LONDON 1100–1600

Studies in the Archaeology of Medieval Europe

Series Editor: John Schofield

This series brings together new archaeological studies of medieval Europe

(1100 to 1600). We want to describe life in medieval Europe and to show
how archaeology does this. It is a new form of history. There will be studies
of regions such as the North Sea, of subjects such as towns or castles, and of
relevant areas of study such as ceramics. To what extent was Europe a cultural,
economic and religious entity? Understanding leads to appreciation, and
that leads to a concern for conservation of our common European past.
The authors will be drawn from Britain and other European countries.

Published

Castles and Landscape: Power, Community and Fortification in Medieval England

O.H. Creighton

Medieval Towns: The Archaeology of British Towns in their European Setting

John Schofield and Alan Vince

Forthcoming

The Archaeology of Medieval Czech Lands, 1100–1600

Jan Kláps�te�

The Archaeology of Medieval Spain, 1100–1500

Magdalena Valor and Avelino Gutiérrez

The Archaeology of the Irish Sea Region, 1100–1500

Kieran O’Conor

Medieval Europe Around the North Sea

Brian Ayers
 LONDON 1100–1600
THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF A CAPITAL CITY

John Schofield
 Published by Equinox Publishing Ltd.

UK: Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield S3 8AF

USA: DBBC, 28 Main Street, Oakville, CT 06779
www.equinoxpub.com

First published 2011

© John Schofield 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information
storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-84553-551-3 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-908049-72-8 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schofield, John, 1948-

London, 1100-1600 : the archaeology of a capital city / John Schofield.
p. cm. – (Studies in the archaeology of medieval Europe)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-84553-551-3 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-908049-72-8 (paperback)
1. London (England)–History–To 1500. 2. Excavations
(Archaeology)–England–London. 3. London (England)–Buildings,
structures, etc. 4. London (England)–Social conditions. 5. London
(England)--Antiquities. 6. Archaeology, Medieval–England–London. I.
Title. DA680.S36 2011
942.1–dc22
2010049233

Typeset and edited by Queenston Publishing, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Printed and bound in the UK by the MPG Books Group.

 Contents

List of figures vi
Foreword xi
Acknowledgements xii
1. Introduction 1
2. Public buildings and concerns 11
3. Castles, palaces and royal houses 42
4. Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods 60
5. Selling and making 114
6. Religion and religious ways of life 159
7. Human health and the environment 198
8. London’s region 220
9. Medieval and Tudor London after 1600 241
Notes 263
Appendix 280
Bibliography and abbreviations 282
Index 308

v
 List of figures

Cover: part of an anonymous painting of the City of London from the south, painted
about 1630 but based on earlier drawings of around 1600 (MoL)

1.1 Map of the London region as studied in this book, with its surrounding 2
towns and villages
1.2 Main features of the City of London around 1100 5
1.3 Extent of the central medieval conurbation 9
2.1 The 13th-century seal of the City of London, showing St Paul defending the city 12
2.2 A reconstruction of a typical section of the City wall by 1500 13
2.3 A rectangular interval tower on the City wall south-west of Ludgate 14
2.4 Plan of Bishopsgate by William Leybourn in 1676 16
2.5 The exterior of Aldersgate of 1617, as engraved in the middle of the 18th 18
century
2.6 View through the second arch of London Bridge looking east, by E W 20
Cooke in 1831
2.7 Plan of the north end of London Bridge, undated but probably shortly 21
after 1632
2.8 London Bridge from the south-east, drawn by Wyngaerde about or shortly 22
after 1540
2.9 The southern part of London Bridge by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1647 23
2.10 Plan of the relationship of the 12th-century Guildhall building to the 24
north side of the underlying Roman amphitheatre
2.11 The eastern undercroft of Guildhall, photographed in 1896 25
2.12 An angel carved in the vaulting of the Croxton undercroft of Guildhall 26
2.13 Reconstruction of the north range of Leadenhall by Mark Samuel 27
2.14 Interior view of Leadenhall chapel by John Carter, about 1785 28
2.15 The market house at Barking (Essex), by an unknown artist in 1799 29
2.16 Excavation of the vaulted sub-structure of the 13th-century Great Conduit 31
in Cheapside at the One Poultry site

vi
 List of figures

2.17 Fragments of the lead medieval conduit pipe were found on the 32
Paternoster Square site in 2001
2.18 The timber riverwall or revetment of about 1220 excavated at Billingsgate 35
Lorry Park in 1982
2.19 The Bishopsgate suburb in 1577–98, from the drawing of London from 38
the north
3.1 Elevation of the south side of the White Tower, showing different mortar 43
types revealed in recording of 1997–8
3.2 Extract from Hollar’s plan of the City as damaged in the Great Fire of 1666 45
3.3 Plan of the Palace of Westminster and the main buildings of the adjacent 47
Westminster Abbey, about 1350
3.4 Some of the decorated tiles of the floor in the chapter house of 48
Westminster Abbey
3.5 The north front of Westminster Hall, as engraved in about 1800 49
3.6 Excavations in 1970–1 in the Grand Square of the Naval College at Greenwich 51
3.7 Reconstructed plan of Bridewell Palace 52
3.8 The south-east corner of the main court of Bridewell Palace, recorded 53
during demolition in the early 19th century
3.9 Westminster Hall and its surroundings about 1560, based on the copperplate map 55
3.10 Reconstruction of Edward III’s house at Rotherhithe around 1400, from 57
recent excavations
4.1 How a medieval lane was formed: four periods of building along the lane 62
leading to the 12th-century Guildhall
4.2 The townhouse of the Bishop of Winchester in the 12th century. 63
4.3 Map of the medieval aristocratic residences between the City of London 65
and Westminster, around 1400
4.4 The Inn of the Bishop of Ely in Holborn in the late 18th century 67
4.5 An undercroft of about 1290 at Gisors’ or Gerard’s Hall in Basing Lane 69
4.6 The four types of house plans used in analysis of the Treswell surveys 71
4.7 Plan in 1610 of the White Hart brewhouse and its neighbours in 73
Knightrider Street, City of London, by Ralph Treswell
4.8 Holy Trinity Priory Aldgate: reconstruction of part of the noble mansion 75
in 1585, from plans by John Symonds
4.9 A stone cesspit probably of 14th-century date on the Watling Court site, 76
on the west side of Bow Lane, in 1978
4.10 Little Pickle, Bletchingley (Surrey): a medieval manor house 79
4.11 Interior of the hall of Furnival’s Inn during demolition in the early 19th century 83
4.12 Sketches of timber-framed buildings suggested by study of joints on 85
excavated waterfronts at Trig Lane

vii
 London 1100–1600

4.13 A late 16th-century range in Grub Street, Moorfields, which survived the 86
Great Fire to be recorded in the early 19th century
4.14 Detail of the Old Palace, Hatfield, of about 1485 87
4.15 Buildings of 1640–66 excavated at Billingsgate Lorry Park in 1982 91
4.16 Pit 81 at Milk Street, looking east 95
4.17 Ash bowl from Pit 116 at Milk Street, 13th century 96
4.18 Medieval shoes from excavations in London 97
4.19 A small lead candlestick from Swan Lane Group A49, found in 98
reclamation of the period 1180–1270
4.20 Finds from Group A74 at Swan Lane, Upper Thames Street, 1981: dress 100
accessories
4.21 Finds from Group A74 at Swan Lane: knives and scabbards 101
4.22 Small houses on the edge of Fleet Ditch in 1612, from a Treswell survey 112
5.1 Reconstruction of a block of five shops in Abchurch Lane, from the 117
Treswell surveys
5.2 The London waterfront immediately above the Bridge around 1540, by 119
an unknown artist
5.3 Section through the dormitory range of St Helen’s nunnery in 1799 120
5.4 Plan of the Crowne Inn, Aldgate, by Ralph Treswell in 1610 122
5.5 A long-distance carrier leaves London via Gray’s Inn Lane in a panorama 124
of London drawn from the north about 1598
5.6 The proposed date-ranges of local, regional and imported pottery wares 126
(fabrics) in London, from 1100 to 1600
5.7 Jugs in the museum’s collection from Saintonge in south-west France (MoL) 128
5.8 The London Steelyard, as shown by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1647 130
5.9 Reconstruction of the barge of about 1400 from Blackfriars 136
5.10 Swan Lane, City of London, site plan for the late 12th century to about 1220 138
5.11 Part of Hollar’s view of the City in 1647 showing cloths hanging from the 140
window of a building suggested to be a dyehouse
5.12 Mills and noble houses on the Southwark waterfront 142
5.13 Eleventh- or 12th-century carpenter’s axe from Milk Street 146
5.14 Twelfth-century capital in Reigate stone from excavations at Holy Trinity 148
Priory, Aldgate
5.14 Morton’s gatehouse of brick with stone dressings, of about 1490, at 150
Lambeth Palace
5.16 A kiln for bricks or for lime shown on the copperplate map of about 1559 151
5.17 Excavation of a waster pit from a 14th-century pottery kiln at Eden Street, 153
Kingston
5.18 Monumental brass on the tomb of Ralph de Hengham in St Paul’s Cathedral 156

