Walter Besant - London

In the following chapters it has been my endeavor to present pictures of the City of London – instantaneous photographs, showing the streets, the buildings, and the citizens at work and at play. Above all, the citizens: with their daily life in the streets, in the shops, in the churches, and in the houses; the merchant in the quays and on 'Change; the shopkeeper of Cheapside; the priests and the monks and the friars; the shouting of those who sell; the laughter and singing of those who feast and drink; the ringing of the bells; the dragging of the criminal to the pillory; the Riding of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen; the river with its boats and barges; the cheerful sound of pipe and tabor; the stage with its tumblers and its rope-dancers; the 'prentices with their clubs; the evening dance in the streets. I want my pictures to show all these things. The history of London has been undertaken by many writers; the presentment of the city and the people from age to age has never yet, I believe, been attempted.

The sources whence one derives the materials for such an attempt are, in the earlier stages, perfectly well known and accessible to all. Chaucer, Froissart, Lydgate, certain volumes of the "Early English Text Society," occur to everybody. But the richest mine, for him who digs after the daily life of the London citizen during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is certainly Riley's great book of Extracts from the City Records . If there is any life or any reality in the three chapters of this book which treat of the Plantagenet period, it is certainly due to Riley.

As regards the Tudor period, the wealth of illustration is astonishing. One might as well be writing of the city life of this day, so copious are the materials. But it is not to Shakespeare and the dramatists that we must look for the details so much as to the minor writers, the moralists and satirists, of whom the ordinary world knows nothing.

The reign of Charles II. directs one to the Plague and to the Fire. I was fortunate in finding two tracts, one dealing with the plague of 1603, and the other with that of 1625. These, though they are earlier than Charles II., were invaluable, as illustrating the effect of the pestilence in causing an exodus of all who could get away, which took place as much in these earlier years as in 1666. Contemporary tracts on the state of London after the Fire, also happily discovered, proved useful. And when the Plague and the Fire had been dismissed, another extraordinary piece of good fortune put me in possession of certain household accounts which enabled me to present a bourgeois family of the period at home.

Where there is so much to speak about, one must exercise care in selection. I have endeavored to avoid as much as possible those points which have already been presented. For instance, the growth of the municipality, the rise of the Guilds and the Companies, the laws of London, the relations of the City to the Sovereign and the State – these things belong to the continuous historian, not to him who draws a picture of a given time. In the latter case it is the effect of law, not its growth, which is important. Thus I have spoken of the pilgrimizing in the time of Henry II.; of the Mysteries of that time; things that belonged to the daily life; rather than to matters of policy, the stubborn tenacity of the City, or the changes that were coming over the conditions of existence and of trade. Again, in Plantagenet London one might have dwelt at length upon the action taken by London in successive civil wars. That, again, belongs to the historian. I have contented myself with sketching the churches and the monasteries, the palaces and the men-at-arms, the merchants and the workmen.

Again, in the time of George II., the increase of trade, which then advanced by leaps and bounds, the widening of the world to London enterprise, the part which London took in the conquest of India and the ejection of France from North America belong to history. For my own part I have preferred to show the position, the influence, and the work of the Church at a time generally believed to be the deadest period in the whole history of the Church of England. This done, I have gone on to illustrate the day-by-day life of the citizens, with the prices of things, the management, and the appearance of the City.

One thing remains to be said. Mr. Loftie, in his History of London (Stadford), first gave the world a reconstruction of the ground – the terrain – of London and its environs before ever a house was erected or an acre cleared. The first chapter of this book – that on Roman London and After – is chiefly due to a study of this map, and to realizing what that map means when applied to the scanty records of Augusta. This map enabled me to recover the years which followed the retreat of the Romans. I cannot allow this chapter to be called a Theory. It is, I venture to claim for it, nothing less than a Recovery.

The only real authorities for the events which took place in Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries are Gildas and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle . There are other writers – Ethelwerd, for instance, who copied the Chronicle , and adds nothing; and Nennius, whose work, edited by one Mark the Hermit in the tenth century, was found in the Vatican. The first edition was published in London in the year 1819, in the original Latin, by the Rev. William Gunn. Nennius gives a brief account of King Arthur and his exploits, but he affords little or no information that is of use to us. The work of Richard of Cirencester is extremely valuable on account of its topography; it is also interesting as the work of the first English antiquary. But he belonged to the fourteenth century, and has added nothing to the history, of which he knew no more – less, indeed – than we ourselves can discover. The book named after Geoffrey of Monmouth is not worth a moment's serious consideration. In Bede's Ecclesiastical History passages may be found which throw side lights on this period, but they are few.

Gildas, called Badonicus, is supposed to have been born in or about the year 520, in Wales. A great mass of legend has collected about the name of Gildas. He was the son of a British kinglet; his three-and-twenty brothers fought under King Arthur. He himself preached, taught, and in the matter of miracles was greatly blessed. He wrote – if he did write – about the year 560, and is therefore contemporary with the events of which he speaks. His book contains a vast quantity of rhetoric to a very small amount of history. Unfortunately for him, he was called by his admiring fellow-monks, in his lifetime, Sapiens – the Wise. Perhaps, in order to live up to this designation, he was fain to assume the garb and language of a prophet, and, with what he thought prophetic force, which we now perceive to be ecclesiastical inflation, he proceeded to admonish princes and people of their sins. Every age, to the ecclesiastical prophet as to the secular satirist, is an age of unbounded profligacy; of vice such as the world has never before witnessed; of luxury advanced to heights hitherto untrodden; of license, wantonness, riot unbridled and unparalleled, insomuch that the city of Jerusalem, even when under the soft influences of Ahola and Aholibah, were really righteous and pure in comparison. No doubt Gildas lived in a most trying and most disappointing time. Things went wrong, and things went steadily from bad to worse. His people were defeated and driven continually westward; they could not even hold together and fight side by side against the common enemy; religion was forgotten in the fierce struggles for life, and in the fiercer civil dissensions. As for the enemy, Saxon, Angle, or Jute, all were alike, in that none had the least reverence for priest or for Church; everywhere fighting, defeat, and massacre. Yet one cannot but think that a lower note might have been struck with greater advantage; and now that it is impossible to learn how far the prophet's admonitions brought repentance to his kings, one regrets that a simple statement of the events in chronological order as they occurred was not thought useful or desirable in a historical work. Would you hear how the Sapient addresses kings? Listen. He is admonishing for his good the King of North Wales – Cuneglass by name: