The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 by Thomas Babington Macaulay (diy ebook reader .txt) π
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just been built St. James's Square and Jermyn Street. St. James's
Church had recently been opened for the accommodation of the
inhabitants of this new quarter.116 Golden Square, which was in
the next generation inhabited by lords and ministers of state,
had not yet been begun. Indeed the only dwellings to be seen on
the north of Piccadilly were three or four isolated and almost
rural mansions, of which the most celebrated was the costly pile
erected by CIarendon, and nicknamed Dunkirk House. It had been
purchased after its founder's downfall by the Duke of Albemarle.
The Clarendon Hotel and Albemarle Street still preserve the
memory of the site.
He who then rambled to what is now the gayest and most crowded
part of Regent Street found himself in a solitude, and, was
sometimes so fortunate as to have a shot at a woodcock.117 On the
north the Oxford road ran between hedges. Three or four hundred
yards to the south were the garden walls of a few great houses
which were considered as quite out of town. On the west was a
meadow renowned for a spring from which, long afterwards, Conduit
Street was named. On the east was a field not to be passed
without a shudder by any Londoner of that age. There, as in a
place far from the haunts of men, had been dug, twenty years
before, when the great plague was raging, a pit into which the
dead carts had nightly shot corpses by scores. It was popularly
believed that the earth was deeply tainted with infection, and
could not be disturbed without imminent risk to human life. No
foundations were laid there till two generations had passed
without any return of the pestilence, and till the ghastly spot
had long been surrounded by buildings.118
We should greatly err if we were to suppose that any of the
streets and squares then bore the same aspect as at present. The
great majority of the houses, indeed. have, since that time, been
wholly, or in great part, rebuilt. If the most fashionable parts
of the capital could be placed before us such as they then were,
we should be disgusted by their squalid appearance, and poisoned
by their noisome atmosphere.
In Covent Garden a filthy and noisy market was held close to the
dwellings of the great. Fruit women screamed, carters fought,
cabbage stalks and rotten apples accumulated in heaps at the
thresholds of the Countess of Berkshire and of the Bishop of
Durham.119
The centre of Lincoln's Inn Fields was an open space where the
rabble congregated every evening, within a few yards of Cardigan
House and Winchester House, to hear mountebanks harangue, to see
bears dance, and to set dogs at oxen. Rubbish was shot in every
part of the area. Horses were exercised there. The beggars were
as noisy and importunate as in the worst governed cities of the
Continent. A Lincoln's Inn mumper was a proverb. The whole
fraternity knew the arms and liveries of every charitably
disposed grandee in the neighbourhood, and as soon as his
lordship's coach and six appeared, came hopping and crawling in
crowds to persecute him. These disorders lasted, in spite of many
accidents, and of some legal proceedings, till, in the reign of
George the Second, Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, was
knocked down and nearly killed in the middle of the Square. Then
at length palisades were set up, and a pleasant garden laid
out.120
Saint James's Square was a receptacle for all the offal and
cinders, for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster. At
one time a cudgel player kept the ring there. At another time an
impudent squatter settled himself there, and built a shed for
rubbish under the windows of the gilded saloons in which the
first magnates of the realm, Norfolk, Ormond, Kent, and Pembroke,
gave banquets and balls. It was not till these nuisances had
lasted through a whole generation, and till much had been written
about them, that the inhabitants applied to Parliament for
permission to put up rails, and to plant trees.121
When such was the state of the region inhabited by the most
luxurious portion of society, we may easily believe that the
great body of the population suffered what would now be
considered as insupportable grievances. The pavement was
detestable: all foreigners cried shame upon it. The drainage was
so bad that in rainy weather the gutters soon became torrents.
Several facetious poets have commemorated the fury with which
these black rivulets roared down Snow Hill and Ludgate Hill,
bearing to Fleet Ditch a vast tribute of animal and vegetable
filth from the stalls of butchers and greengrocers. This flood
was profusely thrown to right and left by coaches and carts. To
keep as far from the carriage road as possible was therefore the
wish of every pedestrian. The mild and timid gave the wall. The
bold and athletic took it. If two roisterers met they cocked
their hats in each other's faces, and pushed each other about
till the weaker was shoved towards the kennel. If he was a mere
bully he sneaked off, mattering that he should find a time. If he
was pugnacious, the encounter probably ended in a duel behind
Montague House.122
The houses were not numbered. There would indeed have been little
advantage in numbering them; for of the coachmen, chairmen,
porters, and errand boys of London, a very small proportion could
read. It was necessary to use marks which the most ignorant could
understand. The shops were therefore distinguished by painted or
sculptured signs, which gave a gay and grotesque aspect to the
streets. The walk from Charing Cross to Whitechapel lay through
an endless succession of Saracens' Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Bears,
and Golden Lambs, which disappeared when they were no longer
required for the direction of the common people.
