to-day how many will be alive to-morrow,
they snatch impatiently at the present joy; it is too precious to be
lost; another moment, and the chance will be gone--perhaps forever. As
is the merriment of the camp when the battle is imminent, so is the joy
of the people between the comings of the plague. Life never seems so
full of rich and precious gifts as at such a time. As for the lessons in
sanitation that the plague should teach, the people had not as yet begun
to learn them. The lay stalls and the river-bank, despite laws and
proclamations, continued to be heaped with filth, and the narrow street
received the refuse from every house. And, in addition to the
occasional plague, there was ever present typhoidal fever striking down
old and young.
Perhaps the joy of the present was also intensified by the possibility
of famine. At the end of the twelfth century there was a terrible
famine. There was one in 1251; there was one in 1314, when "no flesh was
to be had ... a quarter of wheat, beans, and peas was sold for twenty
shillings." This is something like twenty pounds at present prices. This
famine continued throughout the next year, when Stow says "horse-flesh
was counted great delicates, the poore stole fatte dogges to eate; some
(as it was said), compelled through famine, in hidden places, did eate
the fleshe of their owne children, and some stole others, which they
devoured. Thieves that were in prison did plucke in pieces those that
were newlie brought among them, and greedily devoured them half alive."
The uncertainty whether next year would produce any bread at all
sweetened the loaf of to-day. In the year 1335 long-continued rains
caused a famine. In 1353 there was another; in 1438 the scarcity was so
great that bread was made from fern-roots, and so on.
The earliest schools of the City were those of St. Paul's, Westminster,
and the Abbey of Bermondsey. Each of the religious houses in turn, as it
was erected, opened another school. When, however, Henry V. had
suppressed the alien priories, of which four certainly, and perhaps
more, belonged to London, their schools were also suppressed. So much
was the loss felt that Henry VI., the greatest founder of schools of all
the kings, erected four new grammar-schools, namely: at St. Martin's le
Grand, St. Dunstan in the West, St. Mary le Bow, and St. Anthony's; and
in the following year he made four more, namely: in the parishes of St.
Andrew's, Holborn; All Hallows the Great, Thames Street; St. Peter's,
Cornhill; and St. Thomas of Acon.
[Illustration: THE STRAND (1547), WITH THE STRAND CROSS, COVENT GARDEN,
AND THE PROCESSION OF EDWARD VI. TO HIS CORONATION AT WESTMINSTER]
But to what extent education prevailed, whether the sons of craftsmen
were taught to read and write before they were apprenticed, I know not.
For them the _trivium_ and the _quadrivium_ of the mediæval school, the
grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy
could not possibly be of use. On the other hand, one cannot understand
that the child of a respectable London craftsman should be allowed to
grow up to the age of fourteen with no education at all. As for the
children of gentle birth, we know very well how they were taught. Their
education was planned so as to include very carefully the mastery of
those accomplishments which we call good manners. It also included
Latin, French, reading, writing, poetry, and music. In the towns the
merchants and the better class understood very well the necessity of
education for their own needs. The poor scholar, however--the lad who
was born of humble parents and received his education for nothing--was a
young man well known and recognized as a common type. But he never
intended his learning to adorn a trade; rather should it lead him to the
university, to the Church, even to a bishopric. It is significant that
throughout Riley's _Memorials_ there is no mention of school or of
education; there is no hint anywhere how the children of the
working-classes were taught. One thing is certain, the desire for
learning was gradually growing and deepening in those years; and when
the Reformation set the Bible free, there were plenty--thanks perhaps to
King Henry's grammar-schools--in the class of craftsmen who could read
it. But as yet we are two hundred years from the freeing of the Book.
It is always found that the laws are strict in an inverse proportion to
the strength of the executive. Thus, had the laws been properly carried
out, London would have been the cleanest and the most orderly town of
the present, past, and future. Every man was enjoined to keep the front
of his house clean; no refuse was to be thrown into the gutter; no one
was to walk the streets at night. When the curfew-bell rang, first from
St. Martin's, and afterwards from all the churches together, the gates
of the City were closed; the taverns were shut; no one was allowed to
walk about the streets; no boats were to cross the river; the sergeants
of Billingsgate and Queenhithe had each his boat, with its crew of four
men, to guard the river and the quays; guards were posted at the closed
gates; a watch of six men was set in every ward, all the men of the ward
being liable to serve upon it. These were excellent rules. Yet we find
men haled before the Mayor charged with being common _roreres_
(roarers), with beating people in the streets, enticing them into
taverns, where they were made to drink and to gamble. Among the common
_roreres_ was once found, alas! a priest. What, however, were the other
people doing in the street after curfew? And why were not the taverns
shut? As is the strength of the ruling arm, so should be the law. We are
not ourselves free from the reproach of passing laws which cannot be
enforced because they are against the will of the people, and the
executive is too weak to carry them out against that will. People, you
see, cannot be civilized by statute.
