JOHN STOW—II

HIS LONDON'

HEN John Stow sat him down to what he called the discovery of London,' he approached his task in a spirit of loyal humility. 'It is a duty,' said he, that I willingly owe to my native mother and country,' and he discharged the duty with all the zeal and intelligence that were his. 'What London hath been of ancient time,' he claims, men may here see, as what it is now every man doth beholde.' Alas, we behold it no longer, and it is not easy to reconstruct London's vanished beauty from Stow's record. He saw it, as we see

Gothic austerity was

it, in a moment of transition. yielding to the grace and lightness

of the Tudor

Stow is quick

new material.

style. Timber was replacing stone. to record the triumph of the 'Downe lower have ye Elbow lane,' says he, 'and at the corner thereof was one great stone house, called Olde Hall, it is now taken downe and diverse faire houses of timber placed there.' Contrary to the conservative habit of his mind he seems to have welcomed the innovation. In a passage of rare enthusiasm he acclaims the stately house of

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brick and timber lately raised by Sir Robert Cecil, but his enthusiasm was evoked less by the elegance of the design than by the paved and levelled highway, which beautified the street and served for the great commodity of passengers. Stow, in fact, did not presume to explain or to criticise the architecture of London. He was a plain man, who dealt with facts, catalogued monuments, wrote down inscriptions, and left the work of appreciation to others. In his eyes a palace and a conduit were of equal value. A visit to St. Martin's Oteswick inspired him to this reflection, 'You had of olde time a faire well with two brackets, so fastened that the drawing up of the one let downe the other, but now of late that well is turned into a pumpe.' Herein may be discerned the true spirit of the book—a book written not merely by a citizen for citizens, but by an antiquary for antiquaries.

And Stow, being both a citizen and an antiquary, had all the limitations of his kind. He was not very observant, and he was very credulous. If he was all unconscious of the city's wonderful aspect, he was eager to believe in any legend that was brought to his ear. He is vastly interested in the strange bones that once were treasured in ancient churches. He tells us little enough of St. Lawrence, in the Jewry, but he does not forget the immense bone which he saw there, fastened to a post of timber, which most took to be the thighbone of a man, and which he attributed doubtfully to 'an oliphant.'

As to the larger specimen, preserved in the church of St. Mary, Aldermanbury, he had no doubt. 'True it is,' he writes in all simplicity, 'that this bone (from whence soever it came) being of a man, as the form showeth, must needs be monstrous, and more than after the proportion of five shanke bones of any man now living amongst us.' Again, though he pronounced Gerrard the giant and his mighty staff to be fables, perhaps because Grafton gave credit to them, and because the master of the hostelry, where the staff was kept, refused to tell him its history, but bade him consult a rival chronicle, he put implicit faith in his father's story that once, upon St. James's night, the devil appeared in the church of St. Michael's, Cornhill, and left the print of his claws on certain stones in the north window, as if they had been so much butter.

Such was Stow's temper, such the criticism of his time. He exercised his faith as he chose, accepting this fact and rejecting that, according to the whim and fancy of the moment. It is, indeed, his prejudices which give life and humour to his work. He cursed most heartily him who removed his neighbour's landmark. Living at a time when the city was greedily encroaching upon the open spaces, he lost no chance of condemning those who covered what once were pleasant walks with bricks and timber. Sorrowfully does he record that apples grew where now houses were lately built, and that from Houndsditch in the west, to

Whitechapel in the east, the fields were all turned into 'Garden plottes, teynter yardes, bowling allyes, and such like.' The truth is that, though as I have said, he smiled upon the houses of the new fashions, in all other matters he hated change with a constant heart. His sentiment was anchored securely in the past. Even the inns of London were little to his taste. He remembered with pleasure the brave days when Eastcheap was a cooks' row, and that there they cried hot ribs of beef roasted, pies well baked, and other victuals. Of olde time,' says he, 'when friends did meet, and were disposed to be merrie, they went not to dine and supper in taverns, but to the cookes, where they called for meate what them liked, which they alwayes found ready dressed at a reasonable rate.'

As he loves the customs, so he loves the charity and magnificence of ancient days, when the poor man found a ready welcome at the rich man's gate, and the rich man thought it no dishonour to display his wealth. He tells us, with a reflected pride, that time was when Wolsey kept 400 servants, excluding his servants' servants, who were a goodly train, and he was old enough to recall the grandeur and generosity of the religious houses. He had seen a buck brought up to the altar steps of Paul's in solemn procession, and had watched the dean and chapter, apparelled in copes and vestments, with rosegarlands on their heads, send the body of the buck to the baking. His well-stored memory carried him

back to the reign of King Henry, and as he lived to see the first James mount the throne he had witnessed a complete revolution in thought and manners. He recked not of revolutions. He turned his eyes resolutely backward: he sought in history what his own age could not give him; in pious secrecy he deplored the evil influence of the reformation; he witnessed with a sad regret the influx of penurious foreigners; and he descended to an honourable poverty without making a single concession to the changed world that lay about him.

If he was not quick in appreciation, if he knew not how to describe or applaud, if he was so patient a collector of facts, which he could neither contrast nor combine, that he never ceased to be hampered with his own collections, none was ever a more constant lover of London than he. He quotes the testimonies to its grandeur wherever he can find them. He delights in the praise of Tacitus, that London, though no colony of the Romans, was yet most famous for the great multitude of merchants, provisions, and intercourse.' But it was not for its loved it. He loved it

beauty and romance that he because there he was born and bred, because it reminded him that he was a citizen of no mean city, because the tailor's stall, which brought him bread and cheese, stood hard by the famous pump of Aldgate. The brilliance and colour of its streets, the courage of its many-coloured life, the skill of its poets, the enterprise of its adventurers, escaped him. And