Near the top of St. Andrew's Hill and within the precinct of Blackfriars was a house which Shakespeare purchased in 1613. It is described in the extant Deed of Conveyance as "now or late being in the tenure or occupation of one William Ireland ... abutting upon a street leading down to Puddle Wharf on the east part, right against the Kinges Majesties Wardrobe." Curiously enough, the name of this occupier survives in the existing Ireland Yard.
ENVOY
The omissions in this imperfect sketch of Elizabethan London are many and obvious. The design has been to show the tangible setting of a jewel rather than the jewel itself; the outward conditions in which the life of a new age was manifested. The background of destruction has been inevitably emphasised; but in Elizabethan London historic memorials existed on every hand. Nothing has been said of Baynard's Castle, its Norman walls rising from the margin of the river to the south of Blackfriars, or of St Bartholomew the Great, or the Charterhouse, or St. Giles's, Cripplegate; although an account of them would have completed the outer ring of our perambulation of the London described by Stow. The whole region westward—Holborn, Fleet Street, the Strand, and Westminster—has been left for another occasion. Here and there, however, we have been able to glance at historic buildings which had survived from earlier ages to witness the changes in London after the Reformation. It was those changes that led to the making of the playhouse and brought the conditions which enfolded the possibility realised in Shakespeare. This has been the point of view in the foregoing pages. A study of characteristics rather than a detailed account has been offered for the consideration of the reader.
[PEPYS'S LONDON]
By Henry B. Wheatley, F.S.A.
The growth of population in London was almost stationary for many centuries; as, owing to the generally unhealthy condition of ancient cities, the births seldom exceeded the deaths, and in the case of frequent pestilences the deaths actually exceeded the births. Thus during its early history the walls of London easily contained its inhabitants, although at all times in its history London will be found to have taken a higher rank for healthy sanitary conditions than most of its continental contemporaries. In the later Middle Ages the city overflowed its borders, and its liberties were recognized and marked by Bars. Subsequently nothing was done to bring the further out-growths of London proper within the fold, and in Tudor times we first hear of the suburbs as disreputable quarters, a condemnation which was doubtless just, as the inhabitants mostly consisted of those who were glad to escape the restrictions of life within the city walls.