The House by the Thames (5 page)

Furthermore, some of what Stow recounts goes back almost a century before his own time, to the moment when Henry VII reduced the brothels from eighteen to twelve – ‘These allowed stew houses had signs on their fronts, towards the Thames, not hanged out but painted on the walls, as a Boar's head, the Cross keys, the Gun, the Castle, the Crane, the Cardinal's hat, the Bell, the Swan, etc.'

It is a striking image, these black signs painted on whitewashed walls to be visible across the river, prefiguring the much later practice of printing the names of wharves large and clear on the walls for the same reason. When I was researching I found one interested party convinced that he had actually seen a painting depicting the houses with their signs, though diligent research has not revealed any such picture. However, it is clear that Stow was not recounting what he had seen with his own eyes but giving a general, vivid word-picture of what he had been told. So, when he lists the Cardinal's Hat among the names, this is an interesting indication but it is hardly conclusive evidence that the site of 49 was a functioning brothel at the beginning of the sixteenth century – especially in view of the plot having been described as ‘void' twenty years before and not apparently rebuilt till much later. I suspect that Stow was simply taking assorted names from his own day of the inns on Bankside – which was by then, according to the playwright Dekker, ‘one long ale-house' – and ascribing them to the notable houses of a hundred years before as a general illustration. So between them, John Stow, who evoked bygone days, and Hugh Browker, who bestowed on his new inn an old and possibly nostalgic name, were already contributing to the process of mythologising the past, a tendency which continues, with interludes of forgetting, to our own day.

Admittedly, some unofficial prostitution and generally ‘licencious behaviour' is likely to have continued on Bankside, what with all those ale-houses, later followed by the bear-pits and playhouses. But it seems to have moved two or three hundred yards westwards. By the time the Bankside brothels were shut down by Henry VIII, the old manor house in Paris Garden was rented by a local Southwark man. He attempted, once again, to deal with the chronic flooding problem, and established a gaming place there, with card tables and bowling alleys. By and by one of the Elizabethan theatres, the Swan, was also built on that ground. The place sounds to have been rather like the later riverside pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh and, like them, it acquired over the decades a louche reputation. It became known by the odd name of Holland's Leaguer, after a tenant of the one-time manor house, a Mistress Holland, who was charged with being ‘an incontinent woman'. In 1632, a decade before the rise of Puritanism under Cromwell would close down much of the Bankside entertainment industry, a contemporary commented on the Paris Garden, with the relish usual in those castigating sin: ‘This may better be termed a foule dene than a faire Garden … here come few that either regard their credit, or losse of time, the swaggering Roarer, the cunning Cheater, the rotten Bawd, the swearing Drunkard, and the bloudy Butcher, have their rendezvouz here.'
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During the Commonwealth, much of the grounds were used for the bleaching and fulling of cloth, a long-term Southwark activity due to the abundance of water on hand. On eighteenth-century maps the land is still marked as being in this use (‘Tenter grounds'). The one-time manor house, still with the remnants of a medieval moat around it, was finally pulled down in the 1760s to make way for the approach to ‘Pitt's Bridge', which became Blackfriars Bridge.

The Agas map, and several others from the later sixteenth century, are all formalised bird's-eye views of London, all taken from a notional and shifting vantage point somewhere above Southwark – as if the Tudors possessed hot-air balloons but failed to record this interesting fact for posterity; or as if the artist-cartographer had been standing on a non-existent small mountain in the south located roughly at the Elephant and Castle. Such was the general convention of the times for views of towns and cities. This tells one something about the limits of accuracy in these early maps, since their creators were depicting what they knew to be there rather than what they could actually see: they did not hesitate to foreshorten certain features and exaggerate others to create a satisfying whole, and the scale does not diminish significantly in the perspective of distance. It also tells one something about the unbuilt nature of most of Southwark then and for some time to come. In these early maps of London and its suburbs, the ribbon of housing down Southwark High Street (the Borough) is cut off by the foot of the map, since it is clear that all around it still lay fields, not townscape to be mapped. Even the best part of a century later, in 1676, the first heroic, properly surveyed London street plan did not include the south bank at all.

