| Volume Thirty-Six | 1994 | |
1. Donald Lupton, London and the Countrey, quoted in Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, eds. The London Encyclopaedia (London: Macmillan, 1983), 582.
2. John Stow, The Survey of London, ed. Ernest Rhys (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1929), 362; G.E. Mitton, ed.,Maps of Old London (London: Black, 1908), I, II, IV, V, VI.
3. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, eds.,Stuart Royal Proclamations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973-1983), I. 345.
4. "Introduction," A.L. Beier and Roger Finlay, eds., London 1500-1700: The making of the metropolis (London: Longman Group Ltd., 1986); Robert Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control in Later Elizabethan and Early Stuart London," The London Journal IX (1983), 3; F.J. Fisher, "The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society XXX, 4th ser. (1948), 37.
5. The term "London" refers to the metropolitan area generally, while the term "City" means the parts under the authority of the aldermen and Lord Mayor.
6. From Acts of the Privy Council of England, quoted in Normand Berlin, The Base String: The Underworld in Elizabethan Drama (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1968), 17; Thomas Dekker, Lanthorne and Candle-light (1608), in A.V. Judges, ed., The Elizabethan Underworld (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1930), 348.
7. Norman G. Brett-James, The Growth of Stuart London, Publ. for London & Middlesex Archaeological Society (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1935), 405; Sir Walter Besant, South London (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1898), 124 ff.
8. H.E. Malden, ed., The Victoria History of the County of Surrey, Publ. for the Institute of Historical Research (London: Oxford University Press, 1902, repr. 1967), IV, 125.
9. deodand: anything, animate or inanimate, which is the instrument that brings about the death of a person.
10. "The Charter of Edward VI, 23 April 1550" in David J. Johnson, Southwark and the City, Publ. for the Corporation of London (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), Appendix I, 395-406.
11. Southwark was accompted within the County of Surrey, whereas London north of the Thames was accounted part of Middlesex.
12. Victoria County History of Surrey, 138; Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 28-9.
13. Johnson, Southwark and the City, 148; Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, 28.
14. Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, lxix; Frank F. Foster, The Politics of Stability (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 184-85.
15. John Strype, The Survey of London, quoted in Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, 14; Victoria County History of Surrey, IV, 150.
16. Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: The University Press, 1987), 19-21, 43, 58-9.
17. See Mitton, Maps of Old London, passim.
18. Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, 15.
19. John Strype, The Survey of London, quoted in Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, 14; C[alendar of] S[tate] P[apers] D[omestic], 1638-1639, 562-63, 579.
20. C.S.P.D., 1619-23, 334; Victoria County History of Surrey, IV, 140-41.
21. From Index to Remembrancia, quoted in Frank Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds (London: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., 1967), 73-74.
22. See especially M.J. Power, "The Social Topography of Restoration London," in Beier and Finlay, London 1500-1700, ch. 7.
23. Stow, Survey of London, 362; Victoria County History of Surrey, IV, 128; Mitton, Maps of Old London, I.
24. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor
Royal Proclamations (New Haven and New York: Yale University
Press, 1964), II, no. 649; Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations, I,
no. 25, and passim. Building restrictions in the suburbs found their
way, too, into contemporary drama and literature:
Pompey. You have not heard the proclamation, have you?
Mistress Overdone. What proclamation, man?
Pom. All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down.
Mistress O. And what shall become of those in the city?
Pom. They shall stand for seed: they had gone
down too, but that a wise burgher put in for them.
Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, I.ii.85-95.
25. John Northbrooke, A treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vaine playes, or enterluds, with other idle pastimes, &c., commonly used on the Sabboth day, are reproued by the authoritie of the word of God and auntient writers (1577), ed. Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1974), 51; A.L Beier, "Vagrants and the Social Order in Elizabethan England," Past and Present LXIV (Aug. 1974), 10-11.
26. Johnson, Southwark and the City, 142, 325.
27. Beier, "Vagrants and the Social Order in Elizabethan England," 26.
28. C.S.P.D., 1591-1594, 464; Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations and Stuart Royal Proclamations, passim.
29. See Berlin, The Base String, ch. 1; F.W. Chandler, The Literature of Roguery, 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1907); and Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld.
30. Gamini Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1977), 51.
31. Robert Greene, The Second Part of Cony- Catching (1591), in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, 165; Gilbert Walker (?), A Manifest Detection of the most vile and detestable use of Dice-play, and other practices like the same (1552), Ibid., 48-49; Thomas Harman, A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds (1566), Ibid., 72 & n.
