Tudor London Research Articles

Rebuilding St Andrew Undershaft: A Study in Executorial Discretion in Early Tudor London

Using a case study of the early sixteenth-century rebuilding of the London parish church of St Andrew Undershaft, this article focuses on the hitherto unrecognised role played by the executors of London mercantile testators in pre-Reformation church building. Drawing on the rare sets of extant accounts kept by executors in the course of their duties (which would once have been ubiquitous), the details of several ecclesiastical rebuilding projects can be revised, including that of St Andrew’s. It will be argued that this realisation possesses important implications for our understanding of late medieval ecclesiastical building projects, and that executors—sometimes acting on the instruction of the testator but also (more significantly) on their discretion—should be considered a profoundly influential force in shaping the infrastructure of the pre-Reformation City.

Disorder, Riot and Governance in Early Tudor London: Evil May Day, 1517

Abstract On the eve of the May Day festival in 1517, a night of anti-immigrant violence broke out in London. Though pre-modern English historians have frequently invoked Evil May Day, as it came to be called, it has only recently been given concerted scholarly attention. The riot itself was ordinary, one amongst dozens in the first decades of the sixteenth century; it reveals, as a reflection of endemic grievance, a constellation of tensions surrounding labour, immigration, masculine identities, and governance in early Tudor London. More extraordinary, and heretofore not much noticed, was the Crown reaction to the Evil May Day disturbances, on which this article focuses. The insurrectionists were prosecuted for high treason rather than the minor charge of riot; a multi-day pageant of severe justice punctuated by theatrical reprieves followed. At least fifteen were put to death within London’s city walls and there are indications that the final execution toll was much greater, perhaps as high as forty-three. Such a toll following a mild riot could only have been unexpected and shocking, even if in fact ‘only’ fifteen rather than forty or more were executed. This was a message from the Crown both strategically conceived and emotionally driven by the king’s own rage, fury and fear. Though it was the youthful rioters who constituted most of those put to death in the aftermath, the message was meant primarily for the London civic elite, who had dared to question Crown policy and had failed to control the violence in their city.

Shannon McSheffrey and Ad Putter, The Dutch Hatmakers of Late Medieval and Tudor London, with an Edition of their Bilingual Guild Ordinances. Medieval and Renaissance Clothing and Textiles. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2023, 153 pp, 15 b & w ill.

The core of this book is Guildhall Library MS 15838, a never-before-edited work that contains what is most probably the earliest bilingual English-Dutch document in existence. The manuscript contains three texts: the bilingual Ordinances of the Hatmakers (written ca. 1501 though likely recording older usage), followed by an English-only agreement of 1511 between the Hatmakers and Haberdashers, in which the former were amalgamated into the latter, and finally an English oath of the wardens of the Haberdashers of the early to mid-sixteenth century. An edition of these texts comprises the last quarter of the book, accompanied by a selective glossary of the more unfamiliar terms used. The choice of the glossary terms ranges from clarification of middle English phrasing to translation of Dutch dialect terms (where appropriate). Based on a linguistic analysis of the Dutch used, the authors hypothesize that the first scribe who wrote the Ordinances was from the northwest Netherlands on the border with Germany, while the second was from the southwest, possibly Flanders, though both were clearly also fluent in English. The edited text portion does not specifically indicate changes in script, although chapter four fills these potential lacunae admirably, assisted by figures 8–11.

Five Parishes in Late Medieval and Tudor London: Communities and Reforms. Gary G. Gibbs. Microhistories. New York: Routledge, 2019. x + 202 pp. $160.

Five Parishes in Late Medieval and Tudor London: Communities and Reforms. Gary G. Gibbs. Microhistories. New York: Routledge, 2019. x + 202 pp. $160.

Gary G. Gibbs. Five Parishes in Late Medieval and Tudor London: Communities and Reforms. Microhistories. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Pp. 206. $155.00 (cloth).

Gary G. Gibbs. Five Parishes in Late Medieval and Tudor London: Communities and Reforms. Microhistories. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Pp. 206. $155.00 (cloth).

