London

When, in the case of Richard II., the time of expostulation had passed, and that for armed resistance or passive submission had arrived, the Londoners remembered their action in the reign of Edward II., and perceived that if they did not move they would be all ruined and destroyed. They therefore resolved upon bringing over from France, Henry, Earl of Derby, and entreated the Archbishop of Canterbury to go over secretly and invite him, promising the whole strength of London for his service. As we know, Henry accepted and came over. On his landing he sent a special messenger to ride post haste to London with the news. The journey was performed in less than twenty-four hours. The Lord Mayor sent the news about in all directions, and the Londoners prepared to give their future king a right joyous welcome. They poured out along the roads to meet him, and all men, women, and children clad in their best clothes. "The Mayor of London rode by the side of the Earl, and said, 'See, my Lord, how much the people are rejoiced at your arrival.' As the Earl advanced, he bowed his head to the right and left, and noticed all comers with kindness… The whole town was so rejoiced at the Earl's return that every shop was shut and no more work done than if it had been Easter Day."

The army which Henry led to the west was an army of Londoners, twelve thousand strong. It was to the Tower of London that the fallen King was brought; and it was in the Guildhall that the articles drawn up against the King were publicly read; and it was in Cheapside that the four knights, Richard's principal advisers, were beheaded. At the Coronation feast the King sat at the first table, having with him the two archbishops and seventeen bishops. At the second table sat the five great peers of England. At the third were the principal citizens of London; below them sat the knights. The place assigned to the city is significant. But London had not yet done enough for Henry of Lancaster. The Earls of Huntingdon and Salisbury attempted a rebellion against him. Said the Mayor, "Sire, we have made you king, and king you shall be." And King he remained.

It was in this fourteenth century that the city experienced the most important change in the whole history of her constitution, more important than the substitution of the Mayor and Aldermen for the port-reeve and sheriff, though that was nothing less than the passage from the feudal county to the civic community. The new thing was the formation of the city companies, which incorporated each trade formally, and gave the fullest powers to the governing body over wages, hours of labor, output, and everything which concerned the welfare of each craft.

There had been many attempts made at combination. Men at all times have been sensible of the advantages of combining; at all times and in every trade there is the same difficulty, that of persuading everybody to forego an apparent present advantage for a certain benefit in the future; there are always black-legs, yet the cause of combination advances.

The history of the city companies is that of combination so successfully carried out that it became part of the constitution and government of the city; but, which was not foreseen at the outset, combination in the interests of the masters, not of the men.

The trades had long formed associations which they called guilds. These, for some appearance of independence, began to arouse suspicion. Kings have never regarded any combination of their subjects with approbation. The guilds were ostensibly religious; they had each a patron saint – St. Martin, for instance, protected the saddlers; St. Anthony, the grocers – and they held an annual festival on their saint's day. But they must be licensed; eighteen such guilds were fined for establishing themselves without a license. Those which were licensed paid for the privilege. The most important of them was the Guild of Weavers, which was authorized by Henry II. to regulate the trades of cloth-workers, drapers, tailors, and all the various crafts and "mysteries" that belong to clothes. This guild became so powerful that it threatened to rival in authority the governing body. It was therefore suppressed by King John, the different trades afterwards combining separately to form their own companies.

We are not writing a history of London, otherwise the rise and growth of the City companies would form a most interesting chapter. It has been done in a brief and convenient form by Loftie, in his little book on London (Historic Towns Series). Very curious and suggestive reading it is. At the period with which we are now concerned, the end of the fourteenth century, the companies were rapidly forming and presenting regulations for the approval and license of the Mayor and Aldermen. By the year 1363 there were thirty-two companies already formed whose laws and regulations had received the approbation of the King. Let us take those of the Company of Glovers. They are briefly as follows:

(1) None but a freeman of the City shall make or sell gloves.

(2) No glover shall be admitted to the freedom of the City unless with the assent of the Wardens of the trade.

(3) No one shall entice away the servant of another.

