The House by the Thames Read online

  By the mid-sixteenth century, between the fish ponds and the river, there was a whole run of houses along Bankside, though they had spaces between them. A picture of the Coronation procession of the short-lived boy king Edward VI, in 1547, shows the houses, seen across the water, backed by trees. They look modest and countrified compared with the high-gabled City houses in the foreground. But in-filling evidently continued during the rest of the century; the relative prosperity and peace of Elizabeth’s reign provided the conditions for a sustained building boom. John Stow, the first committed London antiquarian, who was writing near the end of Elizabeth’s reign, remarked, as if it were a new phenomenon, that ‘On the [south] bank of the river Thames there is now a continual building of tenements, about half a mile in length to the bridge.’ This is corroborated by a St Saviour’s record of church rates paid in what had become known as the Clink parish in 1600. There were stated to be five hundred and sixty householders. One of these householders, occupying one of the new tenements referred to by Stow, was the proprietor of the Cardinal’s Cap – or Hat – Inn, on the exact plot of ground where, later, 49 Bankside would stand.

  The new inn was built in 1579, apparently by a London lawyer called Hugh Browker who also made the alley alongside. He had done well in property development during these fat years and was later to buy the Paris Garden and erect some buildings there. He owned several inns in Southwark, including large ones in the Borough High Street where innkeeping was now a major Southwark trade: it remained so until the coming of the railways. However, the inns and ale-houses strung by then along Bankside too were not for the accommodation of travellers so much as for the pleasure and convenience of Londoners coming over by water from the other side.

  But which cardinal is commemorated in the name ‘Cardinal’s Hat’ and why? Because the Bishop of Winchester had his extensive palace on Bankside for centuries, and because a fragment of this palace still survives today, poignantly visible once more since the warehouses that engulfed it have been cleared, there have been attempts to find a cardinal from the palace to fit. Cardinal Beaufort, who was Bishop of Winchester and died in 1447, has been suggested, and so has the redoubtable Cardinal Wolsey, who was briefly Bishop of Winchester in 1529–30 just before he fell from Henry VIII’s favour. But neither of these can realistically be supposed to have inspired the name of an inn not built till 1579, and in any case why should a prosperous entrepreneur like Browker, living under the reformed Anglican regime, have wanted to single out a discredited prelate in this way?

  An obvious conclusion would be that Browker simply rebuilt a previous inn on the same site, but, if so, the existence of this early Cardinal’s Cap/Hat is rather shadowy. If there was a medieval inn there of that name it had disappeared by 1470, over a hundred years before Browker’s construction, since the plot was then described as ‘a void piece of ground near the steweside’. In 1533, when the plot was sold on, no mention was made of a building on it. This sale was by one fishmonger to another. We know that plot of land was just by one of the Pike Gardens. Since the fish ponds were run like fresh fish farms today, with live fish netted and killed as customers came and asked for them, it seems extremely likely that the fishmongers’ presence was related to this trade. Possibly the empty plot on Bankside was used as a weighing and sales point for the fish, the place from which assistants were sent off to get a pike or carp of the requested size.

  Yet evidence that there was a house thereabouts on Bankside, called the Cardinal’s Cap or Hat, before the time when a vacant piece of land was noted there in 1470, is clear. The first Englishman was made a cardinal in 1310 and his image became a popular sign. Variants such as ‘le Cardinalishatte’ crop up on Bankside in 1361, 1447 and as late as 1468, two years before the plot was described as empty. It looks as if, in naming his inn a hundred-odd years later, Browker or his tenant (John Raven) was simply reviving an old tradition, a half-forgotten tale. So present-day 49 Bankside is linked with the very distant past not through something as material as foundations or re-used timbers: these form connections at a later period. What has persisted through six and a half centuries is a distinctive name. As well as its street number, the house has the name ‘Cardinal’s Wharf’ lettered in plaster above its front door. Cardinal Cap Alley obviously took its name from Browker’s inn; but without the persistence of the alley, which has survived when most of Bankside’s narrow cross-lanes have been obliterated, the name of the inn would have passed away as all the others have.

  The fact that the earliest house on the site was known by a sign does not necessarily mean that it was an inn. In that pre-literate era all houses were commonly known by reference to signs – ‘You may find me at the sign of the Cross Keys … next the Green Lion … two doors from the Red Cross …’ people would say. What the medieval Cardinal’s Hat may have been, however, was a brothel.

  Chapter III

  OF WINCHESTER GEESE, BIRD’S-EYE

  VIEWS AND SHOW BUSINESS

  EVERYONE LIKES HEARING about ancient vice: it is not surprising that the long-ago brothels of Bankside have taken on a posthumous, mythic life of their own. Our vanished ancestors, with their strongly hierarchic society, their literal belief in Heaven and Hell, their brutal sports and punishments and their lack of what we would regard as cleanliness, seem closer to us when we think of them in their most private and instinctual functions. Casual sexual encounters are, you may say, among the most transient of human relations, intended as they are to be without consequences and rapidly dismissed from the individual memory. Yet in the collective memory the idea of all that male energy expended on Bankside, and all those anonymous women of pleasure who received it, touches us with some message about the frailty and impermanence of human beings which is, in itself, timeless.

  John Stow was responsible for the belief (‘heard of ancient men, of good credit’) that the ‘single women’ of the Bankside houses, being disbarred by their sinful profession from burial in consecrated ground, were given their own separate graveyard away from both St Saviour’s and St Margaret’s churches. There is no evidence to corroborate this, but the idea has taken root in Southwark consciousness and is still current today. Near the beginning of the twenty-first century an attempt to build over a one-time local graveyard, the Cross Bones ground, was vigorously opposed, as it had been several other times over the last hundred and fifty years. The supposition that this is the ground where lies the dust of all those despised medieval women is a potent modern argument against its obliteration.

