… England’s burgeoning prosperity, carried on a tide of coal and woollens and overseas ventures, and London’s unassailable claim to be England’s only city worth a fart, … with a boom that drew thousands of new dwellers to the capital each year, from across the land and from across the seas. And so the monasteries had at last been cleared, or their better halls kept and taken over for use by the city’s wealthy … grand town houses of the nobility now stretched along the Strand, each with its private stairs down to the Thames, for boats were the fastest and least troublesome way to travel about the crowded city, … and Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange, with its great open piazza and arcaded colonnade and hundred shops for goldsmiths and armourers and financiers, had opened on the east end of Cheapside, heralding London’s arrival as the great centre of European trade and finance it had become.
And with the grandeur of prosperity came the squalor of prosperity, for each year the city burst a bit more to accommodate the destitute and the adventurers and the ambitious and the refugees drawn by hope or impelled by need. Within the city, hovels and tenements jostled with grand houses and merchants’ stalls; just beyond the gates, beyond the reach of the law of the good bourgeois aldermen, the filthy cottages of the poor crowded along the main roads to the north and the east, colonizing the fields where cattle had grazed but a few years before. Farther out, the brick kilns of Islington attracted the more desperate, the homeless unemployed looking for a warm place to sleep while they scrounged for work. And across the river, to the south, the suburb of Southwark teemed with shipwrights and sailors and semi-skilled craftsmen and foreigners and prostitutes, and with the crowds who frequented prostitutes and the bull-baitings and bear-baitings nearby.
The watermen who jammed the Thames calling “Westward ho!” and “Eastward ho!” for fares, and the carriers who carted in water to all who could afford to save themselves from the sickness and death of drinking right from the foul river; and the speculators who divided up some of the old decaying palaces of the wealthy into rude tenements, and the prostitutes, and the bull-baiters, and the butchers, and the tavern keepers, and the prison wardens, all saw little to choose between grandeur and squalor: demand was demand, and prosperity was prosperity.
It was not democracy; but London’s hugger-mugger jumbling together of rich and poor, merchants and seamen, aristocrats and tradesmen, cosmopolitans and vagabonds, foreigners and yokels, meant that all kinds of men crossed paths in London’s streets and alleys and churches. The parish register … lists them all in their succinct catalogue of baptisms, marriages, and burials: knight, parson, stranger; baker, cobbler, carpenter; gentleman, silkweaver, scrivener; merchant, blackamoor, vintner, broker, sugarmaker, porter. And so they all lived upon and walked upon the same streets, and rubbed elbows in the same taverns, and occasionally even the same prisons; and they heard things, and knew things, well outside the conventional stations that Elizabethan society assigned to men.