[Illustration: ARMS OF SIR RICHARD WHITTINGTON]
The wages and hours of work of the craftsman have not been
satisfactorily ascertained. The day's work probably meant the whole day.
Like the rustic, he would begin in the summer at five and leave off at
7.30, with certain breaks. In winter he would work through the
daylight. His wages, which were ordered for the craft by the company,
seem to have been ample so long as employment was continuous. But the
crafts were always complaining of foreign competition. Edward IV., in
1463, states that owing to the import of wares fully wrought and ready
made for sale, "artificers cannot live by their mysteries and
occupations as they have done in times past, but divers of them, as well
householders as hirelings, and under-servants and apprentices in great
numbers, be this day unoccupied, and do hardly live in great misery,
poverty, and need." Therefore the statute enumerates a long list of
things that are not to be exported. Among these we observe knives,
razors, scissors--showing that the cutlery trade was already flourishing
then--but not swords, spear-heads, or armor of any kind. Actual
artificers were not to be employers but only servants; those already
established could sell in gross but not in retail, and they were not to
have alien servants. That there was discontent among the working-men is
clear from these statutes and from the constant attempts of the
craftsmen to form journeyman, or yeoman guilds, whose real objects,
though they might mask them under the name of religion, were to increase
wages and keep out new-comers.
Apart from the question of wages, what the craftsmen wanted was what the
masters, too, demanded--"encouragement of natives, discouragement of
foreigners, the development of shipping, and the amassing of
treasure."[13]
Such were the people of London in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. Such was Plantagenet London, the land of Cocaigne--Cockney
Land--whither the penniless young gentleman, the son of the country
squire, made his way in search of the fortune which others had picked up
on its golden pavement.
Strewed with gold and silver sheen,
In Cockneys' streets no molde is seen;
Pancakes be the shingles alle
Of church and cloister, bower and halle;
Running rivers, grete and fine,
Of hypocras and ale and wine.
But, indeed, a pavement of flints and stones the City offered to any who
tried to win her fortunes save by the way prescribed. Of course there
were--there always are--many who cannot enter by the appointed gate, nor
keep to the ordered way. As it is now, so it was then. There were rogues
and cheats; there were men who preferred any way of life to the honest
way. How the City in its wisdom dealt with those we shall now see.
At first sight one may be struck with the leniency of justice. In cases
which in later years were punished by flogging at the cart-tail, by
hanging, by long imprisonment, the criminal of the fourteenth century
stood in pillory, or was made to ride through the streets, the nature
of his crime symbolized by something hung from his neck. There were as
yet no burnings, no slicing off of ears; there was no rack, no torture
by rope, boot, or water. It is true that those who ventured upon
violence to the sacred person of an Alderman were liable to have the
right hand struck off; but at the last moment that officer always begged
and obtained a commutation, while the criminal made humble submission.
Those who have entered upon an inheritance of law-abiding and of order
have forgotten by what severities men were forced into external forms of
respect for the officers of justice. Then, again, the Alderman knew
every man in his ward; he was no stranger among his people; he knew the
circumstances and the condition of every one; he was punishing a brother
who had brought the ward into disrepute by his unruly conduct; he was
therefore tender, saving the dignity of his office and his duty to the
city.
[Illustration: ARMS GRANTED TO THE CRAFT OF THE IRONMONGERS OF LONDON BY
LANCASTER KING OF ARMS, A.D. 1466]
For instance, it was once discovered that wholesale robberies were
carried on by certain bakers who made holes in their moulding-boards,
and so filched the dough. These rogues in the last century would have
been flogged unmercifully. Robert de Bretaigne, Mayor A.D. 1387, was
satisfied by putting them in pillory till after vespers at St. Paul's,
with dough hung about their necks, so that all the world might know why
they were there. When certain "tapicers" were charged with selling false
blankets, that is, blankets which had been "vamped" in foreign parts
with the hair of oxen and cows, the blankets were ordered to be burned.
On the other hand, highway robbery, burglaries, and some cases of theft
were punished by hanging. The unhappy Desiderata de Torgnton, for
instance, in an evil moment stole from a servant of the Lady Alice de
Lisle thirty dishes and twenty-four salt-cellars of silver. The servant
was bound by sureties that he would prosecute for felony, and did so,
with the result that Desiderata was hanged, and her chattels
confiscated; but of chattels had she none.
For selling putrid meat the offender was put in pillory, and the bad
meat--dreadful addition to the sentence--burned beneath his nose. The
sale of "false" goods--that is, things not made as they should be made,
either of bad materials or of inferior materials--was always punished by
destruction of the things.
[Illustration: GUILDHALL, KING STREET, LONDON]