viii
 List of figures

6.1 Plan of the medieval cathedral in its proposed relationship to its Wren 160
successor
6.2 The 12th-century nave of St Paul’s, by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1657 161
6.3 Moulded stones from recent excavations at the cathedral 162
6.4 The entrance to the choir or New Work in 1656, by Hollar, with proposed 163
dates for the various parts of the masonry
6.5 Some of the City churches on the copperplate map of c 1559 165
6.6 The development of two parish churches as revealed by excavation 166
6.7 St Mary Willesden, in an engraving of 1807 168
6.8 St Ethelburga Bishopsgate, plan in 1929 169
6.9 Timbers from the belfry of St Ethelburga’s church being assembled in a 171
car park in north London
6.10 Pilgrim souvenir badge from Old Lady Undercroft at Canterbury Cathedral 176
6.11 Map of the religious institutions in and immediately around the City by 1400 178
6.12 Plan of St Helen Bishopsgate, a combined nunnery and parish church 181
6.13 Reconstruction of half of one bay of the tracery from a cloister of the late 183
14th century at Merton Abbey
6.14 A brass rubber at work at St Helen Bishopsgate in 1972 188
6.15 Two pieces of a mullion from a large window at Holy Trinity Priory, 190
reused in a rough foundation of brick about 1600
6.16 The effects of the Dissolution at St Bartholomew Smithfield, by about 1630 191
6.17 Wooden effigy of the Virgin and Child in Mondoñedo Cathedral, Spain 193
6.18 Wall at the east end of the south aisle of St Botolph Billingsgate church, 194
which was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, excavated 1982
7.1 Skeleton of a man aged 32–35, 10th to 12th century, from the St Nicholas 199
Shambles site excavated in 1975–9
7.2 Skeleton of a woman aged 32–35, also from St Nicholas Shambles 200
7.3 Reconstruction, cutaway without the end wall, of Building 103 of the 206
third quarter of the 12th century on the Guildhall site
7.4 Pits on medieval properties at Milk Street, City of London, excavated in 1977 207
7.5 Plan by Ralph Treswell of Clothworkers’ Hall, Mincing Lane, and its 211
garden in 1612
7.6 Formal gardens south of the Strand, as shown by Hollar about 1658 213
7.7 St Giles in the Fields church and gardens, by Hollar around 1658 214
8.1 Section and plan of the Harmondsworth barn in 1937 222
8.2 Plan of the medieval manor at Northolt, from excavation in the early 1950s 225
8.3 Marks manor house, Dagenham, drawn for Lysons’ Environs of London 226
in 1796
8.4 Rear view of Eastbury House, Barking, in 1796 228

ix
 London 1100–1600

8.5 Manor Farm and nearby historic buildings at Ruislip, as surveyed in 1937 230
8.6 An anonymous view of Bow Bridge in 1834 232
8.7 London east of the River Lea, drawn for Lysons in the 1790s 238
8.8 The Ancient House, Walthamstow 239
9.1 The Great Fire of London, by Griffier 242
9.2 The extent of the central built-up area in 1666, with the outline of the 243
City wall and the extent of the Great Fire
9.3 Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in its present setting, showing its relationship 244
to the medieval cathedral beneath
9.4 The library endowed by Richard Whittington at Greyfriars, 1812 245
9.5 Section through the Wren parish church of St Mary-le-Bow, about 1848. 246
9.6 Plan of a property on the east side of Pudding Lane, surveyed in 1611 by 247
Ralph Treswell
9.7 Buildings before and after the Great Fire on a property in Botolph Lane 248
9.8 Middle and Inner Temple on Ogilby and Morgan’s map of 1676 250
9.9 Houses in Little Bell Alley, on the east side of Moorgate, 1818 251
9.10 St Nicholas Plumstead, viewed from the east in 1807 253
9.11 A 13th-century crypt from the medieval religious house of St Martin le Grand 254
9.12 Rebuilding of Carpenters’ Hall in London Wall in the 1870s 256
9.13 Firemen combat the blaze after Christ Church Greyfriars is hit by a bomb, 258
1940

Colour plates
1 St John’s Chapel in the White Tower, in a watercolour by John Crowther of about
1883
2 Italian glass beaker found south of Tower Street, 1990
3 Jugs, cooking pots, crucibles and a pottery money box produced at Kingston
4 Reconstruction of the priory of Holy Trinity Aldgate around 1500
5 Extract of an estate map of 1597 for All Souls College Oxford, surveyed by
Thomas Langdon
6 The vault of the 13th-century nave at Temple Church today
7 One of the schemes by William Holford, 1956
8 Excavation of a medieval water mill at Greenwich
9 View of St Paul’s Cathedral from the east in 2007, made available by the removal
of a post-War office building in New Change
10 The south churchyard at St Paul’s with the outlines of the 14th-century cloister
and buttress bases for the chapter house laid out in facsimile stone

x
 Foreword

This series brings together new archaeological studies of medieval Europe. We want to
describe and explain life in medieval Europe between the late 11th and 17th centuries,
and to show how archaeology does this. It is a new form of history.
The series sets out to be a major review of recent achievements and of future directions
for the subject. Each book is based on new archaeological research, often arising out of
work made necessary by urban and rural redevelopment. Each volume will assess new and
profitable methods of analysis, encourage debate and not avoid controversy.
The choice of subjects is deliberately wide. There will be studies of regions of Europe,
such as individual countries, or areas such as the North Sea where a geographical or
cultural zone will provide the scope or framework. Others will be of features of medieval
life, such as towns or castles in their landscapes. A third kind will review recent work on
certain classes of artefacts, to show how archaeological work is revolutionising our view
of medieval living standards, trade and religious experience. Yet others will be devoted to
new and challenging methodologies rather than surveying results.
The series will address important questions. To what extent was medieval Europe a cul-
tural, economic and religious entity? How did western Europe become a centre of civilisa-
tion? How should the present countries of Europe manage and enhance their medieval
heritage? Understanding leads to appreciation, and appreciation leads to a concern for
conservation of our common European past. This series will constitute a formidable array
of handbooks to explain why the past and its products, from artefacts to great buildings
and historic landscapes, are important for enriching life in Europe today.

John Schofield, series editor

xi
 Acknowledgements

Most of the maps and plans are by Mark Roughley and Carlos Lemos, and the Treswell
surveys have been redrawn by Alison Hawkins. I am grateful to the following for allowing
their work to be redrawn: Nathalie Cohen, Edward Impey and Gustav Milne. Many photo-
graphs have been provided by Andy Chopping of Museum of London Archaeology, and I
also thank Tracy Wellman and Roy Stephenson of the Museum for assistance. The text has
been read by Tony Dyson and Dave Evans, to both of whom I am grateful for much sound
criticism and correction. I have also received advice and comments from Lyn Blackmore,
Eileen and Colin Bowlt, Alan Pipe, Jane Sidell, Kathryn Stubbs and Bill White.
The author and publisher are grateful to the following for allowing reproduction of
illustrations: the Ashmolean Museum Oxford, Phil Dixon, English Heritage, Guildhall
Library (London Metropolitan Archives), the Museum of London and The Warden and
Fellows of All Souls College Oxford.
Much of the archaeological and documentary work reported here has been financially
supported by developers of individual sites; since the 1970s consistent support has come
from English Heritage and its predecessor the Department of Environment, and the City
of London Archaeological Trust. The support by the Corporation of the City of London
for this publication is also gratefully recorded.

xii
 —1—

Introduction

The scope and purpose of this book

This book is an attempt to describe and explain the development of London and the
lives of its occupants in the period 1100 to 1600, by demonstrating the contribution of
archaeological work to the elucidation and understanding of this city and its region.
Our first impressions of towns and cities, as of people, are crucial and often long-lasting.
Cities round the world, in their modern form, have the capacity to startle and fill the visi-
tor with an urge to explore. The walk out into the open air from the railway station at
Venice is a shock, even for the most prepared: what is this waterfront marina doing here?
Where are the roads? Imagine if there was a railway station in medieval London, and that
one day you came here for the first time and walked out into the city. What would you see?
There are several ways of reconstructing the historic view to answer this question, and the
most recent to make its contribution is archaeology.
Though western Europe is the wider canvas, this short book concentrates on the historic
central conurbation of London—the City of London, Southwark and Westminster—and
a surrounding region of approximately circular shape, itself with both an inner and outer
part as regards the treatment offered here. The inner region includes at its outer edge
the settlements of Uxbridge, Waltham Abbey, Romford, Dartford, Reigate, Leatherhead,
Chertsey and Staines (Figure 1.1). There will be occasional reference to towns, villages and
individual sites in a further strip of varying width outside this immediate area, for instance
to places such as St Albans, Chelmsford, Maidstone and Guildford, or rural sites at this
distance. And medieval and Tudor London communicated within Britain far beyond this
zone, to towns which shared many of its urban aspirations, such as York, Norwich, Canter-
bury and Winchester. London, shortly after 1600, played a significant part in the colonisa-
tion of the east coast of America.
The study is of the strata, the fragments, the objects that we can touch today to gain
an insight into former centuries. It is about the fragility and declining availability of this
historical resource. It attempts to chart, in outline, what is left.
There are one or two medieval or Tudor buildings standing above ground, usually the
original parish churches, in every London borough. In several inner London boroughs,
the likelihood of finding much medieval strata surviving below ground is however unpre-
dictable. In Southwark ‘the medieval past is still just traceable in its main street with little