Five parishes in late medieval and Tudor London. Communities and reforms. By Gary G. Gibbs. (Microhistories.) Pp. x + 202 incl. 11 figs and 10 tables. London–New York: Routledge, 2019. £120. 978 0 367 13402 0

Five parishes in late medieval and Tudor London. Communities and reforms. By Gary G. Gibbs. (Microhistories.) Pp. x + 202 incl. 11 figs and 10 tables. London–New York: Routledge, 2019. £120. 978 0 367 13402 0 - Volume 72 Issue 1

:Five Parishes in Late Medieval and Tudor London: Communities and Reforms

:<i>Five Parishes in Late Medieval and Tudor London: Communities and Reforms</i>

Julia Boffey Manuscript and Print in London, c. 1475-1530Manuscript and Print in London, c. 1475–1530. Julia Boffey. London: British Library, 2012. Pp. vi+246.

<i>Julia Boffey</i> Manuscript and Print in London, c. 1475-1530<i>Manuscript and Print in London, c. 1475–1530</i>. Julia Boffey. London: British Library, 2012. Pp. vi+246.

London, 1100-1600: the archaeology of a capital city

1. Introduction 2. Public Buildings and Concerns 3. Castles, Palaces and Royal Houses 4. Houses, Daily Life and Neighbourhoods 5. Selling and Making 6. Religion and Religious Ways of Life 7. Human Health and the Environment 8. London's Region 9. Medieval and Tudor London after 1600

The allocation of merchant capital in early Tudor London

This article is a discussion of the allocation of merchants' capital in early Tudor London among household furnishings, business inventories, debts, orphans' estates, landed property, and other forms of income. Previously, historians had to rely on either goods or income summary assessments in the enrolled subsidy returns to estimate wealth. These newly discovered valuations for 1535 provide quantitative evidence for the enormous importance of credit in trade, and show that merchants, as soon as they could, invested much of their wealth in property.

Langland's Early Modern Identities by Sarah A. KelenLocating Privacy in Tudor London by Lena Cowen Orlin

Langland's Early Modern Identities by Sarah A. KelenLocating Privacy in Tudor London by Lena Cowen Orlin

“What say you to a piece of beef and mustard?”: The Evolution of Public Dining in Medieval and Tudor London

By Shakespeare's day, dining out was commonplace in London, but it was a comparatively recent development in English towns. In the London suburb of Westminster, the home of the royal palace, law courts, and abbey, fast-food cookshops were beginning to serve restaurant-style meals to the general public by the mid-1370s, but it was not until about 1460 that this practice spread to the cookshops, inns, and taverns of the City itself. In the mid-sixteenth century there appeared a new form of public eating-house, the ordinary, which served set meals at a fixed price. In this article, Martha Carlin examines how and why these developments occurred in the capital.

The Wealth of the Trades in Early Tudor London

The rapid expansion of the overseas trade in woollen cloth through London, the city's growing dominance of the import trade of both luxury manufactured goods and raw materials, its growth as a manufacturing centre, and its increase in population brought great prosperity to the merchants, and the companies to which they belonged. Through the tax records for London in the 1520s that identify the citizen's trade, the distribution of wealth by trade, and by ward can be analysed. The records that have survived for the preliminary assessment for the aborted Amicable Grant for 1525 are unique for the information they provide and because they are the only financial records for this tax that have survived anywhere in the country.

English Calvinism and the Crowd: Coriolanus and the History of Religious Reform

Late Tudor London comes alive when Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed biography of William Shakespeare, shadowing its subject, takes to the streets. “The unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling … crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and theaters and churches,” Greenblatt suggests, is a “key to the whole spectacle” of crowds in the playwright's histories and tragedies. To be sure, his little excursions in London left their mark on his scripts, yet he scrupulously sifted his literary sources from which he drew characters and crises onto the stage. He prowled around Plutarch and read Stow and Hollinshed on the wars of succession he chronicled. Nonetheless, “the sight of all those people—along with the noise, the smell of their breath, and their rowdiness and potential for violence—seems,” Greenblatt says, “to have been Shakespeare's first and most enduring impression of the city” in the 1580s and to have been the inspiration for the “greasy aprons” and “gross diets” of “tag-rag people” or rabble in his plays. There, onstage, the glory that was Rome and the grit of fifteenth-century England were “suffused less with the otherness of the past than with the familiar coordinates of Shakespeare's own present.” And familiarity bred contempt for “the sweaty multitude.” “All those people” were terribly, dangerously unpredictable or, as with Jack Cade's crowd in the second part of Henry VI, just plain dangerous. Cade stirred his prole followers to kill the city's more cultured citizens. Sinisterly self-interested tribunes—or so they may have seemed to some playgoers—swayed the crowd in Coriolanus against the play's protagonist, Rome's most noble soldier. And commoners could be “lightly blown to and fro.”

