The House by the Thames (7 page)

What was Southwark like in the early seventeenth century, in the days before the Commonwealth drove out the Bishop of Winchester from his palace, before the Fire gutted the City opposite, before Ludgate Hill, Holborn, Charing Cross and Westminster began to coalesce into a greater metropolis? London Bridge was still crowded with houses (some of which, near the north end, would not escape the Fire either), and the heads of the executed were still displayed on poles over the gatehouse at the southern end: you can see them on Visscher's panorama. Where Borough High Street ran down from the bridge there was a row of butchers' shops, interspersed with the odd tailor and shoe-maker. Since butchers did their own butchery then, there must often have been cattle or sheep in the yards and enclosures adjoining; the problem of smelly offal cast carelessly into the river, as most rubbish was, became sufficient of a nuisance later in the century for rules to be made about disposing of it only at night and by an outgoing tide. Naturally, all streets and lanes were dirty: in fact the chaplain to the Venetian Ambassador, visiting in 1617, remarked particularly in London on ‘a sort of soft and very stinking mud, which abounds at all seasons'. He did add, however, that this served ‘as excellent manure, rich and black as thick as ink, and which is conveyed at small cost by the innumerable carts which are bound to clean the streets'. In Southwark, the ubiquitous presence of hogs must have increased the dirt, although these creatures also did some useful scavenging. Hogs being allowed to run wild in the area of Bankside continued to be a matter of contention up to the late eighteenth century.

Not till after the Restoration did London or its suburbs have any form of public street lighting. But the dark lanes of medieval London had seen some progress by Elizabeth's day: each individual householder was now required to hang out a lantern in the winter months, except at the full moon. By the early seventeenth century all foreign visitors remarked how busy London was with modern trade. There were small shops everywhere, and a mass of wheeled vehicles in the streets, from handcarts to great waggons, were replacing the immemorial figures of the pedlar and the packhorse. Southwark participated in the general boom: as well as the butchers in the High Street there were grocers, saddlers, linen-drapers, barber-surgeons, hatters, pastry-cooks, poulterers and many other businesses, including the string of taverns. (John Harvard, who would leave in 1637 for the new world across the Atlantic, after another round of plague had killed most of his family, was the son of a Southwark butcher who also kept the Queen's Head in the High Street. He prospered in America: the university he founded there is his monument.) There was an old established market in the High Street on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, till two in the afternoon in winter and three in summer. It sold fruit, vegetables, rabbits, cheeses and the like, brought in by country people, who were frequently in dispute with local people for taking away their custom. The Borough Market, which flourishes today under the booming railway arches that crowd close to St Saviour's, is the direct descendant of the ancient market.

But prosperous and lively as Southwark was, it was by the same token becoming more built up in a piecemeal way, with new alleys and ‘rents'. The day of the old, grand houses was passing: even before the bleak time of the Commonwealth, mansions were beginning to be partitioned into tenements. In one of them was established a soapworks which was soon to be one of the biggest in London. Glassworks, too, were appearing. Since the City authorities were not keen on smoky businesses within their own district, Bankside was an obvious location; there was already a tradition of small-scale glass-blowing in the Borough. The Bishop was still in his palace when a glassworks was set up within its precincts, in an ex-brewhouse, the forerunner of others that were to open at several places along Bankside later in the century.

While the theatres played and the inns were full of City folk come over to enjoy the late afternoon sun, as office workers do today, Bankside's industrial destiny still lay in the future. But the future, by the time of Charles I, was just beginning to signal its coming.

THE RIVER THAMES
runs through this story as a constant presence, but its role changes over the centuries. After the Tudor period it was no longer a defensible barrier against foreign or home-grown marauders; instead, it became London's open space, a combination of highway and arena. Elaborate pageants were staged on its surface, especially by London Mayors. An early seventeenth-century show, which celebrated the burgeoning trade with the East India Company's newly established ports, featured five artificial floating islands complete with exotic fruit and spice trees. The great world was opening up and the Thames was England's gateway to it.