32. Johnson, Southwark and the City, 148.
33. William B. Rye, ed., London as seen by Foreigners in the days of Elizabeth and James the First (New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1967), 7.
34. [William] Harrison's Description of England in Shakspere's Youth, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, Publ. for the New Shakspere Society (London: N. Trber & Co., 1878), 32.
35. Index to Remembrancia, quoted in Judges, Elizabethan Underworld, xliii.
36. According to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, the people of the City and suburbs used the fields surrounding the City Walls as places of assembly for initiating campaigns and organizing petitions. Such meetings, he asserted, were held in Southwark and particularly in St. George's Fields, "where the arms and magazines were kept". Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, 234.
37. Ibid., 107-8, 235; Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations, II, no. 301.
38. C.S.P.D., 1581-1590, 344; Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds, 67.
39. Each of London's fourteen prisons had its different grades of accommodation, and which one a prisoner ended up in depended not on the nature of the offense he was charged with or the severity of the sentence but entirely on how much money ("garnish" was the technical term) he was prepared to lay out in bribes to gaolers, keepers, tipstaffs and others. Life on the Master's Side could be as comfortable as life outside for those who had money: the inmate could eat and drink as he pleased, smoke whenever he had a mind, have his friends in for an evening's gambling, or a woman from the local brothel to warm his bed. He could even bribe a gaoler to escort him out of doors. On the Common Side, however, a penniless man might actually starve to death if he failed to secure relief, primarily obtained by begging through the grated prison windows. A riot in the King's Bench prison in 1620 was sparked when the Marshal walled up the window through which the inmates obtained food. The best known account of prison life is William Fenner's The Counter's Commonwealth, or, a Voyage made to an Infernal Island (1617), in Judges, Elizabethan Underworld, 423 ff. See also Richard Byrne, Prisons and Punishments of London (London: Harrap Books Ltd., 1989); Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Prisons Under Local Government (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1922); Clifford Dobb, "London's Prisons," Shakespeare Survey XVII (Cambridge, 1964), 87-100; and Salgado, Elizabethan Underworld, 168-80.
40. Johnson, Southwark and the City, 336; The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), III, 165 & n. The White Lion was the smallest of Southwark's prisons, and from its name we can deduce that it had once been an inn, adapted to the minimal security need to contain debtors and petty offenders. But when other Southwark prisons became too overcrowded the White Lion was available to receive their surplus, including religious detainees. It seems frequently to have come under attack, and by 1681 it was so ruinous that it was no longer a place of safe custody, and its population was absorbed into the neighboring gaols. Byrne, Prisons and Punishments of London, 102-3; Victoria County History of Surrey, 141.
41. Stow, Survey of London, 367.
42. Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control," 10; Peter Clark, "The Alehouse and the Alternative Society," in Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History presented to Christopher Hill, ed. Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 50. When German traveller Thomas Platter came to England in the 1590s, he declared: "I have never seen more taverns and alehouses in my whole life than in London." Many other visitors before 1640 orchestrated the same theme. Thomas Platter's Travels in England 1559, trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 189.
43. Beier and Finlay, London 1500-1700, 22; Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: a social history 1200-1830 (London: Longman Group Limited, 1983), 49; Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control," 11; Dekker, Lanthorne and Candle-Light, in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, 347. Water poet John Taylor dedicated an entire section of his Carriers' Cosmography to "The Inns and Lodgings of the Carriers which come into the Borough of Southwark out of the counties of Kent, Sussex and Surrey." John Taylor, The Carrier's Cosmography; or, a Brief Relation of the Inns, Ordinaries, Hostelries, and other lodgings in and near London (1637), in Social England Illustrated: A Collection of XVIIth Century Tracts, ed. Andrew Lang (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1964), 359-60.
44. Quoted in Clark, "The Alehouse and the Alternative Society," 47.
45Ben Jonson, Every Man In His Humour, II.i.56-63.
46. Clark, The English Alehouse: a social history, 123-4, and "The Alehouse and the Alternative Society," 48-49; John Earle, Microcosmography; or, a piece of the world characterized (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1934), 22.
47. Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control," 10; Thomas Platter's Travels in England, 170.
48. Clark, The English Alehouse: a social history, 108-9.
49. Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control," 13.
50. Clark, The English Alehouse: a social history, 111.
51. Johnson, Southwark and the City, 247-48; Clark, The English Alehouse: a social history, 154, and "The Alehouse and the Alternative Society," 63; Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control," 8.
