Tudor London

• 1. Introduction

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  Tudor London began in 1485, the year Henry VII took the throne, and ended in 1603 with the death of Elizabeth I. In that same final year, 40,040 deaths were recorded across the city, of which 32,257 were from the plague. John Stow, the city's own historian, had called it just five years earlier "the fairest, largest, richest and best inhabited city in the world." Both statements were true at once. This was London at its Tudor peak: swelling, thriving, violent, and perpetually on the edge.

  The population had quadrupled over those 118 years, from roughly 50,000 souls at the end of the 15th century to an estimated 200,000 by 1603. That figure was more than 13 times the population of Norwich, England's second city. The medieval walls could no longer contain it. The city pushed west toward St. Giles, east toward Whitechapel, and south across the Thames. Every generation found a London larger and stranger than the one before.

  What drove that transformation? How did a city governed by wardsmen and a Lord Mayor also become the stage for beheadings, religious purges, theatrical revolutions, and the globe-spanning ambitions of joint-stock merchants? What did it actually feel like to live, work, worship, or be put in the pillory in Tudor London? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A City Breaking Its Walls

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  Repeated royal ordinances from 1580, 1583, and 1593 tried to stop London from growing. The law forbade new houses on less than four acres of ground, applying to land as far out as Chiswick or Tottenham. The effect was the opposite of what was intended. Landlords inside the medieval walls began subdividing their buildings as tightly as possible, while builders outside the walls were encouraged not to build well, but to build quickly and surreptitiously before officials noticed.

  By 1605, just after the Tudor era ended, an estimated 75,000 people lived within the City of London's old boundaries while 115,000 occupied the surrounding liberties, places like St. Martin's-le-Grand, Blackfriars, and Whitefriars. The city had effectively turned itself inside out.

  The East End developed fastest. Enclosures had driven farmers off their land and into cities, and the absence of guild oversight meant businesses could operate without regulation. John Stow, who had grown up watching the change, recalled that Petticoat Lane in his youth had run among fields flanked with hedgerows. By the time he wrote, it had become a continual building of garden houses and small cottages. Wapping, he observed, was now a continual street or filthy straight passage with alleys of small tenements. Whitechapel had completed the transition entirely, turning from a rural area into a hive of tanneries, slaughterhouses, breweries, and foundries.

  Cartographers raced to keep up. George Hoefnagel and Frans Hogenberg published their map in 1572, though it captured the city as it looked around 1550. The Agas map, attributed to Ralph Agas, was made around 1561. John Norden mapped both the City and Westminster for his Speculum Britanniae in 1593. John Stow himself published his Survey of London in 1598, a thorough account of a city he could already see transforming faster than any map could record.

• 3. The Palace-Builder King

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  Henry VIII acquired, built, expanded, and seized more royal residences in London than any other Tudor monarch. Hampton Court came to him in 1529 from his advisor Thomas Wolsey, and Henry turned it into a complex with tennis courts, bowling alleys, a tiltyard, Great Kitchens, and a Great Hall. His third wife Jane Seymour died there; his son Edward VI was born there; and he married his sixth wife Catherine Parr there.

  York Place, also from Wolsey, became Whitehall Palace, the largest in London, complete with a tiltyard, tennis court, and a royal mews near Charing Cross for horses, carriages, and hunting falcons. Henry died there in 1547. That same year he gave Chelsea Manor House to Catherine Parr, where she continued to live after his death.

  In 1531, Henry seized a monastic leper hospital near St. James to rebuild as St. James's Palace. In 1538 he had Nonsuch Palace built. In 1543, he had the Great Standing constructed in his hunting grounds at Epping Forest. From 1515, he had also built Bridewell Palace outside the city walls, though it outlasted his reign only briefly as a palace. In 1553, Edward VI gave it to the City of London to be converted into a workhouse, the first such institution in Europe. Its officers were authorised to roam alehouses, cockfighting pits, gambling dens, and skittle-alleys, seizing anyone considered homeless, unemployed, or disorderly.