(4) If a servant in the trade shall make away with his master's chattels to the value of twelvepence, the Wardens shall make good the loss; and if the servant refuse to be adjudged upon by the Wardens, he shall be taken before the Mayor and Aldermen.

(5) No one shall sell his goods by candlelight.

(6) Any false work found shall be taken before the Mayor and Aldermen by the Wardens.

(7) All things touching the trade within the City between those who are not freemen shall be forfeited.

(8) Journeymen shall be paid their present rate of wages.

(9) Persons who entice away journeymen glovers to make gloves in their own houses shall be brought before the Mayor and Aldermen.

(10) Any one of the trade who refuses to obey these regulations shall be brought before the Mayor and Aldermen.

Observe, upon these laws, first, that the fourth simply transfers the master's right to chastise his servant to the governing body of the company. This seems to put the craftsmen in a better position. Here, apparently, is combination carried to the fullest. All the glovers in the City unite; no one shall make or sell gloves except their own members; the company shall order the rate of wages and the admission of apprentices; no glover shall work for private persons, or for any one, except by order of the company. Here is absolute protection of trade and absolute command of trade. Unfortunately, the Wardens and court were not the craftsmen, but the masters. Therefore the regulations of trade were very quickly found to serve the enrichment of the masters and the repression of the craftsmen. And if the latter formed "covins" or conspiracies for the improvement of wages, they very soon found out that such associations were put down with the firmest hand. To be brought before the Mayor and Aldermen meant, unless submission was made and accepted, expulsion from the City. So long as the conditions of the time allowed, the companies created a Paradise for the master. The workman was suppressed; he could not combine; he could not live except on the terms imposed by his company: if he rebelled he was thrust out of the City gates. The jurisdiction of the City, however, ceased at the walls; when a greater London began to grow outside Cripplegate, Bishopsgate, and Aldgate, and on the reclaimed marshes of Westminster and along the river-bank, craftsmen not of any company could settle down and work as they please. But they had to find a market, which might be impossible except within the City, where they were not admitted. Therefore the companies, as active guardians and jealous promoters of their trades, fulfilled their original purposes a long while, and enabled many generations of masters to grow rich upon the work of their servants.

Every company was governed by its Wardens. The Warden had great powers; he proved the quality, weight, or length of the goods exposed for sale; the members were bound to obey the Warden; to prevent bad blood, every man called upon to serve his time as Warden had to undertake the office. The Warden also looked after the poor of the craft, assisted the old and infirm, the widows and the orphans. He had also to watch over the fraternity, to take care that there should be no underselling, no infringement of the rate of wage, no overreaching of one by the other. He was, in short, to maintain the common interest of the trade. It was a despotism, but, on the whole, a benevolent despotism. The Englishman was not yet ready for popular rule; doubtless the jealousies of the sovereign were allayed by the discovery that the association of a trade was a potent engine for the maintenance of order and the repression of the turbulent craftsman. How turbulent they could be was proved by the troubles which arose in the reign of Henry III.

The great companies were always separate and distinct from the smaller companies. For a long time the Mayor was exclusively elected from the former. Even at the present day, unless the Mayor belongs to one of the great companies, he labors under certain disadvantages. He cannot, for instance, become President of the Irish Society.

By the end of the fourteenth century, then – to sum up – the government of London was practically complete and almost in its present form. The Mayor, become an officer of the highest importance, was elected every year; the Sheriffs every year; the Aldermen and the Common Councilmen were elected by wards. The Mayor was chosen from the great companies, which comprised all the merchant venturers, importers, exporters, men who had correspondence over the seas, masters, and employers. Every craft had its own regulations; no one could trade in the City who did not belong to a company; no one could work in the City, or even make anything to be sold, who did not belong to a company. Wages were ordered by the companies; working-men had no appeal from the ruling of the Warden. From time to time there were attempts made by the craftsmen to make combinations for themselves. These attempts were sternly and swiftly put down. No trades-unions were suffered to be formed; nay, even within the memory of living man trades-unions were treated as illegal associations. The craftsman, as a political factor, disappears from history with the creation of the companies. In earlier times we hear his voice in the folkmote; we see him tossing his cap and shouting for William Longbeard. But when Whittington sits on the Lord Mayor's chair he is silenced. And he remains silent until, by a renewal of those covins and conspiracies which Whittington put down so sternly, he has become a greater power in the land than ever he was before. Even yet, however, and with all the lessons that he has learned, his power of combination is imperfect, his aims are narrow, and his grasp of his own power is feeble and restricted.

