London: The Biography

There was also constant activity in the “suburbs,” or fields just outside the walls. In the twelfth century the great priories of Clerkenwell and Smithfield, St. John and St. Bartholomew, were established, while in the succeeding century the religious houses of Austin Friars, St. Helen, St. Clare and Our Lady of Bethlehem were also founded. The church of St. Paul’s was rebuilt, and the monastic hospital of St. Mary Spital erected. The white friars and the black friars completed their great religious houses within twenty years of each other in the west of the city. This was the part of London in which there was the most heavy investment, with vacant land being sold on the promise of immediate development while buildings and tenancies were continually being subdivided into more profitable units. Yet the grandest work in all the rebuilding was that of London Bridge. It rose in stone and became the great highway of commerce and communication which has remained upon the same site for almost nine hundred years.

On either side of the southern entrance to that bridge, there now rear two griffins daubed in red and silver. They are the totems of the city, raised at all its entrances and thresholds, and are singularly appropriate. The griffin was the monster which protected gold mines and buried treasure; it has now flown out of classical mythology in order to guard the city of London. The presiding deity of this place has always been money. Thus did John Lydgate write of London in the fifteenth century: “lacking money I might not spede.” Alexander Pope repeated his sentiments in the eighteenth, invoking, “There, London’s voice: ‘Get Money, Money still!’”

“The only inconveniences of London,” Fitz-Stephen wrote, “are, the immoderate drinking of foolish persons, and the frequent fires.” In this he was prophetic as well as descriptive. Other observers at a slightly later date in the twelfth century, however, were more critical. One Yorkshire writer, Roger of Howden, reported that the sons of the wealthier citizens would assemble at night “in large gangs” in order to threaten or assault anyone who passed by. A monk from Winchester, Richard of Devizes, was more colourful in his condemnation: for him London was a place of evil and wrong-doing, filled with the worst elements of every race as well as native pimps and braggarts. He referred to the crowded eating houses and taverns, where dicing and gambling were customary. It is perhaps significant that he also mentioned theatrum, “the theatre,” which suggests that the London appetite for drama was already being satisfied in forms other than those of the mystery or miracle plays staged at Clerkenwell. (The “first” theatres of 1576, the Theatre and the Curtain, may well descend from lost originals.) The monk also provided an interesting survey of the city’s population, comprising in part “pretty boys, effeminates, pederasts.” They are joined by “quacks, belly-dancers, sorceresses, extortioners, night-wanderers, magicians, mimes” in a panoply of urban life that would be celebrated, rather than condemned, in other centuries by writers as diverse as Johnson and Fielding, Congreve and Smollett. It is, in other words, the permanent condition of London.

William Fitz-Stephen noted that “The city is delightful indeed, when it has a good governor.” The word itself might be construed as “leader” or “master,” and has generally been taken to refer to the king. Yet in the years immediately succeeding his chronicle, the term is susceptible to other interpretations. There came a moment, in the last decade of the twelfth century, when it was shouted abroad that “Londoners shall have no king but their mayor!” This short-lived revolution was the direct consequence of a king’s absence on crusade in Palestine and Europe. Richard I had come to London for his coronation and was anointed on the first Sunday in September 1189 “that was marked unlucky in the calendar”; indeed it proved “very much so to the Jews in London, who were destroyed that day.” These cryptic words describe a mass slaughter-called by Richard of Devizes a “holocaust”-which has generally been scantily treated by historians. It has often been said that the principal culprits were those who owed money to the Jews, but it is hard to overestimate the savagery of the London mob; it represented a violent and ruthless society where the metaphor for the native population was that of bees swarming in angry clusters. The multitude are “busie Bees,” according to the sixteenth-century author of The Singularities of the City of London; their clamour, according to Thomas More in the same period, was “neyther loude nor distincke but as it were the sounde of a swarme of bees.” On this occasion the mob of bees stung the Jews and their families to death.