  Let us return to a few facts. The false trail connected with the fish ponds has led some commentators to claim a brothel whenever the term ‘stew’ or ‘stewside’ is mentioned in a record. To take just one example: the fact that the household accounts of the fifteenth-century Duke of Norfolk (who later died at the battle of Bosworth) contain an item about a sum of twenty-two shillings having been lent to him ‘when he lay at the stews’ probably indicates no more than that the Duke was spending that night on the Surrey side of the river for which ‘stewside’ was a current term. The Duke’s secretary would hardly have left an official record of his master having slept in a brothel. It is, however, indisputable that the stewside was also a location for brothels, and that, by a natural transfer – aided, no doubt, by knowing fishy jokes and puns – the term ‘stews’ did come to be applied to the brothels as well.

  But then the realities of medieval brothel-keeping do not quite seem to fit the highly coloured images of ‘bawds’ and lascivious fun and games that today get imagined – the ‘buxom wench’ genre of historical evocation. We are amused that apparently the Bankside whores were known as ‘Winchester geese’ from the fact that no less a grandee than the Bishop of Winchester himself reaped revenue indirectly from their activities. We assume there was something covert and corrupt in this situation. But the truth seems to be that, far from illicit, the whorehouse trade on Bankside was a conscious attempt by the City of London to recognise human nature for what it is. The City did not want
the problem within its own walls, but, acknowledging the inevitability of prostitution ‘for the repair of incontinent men and like women’, it tolerated brothels on its doorstep, across the water. It also laid down guidelines about their good conduct. The medieval period was a time of assiduous regulation (or attempted regulation) in matters of social conduct, perhaps for the very reason that violence, anarchy and natural disasters were never far below the surface of life.

  The lodging houses permitted on Bankside for single women seem to have been rather low-key, genteel establishments, not so much like our modern idea of a brothel as like the maisons tolérées of France up to 1946. Or perhaps not even that, since the women were apparently independent, but more like discreet private boarding houses, where women lodgers were allowed to bring men visitors provided certain rules were observed. Yet at the same time it was supposed to be obvious from the women’s dress that they were in some sense set apart from respectable society: they were not to wear aprons like ordinary housewives, and for a while they were told to wear striped hoods. These differences were meant to signal to a censorious world that – unless they repented and became washer-women instead – these women’s souls were bound for the fires of Hell and their mortal flesh for banishment to the unconsecrated ground where Red Cross Street now joins Union Street. It also appears from a fourteenth-century document that many of the women were not initially citizens of London but were ‘frows of Flaunders’ – Flemish women, foreigners, and therefore the classic marginalised outsiders who tend to appear in all cities, in every era, employed in the sex trade.

  It is true that by then Flemings, many of them in the weaving trade, had begun to settle in Southwark, but this leads one to wonder if a number of the women were merely the friends and consorts of the weavers rather than brothel-inmates in a strictly defined sense. The intermittent moral fervours of the Middle Ages tended not to distinguish between actual prostitution and simple concubinage or loose living, and this further confuses an already confused record.

  We owe our knowledge of the rules that are said to have regulated brothels to John Stow, who listed them in a later era in his Survey of London (1598). Some of them seem admirably designed to protect the women’s own liberty to come and go and not be exploited or ill-treated by the ‘stew-holders’. Others were designed to protect society’s fabric – women of religion, married women, and ‘any woman that hath the perilous infirmity of burning’ (i.e. gonorrhoea) were not to be given lodging. Pregnancy was another reason for barring women, though this seems illogical given that this was the natural result of their permitted way of life. Several rules seem aimed at making the brothels as quiet and respectable as possible: convivial gatherings were not encouraged, for no food or drink was to be sold, men were not to be ‘enticed’ inside, the premises were to be inspected every week and were not to be open on holy days. There is too an interesting implication that the women of Bankside were offering something more than just quick relief – ‘No single woman to take money to lie with any man, but she lie still with him all night till the morrow.’

  How far these rules were kept is not clear: certainly everyone knew about the Bankside brothels, and they suffered periodic assaults from a people eager to escape the fires of Hell themselves by punishing sin elsewhere. They were attacked and burnt during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and again by Jack Cade’s rebellious mob in 1449, when some of the houses were fired and the women ‘reviled’. (They looted the Bishop’s palace at the same time, for good measure, let the prisoners out of the Clink, and lynched several unpopular City dignitaries.) Stow says the brothels were closed again for a year near the beginning of the next century by Henry VII, and that their number was reduced after that from eighteen to twelve. They were clearly a target for troublemakers: there is a record from Henry VIII’s reign of a party of drunk young men from good families, including Thomas Wyatt the younger, going out on the river at night and shooting with catapults at ‘the queenes at the Bank’. A few years later the King had the houses ‘put down’ in a repressive gesture that Stow seems to think was final.

  It is significant that Stow was writing half a century after this, when accurate memories of these licensed brothels must have been fading, even in the minds of ‘ancient men of good credit’. The second half of the sixteenth century was one of those periods when life moved at great speed, with the dismantling of the religious fabric of society and the traumatic changes of regime and official faith, as the fanatically Protestant boy Edward was succeeded by Catholic Mary and then by Elizabeth. In the 1590s, when Stow was compiling his Survey, the time before the Reformation must already have seemed quaintly antique: an old world before modernity set in, when Bankside had no theatres or animal shows, and only the few houses scattered among trees that are shown in the picture of Edward’s coronation.

  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.’1 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 eighteen
th-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.