For my own part, I confess that this repression, this silencing of the craftsman in the fourteenth century, seems to me to have been necessary for the growth and prosperity of the City. For the craftsman was then incredibly ignorant; he knew nothing except his own craft; as for his country, the conditions of the time, the outer world, he knew nothing at all; he might talk to the sailors who lay about the quays between voyages, but they could tell him nothing that would help him in his trade; he could not read, he could not inquire, because he knew not what question to ask or what information he wanted; he had no principles; he was naturally ready, for his own present advantages, to sacrifice the whole world; he believed all he was told. Had the London working-man acquired such a share in the government of his city as he now has in the government of his country, the result would have been a battle-field of discordant and ever-varying factions, ruled and led each in turn by a short-lived demagogue.

It was, in short, a most happy circumstance for London that the government of the City fell into the hands of an oligarchy, and still more happy that the oligarchs themselves were under the rule of a jealous and a watchful sovereign.

So far it was well. It would have been better had the governing body recognized the law that they must be always enlarging their borders. Then they would have begun in earnest the education of the people. We, who have only taken this work in hand for twenty years, may not throw stones. The voice of the educated craftsman should have been heard long ago. Then we might have been spared many oppressions, many foolish wars, many cruelties. But from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century the craftsman is silent. Nay, in every generation he grows more silent, less able to say what he wants; more inarticulate, more angry and discontented, and more powerless to make his wants heard until he reaches the lowest depth ever arrived at by Englishmen; and that, I think, was about a hundred years ago.

V

PLANTAGENET

III. THE PEOPLE

Through broad Chepeside rode the great lord – haply the King himself – followed by his regiment of knights, gentlemen, and men-at-arms, all wearing his livery. The Abbot, with his following, passed along on his way to Westminster in stately procession. The Alderman, in fur gown and gold chain, with his officers, walked through the market inspecting weights and measures and the goods exposed for sale. Priests and friars crowded the narrow ways. To north and south, in sheds which served for shops, the prentices stood bawling their wares. This was the outward and visible side of the City. There was another side – the City of the London craftsman.

Who was he – the craftsman? Whence did he come? London has always opened her hospitable arms to foreigners. They still come to the City and settle, enjoying its freedom, and in the next generation are pure English. In the days of Edward the Confessor the men of Rouen and of Flanders became citizens with rights equal to the English. Later on, the names of the people show their origin and the places whence they or their forefathers had come. Then William Waleys is William the Welchman; Walter Norris is Walter of Norway; John Francis is John the Frenchman; Henry Upton is Henry of that town; William Sevenoke, Lord Mayor of London, took his name from the village of Sevenoaks, in Kent, where he was born. The first surnames were bestowed not only with reference to the place of birth, but partly to trades, partly to the place of residence, partly to personal defects or peculiarities. But it is obvious from the earliest names on record how readily London received strangers from any quarter of western Europe, Norway, Denmark, Flanders, Lorraine, Picardy, Normandy, Guyenne, Spain, Provence, and Italy. It is noteworthy in studying the names, first, that, as was to be expected, there is not in the fourteenth century a single trace of British or Roman-British name, either Christian or surname, just as there was not in the Saxon occupation a single trace of Roman customs or institutions; next, that the Saxon names have all vanished. There are no longer any Wilfreds, Ælfgars, Eadberhts, Sigeberts, Harolds, or Eadgars among the Christian names. They have given place to the Norman names of John, Henry, William, and the like. The London craftsman was therefore a compound of many races. The dominant strain was Saxon – East Saxon; then came Norman, then Fleming, and then a slight infusion of every nation of Western Europe.