When the evening closed in, the difficulty and danger of walking
about London became serious indeed. The garret windows were
opened, and pails were emptied, with little regard to those who
were passing below. Falls, bruises and broken bones were of
constant occurrence. For, till the last year of the reign of
Charles the Second, most of the streets were left in profound
darkness. Thieves and robbers plied their trade with impunity:
yet they were hardly so terrible to peaceable citizens as another
class of ruffians. It was a favourite amusement of dissolute
young gentlemen to swagger by night about the town, breaking
windows, upsetting sedans, beating quiet men, and offering rude
caresses to pretty women. Several dynasties of these tyrants had,
since the Restoration, domineered over the streets. The Muns and
Tityre Tus had given place to the Hectors, and the Hectors had
been recently succeeded by the Scourers. At a later period arose
the Nicker, the Hawcubite, and the yet more dreaded name of
Mohawk.123 The machinery for keeping the peace was utterly
contemptible. There was an Act of Common Council which provided
that more than a thousand watchmen should be constantly on the
alert in the city, from sunset to sunrise, and that every
inhabitant should take his turn of duty. But this Act was
negligently executed. Few of those who were summoned left their
homes; and those few generally found it more agreeable to tipple
in alehouses than to pace the streets.124
It ought to be noticed that, in the last year of the reign of
Charles the Second, began a great change in the police of London,
a change which has perhaps added as much to the happiness of the
body of the people as revolutions of much greater fame. An
ingenious projector, named Edward Heming, obtained letters patent
conveying to him, for a term of years, the exclusive right of
lighting up London. He undertook, for a moderate consideration,
to place a light before every tenth door, on moonless nights,
from Michaelmas to Lady Day, and from six to twelve of the clock.
Those who now see the capital all the year round, from dusk to
dawn, blazing with a splendour beside which the illuminations for
La Hogue and Blenheim would have looked pale, may perhaps smile
to think of Heming's lanterns, which glimmered feebly before one
house in ten during a small part of one night in three. But such
was not the feeling of his contemporaries. His scheme was
enthusiastically applauded, and furiously attacked. The friends
of improvement extolled him as the greatest of all the
benefactors of his city. What, they asked, were the boasted
inventions of Archimedes, when compared with the achievement of
the man who had turned the nocturnal shades into noon-day? In
spite of these eloquent eulogies the cause of darkness was not
left undefended. There were fools in that age who opposed the
introduction of what was called the new light as strenuously as
fools in our age have opposed the introduction of vaccination and
railroads, as strenuously as the fools of an age anterior to the
dawn of history doubtless opposed the introduction of the plough
and of alphabetical writing. Many years after the date of
Heming's patent there were extensive districts in which no lamp
was seen.125
We may easily imagine what, in such times, must have been the
state of the quarters of London which were peopled by the
outcasts of society. Among those quarters one had attained a
scandalous preeminence. On the confines of the City and the
Temple had been founded, in the thirteenth century, a House of
Carmelite Friars, distinguished by their white hoods. The
precinct of this house had, before the Reformation, been a
sanctuary for criminals, and still retained the privilege of
protecting debtors from arrest. Insolvents consequently were to
be found in every dwelling, from cellar to garret. Of these a
large proportion were knaves and libertines, and were followed to
their asylum by women more abandoned than themselves. The civil
power was unable to keep order in a district swarming with such
inhabitants; and thus Whitefriars became the favourite resort of
all who wished to be emancipated from the restraints of the law.
Though the immunities legally belonging to the place extended
only to cases of debt, cheats, false witnesses, forgers, and
highwaymen found refuge there. For amidst a rabble so desperate
no peace officer's life was in safety. At the cry of "Rescue,"
bullies with swords and cudgels, and termagant hags with spits
and broomsticks, poured forth by hundreds; and the intruder was
fortunate if he escaped back into Fleet Street, hustled,
stripped, and pumped upon. Even the warrant of the Chief Justice
of England could not be executed without the help of a company of
musketeers. Such relics of the barbarism of the darkest ages were
to be found within a short walk of the chambers where Somers was
studying history and law,
just been built St. James's Square and Jermyn Street. St. James's
Church had recently been opened for the accommodation of the
inhabitants of this new quarter.116 Golden Square, which was in
the next generation inhabited by lords and ministers of state,
had not yet been begun. Indeed the only dwellings to be seen on
the north of Piccadilly were three or four isolated and almost
rural mansions, of which the most celebrated was the costly pile
erected by CIarendon, and nicknamed Dunkirk House. It had been
purchased after its founder's downfall by the Duke of Albemarle.
