MEDIAEVAL LONDON.*
NOT a few interesting things come out when we study the history of mediaeval London. One of them is the social status of the trader. The fasionable contempt for his business is of comparatively recent growth, not much more than a century old. No precise date can be given ; but in the earlier part of the eighteenth century the feeling on the matter was not what it became in the nineteenth. For hundreds of years before then the connexion between the country and the city, the • Mediaeval London : Historical and Social. By Sir Walter Besant. VoL L London ; A. and C. Black. [308. net.]
country gentlefolk and the city trader, had been most intimate. No more striking evidence of this can be given than the analysis of the origin of the two hundred and three Lord Mayors from Henry Fitz-Aylwin down to the year 1633, a period of two hundred and ten years. Of these a hundred
and fifty-six were country born. When we consider what the mediaeval village was, how limited was the horizon of all but the lord of the manor or a knight here and there, it is not difficult to understand why many lads of good birth sought the opportunities offered by apprenticeship in the City. Camden is quoted to show that the nobility thought with shame of the merchant's career. He himself declared mercatura non derogat nobilitati. These same country lade supplied the City, as, indeed, they do now, with the necessary fresh blood and energy.
Another important point is the fact that London was always great as a distributing, not as a manufacturing, centre. And this fact no legislation, no system of duties, could alter. Fraternities of foreign merchants established themselves in their fortified houses, and kept their trade jealously to themselves. The Crown, so long as it got its tolls and duties, was content. Now and then, indeed, it endeavoured to restrict their increasing trade, but its ordinances were always evaded. For London wanted what they alone could supply. It could supply itself well enough with necessaries, as Sir Walter Besant says ; but neither London nor England has ever been content with necessaries. The mediaeval City of five hundred years ago was as full of luxuries as is the City of to-day,—the best shopping-place in Northern Europe in the days of Edward III., as it is in the days of Edward VII. Entire fleets laden with nothing but wine came to London. Once or twice there were periods when a man could " get dead drunk for two pence," as the fascinating invitation of a later time put it ; but the drink had by that time been changed from wine to gin. Mediaeval London had, indeed, the best of everything, paying for it all in wool. So Capgrave has it : "Our enemies laugh at us ; they say, ` Take the ship off your gold noble and impress a sheep instead.'" (This was the noble of Edward III.) Napoleon repeated the taunt, but the laugh was not in the end with the foreigner. And how, it may be asked, did these good things go backwards and forwards P Not always securely. We could not always command the Channel, though we still claimed the sovereignty of the seas. In this respect things reached their worst, we are told, in the four- teenth century. Foreign merchants settled in London and traded. They came from Venice, Rouen, Genoa, Florence, Lombardy, Antwerp, and Dantzig. And so the period was a halcyon time for pirates, for lords of manors who had fore- shores, for fishermen, and for wreckers.
One is struck nowadays by the variety of articles sold at a "Fancy Repository "; but a fourteenth-century haberdasher's shop would run it close. An inventory of 1378 has among other things, such as woollen caps of kinds which you quite possibly might not find in a modern shop, a long list of articles, chains, wooden beads, inkhorns, leather purses, eye- glasses, coffins, paper, gaming tables (probably backgammon boards), whistles, and whipcord.
Full as this fascinating volume is of curious information, its most interesting chapters are those which seek to reproduce for us the life and customs and the general aspect of the old city. Here the literary skill of the artist becomes invaluable. No doubt Sir Walter Besant was much indebted to the maps and bird's-eye views of old London,—some, and these the most important, of them, by the way, o )mparatively modern discoveries. Nevertheless, the tour which we take with him round the City walls, the stroll through the narrow streets, occasionally stopping to look round from some vantage-point, say Ludgate Hill, and then hiring a wherry on the Thames, is just such as might have been taken by some curious visitor of old, say some Venetian Envoy anxious to give the Magnificos of his Republic a faithful account of far-famed London. There is no doubt of the clear imi res ion that we get of the City, with its innumerable churches, its tortuous streets, the motley crowd of its inhabitants, the open shops with their variety of wares, all the kaleidoscope, in short, of form and colour that showed how great was its wealth, how wide the range of its trade. Probably London was not so dirty as we commonly think. Many of the streets had a stream of water, and the natural drainage of the City was more effective before the Fire than it became afterwards through the continuous levelling of surfaces and the blocking up of old watercourses. The innumerable ordinances did not profit much, when there were no police to enforce them ; still, a rough-and-ready method of disposing of rubbish obtained, and the citizens were compelled to use it. But the soil became poisoned by the infiltration of centuries. Plagues visited London again and again, and helped to keep its population stationary. Sir Walter writes :— "The population of the City did not increase so fast as its wealth; there were more stately houses, more carved work, more gold and silver cups, finer tapestry, finer weapons, but the world, in the eyes of the ordinary citizen, stood still ; as things had been, so they were still, so they would be till the end of all things ; there was no hope, no thought of a larger and nobler humanity ; all his hope lay beyond the world. Let us remember this fact, because it explains a great deal of mediaeval history."
Mediaeval fatalism it does, indeed, explain,—the fatalism which endured so much pestilence and famine, such a surfeit of battle and murder. As to plagues, there is a noticeable gap between 1111 and 1349 ; but after this period of immunity how fearful the scourge that followed ! With plague we naturally associate fire. It was often said that London was in continual danger of fire, and the saying is of doubtful truth. There was certainly no great conflagration between that of 1135, when Southwark was destroyed, and 1666. The mediaeval Londoner's house, built of oak and plaster, was not so inflammable as one might think. There was not then a fire in every room, nor was coal, which throws out so penetrating a heat, in use. The modern city, with its electricity, its gas, its fireplace in every room—shall we add, its system of fire insurance P—runs far more risk.
But at last came the Great Fire, cleansing the City in the most effective fashion with so fierce a heat that in places the ground was calcined to the depth of several feet. It was a boon, if it was a disaster, for it rid the place of the accumu- lated filth of two thousand years.
It is impossible here to do justice to the ability with which this picture of the past is drawn. Sir Walter left out nothing that could help us to realise the vigour of the great City, its pride of patriotism, its wealth, its far-reaching commerce. His name will be linked with it in such a fashion as we can hardly find paralleled in the history of the world's capitals.
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