London, founded by the Romans as Lundinium, became by the 16th century the economic, cultural, and political core of an English nation ready to expand its territory.
With its favored location on the River Thames, London was always a commercial hub. Even before Roman times, merchants living on the Thames engaged in trade with people of northern Europe. With its mouth emptying into the North Sea, the Thames provided excellent access to the European continent and the Low Countries. These connections dating from pre-Christian antiquity laid a firm foundation for flourishing trade by the Middle Ages.
By the time of the Norman Conquest of 1066, farmers had turned London into a market town. In the following
Centuries artisans and laborers also brought their wares to the city. Artisans in specific trades gravitated to particular areas where they worked. Thus, the corn market was on Cornhill, tailors clustered along Threadneedle Street, and Vintry Row was the place to find wine.
The construction of London Bridge in 1176 began London’s rise to modern economic and cultural prominence in Europe. It was the height of architectural design and engineering technology, with 19 stone arches and myriad tall houses that sheltered people and shops. Once the bridge was built, ships began docking at the site because it provided the best means of transporting commercial goods north and south. The Romans had, as part of their imperial vision, built roads to and from the London Bridge area to transport soldiers and material necessary to rule. These roads, maintained and expanded, became crucial for the transportation of goods throughout England by the 16th century. Over time London became a magnet for men and women eager to establish professional and ethnic enclaves. Jews came to London to set up financing houses despite the fact they found hostility, including expulsion in 1290.
During the 16th century enterprising citizens built the first Royal Exchange, and entire industries grew to meet the needs of merchants. Workers flooded into the city, many of them from foreign lands. Native Londoners’ penchant for bigotry and persecution was rekindled when immigrants began inhabiting neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city’s commercial center. Priests decried the invasion during Sunday services, and riots often ensued. Henry VIII even had a few rioters hanged following one incident. The city’s commercial success also attracted emigrants from around England, and a population explosion resulted. In 1500 London boasted 75,000 residents. By 1600 that figure grew to 220,000. In the mid-17th century nearly a half million people called London home.
The social consequences of such growth were immense. Aristocrats, uncomfortable living near the increasing number of laborers, began moving west, beyond the city limits. With the dissolution of the English monasteries during the Reformation, much land that was not used to house laborers became part of large estates. Pastureland, once abundant, became covered with housing, an early episode of urban sprawl that suggested that urbanization could pose substantial challenges across the Continent. Queen Elizabeth I, according to the history recorded by William Camden, wanted to halt any further expansion of the city. Immigrants arrived despite the fact that by 1550 the city had to import most of its food and that urban growth had polluted available water supplies, although the invention of the pump and a 40-mile canal to import water from Hertfordshire helped to solve the problem.
Christianity, like commerce, throve in London. Church spires came to dominate the skyline. St. Paul’s Cathedral, destroyed by fire time and again, rose each time upon the foundations of the earliest Roman basilica. In the 12th century St. Paul’s was finally constructed of stone, all except its spire, and rose to mammoth proportions: The wooden spire reached to 450 feet, nearly 100 feet higher than did Christopher Wren’s dome built after the fire of 1666. Mendicant friars who arrived in the 13th century became successful evangelists who also established hospitals and charitable societies. For these works London’s elite contributed time and money, hoping to attain the salvation the friars promised.
By the end of the 16th century, London had become the center for the nation’s economic and cultural life. Home to many printing presses as well as individuals such as Richard Hakluyt the Younger and Samuel PuRCHAS, London also became the place where the English most frequently discussed the benefits of colonization and dreamed about the wealth to be made from establishing colonies in the Americas.
This brief description of the emergence of one of the most important cities in Europe can only touch on London’s history and meaning. In recent years, scholars have paid ever closer attention to the city and its inhabitants. They have reconstructed relationships between individuals and come to realize that intellectual influence often took place not only through books but also on the streets. It is at times impossible to prove that one person knew another, for example. But in the surviving correspondence of prolific letter writers like John Chamberlain, it is possible to see the city’s action unfold. It was not only merchants who paid attention when a ship weighted down with spices arrived from the East Indies; that kind of moment drew hundreds of observers. So, too, would a royal funeral, like the extraordinary parade that attended Elizabeth I’s body as her cortege wound through the streets in 1603.
Contemporary maps and texts reveal how crowded and noxious the city was, particularly the area contained within the old medieval walls (the “City,” as it was known, much of which disappeared in the great fire of 1666). Some surviving texts give us a sense of how awful London must have smelled, especially in the neighborhoods where butchers practiced their trade and their assistants trailed offal through the streets. Eventually, such unpleasantness gave rise to regulations intended to make London a more livable city. But even at its worst—and its sprawling slums in the 18th century made it seem like newly created hell— London remained the intellectual and cultural capital of the English, the home to premieres by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, the sitting place of Parliament, and the venue for bookshops offering the latest news about the city, the realm, and the world beyond.
Further reading: Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000); Robert Gray,
A History of London (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1978); Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007); Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Jonathan Schneer, The Thames (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005); Geoffrey Trease, London: A Concise History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975); Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, eds. The London Encyclopaedia (London: Macmillan, 1983).
—David P Dewar
World History
