London: The Biography

It is indicative of the close watch kept upon all citizens that there were also regulations about private and social arrangements. Every aspect of life was covered by an elaborate network of law, ordinance and custom. No “stranger” was allowed to spend more than one day and a night in a citizen’s house, and no one might be harboured within a ward “unless he be of good repute.” No lepers were ever allowed within the city. No one was permitted to walk abroad “after forbidden hours”-that is, after the bells or curfew had been sounded-unless he or she wished to be arrested as a “night-walker.” It was also forbidden that “any person shall keep a tavern for wine or for ale after the curfew aforesaid … nor shall they have any persons therein, sleeping or sitting up; nor shall anyone receive persons into his house from out of a common tavern, by night or by day.”

The curfew itself was rung at nine o’clock in the summer months, earlier in the darkness of winter. When the bell of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside rang curfew, followed by the bell of St. Martin’s, St. Laurence’s and St. Bride’s, the taverns were cleared, the apprentices left their work, the lights dimmed as rush or candle were put out, the gates of the city were locked and bolted. Some of these apprentices believed that the clerk of St. Mary-le-Bow kept them at work too long by ringing too late and, according to John Stow, a rhyme was issued against

Clerke of the Bow bell with the yellow lockes

For thy late ringing thy head shall have knocks.

To which the offending clerk responded:

Children of Cheape, hold you all still,

For you shall have the Bow bell rung at your will.

This exchange testifies to the close relationship between all the members of the city so that everyone, for example, knew the bell-ringer with yellow hair. But the most striking image is perhaps that of the dark and silent city, barricaded against the outer world.

That silence was sometimes punctuated by screams, shouts and cries. It was the citizens’ duty to “raise hue and cry” against any transgressor of the peace, for example, and any citizen “who comes not on such hue and cry raised” was heavily fined. London was a city where everyone was watching everyone else, for the sake of the spirit of the commune, and there are numerous reports of neighbours “crying shame” at the ill treatment of an apprentice or the abuse of a wife.

Yet it is to be expected that, in a mercantile culture, the greatest body of law should be concerned with commercial transactions. There are many hundreds of regulations in this period, controlling every aspect of trading life. It was ordered that the vendors of certain products like cheese and poultry “shall stand between the kennels in the market of Cornhulle so as to be a nuisance to no one” with other trades distributed in various sites in the city. No vendor could “buy any victuals for resale before prime rung at St. Paul’s.” From the twenty regulations applying to bakers alone, it might be noted that a baker of “tourte” or pan-baked bread was not permitted to sell white bread; every baker also was commanded to leave “the impression of his seal” upon each loaf of bread. It was decreed that “all kinds of fish brought into the City in closed baskets shall be as good at bottom of the basket as at the top,” and that “no stranger ought to buy of a stranger.”

Fishermen laboured under hundreds of regulations about what they could catch, how they could catch, and where they could catch; the size and mesh of their nets were carefully measured. There was also an elaborate system of tolls and taxes, so that “Every man who brings cheese or poultry if the same amounts to fourpence halfpenny shall pay one halfpenny. If a man on foot brings one hundred eggs or more he shall give five eggs. If a man or woman brings any manner of poultry by horse and lets it touch the ground” he or she will pay more. It was an intricate system but its purpose was simply to ensure that the inhabitants of the city were adequately fed and clothed. It attempted both to pre-empt the extortionate demands of those who bought and sold, and to protect the rights of the citizens to trade in the city at the expense of “aliens” or “strangers.” The regulations had a further primary purpose, in the efforts to systematise trading so that there was little possibility of false measures, adulterated food or shoddy manufactures.