London: The Biography

Yet the women of London were also distinguished by other characteristics. The daughters of wealthier households, together with some of those from the merchant class, were sent to elementary schools; we may presume that a significant number of women could read and write, or owned manuscripts, and might deal with the males of the household on terms of practical if not theoretical equality. A study of wills and testaments, Medieval London Widows, 1300-1500, edited by C.M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton, describes them as “verbose, bossy, disorganised, affectionate and anecdotal” with a concern for distant relatives and distinct expressions of affection for household servants. They also reveal “networks of female friendships and loyalties” which stretched across London.

Most of the early descriptions of London women, then, suggest that they were very much part of the city. One German traveller of the fifteenth century entered a London tavern and a woman, presumably the landlady, kissed him fully on the lips and murmured: “Whatever you desire, that we will gladly do.” This is not quite the docility and propriety expected of women of a patriarchal culture, but it supports evidence from other sources of women who seem to be filled with all the energy and licentiousness of the city.

Representations of women in drama, from the scold to Noah’s wife, display characteristics of aggression and violence. As mentioned earlier, in the Chronicles of London for 1428, there is recorded the fate of a Breton in London who murdered a widow “an as he wente hys wey where as he hadd i-do this cursed dede, women of the same parissh come owte with stonys and canell dong, and there made an ende of hym in the hyghe strete, so that he wente no ferther notwithstondynge the constables and othere men allso, the wiche hade hyum undir gouernans to condite hym forwarde; ffor ther whas a gret manye of them, and no mercy ne no pity.” This scene, which was “without Algate” and thus on the site of the present Whitechapel High Street, is of some interest. A large party of women, aroused by the murder of one of their own, overpower or intimidate a group of men surrounding the murderer; then they stone him to death. This is not a city of order and subordination, but one in which some communal or egalitarian feminine spirit seems to be at work. The women were also without “mercy ne no pity,” which in turn suggests that they were in some sense brutalised or rendered callous by their existence in London.

In an early sixteenth-century account it is revealed that “the women have much more liberty than perhaps in any other place.” The same foreign observer reports that “they also know well how to make use of it, for they go dressed out in exceedingly fine clothes, and give all attention to their ruffs and stuffs, to such a degree indeed that, as I am informed, many a one does not hesitate to wear velvet in the streets, which is common with them, whilst at home perhaps they have not a piece of dry bread.” There was a sixteenth-century proverb that England, for which we may safely substitute London, was hell for horses, purgatory for servants but a paradise for women. One of the central images of the age is that of Dame Alice More berating her husband, Thomas More, for his stupidity in resisting the king’s will. Her remarks to him were often sharp and occasionally sarcastic, but he received them cheerfully enough. Perhaps only in London could that intense spirit of equality be sustained.