The English Polydaedali: How Gabriel Harvey Read Late Tudor London

The English Polydaedali:How Gabriel Harvey Read Late Tudor London Nicholas Popper Harvey and Gaurico In 1590 Gabriel Harvey read his copy of Luca Gaurico's 1552 Tractatus Astrologicus, a collection of genitures and commentaries for cities and individuals.1 Harvey had spent the previous twenty-five years at Oxford and Cambridge, mastering Greek and Latin, earning renown as a rhetorician, and promoting English letters. He was a well-known partisan of the French Calvinist Peter Ramus, whose works on curriculum reform had sparked vicious [End Page 351] controversies in the English universities. But Harvey read Gaurico far removed from the schools where he had acquired fame and notoriety as an orator and poet. He had recently relocated to London, where he daily faced a dense, active city unlike his native Saffron Walden and the university towns. Nevertheless he read as he always had, carefully recording his reactions in the margins of the printed text, filling blank spaces with his own commentaries on the subjects presented by Gaurico. The notes disclose an experience of reading that intervened in contemporary debates regarding technology, astrology and utility.2 They also place Harvey among a group of scholars in London in the 1590s, such as Francis Bacon and Hugh Plat, who were examining the benefits local artisans might offer the commonwealth and reconsidering the intellectual status of craft knowledge. Harvey read and annotated Gaurico on several occasions, but the particular strain of notes that I will follow, united by a common ink and hand, engages the learning and erudition of Gaurico's subjects.3 Concentrated almost [End Page 352] exclusively in Book Four, which discussed learned men, these annotations evaluate the poets, philosophers, philologists, and others whom Gaurico had canonized as especially learned. There are only spare annotations prior to Book Four. On the title page of Book Two, devoted to churchmen, Harvey observes the quality of the individuals Gaurico presented and details his own method of evaluation: The most excellent Exemplars of this century [are] in Gaurico, and Cardano: Giovio, and Guiccardini. There are as many of the wisest men as of the greatest actors. Still others live, whether inferior, equal, or superior. And it is of interest to every skillful artificer, to know those most outstanding in their class, and the most celebrated professors of all. Certainly it is very profitable to observe exquisitely the most perfect artificers either of the world or of neighboring nations, or at least of your own people, and to consider with most cunning reason what it is, where it comes from, and what is most excellent. But seriously, and solidly, and always to the point, seeing that singular things are efficacious and are useful to polytechnoscopy. It is judicious to avoid all trivial detail, and to consider only the most pregnant theorists and practitioners of operating.4 The notion of a sophisticated form of active knowledge labeled "polytechnoscopy" is the most striking element of this passage. This term seems to have been Harvey's own invention, with no direct precedents; nor was it adopted or used by others after him. Harvey repeatedly referred to polytechnoscopy in his notes. A carefully designed triptych annotation on the title page of Book Four clarifies it as a category uniting practice and knowledge. To the left Harvey wrote, "it is my task to observe the most excellent examples of this age which are useful for polytechnoscopy." On the right, "a polytechnic, polymechanic, polydaedalic, and almost panepistemic book; and likewise sufficiently polychristian. For philologists should be skimmed through; while polytechnics should be examined closely; as I did not only in the Lives of Giovio, but also in those of [End Page 353] Laertius, Eunapius, Philostratus, and others."5 The related Greek descriptors "polymechanic" and "polydaedalic" shed further light on polytechnoscopy. This constellation of terms refers to a method of garnering information by deploying technical knowledge. While not a systematic discipline, its practices—active applicability, craft expertise, observation of experience—constitute a significant realm of learning. In the central panel of the triptych, Harvey notes: [I] compared [this] to Giovio's Elegies of Learned Men. Give me the best man outdoors, and his image at home. For even true life is...

