London: The Biography полностью

One ordinance has remained in force for three centuries with the proclamation that “all the graves shall be at least six feet deep.” All beggars were expelled. Public assemblies were banned. In a city which had shown its manic propensities in a thousand different ways, order and authority had to be imposed directly and harshly. Hence the turning of houses into prisons by “shutting up,” a measure which even at the time was considered by many to be both arbitrary and pointless. But in a city of prisons it was the natural and instinctive response of the civic authorities.

By means of anecdote and circumstantial detail, Defoe provides a Londoner’s vision of a city “quite abandoned to despair.” It is clear from his report that the citizens very quickly reverted to superstition and apparently primitive belief. A genuine madness was in the streets, with prophets and interpreters of dreams and fortune-tellers and astrologers all terrifying “the people to the last degree.” Many, fearful of sudden death, ran out into the streets to confess that “I have been a murderer” and “I have been a thief.” At the height of the plague it was fully believed that “God was resolved to make a full end of the people of this miserable city,” and as a result the citizens became “raving and distracted.” Daniel Defoe knew London very well-perhaps better than any man living in his period-and he declared that “the strange temper of the people of London at that time contributed extremely to their destruction.”

There were “conjurors and witches … quacks and mountebanks” who placed posters all over the city advertising their services and who dispensed pills and cordials and treacles and “plague waters” to the desperate. A list of cures was published at the “Sign of the Angell, neare the Greate Conduit in Cheapside,” and it was possible for “An Excellent Electuary against the plague, to be drunk at the Green Dragon Cheape-side at Sixpence a pint.”

London has always been a centre for healers and doctors, surgeons and magnetisers, of all descriptions. Perhaps its nervous fear has in turn promoted symptoms to be cured by “physic.” In fourteenth-century London, calendars of saints, as well as various charts of astrology, were used to determine the efficacy of particular herbs. Ecclesiastics were the first surgeons. In the thirteenth century the papal authorities banned them for shedding blood. After that date, lay surgeons and physicians were ubiquitous. Not all of them had undergone the usual apprenticeship of ten years, however, and in the early sixteenth century it was proclaimed that “the science and cunning of physick and surgery” were being exercised by “smiths, weavers and women” who used “sorcery and witchcraft” to effect their cures. It was believed, for example, that water drunk from the skull of a hanged man or the very touch of a dead man’s hand were efficacious.

Earlier Londoners admiring “London Stone,” which has been considered alternately as a milestone or a symbol of civic power. It now lies almost unseen in Cannon Street.

John Stow: the great sixteenth-century antiquary whose Survey is the first complete and authentic description of London. His bust still survives in the church of St. Andrew Undershaft.

William I’s charter: this small document marked the king’s authority over London and its citizens, and was one of the first salvoes in the continual struggle between the monarchy and the city.

“Buy my fat chickens,” “Fair lemons and oranges,” “Knives, combs and inkhorns”: images of street sellers, drawn by Marcellus Laroon, c. 1687. They are the ragged emblems of London life, confident or careworn, animated or depressed, as the eternal crowd melts around them.

London, 1560. Note the Bankside bear-baiting arenas in the foreground.

A panorama of London Bridge and the northern areas of London in the sixteenth century. The bridge was then a great thoroughfare, complete with shops, houses and public lavatories. Note the number of churches which Wyngaerde has depicted.

Hollar’s panorama of London is one of the most striking and evocative images of the seventeenth-century city before the Fire. The endless activity on the river is a testimony to London’s commerce, while the streets and buildings are an emblem of its magnificence.

A view of old St. Paul’s, completed by Hollar in the mid-seventeenth century. This was the magnificent church quite destroyed in the Great Fire, a reminder of all that London lost in that conflagration.

The Royal Exchange, forerunner of the Stock Exchange, as depicted by Hollar, is packed with merchants and brokers; they are part of a commercial life which was established as early as the Roman period and has continued ever since.

A detail of a map showing the devastation wreaked by the Great Fire of 1666. Even churches did not survive.