1
 London 1100–1600

Figure 1.1 Map of the London region as studied in this book, with its river system, towns and
villages.
alleys opening off’. Kingston has a late 12th-century bridge over a tributary of the Thames,
but its history remains buried.1 The archaeological evidence below ground is generally
good in the central conurbation, especially thick along both sides of the Thames water-
front; patchy and unpredictable in the inner London boroughs; and often better in the
outlying villages and rural areas. Often, in the ground, there are few substantial remains
such as pieces of buildings or bridges; usually it is the ‘made ground’ so often dismissed as
uninteresting, even today, by engineers, surveyors and even those who maintain historic
sites. One point is basic to our enquiry: there is just as much information for the archae-
ologist in the layers of soil, gravel and rubbish which form ‘made ground’ as in the more
easily understandable fragments of buildings.
For example, there have been excavations in Westminster, which has a number of sur-
viving medieval buildings, but medieval strata are quite rare in the borough. Lambeth,
across the river and in the Middle Ages on the edge of the conurbation, is a contrasting
and disappointing case. An archive catalogue of 1998 listed 193 excavations and observa-
tions which had taken place in the borough between 1976 and 1990, mostly in the hectic
development years of the late 1980s. Much was recorded at a small number of sites round
known medieval and Tudor centres, such as the archbishop’s palace, a medieval residence

2
 Introduction
of the dukes of Norfolk nearby, and a house which may have belonged to Bishop Bonner
in the 16th century; or within known medieval settlement sites such as Tooting Bec. But a
large number of investigations monotonously reported ‘evidence of natural topography
only’, because 19th-and 20th-century buildings had removed the shallow deposits of all
previous centuries, even the Roman and prehistoric.2 The search must however continue,
and often sites in the inner London boroughs produce good results, as in the examples
discussed throughout this book.
In the outer parts of the region, now partly rural and partly enmeshed with 19th- and 20th-
century suburban development, there is another source: several hundred timber-framed
medieval and Tudor buildings, mainly rural houses from manor houses to cottages, and
barns.3 Most of the smaller market towns around London also had many timber-framed
buildings, unappreciated, which were drastically reduced in number without record in
redevelopment schemes of the 1960s and 1970s. Uxbridge was a particular casualty. At
Watford, recording of 15th- and 16th-century houses took place, while listing what had
been lost.4 Today attitudes are more sympathetic, and pockets of 15th- to 17th-century tim-
ber-framed buildings survive, for instance in Ruislip and the adjacent hamlet of Eastcote,
in west Middlesex. There are also several examples of single buildings dotted through the
suburbs of east and south-east London. Elsewhere, the buildings of our period have almost
all gone through the passage of time and suburban expansion; a study of vernacular build-
ing in Surrey, for instance, reports 856 secular buildings with some medieval characteristic
in the county, but they are nearly all south of Guildford, on the North Downs or further
south. The area of Surrey which is north of the North Downs has poor survival of struc-
tures, from which no sound conclusions can be drawn.5 The specification of the ancient
construction and repair dates of timber-framed buildings, or of fragments of them which
often survive in later rebuildings, has been greatly assisted by the development, since the
1970s, of tree-ring dating or dendrochronology (some examples are given in Chapter 4).
This book concentrates on the contribution of archaeological recording and study,
which extends to standing buildings when it can, but is mostly a review of investigations
ahead of and sometimes during redevelopment of present-day building sites and is thus
largely about buried strata and finds. The provision of adequate archaeological access to
sites in London, one of the most intensively developed parts of the United Kingdom in
every decade since 1950, gradually became a reality during the 1970s.
In 1984 I published a summary account of the buildings of London from about 1100
to the Great Fire in 1666.6 The contribution of recent archaeological work was then
slim. The new work reviewed here is contained in many articles and longer reports pro-
duced by archaeologists and others since the 1970s, up to 2010. It is a formidable array of
results and speculations. There has been significant work published on medieval London
Bridge, Guildhall, the Tower of London and the joint royal palace and abbey at West-
minster; on several of the capital’s monasteries and hospitals, both in the centre and the
countryside; Shakespearean theatres on the south bank; large houses of the secular and
religious elite; the waterfront with its rich deposits has been elucidated on many sites on
both banks of the Thames. Catalogues of artefacts, drawn from the tens of thousands of
objects excavated, have appeared for several kinds of household objects and personal

3
 London 1100–1600
effects including clothing and shoes. Work is in preparation on the medieval cathedral,
several other monastic houses and many more sites. The present study is a review of work
in progress, a first attempt at synthesis of the archaeological results, and like all first
attempts it is subject to challenge from new material in the future.
This survey therefore attempts to present archaeological frameworks of analysis, that
is the building forms, pottery styles and so on. It tries to match and when it can to go
beyond written evidence, to study human and animal bones, and material culture at
all levels of society, not just those whose artistic triumphs that have ended up in muse-
ums, both national and local. It hopes to help promote London as an archive for future
research, which it is, but also including experimental and theoretical work.
One assessment of the archaeology of the London area in recent years deserves special
mention: The archaeology of Greater London (MoL 2000), produced by the Museum of London
with funds from English Heritage. This reviewed, with extensive gazetteers and maps, the
archaeology of the conurbation of 33 boroughs from remotest prehistory up to the modern
period. The chapters dealing with London from 1100 to 1600 in that assessment7 will be
referred to occasionally in the present study; it summarised aspects of the subject as then
understood and posed questions which should be taken up and, if possible, now answered.
To explore any city, modern or ancient, we need a good map. The reader must forgive
the omission of a detailed street map of medieval London here. It would take up several
pages. But more significantly, one already exists, at least for the City of London. The His-
toric towns atlas volume for the City was published in 1989, and although it has been out
of print for some years now, the reconstructed map of about 1520 in it is reproduced: in
Caroline Barron’s London in the later Middle Ages of 2004, and more recently the same map
has been issued in two forms, to hang on your wall or folded up for use in exploration of
the City on the ground.8 The earlier map of about 1270, also in the Historic towns atlas, will
no doubt surface elsewhere. Readers are referred to these maps to find out the locations
of the historic buildings mentioned in the text below.
It is a central tenet of the present study that towns all over western Europe, when not inter-
rupted by wars or invasions, had remarkably similar economic fortunes and social histories,
beginning in the 10th century.9 Europe, in the modern sense, existed as a cultural entity by
1300. There were universities within a large triangular area defined by Cambridge, Seville
and Salerno. With regional variations, there was a polite style in architecture and common
ways of governing states and dealing with people’s spiritual lives. There was a degree of
cultural homogeneity throughout England, France, Scandinavia, Germany, northern Italy,
northern Spain and Portugal.10 This is reflected in the archaeology of towns and cities in
these countries, and the inevitable regional differences form an attractive tension.

London before 1100

The following chapters deal with London, and briefly its region, in the period 1100
to 1600. Before detailed treatment of various themes, a general introduction may be
required, to describe how London and its surroundings had come to look as they did in
1100 (Figure 1.2).
The fate of London in the centuries following the withdrawal of the Roman administra-
4
 Introduction

Figure 1.2 Main features of the City of London around 1100. St Paul’s Cathedral is shown in
its form about 1300, when the outline is known. The black symbols are the parish
churches known to exist by 1100.
tion in AD 410 is still uncertain. From excavations of the 1980s onwards, it is now clear
that by the 7th century London lay outside the walls of the old Roman town, on a site
to the west in the area of the modern Aldwych. This must be the Lundenwic of the few
documentary references of the time. Extensive resettlement of the area within the walls
of the City did not take place until the late 9th century, as part of Alfred’s national cam-
paign against Danish invasion. Thereafter the City of London grew as a place and as an
international port; by the 11th century it was the largest town in England, though not yet
the national capital.
The mid-Saxon town, described by Bede as ‘a mart of many peoples coming by land and
sea’, was a flourishing riverside settlement established to the west of the old Roman town
by about AD 650. This has been described in a series of books and reports,11 and is the
subject of several current projects. The evidence includes buildings, lanes, pits, ditches,
and copious environmental material; imported pottery includes pieces from France and
the Rhineland. By the 8th century London was becoming an increasingly important part
of the kingdom or polity of Mercia, which stretched from Chester to the Channel.
There is very little archaeological evidence of the 7th, 8th and early 9th centuries from
the walled city itself. The only known focus of activity within the walls for the 250 years
after AD 600 centres on the foundation of St Paul’s Cathedral in AD 604 and its influence
on the surrounding topography thereafter. Evidence of the Saxon cathedral or buildings
in its vicinity is minimal until its Romanesque rebuilding after 1087. Since clearance of
many Roman buildings and deposition of the dark earth horizon had already occurred by