Two other elaborate bird's-eye views from the first decades of the seventeenth century still observe the convention of the artist being suspended somewhere over Southwark and, by this happy chance, depict the townscape in the immediate foreground in greater detail than the body of London proper, which is the ostensible subject. Both views, by coincidence, were drawn and engraved by men who were not natives of London, who published respectively in Amsterdam and Antwerp, for the Low Countries were then the world centre for printing and map making.

Nicholas John Visscher was Dutch; his panorama appeared in 1616, though how well he knew London at first hand and how much he relied on other people's depictions is not clear. To make his view more comprehensive he shows the Thames running straight, as it does in many people's general image of London to this day but not in real life. This device allows him to depict a clear line of buildings along the south bank westwards from the Bridge. After St Saviour's (here under its old name of St Mary Overy's) comes the Bishop's palace (Winchester House), the great hall prominent with its stone tracery windows dating from a rebuilding about 1400. Then comes a bridge over a stream – St Mary Overie's Dock.
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Then come the pointed backs of the Bankside houses, with their chimneys, their back lean-tos and their garden hedges. The Globe Theatre appears, with a cluster of cloaked and hatted people beside it, and so does the Bear Garden. Not shown are the Rose, the Hope and the Swan theatres, which were also there at the date of the map, leading one to think Visscher must have been working from earlier sources. A little west of the Bear Garden is a surviving pike pond. One of the row of gables just to the left of that must represent the back of the Cardinal's Hat Inn.

Wenceslaus Hollar's celebrated Long View of London was produced in Antwerp in 1648, but was based on drawings he made during a sojourn in England a few years earlier. A gifted Bohemian artist and pioneer etcher, Hollar was brought to London by Lord Arundel, and seems to have fallen in love with the place. Except for a few years in Amsterdam during the grimmest days of the Commonwealth, he spent the rest of his long life in his adopted city, and it is largely thanks to him, a foreigner, that we know what much of seventeenth-century London looked like. He never lived in Southwark, but it was the base for his views of London before and after the Great Fire. Unlike the other contemporary panoramas of London, his Long View manages to give the impression of being drawn from one identifiable vantage point: ostensibly this is the tower of St Saviour's/St Mary's, from which elevation Hollar had no doubt made sketches, but actually we are considerably higher up, as if Hollar were treading air like one of the baroque, celestial figures he places above the busy boats on the Thames.

One has the impression that Hollar embarked on this, his greatest work, with the intention of recording London on the opposite bank in the traditional manner, but got carried away by a naturalism and a passion for detail that changed the bird's-eye convention back into a genuine landscape study. The sweep of the south bank in the foreground, curving as in real life, predominates; one's eye is drawn to it as if this were the real subject and the City were a less important backdrop. We see right down into people's yards and gardens. There is a tide-mill near the bridge with sacks of grain on a platform and a deep bed of chaff, then a ferrymen's landing stage with oars laid out on the shore, then a large inn with a round-arched gateway from an alley behind and a rider just setting off. A little further is the dark water of St Mary Overie's Dock, with people walking on a built-up path beside it just as they do today where the
Golden Hind
is berthed. Then comes the very recognisable Winchester House, but with Hollar we are not being invited to admire the elevation but rather to take a walk in its carefully laid-out gardens where some people are already promenading two by two.

This is a final glimpse of the palace and its grounds near the end of its grandeur, for the Bishop was dispossessed under the Commonwealth and his palace was divided up for renting. At the Restoration the Bishop preferred to go elsewhere; the park was leased for building. The approximate spot where Hollar shows the people walking lies today beneath the railway viaduct from Cannon Street where it curves eastward towards London Bridge station.

