London: The Biography

William Fitz-Stephen preferred to emphasise the energy and vivacity of the youthful citizens, how they delighted in cockfighting and in “the well-known game of foot-ball” with an inflated pig’s bladder used as a ball. On the holy days of summer, the children engaged in leap-frogging, wrestling and “slinging javelins beyond a mark”; in winter, they indulged in snowballing and ice-skating, using the long shin bones of animals rather like the skateboards of the late twentieth century. Fitz-Stephen is at pains to emphasise the elements of competition and aggression in these games, to complement his description of the valiant spirit which marked out London from other cities. The “lay sons of the citizens rush out of the gate in crowds … and there they get up sham fights, and exercise themselves in military combat.” Young children were often given bows and arrows with which to practise their skills, since one day they might be required to defend their city. They were already “Londoners,” with a strong sense of civic identity and pride. In similar fashion schoolboys were taught how to engage in dispute and rhetorical combat one with another, while “the boys of the different schools wrangle with each other in verse, and contend about the principles of grammar or the rules of the perfect and future tenses.” In well-known public areas, such as the churchyard of St. Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, the children would mount upon makeshift stages and compete in “rhetorical harangues” or recitations. Here lies one of the origins of London drama but aptly, in Fitz-Stephen’s account, the elements of combat and aggression are compounded with spectacle and theatricality. In this respect the children of London are faithful images of the city itself.

One fourteenth-century bishop reproved “impudent youths” who scribbled in the margins of books, while Robert Braybroke in his “Letter of Excommunication” on 9 November 1385 complained of boys “good for nothing in their insolence and idleness, instigated by evil minds and busying themselves rather in doing harm than good.” They “throw and shoot stones, arrows and different kinds of missiles at the rooks, pigeons, and other birds nesting in the walls and porches of the church. Also they play ball inside and outside the church and engage in other destructive games there, breaking and greatly damaging the glass windows and the stone images of the church.”

A baker’s boy was carrying a basket of loaves up the Strand; he passed the bishop of Salisbury’s palace, and one of the bishop’s servants stole a loaf. The boy raised a “hue and cry” and a crowd of children, apprentices and other citizens engaged in what almost became a full-scale riot. Children were, in other words, part of the turbulent life of the turbulent city. The administrative reports of the fourteenth century record “a boy climbing up to a gutter to retrieve his lost ball; of others playing on a heap of timber when one fell and broke his leg; and of another, a schoolboy returning over London Bridge after dinner, who must needs climb out and hang by his hands from a plank on the side of the bridge, and fell in and was drowned.” They played “hoodman blind,” now known as blind man’s buff, and “cobnutte,” which is the present game of “conkers.”

There were rule-books for schoolboys which by indirection preserve the essence of a London childhood in the medieval city, with injunctions concerning “no running, jumping, chattering, or playing, no carrying of sticks, stones or bows, no tricks upon passers by; no laughing or giggling if anyone were to read or sing minus bene, rather less than well.” In turn there survive doggerel poems by schoolboys about their masters:

I would my master were an hare …

For if he were dead I would not care.

In a city where everyone was competing for notice, the children also clamoured. But they also seemed drawn to the forbidden places of London, as if in defiance against its threat. It is the spirit of impudence, or mockery, which has always been noticeable among London children. In the 1950s and 1960s they played a game called “Last Across” in which they would run across the road in imminent danger of being knocked down by cars. It is a question of meeting, and beating, the city on its own terms.