5
 London 1100–1600
the late Roman period, it is unlikely that the underlying Roman urban topography exer-
cised much influence over subsequent development (excavation has shown that the line
of remarkably few Roman streets remained as thoroughfares by the Late Saxon period).
Although this is an overall conclusion, examples also come to light where substantial
Roman buildings, or roads, survived locally to form points of continuity, as at Number 1,
Poultry, where a Late Saxon sunken-floored building was evidently built against the wall
of a ruined Roman building.12 But topographical continuity is not the same as continuity
of habitation.
The extramural settlement of Lundenwic became deserted sometime during the 9th
century. The resettlement of the walled city may have begun as early as the mid-9th cen-
tury; traditionally it has also been associated with King Alfred’s documented restoration of
the city, now identified as a major episode to which the modern City owes its shape.13 The
nature and extent of occupation within the walls in this period has however proved dif-
ficult to establish, but the settlement was initially small. In the late 9th century it may have
been only immediately east and south of the cathedral, from Cheapside to the river.14
The late Saxon town was enclosed by the Roman landward wall and the decayed but
probably partially surviving riverside wall. Documentary sources imply that the walls were
repaired after AD 886 by Alfred but none of his work has so far been identified. All
the principal Roman gates, or rebuilds on the same sites, were apparently still in use.
A Uestgetum (?Ludgate or Newgate, or possibly both) is mentioned in AD 857; Alders-
gate, Aldgate, Bishopsgate and Cripplegate are mentioned in the 11th century. By 1050,
also, there were ribbon-developments along the major highways outside all the gates, and
especially towards Westminster.
The post-Roman re-establishment of the bridge and nearby Billingsgate are best
described together. The earliest specific reference to Southwark in the Burghal Hidage,
c. AD 915, may imply that a bridge had been repaired or rebuilt as part of the programme
by Alfred or his son Edward the Elder. London Bridge is however only mentioned in the
early 11th century, and it was perhaps rebuilt as late as 1000. Excavation of the Fennings
Wharf site on the south bank of the river in 1984 recorded two ex situ timbers in later
silts, cut from the same tree in the period c. AD 987–1032, and apparently from a bridge
abutment whose precise site and alignment are otherwise unknown. Another probably
in situ timber was from a tree felled after 1056, and is suggested to be the baseplate of a
landward bridge abutment. This may have been part of a documented repair in 1097.15
Archaeological finds of imported objects are scarce for most of the 10th century, sug-
gesting that the concerns of Alfred and his immediate successors were local, not Euro-
pean in ambition. But by 1000 this was changing as commercial links with the Continent
broadened for many English towns. A building date of about this time for the first real
post-Roman bridge would fit with contemporary documentary evidence, in the form of
Ethelred’s Law Code, which shows that merchants from Rouen, Ponthieu in Normandy,
Huy, Liège and Nivelles in Flanders and from the Holy Roman Empire were trading at
‘Billingsgate’. The central part of this trading area has always been identified with the
strip of foreshore which would have lain beneath the north end of the medieval inlet,
now beneath the former Billingsgate Fishmarket building of 1875 and almost certainly

6
 Introduction
destroyed. A controlled excavation at Billingsgate in 1982 lay about 80m to the west of the
1875 building, and the earlier excavation at New Fresh Wharf of 1974–5 lay immediately
west of that. Evidence of land reclamation and perhaps wharves indicate that by 1000 the
trading area probably included what was later St Botolph’s Wharf, between Billingsgate
and the bridge. A number of foreign 11th-century coins, from Belgium, Normandy and
Norway were recovered. The posts of a jetty extending into the river, supported by an
embankment of clay and timbers, at New Fresh Wharf has been regarded as evidence of
‘new techniques of handling cargoes’, in that it presumably allowed ships to be unloaded
at anchor as an alternative to being hauled up the sloping beach.16 If so, it was ahead of
its time, since elsewhere along the Thames waterfront the sloping beach continued to be
used for ships and boats for another century.
By the early 11th century London was once again an international port in a commercial
network which stretched all round the North Sea and well into the Baltic.17 The physical
development of the post-Alfredian city in the 9th and 10th centuries is broadly mirrored
in character and pace by the development of the cores of other medieval towns and cities
in Flanders and northern France. These include Arras, Ghent, Bruges, probably Antwerp,
and Douai; and towns such as Liège and Nivelles which were sending merchandise to
London by 1000 as mentioned in Ethelred’s Law Code.18 The imported objects found in
London during the Late Saxon period testify to a range of contacts: pottery from North
France, the Low Countries and the Rhineland; rings and other metal finery which may be
from Viking lands; hones made from Norwegian ragstone, querns of Niedermendig lava
(Germany); and coins from Belgium, Normandy, Norway and Scotland.19 This overseas
trade, interrupted again by the Vikings around 1012–14, was reflected in the construction
of the bridge, wharves, timber buildings and churches.
In the 1050s Edward the Confessor established a royal palace next to Westminster
Abbey. The abbey had stood in some form on Thorney Island, where the Tyburn stream
met the Thames, for generations: how many, nobody quite knows even today. Archaeo-
logical opportunities in recent decades among the government offices of Whitehall have
been limited, so knowledge of Westminster’s development from being the south end of
Lundenwic to a one-street town serving the palace and abbey is not yet sufficient; the
medieval developments there are reviewed in Chapter 3. Knowledge of the development
of Southwark up to 1200 is also limited.
The names of several medieval Middlesex villages are mentioned in Anglo-Saxon times,
but we cannot be certain in any case that there was an Anglo-Saxon village there. Ashford
(as Ecelesford), Brentford, Cowley, Drayton, Feltham, Greenford, Isleworth, Shepperton,
Sunbury, Teddington, Twickenham, and many others are documented before the end
of the 10th century. But were they villages then? The name Hampstead, mentioned in
AD 959, means ‘farm-site’.20 The national view, at least in the 1980s, was that rural settle-
ment in lowland England at this time was dispersed, of farms and perhaps hamlets, and
there was no need to come together into villages. When they did, the villages betrayed
their origins in being ‘polyfocal’, that is with several older centres such as road junctions
and greens.21 The archaeology of Anglo-Saxon villages and rural settlement around Lon-
don is only beginning.

7
 London 1100–1600
Towns all over western Europe, with local variations, shared similar histories. Until the
10th century, towns were rarely of any size or importance; lords lived off country estates.
True, in the middle and later 9th century the Vikings raided many towns, especially on
coasts, so those places at least must have been worth attacking. Paradoxically, this period
of uncertainty produced stronger towns, in that they invested in defences, and rural peo-
ple must have fled to them. Towns were focal points of religious authority, and important
as the centres for making and issuing coins, though these were not yet small enough in
value for daily use. Sometimes the coins are the only evidence for what was going on.
Towns looked remarkably alike. In London, St Paul’s Cathedral (with its probable duo of
royal and episcopal palaces) stood largely alone in the Roman city until the late 9th cen-
tury, with Lundenwic outside it to the west; at Mainz (Germany) around AD 973, an Arab
traveller found little of the Roman city to be occupied, but a flourishing trading place
outside it. Throughout this book, we shall find parallels for developments in London in
many towns throughout western Europe.

The extent of the built-up area over time

Here is the place to consider one of the most important challenges to archaeological
work, together with work on documents and map evidence from about 1550: to chart the
general extent of the built-up area over the centuries. The reader needs a basic mental
map, and some crucial dates. The central conurbation consisted of the City, Southwark
and Westminster (Figure 1.3).
Recent archaeological work, for instance on the Guildhall and Cheapside area sites, is
filling out the picture first suggested by Alan Vince in 1991 from study of the distribu-
tion of 11th-century pottery, that by 1100 most of the space inside the Roman walls of
London was occupied, apart from the marshy places in the north part around what is
now St Margaret Lothbury, behind the Bank of England.22 Thus archaeology is underpin-
ning or confirming the map in Figure 1.3. By 1100 London probably had a population
of 20,000 or more, which doubled by 1200, then doubled again by 1300, to reach at least
80,000.23 According to current estimates, about 48%, or just under half, of the population
of London died in the Black Death in 1348–50;24 the effects of this devastating moment
on all aspects of life and business will feature in the following chapters. For the conurba-
tion, a total population around 1550 of somewhere between 50,000 and 75,000 is now
suggested by historians. Another plague in 1563 probably removed up to a third of the
people. Despite this setback, the 1560s saw the start of a massive increase in population
of London, so that by 1600, the end date for the present study, it stood at about 200,000.
Thus archaeological work has to take account of a three- or possibly four-fold increase in
population in the second half of the 16th century (from 50,000 to 200,000 people), and
all that meant for new areas of housing, pressures on parish churches, hospitals, food sup-
plies and all the mechanisms of town life. The growth of London from 1500 to 1700 has
also been called ‘one of the most striking and important changes which occurred within
English society and the English economy.’25 London had been central to many facets of
life in England since at least 1100, but its importance and effect on the rest of the country
grew enormously after 1500. This is why the story of London during these centuries is of
8
 Introduction

Figure 1.3 Extent of the central medieval conurbation, about 1300.

interest outside the capital and its immediate region.
The extraordinary and unprecedented growth in population of the conurbation,
according to current estimates, by between three and four times between 1550 and 1600,
a mere 50 years, presents a problem if the sketchmap of Figure 1.3 is considered. The
toned area here represents the built-up area, roughly correct for 1300. Yet maps of about
1600, supported by views (such as the Burden view, below, Figures 2.19 and 5.5), suggest
that the built-up area was not much bigger in 1600 than in 1300. There were certainly new
straggling suburbs along both banks of the river to the east, and incipiently north of the
City wall. Westminster was growing, Southwark would blossom in the 17th century. But
how did the slightly increased area of housing soak up two and a half times more people
in 1600 than it had in 1300? It seems incredible. One contributory answer is that the
Dissolution of the Monasteries had intervened in the 1530s and 1540s. The monasteries
in London occupied a large part of the urban area (map, Figure 6.11). With much new
building, no doubt of a substandard nature, the monastic precincts soaked up many of
the immigrants. Houses were generally probably built higher at this time, and backlands
and gardens became alleys. There was chronic overcrowding. As will be shown in Chap-
ter 4 below which deals with housing, the second half of the 16th century was probably
a period when buildings grew much taller, thus accommodating more people. All these
factors contributed, but we still have to explain in detail how the area of land occupied in

9
 London 1100–1600
1300, or a little more, contained all these people in 1600.
This study will compare medieval London with other European towns and cities from
time to time. London was among the larger cities; but as measured by area within its
defences, by no means in the top league. The walled City of London, in 1300, contained
about 160 hectares; the same size as Nuremberg, but smaller in area than Siena, Barce-
lona or Pisa, just over a third of the size of Paris, and less than a third of the size of Ghent
or Milan. It is nevertheless with these larger cities that London should be compared in its
development.
Several books could be written about the archaeology of London from the beginning of
the 12th century to the end of the 16th century, and all would have to be selective. What
follows is my impression.

10
 —2—

Public buildings and concerns

This chapter brings together several themes which are loosely related: the archaeology
of civic authority (the defences, London Bridge, Guildhall, inland markets, water sup-
ply), the deliberate manipulation of the extent of the built-up area of the City over time,
including expansion into the River Thames, and a final section on the character of lan-
duse outside the City walls, including places of public resort such as the Tudor theatres.
These topics form an archaeology of the public aspects of life in London. They are briefly
compared in other towns.

London’s defences
The medieval defences of the City of London, which were the prime symbol of its author-
ity as shown on its 13th-century seal (Figure 2.1), comprised the wall and interval towers;
a bank of earth behind and ditches in front; and gates both on the principal entry roads
and in a couple of places as posterns.1
The characteristic Roman work of roughly squared ragstone with triple levelling cours-
es of tiles at regular intervals must have been visible above ground along many stretches
of the walls in the medieval period (Figure 2.2). Medieval work, albeit much repaired, is
still visible at Tower Hill, Coopers Row, Crosswall, St Alphage Garden and Noble Street,
and fragments survive elsewhere out of public view. The length of wall at Cooper’s Row
includes round-headed embrasures, possibly 12th-century, and perhaps traces of a stair to
the wall-walk. The height of the wall probably varied slightly, as efforts would be made to
keep the top level while accounting for local slopes in the ground surface. Being based on
the Roman work, the medieval wall was about 9.5m high when viewed from outside; this
was low in comparison to a city wall built on a new course in the medieval period, such as
that of 12th-century Paris, which was about 12m high.2
In 1278 Edward I licensed the archbishop of Canterbury to extend the line of the city
walls to the south and west of Ludgate, around the intended new second site for the
Blackfriars friary. Completed about 1310, this extension at the south�western corner of the
city, overlooking the River Fleet, represented the only enlargement of the defences by the
City. In contrast, the earliest phases of the Tower were contained within the south-eastern
angle of the Roman walls but later circuits of the castle broke through this line, so that by
1300 the city walls proper began on the northern side of the Tower moat.
11
 London 1100–1600

Figure 2.1 The 13th-century seal of the City of London, showing St Paul defending the city,
circled by its wall studded with towers (Corporation of London).
The wall of London may have looked distinctive. At various parts of the wall repairs in
the form of layers of knapped flints have been seen; they probably date from the 14th or
15th century. William Maitland in 1756 reported his watching of destruction of part of
the wall south of Bishopsgate, and this included five courses of what we call chequerwork,
flint and other stone squares ‘ranged in a quincunx order’.3
London was also defended by D-shaped interval towers, traditionally called bastions; the
term and the numbering of the towers seems to have been introduced in 1928, probably
by Mortimer Wheeler.4 Up to 18 have now been discovered or inferred on the east side of
the city, up to the Moorfield marshes on the north side. These all seem to be late Roman
in date, and most (but not all) were kept in operation in the medieval period. One in
Bevis Marks was evidently rebuilt in polygonal form, like medieval towers in other towns.
After the marshy interval, a western series of bastions resumed with one which was lost by
1600, but found in 1965 in the bombed cellars of the Barbican. To fit in with the existing
numbering, this is known as Bastion 11A.
The western towers have been considered by Milne in his publication of excavations by
W F Grimes.5 Round towers continued at regular intervals from Cripplegate to Ludgate;

12
 Public buildings and concerns

Figure 2.2 A reconstruction of a typical section of the City wall by 1500, published in the Royal
Commission’s volume on Roman London in 1929. The ‘post Roman work’ probably
includes repairs from the time of Alfred in the late 9th century up to 1477, when
Jocelyn replaced the parapet with bricks containing diaper patterns. The full se-
quence is best seen in the surviving section at the present St Alphage Garden, in the
medieval period just east of Cripplegate.

south of that was the extension of the wall around the Blackfriars of 1278, with its own
towers, one of which was rectangular in plan (Figure 2.3).6 Although one period of con-
struction or rebuilding was probably 1257, as instructed by Henry III, it is clear that some
of the towers already existed by then; one north of Ludgate is mentioned in 1235. Milne
argues that no two towers are identical in their construction, and that several medieval
13
 London 1100–1600

Figure 2.3 A rectangular interval tower on the City wall south-west of Ludgate, drawn by J T
Smith after a fire of 1792 (MoL).
campaigns of building and repair are indicated. New detailed recording of the masonry
of Bastion 14, which today can be seen from the Museum of London gallery, reveals traces
of three blocked arrow loops and two other windows in the superstructure. We might
expect gunloops (slits with rounded openings at the bottom) in the late medieval period
14
 Public buildings and concerns
as well, as surviving in quantity on similar towers at Canterbury, but they do not appear
yet in the masonry or graphic records.
The ditch beyond the walls was recut on a large scale in 1212–13 and 1477, and formed
a series of moated arms apparently divided by causeways at each of the gates. The medi-
eval ditches have been examined at many sites, revealing successive cuttings, filling with
rubbish and silting-up. The ditches contain much datable pottery and other objects, but
these cannot be associated with specific places of origin and use.7 Environmental samples
from some of the more recent excavations may in the future reveal whether the ditch
was filled with water, and whether the water was flowing or stagnant. Extramural roads
ran along the outer edge of the ditch at Old Bailey and Houndsditch. By the early 14th
century there were properties and buildings on the outer edge of the ditch at Old Bailey,
where the law courts of that name now stand, next to Newgate; similarly the ditch had
been filled in for a distance north of Ludgate, and medieval wicker fences have been
found here in excavations. The land next to and just outside gates was clearly under pres-
sure and prized, presumably for selling goods to all those who passed through.
The gates and posterns in the wall have a patchy archaeology. None of the six main
landward gates has been comprehensively excavated, though there have been observa-
tions at several of them, especially Aldgate, where the 12th-century flanking towers of the
gate have been noted. It is very likely that for much of the medieval and Tudor periods,
most of the gates were patched up structures going back to the 12th century and possibly
even before, as can still be seen in the surviving west gate of Winchester and at medieval
gates in other towns. Aldgate, Bishopsgate and especially Newgate contained fabric from
their Roman predecessors, and probably still do in all three cases, below the present road-
ways. Aldgate had two pairs of doors, inner and outer, though only one remained at the
time of John Stow in the 1590s.8 There is little to see above ground: a postern gate north
of the Tower, rebuilt in the 13th century, is now conserved and exposed on the north side
of the Tower moat after excavation in 1976. William Leybourn provides a plan of each of
the gates in 1676, as part of his survey of the city wall; in the case of Newgate and Ludgate,
with outlines of their attached prisons.9 At that date several had been rebuilt after the
Fire, but Bishopsgate (Figure 2.4) and Cripplegate must have been in their medieval
form; Newgate had only partly been rebuilt. Some of the medieval gates incorporated
statues, usually on the outside; those at Bishopsgate (where a headless statue of St Peter
was found nearby in the 18th century) and on the bridge are the best known. Such groups
of statues are known on gates of major towns all over medieval Europe.
London was never seriously besieged, but the defences were occasionally tested. In 1461
the gates were successfully and pointedly closed against the victorious army of Henry
VI’s queen, who had just won the Battle of St Albans.10 The most substantial remodel-
ling of the walls occurred in 1477, when Ralph Jocelyn (mayor 1476–7) organised the
strengthening of the northern section of the wall, with the fairly new material brick, from
Aldgate to Aldersgate. This survives best at St Alphage Garden, where it was revealed by
the first bombs of the Blitz. Why this long section should have been thought vulnerable
or dilapidated is not now apparent, but rebels had been repulsed at Aldgate in 1471. New
walling at the top included diapering (diamond patterns) in burned brick, though it is
15
 London 1100–1600