In the narrow lanes leading north and south of the two great streets of Thames and Chepe the craftsmen of London lived in their tenements, each consisting of a room below and a room above. Some of them followed their trade at home, some worked in shops. There were those who sold and those who made. Of the former, the mercers and haberdashers kept their shops in West Chepe; the goldsmiths in Guthrun's Lane and Old Change; the pepperers and grocers in Soper's Lane; the drapers in Lombard Street and Cornhill; the skinners in St. Mary Axe; the fish-mongers in Thames Street; the iron-mongers in Ironmongers' Lane and Old Jewry; the vintners in the Vintry; the butchers in East Chepe, St. Nicolas Shambles, and the Stocks Market; the hosiers in Hosiers' Lane; the shoemakers and curriers in Cordwainer Street; the paternoster-sellers in Paternoster Row; patten-sellers by St. Margaret Pattens; and so forth.

It is easy, with the help of Stow, and with the names of the streets before one, to map out the chief market-places and the shops. It is not so easy to lay down the places where those dwelt who carried on handicrafts. Stow indicates here and there a few facts. The Founders of candlesticks, chafing-dishes, and spice mortars carried on their work in Lothbury; the coal-men and wood-mongers were found about Billingsgate stairs; since the Flemish weavers met in the church-yard of Lawrence Pountney, they lived presumably in that parish. For the same reason the Brabant weavers probably lived in St. Mary Somerset parish. The furriers worked in Walbrook; the curriers opposite London Wall; upholsterers or undertakers on Cornhill; cutlers worked in Pope's Head Alley; basket-makers, wire-drawers, and "other foreigners" in Blond Chapel, or Blanch Appletone Lane. In Mincing Lane dwelt the men of Genoa and other parts who brought wine to the port of London in their galleys. The turners of beads for prayers lived in Paternoster Row; the bowyers in Bowyer Row; other crafts there are which may be assigned to their original streets. Sometimes, but not always, the site of a company's hall marks the quarter chiefly inhabited by that trade. Certainly the vintners belonged to the Vintry, where is now their hall, and the weavers to Chepe, where they still have their hall. When, however, the management of a trade or craft passed into the hands of a company, there was no longer any reason, except where men had to work together, why they should live together. Since there could be no combined action by the men, but, on the contrary, blind obedience to the Warden, they might as well live in whatever part of the City should be the most convenient. From the absence of great houses, whether of nobles or princes, in the north of the City, one is inclined to believe that great numbers of craftsmen lived in that part, namely, between what is now called Gresham Street and London Wall.

The trades carried on within the walls covered very nearly the whole field of manufacture. A mediæval city made everything that it wanted – wine, spices, silks, velvets, precious stones, and a few other things excepted, which were brought to the port from abroad; but the City could get on very well without those things. Within the walls they made everything. It is not until one reads the long lists of trades collected together by Riley that one understands how many things were wanted, and how trades were subdivided. Clothing in its various branches gave work to the wympler, who made wimples or neckerchiefs for women; the retunder, or shearman of cloth; the batour, or worker of cloth; the caplet-monger; the callere, who made cauls or coifs for the head; the quilter; the pinner; the chaloner, who made chalons or coverlets; the bureller, who worked in burel, a coarse cloth; the tailor; the linen armorer; the chaucer, or shoemaker; the plumer, or feather-worker; the pelliper, pellercer, or furrier; the white tawyer, who made white leather; and many others. Arms and armor wanted the bowyer; the kissere, who made armor for the thighs; the bokelsmyth, who make bucklers; the bracere, who made armor for arms; the gorgiarius, who made gorgets; the taborer, who made drums; the heaulmere, who made helmets; the makers of haketons, pikes, swords, spears, and bolts for crossbows. Trades were thus already divided; we see one man making one thing and nothing else all his life. The equyler made porringers, the brochere made spits, the haltier made halters, the corder made ropes, the sacker made sacks, the melmallere made hammers, and so on.

