London: The Biography

Yet poverty never leaves London. It merely changes its form and appearance. In a recent survey into “measures of deprivation,” the highest counts were in Southwark, Lambeth, Hackney and Tower Hamlets (formerly Bethnal Green and Stepney); these are precisely the areas where the poor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries congregated. So there is a continuity of need or distress, clustering around significant localities. Asian children now play in Old Nichol Street and Turville Street, and the area is curiously silent after its raucous and terrible life as the “Jago,” the area of Shoreditch immortalised in Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896). Poverty has now become less noisy, and noisome, than in any of its previous incarnations but it is present nonetheless, an intrinsic and instinctive part of the city. Were there no poor, then there would be no rich. Like the women who accompanied eighteenth-century armies, dependent and defenceless, so do the poor accompany London on its progress. It created the poor; it needed the poor, not least for the purpose of cheap or casual labour; now they have become the shadows which follow it everywhere.

CHAPTER 65. Can You Spare a Little Something?

The most visible manifestations of poverty came to London in the form of mendicants and beggars. They were arguing with each other at the end of the fourteenth century. “John Dray in his own person denied the charge, and said that on the day and in the place mentioned he and the said Ralph were sitting together and begging, when John Stowe, a monk of Westminster came by and gave them a penny in common. Ralph received the penny, but would not give Dray his share. A quarrel arose and Ralph assaulted him with a stick.” Such a scene could have occurred centuries before, or centuries after. Where else could a beggar find a better plot than London itself, filled with people and according to legend replete with money? There were religious mendicants, or hermits, mumbling in stone alcoves beside the principal gates of the city; there were lame beggars on street corners; there were prison beggars, calling out for alms from the gratings which held them; there were old women begging outside churches; there were children begging in the street. In the early twenty-first century some of the principal thoroughfares are lined with beggars, young and old; some lie huddled in doorways, wrapped in blankets, and stare up with imploring faces with the customary cry, “Spare any change?” The older of them tend to be drunken vagrants, existing altogether out of time; which is as much to say that they uncannily resemble their counterparts in previous ages of London’s history.

Sir Thomas More recalled the crowds of beggars who swarmed around the gates of the monasteries of London, and in the late medieval city it was common practice for servants of great houses and institutions to gather up the broken bread and meat of a public feast in order to distribute them to the supplicants begging for dole outside the doors. In one of his English works More wrote: “I se somtyme my selfe so many poore folke at Westmynster at the dolys … that my self for the preace of them haue ben fayn to ryde another waye.” But though he would have preferred to ride in another direction, avoiding the press and the smell of them, he alighted and spoke to one of them. When More praised the generosity of the Westminster monks, he drew the retort that it was no thanks to them, since their lands had been given to them by good princes. The beggars were desperate, but not destitute of resentment or a certain type of moral clarity; the position of a beggar in London is that of a supplicant but through the ages it has always been compounded by bitterness or anger at the condition to which he or she has been reduced. Citizens gave them money out of embarrassment as much as pity.