London: The Biography

When the young Thomas More walked in the 1480s from his house in Milk Street to St. Anthony’s School in Threadneedle Street, the city pressed upon him in ways which he never forgot. He passed the Standard in Cheapside, for example, where public and bloody executions took place; children were not spared the spectacle of violent death. He passed churches, painted images of the saints, and the “pissing conduit” as well as the stalls of the fishmongers and butchers; he would have seen the beggars, some of his own age, as well as the prostitutes and the thieves or loiterers set up in the stocks. Like an adult he went dressed in doublet and hose because children were not considered “different” from their elders but simply younger versions of the same thing. At school he learned music and grammar, as well as useful proverbial phrases. “O good turne asket another … Many handes maken lite werke … The more haste, the werse spede.” He was also educated in rhetoric, and was one of those children who competitively exercised their talents in St. Bartholomew’s Churchyard. But the important point is, simply, that he was being trained for a career in the legal administration of London. It was undoubtedly and principally a civic education; he was taught to celebrate order and harmony, and much of his public career was devoted to introducing that order and harmony within the streets which he had known since childhood. Yet those same streets hardened him, as they hardened all their children. His own writing is filled with their slang and demotic; the hardness and theatricality of his own nature, as well as his wit and aggression, sprang from a characteristic London childhood.

London children, therefore, confronted harsh realities. If they were poor they were put out to hard service, working hours as long as their adult companions, but if they were the offspring of affluent families they were enlisted within the households of richer or more eminent citizens; the young Thomas More, for example, entered the household of the archbishop of Canterbury. It was necessary to work, or be punished. The records of Bridewell show that nearly half of its inmates were boys accused of nothing but vagrancy; they were “packte up and punnyshed alyke in Brydewell with rogues, beggers, strompets and pylfering theves.” This harshness is reflected in the commentaries of two Londoners, the late fifteenth-century William Caxton, and the early sixteenth-century Roger Ascham. Caxton complained that “I see that they that ben borne within [the city of London] encrease and prouffyte not lyke theys faders and olders,” while Ascham maintained that “Innocence is gone: Bashfulnesse is banished; moch presumption in yougthe.” These sentiments might be considered as the perpetual rage of age against youth, in the context of the changing generations, but it is interesting to note that they were made at a time when the city was expanding. Between 1510 and 1580 the population rose from 50,000 to 120,000, and it suffered from an excess of turbulence, unrest and energy; it seems likely that the children embodied that spirit in the most obvious and, to the older citizens, alarming way.

The image of the unruly young apprentice was a potent one within the city, for example, and as a result the civic authorities drew up tightly regulated and organised statutes of labour and discipline. Nothing could be allowed to disrupt commercial harmony. The apprentice was bound “and must obey. Since I have undertook to serve my Maister truly for seven years My duty shall both answer that desire And my Old Maister’s profite every way. I prayse that City which made Princes tradesmen.” By the latter comment the speaker meant that even those of noble birth could be enrolled as apprentices of a trade. The commercial instinct was very strong. Apprentices were forbidden to muster in the streets, drink in the taverns, or wear striking apparel; they were, in addition, allowed only “closely cropped hair.” In a similar spirit it was still the custom for children to kneel before their father to acquire his blessing before proceeding with the day’s events. They often dined at a separate, smaller table, and were served after the adults; then they might be questioned about their activities, or their learning at school, or asked to recite a verse or a proverb. Recalcitrant children were often whipped with “the juice of the birch” which is “excellent for such a cure if you apply it but twise or thrice.”