In a city of rumour and of fluctuating fortune, of excess in every form, the London crowd has over the generations acquired an interesting pathology. The crowd is not a single entity, manifesting itself on particular occasions, but the actual condition of London itself. The city is one vast throng of people. “On looking into the street,” one seventeenth-century observer recalled, “we saw a surging mass of people moving in search of some resting place which a fresh mass of sightseers grouped higgledy piggledy rendered impossible. It was a fine medley: there were old men in their dotage, insolent youths and boys … painted wenches and women of the lower classes carrying their children.” A “medley” suggests a show or spectacle, and in the mid-seventeenth century painters began subtly to examine the London crowd. It was no longer an indistinct mass, seen from a safe distance, but a general group of people whose particular features were differentiated.
There was always the noise, as well as the spectacle. “It was very dark, but we could perceive the street to fill, and the hum of the crowd grew louder and louder … about eight at night we heard a din from below, which came up the street continually increasing till we could perceive a motion.” The loud indistinct hum, rising to a roar and accompanied by strange general motion, is the true sound of London. “Behind this wave there was a vacancy, but it filled apace, till another like wave came up; and so four or five of these waves passed one after another … and throats were opened with hoarse and tremendous noise.” There is something crude, and alarming, about this sound; it is as if the voice of the city were primeval, unearthly. The occasion described here, in Burke’s
Yet, for the royalists of the seventeenth century, the throng of London were “the scum of all the profanest rout, the vilest of all men, the outcast of the people … mechanic citizens, and apprentices.” The crowd, in other words, became a tangible threat; it was turning into a mob (the word was coined in the seventeenth century) which might become King Mob.
The salient fact was that London had grown immeasurably larger in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and so obviously the size of its crowds was enlarged. In an atmosphere of religious and political controversy, too, there was no model of civic polity to restrain them. Pepys records a crowd “bawling and calling in the street for a free Parliament and money” and, in the summer of 1667, “it is said that they did in open streets yesterday, at Westminster, cry ‘A Parliament! a Parliament!,’ and do believe it will cost blood.” In the following year there were riots in Poplar and in Moorfields, and the new prison at Clerkenwell was broken open by the people to rescue those who had been imprisoned for the old London custom of pulling down brothels. “But here it was said how these idle fellows have had the confidence to say that they did ill in contenting themselves in pulling down the little bawdy-houses and did not go and pull down the great bawdy house at Whitehall.” This is the authentic radical and levelling voice of the Londoner, newly become a crowd or throng or mob, in the heart of the city. “And some of them last night had a word among them, and it was ‘Reformations and Reducement.’ This doth make the courtiers ill at ease to see this spirit among the people.”