The Clarendon Hotel and Albemarle Street still preserve the
memory of the site.
He who then rambled to what is now the gayest and most crowded
part of Regent Street found himself in a solitude, and, was
sometimes so fortunate as to have a shot at a woodcock.117 On the
north the Oxford road ran between hedges. Three or four hundred
yards to the south were the garden walls of a few great houses
which were considered as quite out of town. On the west was a
meadow renowned for a spring from which, long afterwards, Conduit
Street was named. On the east was a field not to be passed
without a shudder by any Londoner of that age. There, as in a
place far from the haunts of men, had been dug, twenty years
before, when the great plague was raging, a pit into which the
dead carts had nightly shot corpses by scores. It was popularly
believed that the earth was deeply tainted with infection, and
could not be disturbed without imminent risk to human life. No
foundations were laid there till two generations had passed
without any return of the pestilence, and till the ghastly spot
had long been surrounded by buildings.118
We should greatly err if we were to suppose that any of the
streets and squares then bore the same aspect as at present. The
great majority of the houses, indeed. have, since that time, been
wholly, or in great part, rebuilt. If the most fashionable parts
of the capital could be placed before us such as they then were,
we should be disgusted by their squalid appearance, and poisoned
by their noisome atmosphere.
In Covent Garden a filthy and noisy market was held close to the
dwellings of the great. Fruit women screamed, carters fought,
cabbage stalks and rotten apples accumulated in heaps at the
thresholds of the Countess of Berkshire and of the Bishop of
Durham.119
The centre of Lincoln's Inn Fields was an open space where the
rabble congregated every evening, within a few yards of Cardigan
House and Winchester House, to hear mountebanks harangue, to see
bears dance, and to set dogs at oxen. Rubbish was shot in every
part of the area. Horses were exercised there. The beggars were
as noisy and importunate as in the worst governed cities of the
Continent. A Lincoln's Inn mumper was a proverb. The whole
fraternity knew the arms and liveries of every charitably
disposed grandee in the neighbourhood, and as soon as his
lordship's coach and six appeared, came hopping and crawling in
crowds to persecute him. These disorders lasted, in spite of many
accidents, and of some legal proceedings, till, in the reign of
George the Second, Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, was
knocked down and nearly killed in the middle of the Square. Then
at length palisades were set up, and a pleasant garden laid
out.120
Saint James's Square was a receptacle for all the offal and
cinders, for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster. At
one time a cudgel player kept the ring there. At another time an
impudent squatter settled himself there, and built a shed for
rubbish under the windows of the gilded saloons in which the
first magnates of the realm, Norfolk, Ormond, Kent, and Pembroke,
gave banquets and balls. It was not till these nuisances had
lasted through a whole generation, and till much had been written
about them, that the inhabitants applied to Parliament for
permission to put up rails, and to plant trees.121
When such was the state of the region inhabited by the most
luxurious portion of society, we may easily believe that the
great body of the population suffered what would now be
considered as insupportable grievances. The pavement was
detestable: all foreigners cried shame upon it. The drainage was
so bad that in rainy weather the gutters soon became torrents.
Several facetious poets have commemorated the fury with which
these black rivulets roared down Snow Hill and Ludgate Hill,
bearing to Fleet Ditch a vast tribute of animal and vegetable
filth from the stalls of butchers and greengrocers. This flood
was profusely thrown to right and left by coaches and carts. To
keep as far from the carriage road as possible was therefore the
wish of every pedestrian. The mild and timid gave the wall. The
bold and athletic took it. If two roisterers met they cocked
their hats in each other's faces, and pushed each other about
till the weaker was shoved towards the kennel. If he was a mere
bully he sneaked off, mattering that he should find a time. If he
was pugnacious, the encounter probably ended in a duel behind
Montague House.122
The houses were not numbered. There would indeed have been little
advantage in numbering them; for of the coachmen, chairmen,
porters, and errand boys of London, a very small proportion could
read. It was necessary to use marks which the most ignorant could
understand. The shops were therefore distinguished by painted or
sculptured signs, which gave a gay and grotesque aspect to the
streets. The walk from Charing Cross to Whitechapel lay through
an endless succession of Saracens' Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Bears,
and Golden Lambs, which disappeared when they were no longer
required for the direction of the common people.