  Richmond Palace had its own origins in disaster. Shene Palace burned down in 1497, and Henry VII rebuilt it with gilded domes and pinnacles. Both Henry VII and Elizabeth I died there, separated by more than a century.

• 4. God, Land, and the Reformation

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  At the start of the Tudor period, roughly a third of all land within London's city walls was owned by the Church. London contained 46 monasteries, nunneries, priories, abbeys, and friaries. Wealthy Londoners left bequests to these institutions in their wills, generation after generation, and the Church's landholdings grew accordingly.

  In the 1530s, Henry VIII used a series of Acts to break away from Rome and declare himself Supreme Head of the Church in England. In April 1534, every male Londoner was required to swear the Oath of Succession. At the Charterhouse, the Carthusian monks refused. Four of them, including their prior John Houghton, were hanged, drawn, and quartered. The monastery was seized, dissolved, and eventually acquired by Thomas Howard, who was himself executed for treason in 1572.

  Other dissolutions were less bloody but equally total. Lord Cobham acquired Blackfriars Priory. Covent Garden, farmland belonging to Westminster Abbey, was granted to the Earl of Bedford. Henry claimed for himself the hospital that became St. James's Palace and the land that became Hyde Park. It was estimated that the monastic lands he seized were worth three times his existing royal estate.

  In 1551, the Venetian ambassador Giacomo Soranzo wrote that London was disfigured by the ruins of a multitude of churches and monasteries. In 1539, six copies of the Great Bible had been placed in St. Paul's Cathedral for anyone to read aloud. By the reign of Mary I, 78 people were burned in London alone for Protestant heresy. Under Elizabeth I, the direction reversed again: Catholics were burned less, but more likely to be executed for treason. From 1584, becoming a Catholic priest after Elizabeth's accession was itself an act of treason. The building of new churches in London had already stopped by 1550, and would not resume for over 70 years.

• 5. Commerce and the River

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  The Thames was wider and shallower in the Tudor period than it is today, and in 1564 it froze so completely that Elizabeth I and her courtiers held an archery practice on the ice. For the rest of the year, it was the city's main commercial artery. With only London Bridge crossing it, an estimated 2,000 wherries ferried passengers and cargo upstream, downstream, and across.

  The north bank between London Bridge and the Tower was lined with small wharves, most dedicated to a single kind of trade. Beare Quay handled ships from Portugal. Gibson's Quay dealt in lead and tin. Somers Quay served merchants from Flanders. A 1559 decree formalised the legal quays along the riverside and required all imports to be declared at Custom House.

  Around 1513, royal dockyards opened at Woolwich and Deptford to build a national fleet. The first commission at Woolwich was the Henry Grace a Dieu, then the largest ship in the world. London's merchants did not only trade through official channels. From 1562, vessels were increasingly issued letters of marque authorising them to raid foreign ships, and by 1598 half of all English privateer vessels were from London. Francis Drake, the most famous of them, circumnavigated the globe in the Golden Hind and returned to London in 1581 to be knighted on the deck of his ship at Deptford. A special dock was built there to preserve the vessel for tourists.

  On land, Thomas Gresham founded a new mercantile exchange in 1565 that Queen Elizabeth awarded the title Royal Exchange in 1571. Joint-stock companies followed in waves: the Muscovy Company in 1555, the Eastland Company in 1579, the Levant Company in 1592, and the East India Company in 1600.

• 6. Who Lived in Tudor London

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  Plague hit so hard in 1563 that local authorities began compiling death statistics for the first time, producing what became known as the Bills of Mortality. That year, 17,404 of the 20,372 recorded deaths in London were attributed to the plague. Families around Cheapside averaged four children; in the poorer district of Clerkenwell, the average was only two and a half. Half of all children, it was estimated, did not reach the age of 15. The average height for both men and women in London was five feet.

