[Illustration: WEST CHEPE IN ELIZABETHAN LONDON]
My old guide looked at the people as they passed with a peculiar benevolence, especially upon the young. “I have myself been a ’prentice,” he said; “I know the rubs and crosses of that time; an impatient master, long hours of work, hard fare, hot blood that longs to be up and doing. Many there are who have in their latter days broken their indentures and fled to sail the seas with Oxenham or Drake; many have gone into the service of the adventurous Companies. I remember very well, very well,” he sighed, “the joys of the time, the dancing on a summer evening, the wrestling, the fighting, the pageants and ridings in the streets. Life lies all before the ’prentice. What boots it to be my Lord Mayor when life is wellnigh spent?”
“Sir,” my guide added, “I have shown you our City. Go now, alone, and watch the ways of the people: mark the wealth of our merchants; look at the Port crowded with ships and the Quays cumbered with merchandise; talk with the mariners, and observe the spirit that is in them all. Like all old men I lament the past; but I needs must rejoice in the quickening of these latter days. And so, good sir, farewell.”
[Illustration: A VIEW OF COLD HARBOUR IN THAMES STREET, ABOUT 1600]
Let us supplement this discourse by contemporary evidence.
There is an anonymous map of London in the sixteenth century called “Londinium Feracissimi Angliæ Regni Metropolis.” It is in some respects more exact than the better known map attributed to Agas. The streets, gardens, and fields are laid down with greater precision, and there is no serious attempt to combine, as Agas does, a picture, or a panorama, with a map. At the same time, the surveyor has been unable to resist the fashion of his time to consider the map as laid down from a bird’s-eye view, so that he thinks it necessary to give something of elevation.
I will take that part of the map which lies outside the walls. The precinct of St. Katherine stands beside the Tower with its chapel, court, and gardens; there are a few houses near it, apparently farmhouses; the convent of Eastminster had entirely vanished. Nothing indicates the site of the Nunnery in the Minories; yet there were ruins of these buildings standing here till the end of the last century; outside Bishopsgate houses extended past St. Mary Spital, some of whose buildings were still, apparently, standing. On the west side St. Mary of Bethlehem stood, exactly on the site of Liverpool Street Station, but not covering nearly so large an area; it appears to have occupied a single court and was probably what we should now consider a very pretty little cottage, like St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford.