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LONDON

BY

WALTER BESANT

AUTHOR OF "ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN"
"FIFTY YEARS AGO" ETC.

_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_

[Illustration]

NEW YORK

HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE

Copyright, 1892, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._




PREFACE


In the following chapters it has been my endeavor to present pictures of
the City of London--instantaneous photographs, showing the streets, the
buildings, and the citizens at work and at play. Above all, the
citizens: with their daily life in the streets, in the shops, in the
churches, and in the houses; the merchant in the quays and on 'Change;
the shopkeeper of Cheapside; the priests and the monks and the friars;
the shouting of those who sell; the laughter and singing of those who
feast and drink; the ringing of the bells; the dragging of the criminal
to the pillory; the Riding of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen; the river
with its boats and barges; the cheerful sound of pipe and tabor; the
stage with its tumblers and its rope-dancers; the 'prentices with their
clubs; the evening dance in the streets. I want my pictures to show all
these things. The history of London has been undertaken by many writers;
the presentment of the city and the people from age to age has never
yet, I believe, been attempted.

The sources whence one derives the materials for such an attempt are, in
the earlier stages, perfectly well known and accessible to all. Chaucer,
Froissart, Lydgate, certain volumes of the "Early English Text Society,"
occur to everybody. But the richest mine, for him who digs after the
daily life of the London citizen during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, is certainly Riley's great book of _Extracts from the City
Records_. If there is any life or any reality in the three chapters of
this book which treat of the Plantagenet period, it is certainly due to
Riley.

As regards the Tudor period, the wealth of illustration is astonishing.
One might as well be writing of the city life of this day, so copious
are the materials. But it is not to Shakespeare and the dramatists that
we must look for the details so much as to the minor writers, the
moralists and satirists, of whom the ordinary world knows nothing.

The reign of Charles II. directs one to the Plague and to the Fire. I
was fortunate in finding two tracts, one dealing with the plague of
1603, and the other with that of 1625. These, though they are earlier
than Charles II., were invaluable, as illustrating the effect of the
pestilence in causing an exodus of all who could get away, which took
place as much in these earlier years as in 1666. Contemporary tracts on
the state of London after the Fire, also happily discovered, proved
useful. And when the Plague and the Fire had been dismissed, another
extraordinary piece of good fortune put me in possession of certain
household accounts which enabled me to present a bourgeois family of the
period at home.

Where there is so much to speak about, one must exercise care in
selection. I have endeavored to avoid as much as possible those points
which have already been presented. For instance, the growth of the
municipality, the rise of the Guilds and the Companies, the laws of
London, the relations of the City to the Sovereign and the State--these
things belong to the continuous historian, not to him who draws a
picture of a given time. In the latter case it is the effect of law, not
its growth, which is important. Thus I have spoken of the pilgrimizing
in the time of Henry II.; of the Mysteries of that time; things that
belonged to the daily life; rather than to matters of policy, the
stubborn tenacity of the City, or the changes that were coming over the
conditions of existence and of trade. Again, in Plantagenet London one
might have dwelt at length upon the action taken by London in successive
civil wars. That, again, belongs to the historian. I have contented
myself with sketching the churches and the monasteries, the palaces and
the men-at-arms, the merchants and the workmen.

Again, in the time of George II., the increase of trade, which then
advanced by leaps and bounds, the widening of the world to London
enterprise, the part which London took in the conquest of India and the
ejection of France from North America belong to history. For my own part
I have preferred to show the position, the influence, and the work of
the Church at a time generally believed to be the deadest period in the
whole history of the Church of England. This done, I have gone on to
illustrate the day-by-day life of the citizens, with the prices of
things, the management, and the appearance of the City.

One thing remains to be said. Mr. Loftie, in his _History of London_
(Stadford), first gave the world a reconstruction of the ground--the
_terrain_--of London and its environs before ever a house was erected or
an acre cleared. The first chapter of this book--that on Roman London
and After--is chiefly due to a study of this map, and to realizing what
that map means when applied to the scanty records of Augusta. This map
enabled me to recover the years which followed the retreat of the
Romans. I cannot allow this chapter to be called a Theory