“Goldsmiths, the fifth company, are, strictly speaking, all those who make it their business to work up and deal in all sorts of wrought gold and silver plate; but of late years the title of goldsmith has been generally taken to signify one who banks, or receives and pays running cash for others, as well as deals in plate; but he whose business is altogether cash-keeping is properly a banker.”
To distinguish such of the craft as did not bank, the name silversmith was used; and these again were sub-divided into the working silversmiths, who fashioned the precious metals, and the shopkeepers, who only sold them. This statement has been preserved by Malcolm in his work on the city, called Londinium Redivivum. The distinction is practically obsolete in our day, and the whole craft goes more generally
by the name of jewellers. It would be difficult at present to find one jeweller who is still a banker, though there is no doubt that private negotiations of the sort described may sometimes take place; but as to the safe-keeping of jewels and plate, the London jewellers do a very extensive business. Full as many people keep their family heirlooms at the great jewellers’—Hancock, Emmanuel, Garrett, Tessier, Hunt, and Roskell, etc., etc.—as they do at banks; and, again, the secret loans on valuable jewels, and the sale of some, to be replaced by cunningly-wrought paste, constitute, as of old, an important though private branch of their traffic. The great goldsmiths of old times were pawnbrokers on a magnificent scale, as well as bankers, and even church plate often came for a time into their keeping. Royal jewels and the property of the nation were not seldom in their hands as pledges, and through their aid alone could war be carried on or clamoring mercenaries paid.
Italy was more liberal towards her goldsmiths than England. Here they were artists and ranked as such; in England they were artificers and traders. In the latter country they were powerful, but only through the wealth they controlled; in Italy they were admired, courted, and flattered in society, but politically their power was less. The English at all times excelled rather in manual skill than in design; and to this day the designers of jewellers, lamp-makers, furniture-makers, house-decorators, and even silk, ribbon, and cotton merchants, in England, are generally not English.
In ancient times the London goldsmiths all lived in or near Cheapside, or, as it was often called,
West Cheap, to distinguish it from the other Cheap Street, more to the east. “Cheap” was the same as market. Close by was the Royal Exchange, where the bullion for the coinage of the realm was received and kept, and the street in which stood this building is still called the Old Exchange. Whether by law or custom, only goldsmiths were allowed to have shops in this neighborhood; but even if the right was at first but a prescriptive one, the company soon contrived to have laws passed to forbid any other craft from encroaching on their domains. This localizing of various crafts was common all over Europe in the middle ages, and in many instances was really a convenience to purchasers, as well as a means of defence for the members of the guilds. In the case of the goldsmiths the government had an object of its own. It might have been thought that the concentration of other turbulent companies would have been rather a danger and a provocation to the royal authority; but it was obviously the policy of the king to make the services of this wealthy company as accessible as might be, in case of any sudden emergency requiring a loan or a tax. It was not politic to let any of the fraternity escape contribution by hiding himself in some obscure part of the city; so that not only were other tradesmen prohibited from opening shops among the goldsmiths, but the latter were themselves forbidden from setting up their shops elsewhere. Although neither law nor custom now interferes with them, the majority of the great jewellers have their glittering shops in Bond Street, London, while in other countries the same rule, on the whole, still prevails. The Rue de Rivoli and the Palais Royal
are the chief emporiums for these precious goods in Paris; in Vienna they are mainly sold in the Graben, and one street leading out of it; Rome has its Via Condotti, thronged with jewelry shops and those selling objects of virtu; Venice has its Procurazie, an arcade beneath which nearly all the jewellers in the city are congregated; and in many old Italian cities the Strada degli Orefici (goldsmiths’ street) still fully deserves its name. This is particularly the case at Genoa, where this old, crooked lane, bordered by the booths and dens that we moderns would take for poor cobblers’ shops, is still one of the most surprising and picturesque sights of the city. Goldsmiths’ Row is thus described in Maitland’s History:
“The same was built by Thomas Wood, goldsmith, one of the sheriffs of London in the year 1491. It contained in number ten dwelling-houses and fourteen shops, all in one frame, uniformly built, four stories high, beautified towards the street with the goldsmith’s arms and the likeness of woodmen, in memory of his name, riding on monstrous beasts, all of which were cast in lead, richly painted over and gilt. The said front was again new painted and gilt over in the year 1594, Sir Richard Martin being then mayor, and keeping his mayoralty in one of them.”
The Row, however, before this embellishment, had existed in the same place, and covered adjoining parts of Cheapside, betwixt Bread Street end and the Cross in Cheap. This beautiful monument is now gone, but it stood at the west end of the street, in the middle of an open space from which St. Martin-le-Grand (still one of the London parishes) branches out on the one hand, and St. Paul’s churchyard on the other. The “churchyard,” still retaining its name, is now filled
with gay shops, mostly for the sale of silks, feathers, and other female gear, and quite equal to the resplendent shops of the West End of London. The Cross in Cheap was one of a series which Edward I. built at every place where the body of his wife, Queen Eleanor, rested on the way from Herdeley in Lincolnshire to Westminster, where she was buried.