London: The Biography

It is in the context of this thriving, colourful and energetic city that we can trace specific events which reveal the dangerous condition of the streets. In court records of the period we read of unnamed beggar women collapsing and dying in the street, of occasional suicides and constant fatal accidents- “drowned in a ditch outside Aldersgate … fell into a tub of hot mash.” We learn that “A poor little woman named Alice was found drowned outside the City wall. No one is suspected … a certain Elias le Pourtour, who was carrying a load of cheese, fell dead in Bread Street … a girl of about eight years old was found dead in the churchyard of St. Mary Somerset. It was believed that she was thrown there by some prostitute. No one is suspected.” Suicide in this age of piety, was considered a token only of madness. Isabel de Pampesworth “hanged herself in a fit of insanity” in her house in Bread Street. Alice de Wanewyck “drowned herself in the port of Dowgate, being non compos mentis.” Drunkenness was general, and there are continual references to citizens falling from their solars to the ground, falling down steps into the Thames, falling off ladders. The reports of these, and other fatalities, are to be found in The London Eyre of 1244 edited by Chew and Weinbaum. Other incidents are redolent of the period. “A certain man named Turrock” was found dead but “it was found that three men were lying in the deceased’s bed when he died … and they are in mercy,” the last phrase denoting that they had been acquitted of any charge. In another instance “Roger struck Maud, Gilbert’s wife, with a hammer between the shoulders and Moses struck her in the face with the hilt of his sword, breaking many of her teeth. She lingered until the feast of St. Mary Magdalen, and then died.”

This litany of death and disaster highlights the crude violence of the city streets; tempers are short, and life is held very cheap. “Henry de Buk killed a certain Irishman, a tiler, with a knife in Fleet Bridge Street, and fled to the church of St. Mary Southwark. He acknowledged the deed, and … abjured the realm. He had no chattels.” The quarrel of three men in a tavern by Milk Street led to a fatality when one was attacked with an “Irish knife” and a “misericord,” a merciful knife which was meant to guarantee a quick exit from this life; the fatally wounded man reached the church of St. Peter in Cheapside, but none of the bystanders offered to assist him.

The various trade guilds openly fought against each other in the streets; a group of goldsmiths, for example, fell upon a saddler and proceeded to lay open his head with a sword, chop off his leg with an axe and generally belabour him with a staff; he died five days later. When apprentices of the law rioted by Aldersgate, a citizen “amused himself” by shooting into the crowd an arrow which killed an unfortunate bystander. A “love-day,” designed to reconcile the coppersmiths and ironsmiths, turned into a general and murderous riot. When a group of unruly men entered a tavern one of the customers enquired, “Who are these people?” and was promptly killed with a sword. There were continual fights in the street, ambushes and arguments over nothing-or over “goat’s wool” as it was known. Games of “dice” or “tables” frequently ended in drunken fights, while it is clear that some of the owners of dicing taverns were engaged in wholesale fraud. It is a curious but instructive fact that the officers of the ward or parish were quick to tend to the religious needs of the maimed or dying, but there were few attempts to administer any form of medical treatment by physician or barber-surgeon. The injured were generally left to recover, or die, as providence intended.

There were many assaults upon women; in the transcripts there are cases of female Londoners being beaten or kicked to death, or callously murdered in premeditated fashion. Lettice accused Richard of Norton, vintner, of “raping and deflowering her” but the case did not proceed to trial. Wife-beating was common and went largely unremarked; but the brutalised women themselves could then in turn become brutal. A drunken woman started howling out insults to certain builders who were working on the corner of Silver Street-she called them “tredekeiles,” which might be translated as “lousy slobs,” and promptly started a fight in which one man was stabbed in the heart. Women could also be exponents of justice, rough even by London standards: when a Breton murdered a widow in her bed, “women of the same parish come owte with stonys and canell dong, and there made an ende of hym in the hyghe strete.”