Elizabeth Pickering: The First Woman to Print Law Books in England and Relations Within the Community of Tudor London's Printers and Lawyers

AbstractElizabeth Pickering took over Robert Redman's press when he died in 1540, thus becoming the first woman known to print books in England. Her books tell us simply that she was Redman's widow. Wills and other legal documents in the London archives permit us to know much more. The documents examined here illuminate aspects of her personal life, but also reveal connections between a group of law-printers and lawyers that appear to have influenced the printing of law books in Tudor London. The first part of the essay traces this microhistory of family and community relations. The second half examines the books Elizabeth Pickering published.

:Tudor London: A Map and a View

:<i>Tudor London: A Map and a View</i>

Apprentices, Goldsmiths, and the North in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England

TWO OF THE HUNDREDS if not thousands of northerners who journeyed south to swell the population of burgeoning Tudor London were Martin Bowes from Yorkshire and Thomas Stanley from Cumberland. Each man was bound apprentice in the same company, the Goldsmiths, in which in later life each was to rise to prominence; each man made his career in and came to control the mint in the Tower of London; and each man was well known to the other, not least once they became related through marriage. In what follows these broad similarities are given greater definition, and shaded, in detailed studies of the two men; while some indication of the importance of the North in comparison with the other regions of England to the migration to the metropolis is explored through the apprenticeship records of the Goldsmiths' Company. Sir Martin Bowes (1496/97-1566)* of London, Woolwich, and North Cray, Kent, was born in York in the parish of St Cuthbert, Peaseholme. Despite his later disclaimer that at the time of his going to London at the age of fourteen he had been of 'small substance', he came in fact from a family of some prominence, his greatgrandfather having been mayor and his grandfather sheriff of Y ork.1 His father was pro bably Thomas Bowes, goldsmith, who became free of the city in 1498 and who seems likely to have been related to the man of the same name, who also originated from St Cuthbert's and who went on to pursue an active career at the Tower Mint in London, serving between 1468 and 1476 as attorney to Warden John Wode and then from 1476 until his death on 14 September 1479 as joint warden? In 1513 Bowes was apprenticed to the prominent London goldsmith Robert Amadas, Court supplier and future master of the jewels, under whom he learnt the assaying skills which were to be the mainspring of his highly successful career. Made

Sentiment and Survival: Family and Friends in Late Medieval English Towns

Most studies of medieval English urban society analyze the demographic characteristics of households or reconstruct the life of a single family. This study focuses instead on perceptions of family and household among merchants, using the testamentary evidence of three sizable northern towns. What emerges is a surprising variety of family forms, the consequence of second and third marriages; extensive kin recognition; and an acceptance of wider responsibilities for dependents in and beyond the household. Intermarriage, acting as guardians and executors for fellow merchants, and the creation of networks of affines and in-laws signal early stages of class formation. Comparisons are made with studies of medieval and early Tudor London.

:The Parish in English Life, 1400-1600

Part 1 Contextualizing the parish: introduction, Katherine French et al the English parish in a European perspective, Beat Kumin. Part 2 Parochial sources - their variety, potential and limitations: medieval parish churches in the City of London - the archaeological evidence, John Schofield northern light? parochial life in a dark corner of Tudor England, Margaret Clark churchwardens' accounts of early modern England and Wales - some problems to note, but much to be gained, Andrew Foster popular religion and the parish register, 1538-1603, Will Coster. Part 3 Community action and expectation: parochial fundraising in late medieval Somerset, Katherine French the parish, piety and patronage in late medieval East Anglia - the evidence of roodscreens, Eamon Duffy new duties for the parish community in Tudor London, Gary Gibbs reformation and resistance in Thames/Severn parishes - the dramatic witness, Alexandra F. Johnston and Sally-Beth MacLean. Part 4 Groups within the parish: marginality and the assimilation of foreigners in the lay parish community - the case of Sandwich, Judy A. Ford religious policy and parish conformity - Cratfield's lands in the 16th century, Ken Farnhill St Michael's Gloucester 1540-80 - the cost of conformity in 16th century England, Caroline Litzenberger women and the London parishes, 1500-1620, Claire S. Schen.