The old City grows gradually clearer to the vision when we think of all these trades carried on within the walls. There were mills to grind the corn; breweries for making the beer – one remains in the City still; the linen was spun within the walls, and the cloth made and dressed; the brass pots, tin pots, iron utensils, and wooden platters and basins were all made in the City; the armor, with its various pieces, was hammered out and fashioned in the streets; all kinds of clothes, from the leathern jerkin of the poorest to the embroidered robes of a princess, were made here; nothing that was wanted for household use in the country but was made in London town. Some of those trades were offensive to their neighbors. Under Edward I., for instance, the melters of tallow and lard were made to leave Chepe, and to find a more convenient place at a distance from that fashionable street. The names of Stinking Lane, Scalding Lane, and Sheer Hog sufficiently indicate the pleasing effect of the things done in them upon the neighbors. The modern City of London – the City proper – is a place where they make nothing, but sell everything. It is now quite a quiet city; the old rumbling of broad-wheeled wagons over a stone-laid roadway has given way to the roll of the narrow wheel over the smooth asphalt; the craftsmen have left the City. But in the days of Whittington there was no noisier city in the whole world; the roar and the racket of it could be heard afar off – even at the rising of the Surrey Hills or the slope of Highgate, or the top of Parliament Hill. Every man in the City was at work except the lazy men-at-arms of my lord's following in the great house that was like a barrack. They lay about waiting for the order to mount and ride off to the border, or the Welsh march, or to fight the French. But roundabout these barracks the busy craftsmen worked all day long. From every lane rang out without ceasing the tuneful note of the hammer and the anvil; the carpenters, not without noise, drove in their nails, and the coopers hooped their casks; the blacksmith's fire roared; the harsh grating of the founders set the teeth on edge of those who passed that way; along the river-bank, from the Tower to Paul's stairs, those who loaded and those who unloaded, those who carried the bales to the warehouses, those who hoisted them up, the ships which came to port and the ships which sailed away, did all with fierce talking, shouting, quarrelling, and racket. Such work must needs be carried on with noise. The pack-horses plodded along the streets, coming into the City and going out. Wagons with broad wheels rumbled and groaned along; the prentices bawled from the shops; the fighting-men marched along to sound of trumpet; the church bells and the monastery bells rang out all day long, and all night too. And at the doors of the houses or the open windows, where there was no glass, but a hanging shutter, sat or stood the women, preparing the food, washing, mending, sewing, or spinning, their children playing in the street before them. There are many towns of France, especially Southern France, which recall the mediæval city. Here the women live and do their work in the door-ways; the men work at the open windows; and all day there is wafted along the streets and up to the skies the fragrance of soup and onions, roasted meats and baked confections, with the smell of every trade which the people carry on.

Everything was made within the walls of the City. When one thinks upon the melting of tallow, the boiling of soap, the crushing of bones, the extracting of glue, the treatment of feathers and cloth and leather, the making and grinding of knives and all other sharp weapons, the crowding of the slaughter-houses, the decaying of fruit and vegetables, the roasting of meat at cooks' shops, the baking of bread, the brewing of beer, the making of vinegar, and all the thousand and one things which go to make up the life of a town, the most offensive of which are now carried on without the town; when one considers, further, the gutter, which played so great a part in every mediæval city; the gutter stream, which was almost Sabbatical, because it ceased to run when people ceased to work; the brook of the middle of the street, flowing with suds, the water used for domestic and for trade purposes, and with everything that would float or flow; when, again, one thinks of the rags and bones, the broken bits and remnants and fragments, the cabbage-stalks and pea-pods and onion-peelings which were thrown into the street, though against the law, and of the lay stalls, where filth and refuse of every kind were thrown to wait the coming of carts, even more uncertain than those of a modern vestry – when, I say, one thinks of all these things, and of the small boundaries of the City, and its crowded people, and of its narrow streets, one understands how there hung over the City day and night, never quite blown away even by the most terrible storm that ever wept o'er pale Britannia, a richly confected cloud of thick and heavy smell which the people had to breathe.