Figure 2.4 Plan of Bishopsgate by William Leybourn in 1676 (LMA). North, the exterior side,
is towards the bottom. This shows that the gate included an area of containment on
the outside, between its two main walls. Perhaps the foundations of this gate survive
below the modern street. By this time houses occupied both the bank behind the
wall and the ditch, as shown on the right.
not clear if the embellishment went round the tops of the protruding interval towers.
Arches of brick were added behind at the base of the wall over long distances, presumably
as strengthening against cannon. At Holy Trinity Priory, one of these arches sealed up
and put out of use a private postern door of the priory in the wall. It is also possible that
some smaller towers, such as Bastion 11A, may have been sacrificed in this operation and
removed down to their foundations.11
In the decades after 1540, the Reformation stripped away forms of urban ceremony,
ritual and social organisation which had formerly been organised by the Church. One
recurring concern in this book will be how this radical change affected buildings, arte-
facts and the attitudes with which people structured their surroundings. Towns now had
to find a new repertoire of symbols to replace the semi-religious imagery they were used
to. In London’s case, they turned to history: to the legends which showed how old Lon-
don was, and to bolster that, a pride in its undoubted Roman past; while statues or carv-
ings of monarchs professed loyalty to the crown. The gates, real and symbolic entrances
16
 Public buildings and concerns
to the city, were the showcases for this mentality. Ludgate was rebuilt in 1585–6, and in
its new form was embellished with statues of Queen Elizabeth on the external west side,
and of the mythical King Lud and his two sons on the east side. That of the queen was
replaced with another after the Fire, and when the gate was demolished in 1760, the four
were retained by St Martin’s church. They are now kept at the church of St Dunstan in
the West, Fleet Street, though conditions for the three Tudor statues are hardly ideal. All
have lost hands or arms, and the tips of their noses. Beneath the incrustations of soot,
discolouring attributable to the Great Fire can be seen.12 These remarkable survivals are
matched by a record of part of a stone building recorded on the south side of Ludgate
Hill in 1969, surviving as a present boundary wall; the ragstone fragment was about 7m
tall, and presumably is still there. The wall may be part of an adjacent stone building
which was built to be a prison in 1463.13
In the opening decades of the 17th century, Aldgate and Aldersgate were rebuilt in
the stocky Renaissance style of the time. The rebuilding of Aldgate in 1607–9 was a state-
ment of civic pride in an ancient past. On the new box-like structure two Roman soldiers
stood on the battlements, with stone balls in their hands; beneath, in a square panel, was
a statue of James I. On the inside was a figure of Fortune, and gilded figures of Peace
and Charity copied from Roman coins discovered when digging the foundations of the
gate. An inscription stated ‘Senatus Populus Que Londinensis Fecit 1609, Humfrey Weld,
Maior’.14 Foundations of this gate and its predecessors, now beneath a traffic roundabout,
have also been seen: observation in 1967 recorded the Roman gate, part of a medieval
gate-tower (possibly of 1215) extending outwards, and the basement of the north part of
the gate of 1607–9.15 A panel on the outside of Aldersgate of 1617, showing the king on
horseback, may be the earliest equestrian representation of a monarch in Britain (Figure
2.5).16 Foundations of this gate were seen in the roadway in 1939; they included pieces of
medieval tracery, sadly not kept, which may have been from the previous gate.17
By the mid 16th century the ditch had begun to disappear for good. The length
between Newgate and Aldersgate was vaulted over and the land given to Christ’s Hospital.
The main sections of the ditch were encroached from the outer side with gardens, tenter
grounds for drying cloth, and houses. There was however one attempt to recut the ditch
in the 17th century, probably at the time of the Civil Wars in the 1640s, when there was a
separate, more ambitious defence dug to enclose both the City and Westminster. By the
second half of the 18th century the gates were deemed to be impeding traffic and no
longer a suitable ornament to the city, and they were demolished. Stretches of the walls
survived above ground only in exceptional conditions, where they formed part of an
adjoining long-lived building, for example, or fronted onto an extramural churchyard.
The wall continued to belong to the City, and the present corporation maintains the sur-
viving parts as the city’s largest monument.
Over the last century there have been dozens of excavations of the wall and its ditches,
and only some have been published. It deserves to be more studied, and is poorly rep-
resented in the published literature by comparison to the defences of England’s major
towns. Even the main dates of programmes of work on the defences in 1100–1600 are
barely recorded in documents, and their extent on the surviving fabric is uncharted. The
17
 London 1100–1600

Figure 2.5 The exterior of Aldersgate of 1617, as engraved in the middle of the 18th century,
shortly before its demolition (MoL). The equestrian relief showed James I, probably
one of the earliest representations of a monarch on horseback, as frequently shown
in paintings of Charles I. The attic storey on each side is a later addition, so the cen-
tral feature of the royal arms would be the apex of the design.
gates and many of the bastions were used as accommodation, with the City’s agreement,
by either trustworthy officers including, for a time, Geoffrey Chaucer the king’s servant,
or the noble owners of adjacent property and occasionally anchorites. Especially after
1400, the ditches outside the wall became a landward version of the reclamation units on

18
 Public buildings and concerns
the waterfront, containing household and trade waste from unknown parts of the city,
but with a high information potential. There are at least two further research themes to
explore in the future. The defences and especially the gates including that on London
Bridge were part of the symbolic face of the city itself, part of its standing up to the outside
world. But at the same time, they served to divide London society as well as unite it, since
they physically promoted an attitude of ‘us inside’ and ‘them outside’.18 This crystallisa-
tion of settlement was inherited from the early 3rd century Roman city wall, with which
the medieval wall coincided for nearly all its length. This ancient barrier constrained
suburban development virtually until the entire defensive circuit became redundant in
the early 17th century; only then did housing spread like water into all the surrounding
fields, not just near the gates.
Very few smaller towns around London had defences. Those which did were mostly of
Roman origin, keeping their Roman walls fairly intact: Rochester, Canterbury, Colches-
ter. Hertford, a town of Saxon origins, had defences. No urban place in Middlesex found
them necessary. Where town walls were erected, they were as in London extremely influ-
ential on the development of the place. This is illustrated by towns along the south-east
coast of England which were fortified against foreign attack which sometimes took place,
such as Rye, Dover and Sandwich. Of these, the defences at Rye have been thoroughly
studied in a programme of recording all the medieval buildings, enhanced by drawings
of the defences in 1634 by Van Dyck. In this small town, the wall and gates had as much
impact on the visual character of the place as the larger religious buildings.19
The archaeology of town councils and their actions can be sought, even where there
were no certain civic buildings and no defences. The town or village might be demarcated
by a boundary ditch which would perhaps have evidence of when it was originally dug;
the streets inside the town might be better paved than the approach roads outside, with
the town boundary demarcating the difference in roadmending standards. This seems to
have been the case even in the City of London; the corporation’s responsibility for road
metalling stopped at the civic boundaries, a short distance outside the walls.

London Bridge
Though the wall and gates might be shown on the City seal, the most important single
secular structure was undoubtedly London Bridge. Since its creation in the 1st century by
the incoming Roman conquerors, the bridge had been the reason that the City of Lon-
don was where it was.
The bridge is mentioned in the early 11th century; perhaps it was rebuilt about 1000.
Excavation of the Fennings Wharf site on the south bank of the river in 1984 recorded
two ex situ timbers in later silts, cut from the same tree in the period c AD 987–1032,
and apparently from a bridge abutment whose precise site and alignment are otherwise
unknown. Here was also a rectangular timber structure filled with chalk rubble and clay,
datable to the late 11th or early 12th century. On top of it were traces of two succes-
sive rectangular timber abutment structures, both dating to the second half of the 12th
century. The abutment lay beneath the eastern half of the wider south end of the stone
bridge of 1176–1209 which replaced it. The prevalent assumption is that the 12th-century
19
 London 1100–1600

Figure 2.6 View through the second arch of London Bridge looking east, by E W Cooke in 1831
(GL). The three arches with roll mouldings are probably of the original phase in 1176–
1209; the extension of a pier to the east is later, but it is not certain by how much.
timber bridge was roughly on the same alignment as its stone successor, i.e. it touched the
two river banks at the same points, though there has been a long tradition that the timber
bridge was a little to the east and met the north bank at Botolph Wharf.20
The stone bridge had nineteen piers, with a chapel of St Thomas (rebuilt in the 1380s)
on the eleventh pier from the south, thus not quite in the middle of the structure. Milne
has suggested that there was originally a twentieth pier at the north end, buried in land
reclamation of the 13th century, which if true would put the central larger pier and the
chapel in the middle of the whole bridge.21 The stone bridge was presumably more of
an obstruction to smaller boats than its predecessor; after 1209, Queenhithe lost out to
Billingsgate as a landing place for goods and people, partly because of the bridge. This
process had probably started in the 12th century. After its rebuilding in stone the bridge
must have been a formidable public symbol, the main construction facing most foreign
visitors to the City who would arrive by boat, and a legal and fiscal barrier: passage of
ships through the bridge ‘marked their subjection to the king of England’.22 By the time
it was recorded in detail in the 1830s, on the eve of destruction, the bridge and its arches
showed several periods of building and extension, but detailed analysis may now not be
possible (Figure 2.6).
Shops and houses quickly appeared on both sides of the bridge roadway. The many par-
tial rebuildings of sections of the bridge, for instance after collapses, may have extended
20
 Public buildings and concerns

Figure 2.7 Plan of the north end of London Bridge, undated but probably shortly after 1632
and showing where the fire of that year had removed some of the houses on both
sides of the roadway (GL). The piers seem to have been extended before 1600.

the piers to provide better support for buildings which got higher and wider as time went
on. There is evidence of a programme of extensions of the piers, in both directions, in
the seven piers nearest the north bank. The extension to a pier is shown by Cooke in
1831 (Figure 2.6) as masonry added to what is clearly the original arch with plain 12th-
century mouldings. This extensive rebuilding or addition has been dated to 1757–62, but
the extensions are shown on two earlier plans, the earlier of unknown date but probably
shortly after 1632 (Figure 2.7) and a very similar plan by Edward Woodroffe in a volume
of drawings from Christopher Wren’s office, drawn perhaps in the 1670s. These ‘extend-
ed’ piers show in the late 16th-century drawings of the bridge, for instance by Norden,
but not certainly in the view by Wyngaerde of about 1540 (Figure 2.8). It therefore seems
possible that they represent a rebuilding phase, presumably one of many, in this case of
the second half of the 16th century (the time of the new building called Nonsuch House,
which spanned the roadway at the south end of this set of piers).
Wardens who managed the bridge are known from the late 13th century; their opera-
tions were based in a compound called the Bridge House, on the south bank. The repair
accounts and rentals of property in the city given or acquired to generate income survive
from 1381–2; they comprise a large body of records of what has been described as ‘one
of the biggest and surely the longest-running building project in London’.23 The bridge
was embellished with the chapel of St Thomas which is shown in later panoramas, built
in 1384–96 possibly by Henry Yevele, the builder of Westminster Hall and much else who
lived in Thames Street opposite St Magnus church, less than 100 yards from the bridge.
The new chapel would have replaced an earlier chapel which probably dated from the
original bridge of 1209. The Bridge was condemned as being in a ruinous condition in
1435, and in January 1437 the Stonegate on the second pier from the south collapsed,
taking two of the bridge arches with it; a corbel decorated with a human head found later
in the river nearby has been attributed to the gate. In 1461–2 the drawbridge was raised
112 times for ships to pass through, and in this year the bridge accounts contain pay-
ments for work on ‘the foundation of the new stone work at the south end of the bridge’.
21
 London 1100–1600

Figure 2.8 The south end of London Bridge from the south-east, part of the large view by
Wyngaerde about or shortly after 1540 (Ashmolean Museum Oxford). The outer
face of the Stonegate of 1437–66 shown here bore the City arms between carvings,
possibly heraldic animals of some kind.