When the evening closed in, the difficulty and danger of walking
about London became serious indeed. The garret windows were
opened, and pails were emptied, with little regard to those who
were passing below. Falls, bruises and broken bones were of
constant occurrence. For, till the last year of the reign of
Charles the Second, most of the streets were left in profound
darkness. Thieves and robbers plied their trade with impunity:
yet they were hardly so terrible to peaceable citizens as another
class of ruffians. It was a favourite amusement of dissolute
young gentlemen to swagger by night about the town, breaking
windows, upsetting sedans, beating quiet men, and offering rude
caresses to pretty women. Several dynasties of these tyrants had,
since the Restoration, domineered over the streets. The Muns and
Tityre Tus had given place to the Hectors, and the Hectors had
been recently succeeded by the Scourers. At a later period arose
the Nicker, the Hawcubite, and the yet more dreaded name of
Mohawk.123 The machinery for keeping the peace was utterly
contemptible. There was an Act of Common Council which provided
that more than a thousand watchmen should be constantly on the
alert in the city, from sunset to sunrise, and that every
inhabitant should take his turn of duty. But this Act was
negligently executed. Few of those who were summoned left their
homes; and those few generally found it more agreeable to tipple
in alehouses than to pace the streets.124
It ought to be noticed that, in the last year of the reign of
Charles the Second, began a great change in the police of London,
a change which has perhaps added as much to the happiness of the
body of the people as revolutions of much greater fame. An
ingenious projector, named Edward Heming, obtained letters patent
conveying to him, for a term of years, the exclusive right of
lighting up London. He undertook, for a moderate consideration,
to place a light before every tenth door, on moonless nights,
from Michaelmas to Lady Day, and from six to twelve of the clock.
Those who now see the capital all the year round, from dusk to
dawn, blazing with a splendour beside which the illuminations for
La Hogue and Blenheim would have looked pale, may perhaps smile
to think of Heming's lanterns, which glimmered feebly before one
house in ten during a small part of one night in three. But such
was not the feeling of his contemporaries. His scheme was
enthusiastically applauded, and furiously attacked. The friends
of improvement extolled him as the greatest of all the
benefactors of his city. What, they asked, were the boasted
inventions of Archimedes, when compared with the achievement of
the man who had turned the nocturnal shades into noon-day? In
spite of these eloquent eulogies the cause of darkness was not
left undefended. There were fools in that age who opposed the
introduction of what was called the new light as strenuously as
fools in our age have opposed the introduction of vaccination and
railroads, as strenuously as the fools of an age anterior to the
dawn of history doubtless opposed the introduction of the plough
and of alphabetical writing. Many years after the date of
Heming's patent there were extensive districts in which no lamp
was seen.125
We may easily imagine what, in such times, must have been the
state of the quarters of London which were peopled by the
outcasts of society. Among those quarters one had attained a
scandalous preeminence. On the confines of the City and the
Temple had been founded, in the thirteenth century, a House of
Carmelite Friars, distinguished by their white hoods. The
precinct of this house had, before the Reformation, been a
sanctuary for criminals, and still retained the privilege of
protecting debtors from arrest. Insolvents consequently were to
be found in every dwelling, from cellar to garret. Of these a
large proportion were knaves and libertines, and were followed to
their asylum by women more abandoned than themselves. The civil
power was unable to keep order in a district swarming with such
inhabitants; and thus Whitefriars became the favourite resort of
all who wished to be emancipated from the restraints of the law.
Though the immunities legally belonging to the place extended
only to cases of debt, cheats, false witnesses, forgers, and
highwaymen found refuge there. For amidst a rabble so desperate
no peace officer's life was in safety. At the cry of "Rescue,"
bullies with swords and cudgels, and termagant hags with spits
and broomsticks, poured forth by hundreds; and the intruder was
fortunate if he escaped back into Fleet Street, hustled,
stripped, and pumped upon. Even the warrant of the Chief Justice
of England could not be executed without the help of a company of
musketeers. Such relics of the barbarism of the darkest ages were
to be found within a short walk of the chambers where Somers was
studying history and law,
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