London

by Walter Besant

GATEWAY, ETC., IN CROSBY SQUARE (NOW DESTROYED)

They used to show an old house in Hart Lane, rich with carved wood, as Whittington's, but he must have lived in his own parish of St. Michael's Paternoster Royal, and, one is pretty certain, on the spot where was afterwards built his college, which stood on the north side of the church. Here he entertained Henry of Agincourt and Katherine, his bride, with a magnificence which astonished the king. But Whittington knew what he was doing; the banquet was not ostentation and display; its cost was far more than repaid by the respect for the wealth and power of the city which it nourished and maintained in the kingly mind. The memory of this and other such feasts, we may be very sure, had its after effect even upon those most masterful of sovereigns, Henry VIII. and Queen Bess. On this occasion it was nothing that the tables groaned with good things, and glittered with gold and silver plate; it was nothing that the fires were fed with cedar and perfumed wood. For this princely Mayor fed these fires after dinner with nothing less than the king's bonds to the amount of £60,000. In purchasing power that sum would now be represented by a million and a quarter.

A truly royal gift.

It was not given to many merchants, "sounding always the increase of their winning," thus to thrive and prosper. Most of them lived in more modest dwellings. All of them lived in comparative discomfort, according to modern ideas. When we read of mediæval magnificence we must remember that the standard of what we call comfort was much lower in most respects than at present. In the matter of furniture, for instance, though the house was splendid inside and out with carvings, coats of arms painted and gilt, there were but two or three beds in it, the servants sleeping on the floor; the bedrooms were small and dark; the tables were still laid on trestles, and removed when the meal was finished; there were benches where we have chairs; and for carpet they had rushes or mats of plaited straw; and though the tapestry was costly, the windows were draughty, and the doors ill-fitting. When, with the great commercial advance of the fourteenth century, space by the river became more valuable, the disposition of the Hall, with its little court, became necessarily modified. The house, which was warehouse as well as residence, ran up into several stories high—the earliest maps of London show many such houses beside Queenhithe, and in the busiest and most crowded parts of the City; on every story there was a wide door for the reception of bales and crates; a rope and pulley were fixed to a beam at the highest gable for hoisting and lowering the goods. The front of the house was finely ornamented with carved wood-work. One may still see such houses—streets full of them—in the ancient City of Hildesheim, near Hanover.

CROSBY HALL

On the river-bank, exactly under what is now Cannon Street Railway Station, stood the Steelyard, Guildæ Aula Teutonicorum. In appearance it was a house of stone, with a quay towards the river, a square court, a noble Hall, and three arched gates towards Thames Street. This was the house of the Hanseatic League, whose merchants for three hundred years and more enjoyed the monopoly of importing hemp, corn, wax, steel, linen cloths, and, in fact, carried on the whole trade with Germany and the Baltic, so that until the London merchants pushed out their ships into the Mediterranean and the Levant their foreign trade was small, and their power of gaining wealth small in proportion. This strange privilege granted to foreigners grew by degrees. At first, unless the foreign merchants of the Hanse towns and of Flanders and of France had not brought over their wares they could not have sold them, because there were no London merchants to import them. Therefore they came, and they came to stay. They gradually obtained privileges; they were careful to obey the laws, and give no cause for jealousy or offence; and they kept their privileges, living apart in their own college, till Edward VI. at last took them away. In memory of their long residence in the city, the merchants of Hamburg in the reign of Queen Anne presented the church where they had worshipped, All Hallows the Great, with a magnificent screen of carved wood. The church, built by Wren after the Fire, is a square box of no architectural pretensions, but is glorified by this screen.

The great (comparative) wealth of the City is shown by the proportion it was called upon to pay towards the king's loans. In 1397, for instance, London was assessed at £6,666 13s. 4d., while Bristol, which came next, was called upon for £800 only; Norwich for £333, Boston for £300, and Plymouth for no more than £20. And in the graduated poll tax of 1379, the Lord Mayor of London had to pay £4—the same as an Earl, a Bishop, or a mitred Abbot, while the Aldermen were regarded as on the same line with Barons, and paid £2 each.

Between the merchant adventurers, who sometimes entertained kings and had a fleet of ships always on the sea, and the retail trader there was as great a gulf then as at any after-time. Between the retail trader, who was an employer of labor, and the craftsman there was a still greater gulf. The former lived in plenty and in comfort. His house was provided with a spacious hearth, and windows, of which the upper part, at least, was of glass. The latter lived in one of the mean and low tenements, which, according to Dr. Brewer, made up the whole of London. There were a great many of those, because there are always a great many poor in a large town. Nay, there were narrow lanes and filthy courts where there were nothing but one-storied hovels, built of wattle and clay, the roof thatched with reeds, the fire burning in the middle of the room, the occupants sleeping in old Saxon fashion, wrapped in rugs around the central fire. The lanes and courts were narrow and unpaved, and filthy with every kind of refuse. In those crowded and fetid streets the plague broke out, fevers always lingered, the children died of putrid throat, and in these places began the devastating fires that from time to time swept the City.