Lost Londons: Change and Control in the Capital City 1550 - 1660
by Paul Griffiths

Paul Griffiths is Associate Professor of Early Modern British Cultural and Social History at the History Department, Iowa State University, USA. He has researched in depth his chosen field and has written extensively based on his researches. He is a past winner of The Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize.

This is as Griffiths himself admits a book on crime, related punishment and social control. Griffiths chooses his title Lost Londons because he sees the city as needing to be constantly re-imagined, as one change followed hard on the heels of another. The London under discussion here is the city itself, that well known square mile, much of which was inside the old city walls. In modern terms roughly from the Temple to Tower Bridge and from the Thames to Clerkenwell Rd. There is little doubt that London was dynamic, it ever was so. The population in 1500 to 1600 was 200,000 ; 1600 to 1650 it was 375,000. In the seventeenth century the crowd spilled out over the city walls to the extent that 90,000 now lived in the East End while 18,500 lived in the West End. Griffiths suggests that the housing density was 95 per acre inside the walls and 15 per acre outside. Even the Guildhall was hemmed in; the noise from a next door brothel kept the Lord Mayor awake at night.

It is estimated that 1 in 6 of the English had spent some time in London, often seeking their fortunes. All dynamic events bring about uncertainty as people worry about the unknown and of losing control. London's ruling elites held the city in check and kept it stable, thanks to co-operation between them; barely 1 in 5 of the city's occupants were citizens. The great unwashed showed little, if any, deference to the ruling elites, the latter being subjected to verbal abuse and filthy missiles as they travelled through the streets in their carriages and chairs; such actions could earn the perpetrators a sound whipping a cart's tail.

To a great extent this is the story of Bridewell. Originally St Bride's Well it was a former royal palace given to the city by Edward VI in 1552. Along with Bethlem (which was concerned with the insane), Christ's (orphans and schooling), St Thomas's and St Bartholomew's (both sickness), Bridewell was one of the five London hospitals each giving something to the overall design of battling sickness, sin and vagrancy. Bridewell's speciality was the curbing of vagrancy and vice. Bridewell was founded by Royal Charter and was never backed by any parliamentary act, a fact which always caused some discord and forced its governors to tread a little carefully, especially when sentencing people to transportation; the transported always had to agree with their sentence. Bridewell was situated where the Fleet river poured its filth into the Thames. No trace of remains today but it lies under the Unilever building hard by Blackfriars bridge.

In the founding royal charter the word 'discretion' was used, this terminology virtually gave Bridewell's governors 'carte blanche' . The hospital in the form of its governors was police, judge, jury, jailer and punisher. It was in the vanguard of the push to secure reformation, stability, order, control, surveillance and discipline. To this end a good whipping was often administered which had an effect on other than the immediate subject for the sound of the whipping and victims cries long into the night 'were acoustic cues to toe the line' (p253). Whipping was the punishment handed out for the most menial crime, crimes such as helping a pregnant pauper, an action which these days may well be applauded. The yards of Bridewell ran red with the blood of the poor.

Control was all important to Tudor London's elites; there was no wandering in and out of the city and in addition at night the gates were shut and the curfew bell tolled. Elites were always wary of vagrants or 'vacabonds' and to travel the country, legally, a 'passport' or letter was required. Anyone at large during the night without reason or permission was potentially criminal and suspicious; even Pepys was careful not to run foul of the watch when returning home after a late night drinking session. I was a little surprised that, in view of his dealing with control in some detail, Griffiths didn't mention that in 1552, for the first time, English alehouses had to be licensed; perhaps such a law did not apply to the City.

Griffiths is at pains to point out that policing in Tudor England was not the joke as portrayed in Shakespeare's comedies. To keep control various types of police were used, namely Marshals, Deputies, Constables, Beadles, Warders and finally Bellmen. the latter watched out for fire or trouble and rang the time. All in all approximately 800 men policed the square mile in 1643 more than the 767 officers to be found in 2000- 1. Police knew their patch and its citizens knew their 'constable'.

Many archives survive from this period, as Griffiths says (p418) 'London was a paper city in a paper state described in maps, censuses, and many more written records'. Clerks literally wrote everything down providing at the same time a cross referencing system. These records were consulted constantly when criminal cases came to justice; the defendant would have his story and background, even his name, checked by the court.

Griffiths has consulted such records in great detail, rather too deeply some might say. He, personally, has looked at some 30,000 cases and together with Archer's work this means 50,277 cases, when suspects were depicted in labels. Griffiths began work on Lost Londons when he was a research fellow at Clare College Cambridge in 1991 and his bibliography, thirty nine pages long, reflects this fact. His examples to prove a point are considerable. However, is it really necessary to provide 25 examples on one page (p148) to show that some were making a living from crime? His referencing in the form of footnotes is again somewhat overdone. On page 12 the footnote is longer than the text; page 30 a quote from James Howell is referenced together with notation on some twenty other authors. The footnote for Erasmus's remark 'outward honesty of the body cometh of the soul well composed and ordered' runs to 24 lines. I always thought the idea of referencing was to allow other scholars to check the accuracy of the reference not to provide a list of further reading.

Griffiths has produced a very good narrative work, but I wanted to know more of what Professor Griffiths himself thought. I wanted more of because of p then q, I wanted more of Griffiths thinking of the social stratification of London. Make no mistake this is a good book that questions previously accepted notions. Such ideas as prosecutions were of private not public origin or that the police force consisted of dim witted constable serving on the basis of 'Buggins's turn'. He opens up to us the world of crime and control in what was the greatest city in the world. I am sure that the 'medieval history scholar' will find it an excellent reference work.

Don Vincent