  Immigrants arrived from across England, Wales, and abroad. By 1568, foreigners in London numbered 9,302. French hatters settled in Southwark, silk-weavers in Shoreditch and Spitalfields, and Dutch printers in Clerkenwell. Protestants fleeing persecution in Spain, France, and Holland founded a French church at St. Anthony's Hospital and a Dutch church at Austin Friars, both given special licence in 1550 to operate outside the conventions of the Church of England.

  Irish migrants, mostly Catholic, settled in Wapping and St. Giles-in-the-Fields, but Elizabeth I in 1593 banned their arrival unless they were homeowners, domestic servants, lawyers, or university students. Although Jews had been banned from England since the 13th century, a small community of 80-90 Portuguese Jews lived in London during Elizabeth's reign.

  The Tudor period produced London's first portrait of a named black person: John Blanke, a royal trumpeter who performed at the courts of both Henry VII and Henry VIII. In 1600, Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud arrived from modern-day Morocco as an ambassador, bringing a retinue of 17 Muslim men and seeking an alliance between the King of Barbary and Elizabeth I. He had a portrait painted during his visit.

• 7. Theatre, Music, and the Printed Word

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  In 1566, a servant named Isabella Whitney taught herself to write and became the first English woman to publish a book of verse. The printing press had reached London less than a decade before the Tudor period began, with William Caxton's press in Westminster taken over by Wynkyn de Worde in 1492 and moved to Fleet Street. From 1557, all published works were required to be registered with the Stationers' Company; from 1586, printing presses were permitted to operate only in London, Oxford, and Cambridge.

  Theatres were banned from within the city walls in 1574, so they clustered in the outskirts. The Theatre and The Curtain opened in Shoreditch to the east. The Rose, The Swan, and The Globe went up in Southwark to the south. The Fortune was built to the north, and the Blackfriars to the west. William Shakespeare wrote 25 of his plays during the Tudor period, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The masquerade developed as an aristocratic theatrical form, with the first known performance taking place at Greenwich Palace in 1516.

  Music was everywhere. The satirist Stephen Gosson wrote in 1587 that London was so full of unprofitable pipers and fiddlers that a man could no sooner enter a tavern than two or three of them would hang at his heels to give him a dance before he departed. Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, and John Bull all served Elizabeth I at the Chapel Royal despite being Catholics. Tallis's Spem in Alium was performed at Nonsuch Palace by a massed chorus of eight choirs. When Thomas Gresham died in 1579, his will provided for Gresham College, which offered free public lectures on astronomy, divinity, geometry, law, medicine, music, and rhetoric.

• 8. Punishment, Rebellion, and Order

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  In April 1580, the Dover Straits earthquake damaged chimneys and walls across London. In 1544, 1552, 1560, and 1583, stores of gunpowder exploded within the city, often killing several people alongside the structural damage. Tudor London was a place where disaster arrived without notice, and the state's response to disorder was equally swift and public.

  Hangings took place at Tyburn, though gallows could be erected at any convenient spot near a murder scene. Those convicted of piracy were hanged on the Wapping foreshore at low tide, their bodies left until the tide washed over them three times. The pillory at Cheapside held offenders by hands and face for public view. A tumbrel, a cart carrying the condemned, was wheeled through the streets for cases of fornication and fraud alike. In 1563, a physician called Christopher Langton was carted down Cheapside for being caught with two young wenches at once.

  Tudor London also saw the only two uses of boiling alive as an execution method in English history. Both took place at Smithfield, reserved for poisoners.

  The biggest street rebellion of the period was Evil May Day in 1517, when xenophobic violence erupted among London apprentices. Young men stormed the houses and workshops of French and Flemish craftspeople. The Duke of Norfolk led an armed militia into the city to stop them. 278 were arrested, and 15 were later executed.

  In 1601, Robert Devereux gathered rebels at Essex House for what became the last major revolt of the Tudor era. When the Lord Chief Justice arrived, Essex imprisoned him and marched his forces into the city. The Lord Mayor's forces drove him back to his house, where he was arrested. He was later executed at the Tower, bringing Tudor London's long era of rebellion and reprisal to its final chapter, just two years before Elizabeth I died at Richmond Palace and the period closed.