The Story of London

by Henry B. Wheatley

There is a special fascination to us now in a picture of Elizabethan London, for with its history are bound up some of the most interesting incidents in the lives of the statesmen and other great men of the spacious days of the great Queen; and have we not Shakespeare and Ben Jonson among those who have portrayed the various places for us.

London has always appealed to the imagination of the adventurous country youth to be the home of golden promise. If he can only get there he believes that his successful career has commenced, but it appears that in Elizabeth’s reign there was pretty much the same difficulty in obtaining employment as there is now. This is illustrated by a curious account of the early life of John Sadler, a native of Stratford-on-Avon, and one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, which has come down to us. “He joined himself to the carrier, and came to London, where he had never been before, and sold his horse in Smithfield, and having no acquaintance in London to recommend him or assist him he went from street to street, and house to house, asking if they wanted an apprentice, and though he met with many discouraging scorns and a thousand denials he went on till he lighted on one Mr. Brokesbank, a grocer in Bucklersbury, who, though he long denied him for want of sureties for his fidelity, and because the money he had (but ten pounds) was so disproportionate to what he used to receive with apprentices, yet upon his discreet account he gave of himself and the motives which put him upon that course, and promise to compensate with diligent and faithful service whatever else was short of his expectation, he ventured to receive him upon trial, in which he so well approved himself that he accepted him into his service, to which he bound him for eight years.”

The outdoor life of his time, with the men and women who frequented the streets, is brought vividly before our eyes in Ben Jonson’s plays. The useful and useless members of society pass across the stage. The water-carriers who congregate around the conduits are represented by Cob in Every Man in His Humour.

Before Sir Hugh Myddelton made the New River and brought to men’s houses, all water that was wanted had to be fetched from the conduits. The men who supplied the town drew off the water into large wooden tankards, broad at the bottom, but narrow at the top, which held about three gallons. This vessel was borne upon the shoulder, and to keep the carrier dry two towels were fastened over him, one to fall in front and the other to cover his back.

The narrowness of the old London streets is strikingly shown in The Devil is an Ass, where the lady and her lover speak gentle nothings to each other from the windows of two contiguous buildings.

All the fashions of his time—the rapier fighting of the gallants, the smoking madness of all classes at a time when tobacco was supposed to be the panacea for all the ills of human nature, the custom of garnishing conversation with oaths—are introduced into the books of Ben Jonson. The poet’s love of good liquor and social intercourse made him a frequenter of inns. His acquaintance with the two rival taverns of Cheapside—the Mermaid and the Mitre—must have commenced early, because the names of both occur in the first quarto of Every Man in His Humour (1601); in the later folio edition the Mitre is changed to the Star and the Mermaid to the Windmill. The ever-memorable Mermaid was situated on the south side of Cheapside, between Bread Street and Friday Street. From the mention of this tavern in the first draft of Every Man In His Humour it may be inferred that Jonson was a frequenter before the famous club, consisting of Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Carew, Donne, Selden and others, was established by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603.

The Mitre was a rival house, and some writers tried to write it up at the expense of the Mermaid. Thus Middleton has the following dialogue in his comedy, Your Five Gallants (1608):—

“Goldstone. Where sup we, gallants?

Pursenet. At Mermaid.

Gold. Sup there who list, I have forsworne the house.