But essentially the river was the main road running between one end of the City and the other, or between the cities of London and Westminster, or up river further to Richmond, or down river to Deptford and Greenwich and eventually to the sea. The town streets were narrow, either muddy or dusty according to the weather, choked in many places with stalls and cryers of wares, with workmen plying their trades and with clamorous crowds. Coaches were a rarity before the seventeenth century, and when they did begin to replace horseback as a means of transport they were at first boxy, unsprung contraptions that jolted their passengers over the uneven stones. At most times of year the river offered a smoother and quicker ride, and boats rowed by watermen were the standard means of transport. The Venetian chaplain who spent a period in London towards 1617 might, you would think, be used to such craft, yet he like several other foreign visitors seems to have been charmed by the efficency of the whole system:

‘… the boatmen wait … in great crowds, each one eager to be the first to catch one, for all are free to choose the ship they find most attractive and pleasing, while every boatman has the privilege on arrival of placing his ship for best advantage for people to step into.' (In fact other evidence suggests that customers were sometimes greeted with a cacophony of ‘I am the next man – take me' or the same phrase in Latin.) ‘The wherries are charmingly upholstered and embroidered cushions are laid across the seats, very comfortable to sit on and lean against, and generally speaking the benches only seat two people next to one another; many of them are covered in, particularly in rainy weather or fierce sunshine. They are extremely pleasant to travel in and carry one or a couple of boatmen.'

Wealthy families, especially those living in the Thameside houses along the Strand, would employ their own watermen in livery. Those who made do with the watermen who plied for hire would often have their favoured men among them, with whom they came to regular terms. Samuel Pepys, who lived and worked near Tower Hill, seems to have had such an arrangement. Others used the boats as communal taxis, joining up with strangers going in the same direction. ‘Eastward ho!' a waterman would cry, meaning that he was going down river, or ‘Westward ho!' when he was bound for Westminster or beyond, and prospective passengers would form groups accordingly. But the boats were also used to ferry people from one shore to the other, as a logical alternative to London's one bridge whose narrow right-of-way was threaded between the houses crowded on top of it. You could take a diagonal route from St Paul's, say, to Lambeth, or from Bankside to the Strand; individual watermen tended to have their own set routes.

Journeys that involved going under one of the nineteen arches of London Bridge – ‘shooting the bridge' – were the ones that required particular skill and judgement, for the current there was compressed between wooden ‘starlings' which were built out further and further to protect the stone work. In fact they created a huge problem in their own right, for any unwise move could drive a boat against them. They also choked the river flow, so that at certain turns of tide the water would build up and an artificial drop was created, like that in a lock. Accidents happened, and nervous customers in every generation avoided making that particular trip, preferring to get out, walk round the bridge, and rejoin their boatman on the other side.

On Bankside alone, between the Royal Barge House at the end of Paris Garden and London Bridge under a mile distant, there were fifteen stairs or other docking places, including Mason stairs just to the west of the Cardinal's Hat Inn and Goat stairs a little way to the east. Large numbers of men followed the thriving trade of rowing people about: an Elizabethan survey indicated nearly a thousand of them, and by the end of the century Stow reckoned there were many more. At that date the population of St Saviour's parish was about twelve hundred, of which two hundred and one were stated to be watermen, many of whom lived on Bankside. The one whose name has come down to us, and who has become an emblematic figure for all his kind, apparently lived there: at any rate he was a parishioner of St Saviour's, had friends living near the Hope Theatre and many contacts among the actors. He is said to have plied his trade regularly between Bankside, Whitehall and Old Swan stairs, which was a major boat station just by London Bridge. This was John Taylor, the self-styled ‘water poet'.