The drawbridge was raised against rebels in 1471, but could not be raised in 1476. This
was probably the date after which it never worked again.24
London Bridge is shown in detail on panoramas of the city from the south: principally
that of Wyngaerde, about 1540 (Figure 2.8), and by Hollar, a century later in 1647 (Figure
2.9). There is a striking difference between the two in the character of the buildings on
the bridge. In the earlier Wyngaerde view, many of the buildings must have been of 15th-
century or even earlier date in origin. By the time of Hollar’s view in the 17th century,
many had been rebuilt or replaced by larger, higher structures.25 The 16th and early 17th
centuries must therefore have been a period of rebuilding and expansion for the struc-
tures on London Bridge.
Fairly precise dates for individual timbers and timber constructions have been given,
and that is due to the development in London since about 1970, as elsewhere, with tree-
ring dating or dendrochronology. This is by far the most important scientific contribution
made to archaeology of medieval settlements, since the profuse wooden structures found
in wet conditions on both sides of the Thames, as detailed below in the section on the
waterfront, held back units of reclamation which included thousands of artefacts which
22
 Public buildings and concerns

Figure 2.9 The southern part of London Bridge by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1647 (MoL). By this
time the bridge was largely covered with tall stylish buildings, including Nonsuch
House, at the rear of this picture, about which little is known; it may have been used
by the Corporation for mayoral functions such as banquets.

can now be better dated. The comprehensive archaeological and historical study of the
medieval bridge published in 2001, from which much of the above derives, contains a
review not only of the large numbers of timbers found during excavation of the south end
of the bridge in the 1980s, but an interim statement about the possibilities of dating sam-
ples from several different species of tree. Most of the wood used in London, as elsewhere,
was oak, which is suitable for analysis. Recent work has started on beech, which was used
in many subsidiary capacities, and which is responding to attention by dendrochronolo-
gists. So far the third widely-used species, elm (particularly for waterfront foundations) is
less amenable to use for dating, but work in is progress.26

The archaeology of authority: Guildhall

Medieval Guildhall, rebuilt many times, still stands at the back of its post-War courtyard a
short distance north of Cheapside. The building of a new art gallery next to it, and excava-
tion of the yard, in 1987–92 enabled a detailed study of Guildhall in its setting to be made.27
The excavation had found, to general surprise, that a Roman amphitheatre with earth
banks had occupied the site previously, just south-east of the 2nd-century Roman fort which
formed the north-west corner of the city. The excavators demonstrate that by the 10th
23
 London 1100–1600

Figure 2.10 Plan of the relationship of the 12th-century Guildhall building to the north side of
the underlying Roman amphitheatre (Bowsher et al 2007). The dashed lines indi-
cate the areas of excavation from the 1950s up to 1990.
century, when we know there would have been a rudimentary City government of some
kind, the amphitheatre was almost levelled with the surrounding land, whether by human
or natural agency; so the siting of the first stone building which was probably, though not
certainly, the Guildhall in the early 12th century on the bank of the amphitheatre (Figure
2.10) is pure coincidence. Maybe so, but coincidences do not come much purer.
The new study fills out many details of the main phases in the history of Guildhall it-
self, the main dates of which had been postulated in previous studies. The 12th-century
building was replaced by a larger one in the late 13th century, which in slightly truncated
form comprises the west undercroft below Guildhall today. This was extended to the east,
though losing a bay, by John Croxton in 1411–40 when he created the present building
on its own undercroft (Figure 2.11) and its porch. In the 15th century this was part of
a precinct of civic buildings, including a chapel and library. Adjacent, adapting an early
stone building in Basinghall Street, the City also established Blackwell Hall, which was to
become a national centre for the sale of cloth. By the time of the rebuilding in the late
13th century an earlier lane of mean timber buildings which led to Guildhall (Figure 4.2
below) had been cleared away. The Jews in the area, of whom more in Chapter 4, were
expelled and their stone houses became taverns or inns for those with business in or on
24
 Public buildings and concerns

Figure 2.11 The eastern undercroft of Guildhall of 1440, photographed in 1896 (GL). The col-
umns are a late use of Purbeck marble.
the borders of the precinct. Guildhall even had its own gatehouse to the street on the
south; civic authority was expressed powerfully and in exclusive terms. Within its eastern
undercroft, whatever business happened there if any, an angel in the vaulting supervised
(Figure 2.12). Next to Guildhall by about 1350 was a civic chapel, which was replaced by
a larger one in Croxton’s building of the early 15th century; though I think the excava-
tors have reconstructed the plan of the first chapel too wide. In my view the chapel would
have resembled the contemporary chapel at the house of the Bishop of Ely, now St Ethel-
dreda’s, which is almost the same size, or the longer St Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of
Westminster; chapels were long narrow buildings, not three aisles wide and wider than
the hall they served.
Also shown on Figure 2.10 is the position of St Lawrence Jewry church which also may
have significance, though this is far from certain. Roman amphitheatres in other Euro-
pean towns contained post-Roman churches, such as at Lucca, Tarragona or Arles, where
there were two churches. But these continental amphitheatres were large constructions
of stone, suitable for adaptation into fortified communities which would then accrue
churches. The amphitheatre in London was made of earth banks which had largely been
levelled. And given that medieval London eventually had a hundred churches within its
25
 London 1100–1600

Figure 2.12 An angel carved in the vaulting of the Croxton undercroft of Guildhall (MOLA).

walls, and the amphitheatre was of some size, it is likely that there would have been one or
more churches on its site anyway, as a product of the development of the area with streets
in the 10th to 12th centuries.

Market buildings and spaces

Several of the major streets of the City, particularly where they were broad, a legacy of
the Roman town planning, were designated as markets by the 13th century: those in
Newgate, Cheapside, and Eastcheap were primarily for food. At Newgate and at the east
end of Cheapside, a market building was built in the middle of the street; by the 15th
century the building at the Stocks in Poultry was of stone, specialising in meat and fish.
There were also special open spaces next to the landing places at Billingsgate and Queen-
hithe, each called Romeland, where certain kinds of produce could be sold as it came off
the boat; and the large open space of Smithfield, outside Aldersgate to the north-west,
was a natural choice as a market for horses and the immense numbers of cattle and sheep
which would arrive on the hoof.28
Two examples of market buildings erected by civic authorities are given here. The first
is the largest in the medieval City, and has been elucidated by recent archaeological work:
the 15th-century Leadenhall.29 Here in 1986 a length of medieval wall two storeys high
was found at the back of a Victorian building in Gracechurch Street. At the same time
excavation just to the east, intended to investigate as it did the Roman basilica and forum
beneath, recorded foundations and 177 moulded stones (architectural fragments), all
26
 Public buildings and concerns

Figure 2.13 Reconstruction of the north range of Leadenhall by Mark Samuel (1989).

of which clearly came from the construction of Leadenhall in 1440–9. This was a large
rectangular quadrangle of plain but grand storage chambers, two storeys over a ground-
floor arcade to the court, and with traceried windows to Leadenhall Street on the north
(Figure 2.13). A chapel on the east side was part of the scheme (Figure 2.14). Similar civic
granaries were constructed or enlarged at Cologne and Nuremberg after a widespread
famine in Europe in 1437, and Leadenhall may have been part of this reaction. Though
designed as a granary and market, the complex had battlements and turrets at the cor-
ners, as though it were fortified; evidently the City authorities took the storage of grain
seriously, since shortage of food caused riots. The previous markets for poultry and other
foodstuffs held in the narrow streets outside were moved into the courtyard once it was
finished. The reconstruction of Leadenhall is a model exercise in working from individu-
al stones forming arches, windows and stairs up to plans and sections of the buildings, by
analysing all the available plans of the building, which was not fully demolished until the
19th century, and its documentary history.
27
 London 1100–1600

Figure 2.14 Interior view of Leadenhall chapel by John Carter, about 1785 (GL). This was built
about 1440, the date presumably of the screen in the foreground.
The architect of Leadenhall in 1440 was John Croxton, who was just finishing his other
great work for the City, Guildhall itself. There are some similarities in architectural detail
between the two projects, but Leadenhall exhibits special features. Its component parts
were highly standardised, and even the way stones were laid in courses was rigidly control-
led over long distances; this was a building put up in a short time, presumably by a large
work force, and is a medieval predecessor of modern fast-track construction. It is also a
building without clear predecessors or contemporary parallels. Perhaps its size and design
were influenced by the main market building, the Halles, at Bruges, of about 1240 and
later, though without its famous tower. The arcaded square which was the main feature
at Leadenhall provided a more dignified market setting than that in Paris, where the
main market, also called les Halles, was a rather tangled collection of halls, galleries and
angular courts, apparently with arcades. If anything, the Leadenhall arcade looked like
those surrounding squares in several bastide towns of southern France such as Monpazier,
founded by the English 150 years before; the area of the market and its arcades was as
great as the square in several of the bastides.30
But most of all, Leadenhall was the largest and most imposing medieval market struc-
ture in the City and perhaps in England. In other parts of London and in other towns,
a market would be placed centrally in the place, but its architecture would not vie with
the civic, royal or religious structures because activities centred on those buildings had
more status. But here market activities were given as much status as the political or the
religious; the quadrangle at Leadenhall was far larger than either of the cloisters at the ca-
28
 Public buildings and concerns

