London (England) -- History -- 17th century; London (England) -- Social life and customs -- 17th century
The picturesqueness of London had been lost; gables, projecting
stories, casement windows gave place to a straight façade, and flat
square windows with sashes. In this map of 1677 we step from the
seventeenth to the eighteenth century. And the most ardent admirer
of Wren will hardly aver that his cathedral and his churches were
externally more beautiful, while they were much less venerable, than
those which they replaced.
The demand for land and its value was shown in the curious way in
which many of the churches were built. Some had houses beside and over
the porch; some against the north or south side: as, for instance,
the church of St. Ethelburga, which still has houses built before the
west front; the churches of St. Peter Cornhill, St. Mary le Bow, and
St. Michael, the church of St. Alphege, all hidden by houses. The old
craft quarters had by this time almost disappeared. But there were
still places which continued to keep what modern tradesmen call a
“line.” Linen-drapers and toymen were found in Fleet Street; here also
jewellers held raffles; mutton was sold in Newgate Market; beef in
Leadenhall; veal at St. James’s; the cheesemongers set up their shops
in Thames Street; second-hand booksellers round Moorfields; second-hand
clothes-men in Monmouth Street: fruit was sold in Covent Garden;
mercers were always faithful to Cheapside; bankers and money-lenders
were found in Lombard Street; milliners had stalls in the upper rooms
of the Royal and the New Exchange.
The frays and feuds between the crafts, which constantly arose during
the earlier centuries, had almost become things of the past: but in
1664 the weavers and the butchers reminded the elders of the good old
days by one more burst of brawling and fighting. It seems strange that
so peaceful a creature as the weaver came oft victorious. The weavers
marched triumphantly about the streets offering a hundred pounds for
the production of a butcher, and the blue smocks stayed at home in the
shambles of Newgate, inglorious and defeated. And a butcher, too! a man
of blood and slaughter! The streets, with the exception of Cheapside
and Ludgate Hill, were not used by ladies as a place of walking and
meeting. The merchants met on ’Change; the lawyers had their Inns of
Court; for social and convivial purposes there were the taverns. Nor
were the streets used greatly for purposes of locomotion; if a man
wished to go from the Tower stairs to Blackfriars or from the Temple
to Westminster, he took a boat; the Thames was, and continued until
the nineteenth century, the great highway of the City; thousands of
boats and barges plied up and down the river; the old ferry—the ferry
of St. Mary Overies—still crossed the river above the bridge; that
called the Horseferry still crossed the river at Westminster. It was
a great deal easier and shorter to take oars than to walk, to ride,
or to take a “glass coach”: one of the newly invented machines which
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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