Next in Hollar's View comes a huddle of houses with high, old roofs on which you can count the tiles. Several of them have small cabins tacked to the back of them, which I suspect of being ‘necessary houses' placed over one of Bankside's many ditches. There is another large house with several chimneys right on the river, probably an inn, with another berthing place for ferries nearby. Then the Globe Theatre and the bear-baiting ring – whose names Hollar has transposed, no doubt because he was making his final drawing in Antwerp and could not check from there which building was which. He has the Globe nearer the river, whereas in fact it was the other way round. The building further from the river is the one with a roofed ‘tiring house' on top, the actors' changing place, which a bear pit would not need. Horses graze in an adjacent meadow.

After this, the houses retreat along the shore line in diminishing perspective. We are no longer on top of them so cannot look down into their intimate world. If only Hollar had chosen a vantage point a little further west along Bankside. Then we could have seen with his wonderfully detailed, microscopic vision right into the back yard of the Cardinal's Hat with its barrels of beer, and its waterfront with boats tied up, and the narrow lane leading from one to the other just as it runs today.

It must have been quite a substantial building: Browker, who did business deals with the most respected citizens of Southwark, would hardly have erected anything shoddy, and we know from the house that sits in its footprint today that it had capacious cellars. Houses in the Elizabethan period were still constructed predominately of timber rather than stone or brick, but the new prosperity was favouring larger buildings in which there were more fixed fireplaces and therefore more chimneys. In the following century the Cardinal's Hat was assessed for hearth tax at seven hearths, which implies a good number of rooms – though not as many as the Falcon Inn up river, which was said in its heyday to have twenty-nine rooms. The Cardinal's Hat certainly would have had glass in its windows rather than the old-style coverings of horn or simply wooden lattice, for glass was now being produced much more cheaply, some of it to hand in Southwark, and windows were correspondingly bigger.

For reasons that will become clear when we enter 49 Bankside, I believe that the main door to the inn was probably from the side alley, so that customers came into the middle of the building facing the staircase, with the kitchen on one side and the dining and tap-room on the other side overlooking the river. If the inn let lodgings, which it apparently did, the furnishings would have been more comfortable than the old straw pallets and wooden benches of medieval and Tudor days: a late-Elizabethan cleric
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noted that there were many more chairs and hangings than in his youth, and that chaff or wool mattresses or feather beds, previously ‘thought meet only for women in childbed', were now much favoured. A decent inn's customers had pewter tankers now for their ale rather than horn ones and pewter plates rather than wooden trenchers, while wooden spoons were replaced with tin.

After John Raven's tenancy of the inn there was a John Powell and then a Thomas Mansell or Mansfield. After that, from 1627 to 1674 the place was continuously in the occupation of the memorably named Melchisedeck Fritter: it sounds as if he (like Dekker the playwright) was of Flemish origins, but by the seventeenth century the family was clearly well established in the parish. Fritter, like his predecessor Mansell, laid on dinners for members of the parish vestry, and he had the right to produce his own ha'penny tokens – in effect, to mint his own small change – which argues that he was a well-respected local citizen. We seem quite far here from ‘the women of the stews'.

Because of the connection with Shakespeare, Bankside's identity as the place where Londoners went to the theatre tends to shine disproportionately large and bright in the panorama of remembered history. In reality, this phase was relatively brief; barely fifty years elapsed between the building of the first proper theatre and the suppression of all of them in 1642 in the run-up to the Civil Wars, and Shakespeare himself was only associated with the theatres for about fifteen years. Though the Wooden O of Shakespeare's
Henry V
, or the imaginary ‘cloud capp'd towers and gorgeous palaces' of his
The Tempest
, is the way we like to think of the theatres at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the truth is that the playhouses of Bankside were born out of the bull- and bear-baiting rings that were already well established before the theatres came, and which reappeared there after the Restoration when the theatrical world had moved off elsewhere. On Bankside, the same building was sometimes used for both plays and bloodsports on separate days, and the most celebrated Bankside impresario of the time, Philip Henslowe, was just as keen to be recognised master of fights between dogs and bears as he was to give stage-room to Ben Jonson and Marlowe.