52. Stow, Survey of London, 95.
53. Johnson, Southwark and the City, 225.
54. See Robert Greene, A Notable Discovery of Cozenage, The Second and Third Parts of Cony Catching, &c., in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, 119 ff., and Berlin, The Base String, 22 and passim.
55. Clark, "The Alehouse and the Alternative Society," 57.
56. An Impartial account of the late discovery of the persons taken with fire-balls in Southwark [microform] (London: Printed for J.C., 1688), f. 1r.
57. Clark, The English Alehouse: a social history, 145.
58. Clark, "The Alehouse and the Alternative Society," 66-67.
59. Thomas Nashe, Christs Teares Over Jerusalem (1593), in Works, vol. 2, ed. F.P. Wilson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 148; Dekker, Lanthorne and Candle-light, in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, 349-50. Originally a stew was a sweating or steam-bath, a legacy from the Roman conquest. The association between such baths and brothels was doubtless reinforced by the practice of sweating as a cure for venereal disease. See OED.
60. That an area which consisted mainly of brothels should have been episcopal property will surprise no one who knows anything about the activities of early prelates or about the equivocal attitude of the Church towards the sin of lust and lechery, at least where prostitution was concerned. "Suppress prostitution," wrote St. Augustine, "and capricious lusts will overthrow society." Aquinas was even more explicit: "Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace; take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil-smelling place." Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld, 49-51.
61. It has long been rumored that Bishop of Winchester Stephen Gardiner cemented his friendship with King Henry VIII by providing him with a supply of "Winchester geese" (an epithet which came to apply to prostitutes generally as a result of their episcopal association in Southwark) for the royal pleasure. Primary source evidence to support this, however, has not been forthcoming.
62. "A Whore" (1630), in All the Works of John Taylor the Water Poet (London: The Scolar Press, 1977), 37.
63. Sermons by Hugh Latimer, ed. George Elwes Corrie (Cambridge: The University Press, 1987), 133-34.
64. Stow, Survey of London, 361; Wallace Shugg, "Prostitution in Shakespeare's London," Shakespeare Studies X (1977), 296; Pepys's Diary, IV, 261-62. Bawds have traditionally acquired their professional experience by serving as prostitutes, becoming "managers" in their later years when no longer able to attract customers themselves.
65. Epigrammes CXXXIII, "On the Famous Voyage" (ll. 117-18), and Under-wood VL, "An Execration upon Vulcan" (ll. 148-49), in The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson, ed. William B. Hunter (New York: The University Press, 1963), 71, 192; Shugg, "Prostitution in Shakespeare's London," 297.
66. Nashe, Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, 148-49; Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control," 14.
67. Quoted in "Introduction" to Nicholas Goodman, Hollands Leaguer, ed. Dean Stanton Barnard, Jr. (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1970), 37; Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1972), f. O8v.
68. Quoted in Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld, 51, 58. Pepys records a conversation in 1669 with the manager of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, in which the latter revealed his intentions to have house prostitutes provided at theaters as a convenience for special patrons of the arts. This, however, was an arrangement intended only for private theaters. Pepys's Diary, IX, 425.
69. Dekker, Lanthorne and Candle-Light, in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, 347; Nashe, Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, 150.
70. Shugg, "Prostitution in Shakespeare's London," 312.
71. The Elizabethan Underworld, 54, 56; Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses, f. H4r. Stewed prunes, a supposed cure for syphilis, was a staple dish offered in brothels.
72. Thomas Platter's Travels in
England, 174-75.
The whipping at the house of correction was a very formal affair
conducted in the presence
of the board of governors. One is invited, however, to recall the wild
outpourings of Lear:
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whipp'st her.
Shakespeare, King Lear, IV.vi.158-161.
73. Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, f. H6r.
74. Stow, Survey of London, 360-61; Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control," 15.
75. Nashe, Christs Tears Over Jerusalem, 152.
76. C.S.P.D., 1631-33, 221; Victoria County History of Surrey, 150-51. The event figured in three separate works published within a four-month period: Shakerley Marmion's play Holland's Leaguer (in Dramatic Works, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), Nicholas Goodman's pamphlet Hollands Leaguer (actually a parable of the Church of England from a Protestant point of view, the premise being that the C. of E. had itself become another "Whore of Babylon"), and Lawrence Price's ballad "Newes from Holland's Leaguer" (in Goodman, Appendix C).
78. Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control," 15.
79. Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld, 53; Dekker, Lanthorne and Candle-Light, in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, 348.
80. The discovery of a gladiator's trident suggests the presence of a Roman circus or arena there.
81. Peter Burke, "Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century London," The London Journal III (Nov. 1977), 148.
82. Brett-James, Growth of Stuart London, 463. For Shallow and Falstaff, see Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, III.ii.189-90: "O, Sir John, do you remember since we lay all night in the Windmill in Saint George's Field?"
83. Pepys's Diary, I, 242 & n., IX, 313.
84. Quoted in Besant, South London, 180-82. Evelyn's name for the Fair came from its location between St. Margaret's Hill and St. George's Church.
85. Robert Harris, The drunkards cup (1619), quoted in Clark, The English Alehouse: a social history, 73; Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations, II, nos. 137, 225, 242; Victoria County History of Surrey, 140.
86. E.K Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923, repr. 1965), II, 458.
87. Brett-James, Growth of Stuart London, 461; Crowley, quoted in Besant, South London, 215.
88. The two baiting rings are also marked on maps of 1572 and 1593. Mitton, Maps of Old London, II, IV, VI; Besant, South London, 211.
89. Henry Peacham, Sights and Exhibitions in England, Temp. James I (1611), in Rye, London as Seen by Foreigners, 140. Blind bears seem to have held a peculiar attraction for English audiences, as evidenced by the Jacobean notice cited above. They could still be dangerous, though: On 9 December 1554 a blind bear escaped from one of the Bankside theaters and caught a serving man by the leg, "and bytt a grete pesse away, and after by the hokyll bone, that within .iii. days after he ded." Besant, South London, 216.
90. Pepys's Diary, VII, 245-6, VIII, 239, 429-30, IX, 516-17.
91. C.S.P.D., 1547-1580, 6; Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control," 8-9; Besant, South London, 212.
92. John Field, A Godly Exhortation (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1974), f. B8r and passim; Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control," 6; Flagellum dei, or, A collection of the several fires, plagues, and pestilential diseases that have happened in London especially [microform] (London: Printed for C.VV., 1668), 8-9.
93. C.S.P.D., 1547-1580, 1; The Letters of Stephen Gardiner ed. James Muller (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933), 253-54.
94. Johnson, Southwark and the City, 224; Burke, "Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century London," 148; Taylor quoted in Besant, South London, 217.
95. Victoria County History of Surrey, 133-34; Thomas Platter's Travels in England, 166-67.
96. In a recent study of the playgoing public, Ann Jennalie Cook argues convincingly that insufficient regard has been paid by modern scholars to some of the more obvious economic deterrents to plebeian playgoing: notably, the fact that theater inevitably competed with labor in the use of daylight (Sunday performances were prohibited in 1586 for their adverse effect on church attendance), and the difficulty involved in finding even the minimum admission price of one penny, since attendance itself meant sacrificing an afternoon's wages. Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakspeare's London, 1576-1642 (Princeton: The University Press, 1981), chapter VI: "Plebeian Playgoers".
97. Pepys's Diary, IX, 415; Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld, 41.
98. Letters of Stephen Gardiner, 253-54; C.S.P.D., 1547-1580, 1; Ibid., 1598-1601, 575, 578.
99. Ibid., 1598-1601, 435.
100. Besant, South London, 222.
101. Northbrooke, A Treatise, 58-59; Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, ff. L5r, L8r. Nor did opinion change much over the next century: "as if we were resolved to out-do the Impieties of the very Heathens, Prophaneness, and even Blasphemy, was too often the Wit and Entertainment of our Scandalous Play-Houses." Josiah Woodward, An account of the societies for reformation of manners in England and Ireland, 3rd ed. [microform] (London: Printed for B. Aylmer and A. Bell, 1700), 3.
102. Ben Jonson, Volpone or The Fox, ed. David Cook (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1962), 58; Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1612) and A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (1615) by I.G., ed. Richard H. Perkinson (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1941), ff. A7v- A8r; Besant, South London, 223-24.
103. Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control," 5-6.
104. C.S.P.D., 1595-1597, 310.
105. Index to Remembrancia, quoted in Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control," 5; Pepys's Diary, IX, 313.
106. Dekker, Lanthorne and Candle-light, in Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld, 323.
107. "Introduction" in Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, ed. J.W. Harper (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1966), xii.
108. Index to Remembrancia, quoted in Judges, Elizabethan Underworld, xliii.
109. Northbrooke, A Treatise, 68.
110. Johnson, Southwark and the City, 224.