He was born in Gloucester in 1578, made his way to London like many other people in that time of expansion, became an apprentice waterman, then a freeman of the Watermen's Company. He was forcibly induced to join the Crown ships during the Spanish Wars, but he returned safe and full of travellers' tales. With his production of rhymes, his polemic pamphlets, his noisily proclaimed friendships with important people, his publicised trips around England and to the Continent, and his insistent self-promotion, it is tempting to see him as the forerunner of the archetypal chatty taxi-driver and card – ‘Had that Will Shakespeare in the back of my boat the other day … Want to know what my good friend Mr Henslowe said to me? …' But with his undoubted intelligence, nerve and entrepreneurial flair he did also typify in a more general way a skilled profession that was then at its zenith. As a prominent Waterman (he became an Overseer and spokesman for the Company) he prefigures another of the same Company a hundred years later, who was to become a key figure in the story of 49 Bankside.

The Watermen's Company was established in 1555, in an attempt to regulate and raise the status of what had always been considered rather a rough profession. Watermen, having customers literally at their mercy, had had a reputation for over-familiarity, smart backchat, swearing, spreading scandalous stories, extortionate fare-demands and also for fighting and drunkenness. John Taylor maintained it was frequently members of the public who treated the watermen badly: parties of drunken, upper-class young men, he said, would hire a boat, have themselves ferried, tell the boatman to wait for them and then not return. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the Company had acquired its own coat of arms and Watermen's Hall was built in Upper Thames Street. A proper system of a seven-year apprenticeship was established and a fare-scale was laid down. John Taylor, with his aspirations to literary fame and to a general rise in status, and his championship of the watermen's cause, was highly representative of the new, meritocratic world that was being born in his lifetime, against a background of revolution and change, out of the wreck of a feudal society.

He was a man of radical views in some ways, puritanical about Sin but a great eater, drinker and merrymaker, a fervent egalitarian but also a convinced royalist. He became one of the watermen ceremonially appointed to James I and helped row the Queen's barge to Oxford, although by that time most of the daily rowing of his own boat was done by apprentices. In the early seventeenth century London had for the first time in history a large number of inhabitants who could read. It was for this public that Taylor poured out writing of all kinds: satires on current life, joke books, religious reflections, accounts of his own travels, scripts for water pageants, tirades against the new hackney coaches – which he actually managed to get banned for a generation from taking passengers on short journeys that began and ended within two miles of the river. But his most fervent ambitions, social as well as personal, were invested in his poems, and in plays which were never particularly successful. A showman himself by nature – he and a vintner friend once rowed down the Thames in a boat made of paper, and later made a much-publicised trip down the Rhine and the Elbe – he cultivated the actors of Bankside just as eagerly as he did the great and good of London. John Aubrey, who was familiar with some of the cleverest men of his time, described John Taylor as ‘very facetious and diverting company'. Thomas Dekker, the playwright, called him ‘the ferryman of heaven', but there may have been a touch of irony in this description.

This life strung out, literally as well as metaphorically, on the moving waters between the two constrasting banks, periodically brought Taylor into trouble. In 1613, when he had just been appointed a King's waterman, the Bankside theatres were going temporarily through a bad time: Burbage's Globe had caught fire and burnt during a performance of
Henry VIII
, though it was soon rebuilt, and the Rose was out of action too. There were evidently fears among the watermen that the theatres would migrate back to the northern shore (as indeed they eventually did, though not till after the Restoration) and that the watermen would thereby lose a significant part of their trade. Espousing their cause, Taylor petitioned the King to issue a prohibition against theatres on the City side. Maybe he thought this would also please the Bankside theatre set, but it did not. The players did not care where they were located provided the show went on, and in any case, under royal patronage, the profession was becoming more respectable: theatre-people could now aspire to be gentlemen, and why not in London proper? This was the point at which a group of them, including Philip Henslowe, took Taylor to supper at the Cardinal's Hat. No doubt, in the course of a convivial evening, he charmed them again and swore that he would do nothing against their wishes. The petition to the King failed anyway: there was no particular reason for the King to agree to it, and probably Taylor had misled his fellow watermen by boasting of his royal appointment and his friendships in high places. But many watermen believed that his actor friends had bribed him not to press his suit, and they were not pleased with him.