Idle Hours in a Library

by William Henry Hudson

as a Puritan poet called it—was a long country road flanked with noblemen’s houses (“a continual row of palaces, belonging to the chief nobility,” Hentzner says), the gardens of which on the one side ran down to the river, and on the other backed upon the fine open space of pasture-land called Covent (that is, Convent) Garden. At Charing there was an ancient cross, and beyond, wide fields known as the Haymarket, the quiet stretches of St. James’s Park, and the wide country road called Piccadilly, the regular highway to Reading and the west. St. Martin’s Lane ran up between hedgerows and meadows to Tottenham, or Totten Court. In the other direction, towards Westminster, there was the Court, with its Tiltyard, standing where the Horseguards now stand, and beyond this the city of Westminster, with its abbey and great hall, lying in the quiet fields. Just opposite, on the other bank, in an unbroken expanse of country, stood Lambeth Palace, whence a long, lonely road led eastward, through Lambeth Marsh, to the city purlieus on the Surrey side of the water.

What we know as the suburbs of London were then separate villages, to reach which one had to make a tedious journey over open country and along desolate lanes. Finsbury Field was covered with windmills, and there the archers met for practice. Islington was famous, to quote Ben Jonson, for the citizens that went a-ducking—that is, duck-hunting—in its ponds. Pimlico and Holloway were favorite resorts of pleasure-seeking townsfolk on Sunday afternoons. Hoxton and Hampstead and Willesden lay far away in the country; Holborn was a rural highway running through the little village of St. Giles’s towards Oxford; and the Edgeware Road took you away to Tyburn, the spot which has acquired such grim notoriety in the annals of crime. Highway robberies took place at Kentish Town and Hampstead; even the Queen’s Majesty was mobbed by a handful of ruffians in the sequestered neighborhood of Islington, which stood alone among the hills to the north; while no man who valued his life would venture to walk after nightfall, unarmed or unprotected, as far into the country as Hyde Park Corner.

Let us now look a little more closely at the street life of the city which we have thus roughly sketched.

There was little of that never-ceasing bustle with which we are familiar—little of the eternal hurry, the intense strain, the rush and turmoil of our modern existence; but the buzz of commerce was everywhere to be heard, telling us that the world was not asleep. The streets were rough, ill-paved, and narrow, and the appearance of a vehicle in them was sufficiently rare an occurrence to attract attention; though the ostentation of the rich in making use of carriages on every possible occasion was already beginning to be satirized by the writers of the time—as, for instance, by Massinger in “The City Madam,” and by Cooke in “Greene’s Tu Quoque.” There were the churches—six score or so of them, Lyly tells us, within the walls; the inns, with their wide hostleries; the private houses, built not in long uniform rows, but irregularly, as though they desired to preserve some traces of personal character. Their upper stories were frequently built out, and sometimes projected so far across the narrow streetway that Jonson pictures a lady and her lover exchanging confidences from the topmost windows of opposite tenements—“arguing from different premises,” as Dr. Holmes would say. There, too, were the shops, looking more like booths in a fair, with their quaint and picturesque signs, and their merchandise exposed to public gaze on open stalls, while in front of them paced the young apprentices, besieging the ears of every passer-by with their ceaseless clamor of “What d’ye lack?” and their long-winded recommendations of the articles which they had for sale. In Middleton’s “Michaelmas Term” we have a scene before Quomodo’s shop, and Quomodo himself calling out to Easy and Shortyard: “Do you hear, sir? What lack you, gentlemen? See, good kerseys and broadcloths here—I pray you come near.” Many other passages of similar import might be added. Nor were these the only, or even the noisiest, symptoms of commercial enterprise. Itinerant vendors of the Autolycus tribe also patrolled the streets, murdering the Queen’s English, like their descendants of to-day, as in loud, hoarse voices they advertised their miscellaneous wares. There were fishwives, orange-women, and chimney-sweeps, broom-men, hawkers of meat pies and pepper, of rushes for the floor, of mats, oat-cakes, milk, and coal; and numerous Irish costermongers (of the kind Face refers to in “The Alchemist”) who trafficked in fruit and vegetables. In addition to all these, and to complete the confusion of the streets, there were mountebanks, jugglers, and ballad-singers, full of strange tricks and new songs, whereby to attract attention and pick up a few odd coins.

The daily round of existence in the city streets offered, therefore, no small amount of interest and variety; while from time to time the ordinary routine was broken in upon by fresh elements of excitement. Now it might be a splendid procession—perhaps of one of the great livery companies, purse-proud and ostentatious; perhaps of the newly-installed Lord Mayor, on his way back from Westminster; perhaps of the Virgin Queen and her retinue, coming cityward on some state occasion from Richmond or Whitehall. Now, again, it might be a procession of a very different kind—a mob following a thief who was going to be put into the pillory, or a woman of disreputable character who, meeting the fate dreaded by Doll Common, was carted through the streets to the accompaniment of a brass band, and amid the cries and hootings of the populace; or a group of felons who were led out of the city along Holborn to Tyburn, there to pay the last penalty of the law. Sometimes, too, there were large gatherings in St. Paul’s churchyard to hear some famous preacher—like Bishop Jewell—discourse from the steps of the great cross; and sometimes there were street fights between retainers of rival houses, or bands of hot-tempered ’prentices belonging to the different city guilds—fights which generally ended in bloodshed and broken heads. The ’prentices of the city were indeed notoriously a turbulent tribe, and they figure in many a brawl and squabble in the plays of the time. “If he were in London, among the clubs, up went his heels for striking of a ’prentice,” says Gazet, in Massinger’s “Renegado,” referring in this phrase to the fact that clubs were habitually kept in the shops ready for use in the event of any affray. So that the London streets were not so dull as one might at first suppose; while for the rest there was plenty of quiet, steady activity from dawn till dusk. Though the struggle for wealth was not then so keen as it is to-day, and men on the whole took things more easily, life was full of earnestness and purpose, and commercial ambition shared the magnificent vigor and energy of the Elizabethan nature with the fever of adventure and a youthful, spontaneous, and unabashed delight in the pleasures of sense. Wide roads were open to the young man of brains and courage, roads which would lead to place and power. Fortunes were to be made, positions won; and the ’prentice, starting out in his career, had many examples of self-made and successful men to remind him that the world was all before him where to choose, and that the future largely depended upon himself. Thus, though the London of Shakspere’s time was far different from the London of to-day as regards its commerce, its activities, its habits and daily life, it was still a thriving city, the object of ambition, the dreamland of the aspiring youth, the great heart which set the blood pulsing and dancing through all the arteries of the land.

As for the shops themselves, we must dismiss them with a very few words. The modern difficulty—the importation of foreign wares, and the immigration of foreign dealers—was already to the front; and Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Flemish tradesmen were to be found in almost every street—each with his peculiar class of custom. Some writers of the time, like William Stafford, in his “Brief Conceit,” grow violent over the inroads of these aliens, and roundly proclaim, with Bishop Hall, that all the vice of the city was to be laid at their doors. But in the ordinary walks of business the Englishman, in spite of a good deal of characteristic bluster and grumbling, still held his ground. The apothecary sold love-charms and philters, tobacco, cane, and pudding, as well as drugs; but there were regular tobacco merchants, also, whose shops were of unrivalled splendor. The immense vogue of this novel luxury is sufficiently shown by the statement made by Barnaby Riche in “The Honesty of this Age,” that seven thousand shops in London “vented” tobacco, and by the passing remark of Hentzner, that it was smoked (or “drunk,” as the phrase then went) everywhere. At the theatre and all such places of public resort, the pipe was the Englishman’s habitual companion, and from sundry passages in Jonson, Dekker, Marston, and other dramatists, we infer that it was sometimes carried even to church.

Among the most noteworthy of the tradesmen of the time were the barbers, who, be it remembered, were surgeons as well, and would cut your beard or bleed you, trim your hair or pull out your teeth, with absolute impartiality. Their shops were the favorite resorts of idlers, as they had been long since in the days of Lucian; and owing to the immense attention then paid to hair and beard, the more accomplished among them drove an enormous trade. Their garrulity was proverbial. “Oh, sir, you know I am a barber and cannot tittle-tattle,” says Dello, in Lyly’s “Midas,” in a scene which is full of curious information concerning the barbers of the time. The Cutbeard of Jonson’s “Silent Woman,” is another illustration in point. It may be mentioned, as an odd feature of their establishments, that a lute was commonly kept in readiness for the amusement of those who might have to wait for attention, as the newspapers and comic weeklies are kept to-day. “Barbers shall wear thee on their citterns,” says Rhetias to Coculus, in Ford’s “Lover’s Melancholy,” referring to the grotesque figureheads by which these instruments were often decorated.

In the matter of the relations of sellers and purchasers, we may note, as one of those little touches of nature which make the whole world kin, that customers, as we learn from more than one old play, often indulged in the quite modern practice of having half the goods in a shop laid out for inspection before buying the most trumpery article. Nor, on the other hand, were the dealers of the time much behind their descendants of to-day in what are known as the tricks of trade. Adulteration was a crying evil; some of the methods often employed, for example, for the “sophistication” of tobacco, will be recalled by all readers of “The Alchemist.” Another common practice among shopkeepers was that of darkening their stores to disguise the inferiority of their merchandise. This is constantly referred to by contemporary writers. The sturdy Stubbs attacks the abuse in his “Display of Corruptions.” “They have their shops and places where they sell their cloth very dark and obscure,” he writes, referring to the mercers and drapers of his time, “of purpose to deceive buyers.” Webster, in “The Duchess of Malfi,” employs this familiar abuse in the turn of a compliment: “This darkening of your worth is not like that which tradesmen use in the city; their false lights are to rid bad wares off;” and Quomodo, in “Michaelmas Term,” boasts, humanly enough, that his shop is not “so dark as some of his neighbors’.” Again, Brome, in the “City Wit”: “What should the city do with honesty? Why are your wares gummed? Your shops dark?” In “Westward Ho” we read that the shop of a linen-draper was generally “as dark as a room in Bedlam,” and, not to multiply quotations, Middleton, in “Anything for a Quiet Life,” speaks of shopwares being habitually “set in deceiving lights.” Colliers, too, were so notorious for short measure and other crafty practices that Greene, in his “Notable Discovery of Cosenage,” includes a special “delightful discourse” on purpose to lay bare their knavery.

The houses were not yet numbered, and all trading establishments were known by their tokens—great signboards decorating every shop with strange mottoes and fantastic devices, which took the place of the advertising media of the present day. Milton, we remember, was born at the Spread Eagle, in Bread Street, and well on in the eighteenth century the imprints of publishers still refer to these customary signs; as in the case of the famous “left-legged Tonson,” who did business at “Shakespeare’s Head, over against Catherine Street, in the Strand.” Quotations illustrative of these trading tokens and the part they played in the commercial life of the time might be indefinitely multiplied; but we must content ourselves with a single bit of evidence from “The Alchemist.” Abel Drugger, the young tradesman, is opening a new shop, and comes to Subtle to take his advice about the choice of a suitable device. In the one suggested by Subtle, Jonson satirizes the wildly absurd combinations frequently employed, like the foolish advertisements of our own century, to attract or compel public attention:—

“He shall have a bel, that’s Abel;