TH

JOHN STOW—I

HIMSELF

HE history of the past is revealed to us most clearly in the highest and the lowest. Kings and rufflers, ministers and thieves, willingly surrender their secrets to the art of biography. The prowess of Sir Richard Grenville is as familiar to the world as the wisdom of Burleigh. There is none who may not read, if he will, the life of Moll Cutpurse, or delight in the fustian eloquence of many a last dying speech. It is only the simple virtue of the citizen which finds no place in the archives-of the citizen who opens his stall, follows his craft, and prays that he may become an alderman. In the career of such a one there is little chance of scandal or surprise. He does not play for the larger stakes of life. He is not asked to rescue maidens in distress, or to batter the walls of impregnable fortresses. Even if he venture beyond the limit of the law, he commits his robberies from the discreet shelter of a comfortable office. It is not strange, then, that the Elizabethan dramatists either ignore him or turn him to ridicule. In their eyes he is a fair victim for the lash of the

satirist or the greed of a broken man of pleasure. The Gallipots and Yellowhammers of Middleton are extravagant caricatures. Simon Eyre, Dekker's famous shoemaker, is too nobly picturesque for truth, and even the citizen and his wife, who pleasantly interrupt 'The Knight of the burning pestal,' display so vain a simplicity as to surpass belief. Indeed were it not for the accident which made John Stow a chronicler as well as a tailor, we might lose our time in idle conjecture. But John Stow stands before us, honest, pedantic, irascible, and it is our own fault if we refuse his acquaintance. His own habit of autobiography has stimulated a general curiosity; scholars have treated him with a respect denied to others of his kind; and the last of his editors, Mr. C. L. Kingsford, has accepted the injunction of Thomas Hearne, and reprinted Stow's Survey of London 1 as a 'venerable original.'

Born in 1825, John Stow belonged to a family of citizens. His grandfather was an honest tallowchandler, who supplied the Church of St. Michael in Cornhill with lamp-oil and candles, and his father, inheriting the great melting-pot with all instruments belonging thereto,' inherited also the same privileges. His youth, like his age, was spent in the city. The wards of London were the boundaries

1 A Survey of London by John Stow. Reprinted from the text of 1603, with Introduction and Notes by Charles Lethbridge Kingsford. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press. To Mr. Kingsford's Introduction I am deeply indebted.

of his universe. He saw in his mind's-eye no other river than the Thames. And London in the sixteenth century was a real town, of narrow and absorbing interests, the citizens of which knew one another by sight, and joined in paying a proper deference to the greatest of all citizens-the Lord Mayor. There was nothing which touched the dignity and habit of this great official, greater almost, within his limits, than the king himself, that did not stir the imagination of his subjects. For Stow the smallest innovation in civic custom was a dire offence. He records sorrowfully in 1563 that Sir Thomas Lodge, being Mayor of London, wore a beard. He was the first that ever ventured thus to defame his office, and hardly did the city support the shock. That a Mayor should leave the comely, ancient custom of a clean chin seemed intolerable to the loyal men of London, and the year of Lodge's office was marked by Stow with a black stone.

And as the city was small in size and in outlook, so also was it simple in its joys. It delighted in pleasant shows and homely pageants. It welcomed May-day with its masks and junketings; it hung its houses with holly and ivy at Christmastide; it shadowed its doors, on the vigil of St. John the Baptist, with green birch, long fennel, St. John's wort, orpin, and white lilies. Then there was wrestling at Bartholomew Fair, and much eating of pork, and cock-fighting and bear-baiting in their due

season.

The practice of the long-bow had, alas!

been almost forsaken in Stow's time. The closing of the common grounds, so often deplored by the chroniclers, had already done its work, depraving the citizens, and weakening the national defence. Our Archers,' says Stow, 'for want of room to shoot abroad, creep into bowling allies and ordinary dicinghouses, nearer home, where they have room enough to hazard their money at unlawful games: and there I leave them to take their pleasures.'

And even the graver citizens, content to walk abroad in decent tranquillity, found that the city was encroaching upon their exercise. Hogg Lane, for instance, without Bishopsgate, which now bears the more pompous name of Artillery Lane, had within Stow's memory fair hedgerows of elm trees on either side, with bridges and easy stiles, such as even aldermen might climb to pass over into pleasant fields, and there to refresh their spirits, dulled with the purchase of merchandise and the counting of money, in the sweet and wholesome air. And within a few years this country lane became nothing better than one continual building of garden houses and small cottages. But even though the city was merged in the suburbs, as far as Houndsditch and Whitechapel, London was still fair and clean, seldom oppressed by poverty or exaction, and famous then, as now, for a generous hospitality. Stow remembered the time when two hundred persons were served daily at Lord Cromwell's gate, and when the Prior of Christ Church kept a bountiful house of meat and drink, both for

rich and poor. In brief, all classes seemed to be inspired with a simple gaiety, and if there was a reverse side to the medal, Stow takes care not to show it to us.

Such was the quiet, provincial town in which Stow grew up. His father's house was in Throgmorton Street, and there the old man was the victim of an injustice which rankled in his son's breast unto the end. Thomas Cromwell was building himself a large and spacious house hard by, and in his arrogance made no scruple to take down the pales of his neighbours and to seize their land. Now, close to William Stow's south pale there stood a house, and this house the miscreants loosed from the ground, with the ingenuity of modern Americans, and moved upon rollers some twenty-two feet into the garden, without warning, and with no other answer, when they were taxed, than that Master Sir Thomas had so commanded it. Thus much of mine own knowledge have I thought good to note' -such is Stow's comment-' that the sudden rising of some men causeth them to forget themselves.' Yet in Cromwell's despite, Throgmorton Street had its amenity. Thence the young Stow could walk to the Nunnery of St. Clare in the Minories, and fetch a halfpenny worth of milk, always hot from the kine, and never less than three ale-pints for a halfpenny in the summer, nor less than an ale-quart in the winter. The citizen of to-day must go farther afield for his milk than the Minories, and

M