Figure 2.15 The market house at Barking (Essex), by an unknown artist in 1799 (GL). The
ground-floor arcade provided space for the market, and the town court deliberated
above. The town of Barking meant business by reflecting the City in its civic building.
thedral, or indeed at any other London religious establishment. Arcades were a common
feature of market buildings, as they provided adaptable space out of the weather; there
were long arcades at Queenhithe and Billingsgate, which would have sheltered not only
merchandise but people waiting for the ferries. The modern bus-shelter has a medieval
predecessor.
The arcades were a sign of a public building. As they grew, the small towns around
London often erected a civic building in the middle of town, which combined several
functions, as illustrated at Barking. Here a combined market house and courthouse was
built in 1567–8 (Figure 2.15), rather like the earlier one which survives at Thaxted; there
is a smaller but contemporary market hall which had similar purposes at Horndon-on-
the-Hill, also in Essex.31 The building at Barking consisted of two storeys and an attic;
the ground floor included an arcade on both sides which made it totally permeable to
human traffic and business. This was a corn market, and here the town kept its standard
measure or bushel. At one end (left on Figure 2.15) was the parish cage, which contained
the stocks. The first floor comprised the court room, a chamber for the justices, and the
parish armoury. This building lasted until the 20th century; timbers from it were used to
make the doors of the present Town Hall of 1958, and the arms of Elizabeth I from its
court room were then stored in the council’s strong room.32
These market buildings, sometimes imposing, functioned mainly to serve the local popu-
lations, especially in the City. There is however an overlying thread to the commercial his-
29
 London 1100–1600
tory of London at this period which has already been touched on: the rise of London as a
national market for certain commodities (mostly luxuries) and as an international market,
in the sense that foreigners came to buy and much was exported. Such is implied in the
regulations applying to Dowgate and Billingsgate as ports of entry in the 11th and 12th
centuries. The archaeological study of this national dominance can start early, for instance
with the hazy beginnings of Bartholomew Fair in Smithfield, one of the great cloth fairs of
England. This was held in the open space on the north side of St Bartholomew’s Priory, but
within the precinct wall, where there are now several streets of post-Dissolution date, and is
documented in the 12th century. But how old was it? The traditional story of the foundation
of St Bartholomew’s in the 1120s in an unwanted marshy extramural space may be omitting
a crucial element. It seems equally possible that the priory attached itself to and took over
a site used for the annual fair, and thus the priory would enjoy its commercial and spiritual
traffic if only for a few hectic days. Whatever the truth of the matter, Bartholomew Fair
brought clothiers and merchants to London for centuries, and it survived the Dissolution;
the privilege of holding the fair was shared between the Corporation and the new owner of
the priory, Sir Richard Rich. One hopes that sufficient archaeological strata remain around
the priory and within its boundaries to illuminate the little-known workings of the Fair;
whether, for instance, the medieval buildings were temporary market stalls or stout enough
to stand for the whole year, though only occupied for a short period.
Two commercial buildings of the Tudor period illustrated and underlined London’s
place in national and international markets in the 16th century: the Royal Exchange and
the rebuilding of Blackwell Hall. The Royal Exchange, established in 1571, has been stud-
ied by historians of shopping, business and money,33 but apart from some Roman finds
made on the site in 1840–1, we do not know whether any of the Tudor structure survives
below its successor. It seems unlikely. Blackwell Hall, on the other hand, was studied on
the Guildhall excavation. This national cloth market house had spread its functions into
the closed-down Guildhall library and the crypt of Guildhall. In 1587–8 it was rebuilt as a
small quadrangle of brick, three storeys high with token battlements like its predecessor
at Leadenhall 140 years before.34 The Royal Exchange attempted to be an internation-
al financial centre, and Blackwell Hall concentrated the sale of cloth from all England
in London. The architecture of the two complexes reflected their relative purpose and
significance.

Provision of water and measuring of time

In 1237 the City acquired rights to springs which fed the Tyburn stream, near the present-
day Bond Street underground station, and began to lay lead pipes a distance of 3 miles
(5km) to the centre of town. This was one of the earliest documented facilities supplying
fresh water to a medieval city in Europe.35 The main public access points or conduits were
called ‘standards’ and were placed in the main streets or at road junctions; their construc-
tion, and the local extension of the water system, often relied on funding from generous
individuals, so it was still being developed in the 15th century. Work on a conduit house
at the east end of Cheapside began in 1245, and by 1261 it was a notable landmark in
the middle of the street; since Poultry, beyond it, was then a narrow throughfare and
30
 Public buildings and concerns

Figure 2.16 Excavation of the vaulted sub-structure of the 13th-century Great Conduit in Cheap-
side in 1994, at the One Poultry site (MOLA). This strong base probably supported
the lead cistern above, which with its water content would have been very heavy.

not the wide street seen today, the conduit may have marked the east end of a straight
boulevard of some pretension. The arched base of the structure was recorded during
the excavations at One Poultry (Figure 2.16); it would have supported one or more lead
cisterns, and there were taps along the side. It was called the Great Conduit, partly to dis-
tinguish it later from the Little Conduit, which was placed at the west end of Cheapside,
outside the church of St Michael-le-Querne, in 1389. This latter conduit and the below-
ground pipes serving it are shown in a drawing by Ralph Treswell of 1585.36 The walls of
the Little Conduit were probably observed in the roadway in 1963 and fragments of the
lead pipe system were recorded nearby on the Paternoster Square development in 2001
(Figure 2.17). Another monument called the Standard stood at the meeting point of
three wards, half way between the two conduits, and which by 1443 also dispensed water.
At the Standard, also, executions and official maiming of convicted people took place.
The three structures together formed a symbolic framework to the long, straight open
space of Cheapside itself.37 ‘Bosses’ or water dispensers of some kind spread into other
streets during the 15th and 16th centuries, for instance to Billingsgate, Paul’s Wharf and
next to St Giles Cripplegate all in 1423, and out to the east just within Aldgate in 1535. By
this time, thirteen conduits or bosses can be counted in the City. Treswell shows a partial
plan of one facility in the street immediately outside Aldersgate, set up as late as 1610;
a large cistern occupied what must have been formerly the front of a house, and in the
31
 London 1100–1600

Figure 2.17 Fragments of the lead medieval conduit pipe were found on the Paternoster Square
site in 2001 (MOLA). Continuation of this pipe is shown on Treswell’s drawing of
the nearby St Michael-le-Querne church of 1585 (Schofield 1987).

street was a chamber, the ‘conduit house’, with cocks or taps. By analogy with the ornate
examples in Italian towns, it might be expected that a conduit or fountain would not only
dispense vital water, but would also project civic and religious messages, and provide an
architectural focus to a street or street-junction.38
There does not seem to have been a public clock in medieval London, as there was in
Paris in 1371; but time would have been marked by many sundials, especially on church-
es, and by a clock which struck the hours at St Paul’s. This must have been a feature of the
still nights, since in 1302 a jury assembled in the ward of Walbrook, a third of a mile from
the cathedral, reported than an assault had happened when midnight was striking at St
Paul’s.39 This may have been the clock in the north transept of the cathedral, then fairly
new, but about which very little is known. Certain parish churches in widely-spaced parts
32
 Public buildings and concerns
of town, such as St Bride’s (Figure 6.6) and All Hallows Barking, were given the job of
tolling the daily curfew (evening) bell from their towers in the 1370s. By 1559 St Magnus
had an external clock on brackets which hung out over the north end of London Bridge
(Figure 6.5), and no doubt other parish churches had clocks on their towers. To enter the
City meant to be subject to the discipline of time.

Streets, watercourses and regulation

Connecting these public buildings was a responsibility shared between the authorities
and the citizens, the network of streets and lanes. Whether in the central area or in the
outlying districts, these are rarely excavated; many lie under their modern successors, and
besides being therefore generally inaccessible, they are often severely damaged by the
digging of drains and now telecommunication ducts in the last two centuries. Where sec-
tions across ancient roads have been obtained, the surfaces are usually of gravel, though
sometimes better surfaces involving lumps of stone and Roman brick and tile are found,
as at Bucklersbury and Pancras Lane in the City.40 Slag from bell-founding is a common
find in streets in the eastern part of the City, near the bell-founders’ workshops. It might
be expected that London would demonstrate a characteristic of towns elsewhere, that the
sides of its medieval streets were rarely parallel: the street grew house by house and not in
a planned way. Sometimes one side of a street would be straight but the other side bow-
sided or gently curved, as can still be seen in places like the High Street, Canterbury. That
is sometimes implied in archaeological and historical studies in London, but frontages
are very rarely found.
Whereas the positions of most medieval streets and highways in the capital and the
larger towns are known, and most have survived to the present day, there is a second and
equally important network of lanes in all urban settlements, which is far less well known
and far more open to archaeological study. Lanes and alleys, that is the smaller commu-
nication routes, generally started as private access routes. But if they led to some facility
used by the public, they tended to become public: for instance, to a source of water, as in
the case of many alleys on the waterfront south of Thames Street in the City, to a church,
a tenter-ground or mill.41 When the religious houses arrived in London and some other
nearby places, and started to expand their precincts, they often closed an existing lane,
which might be identified for the first time in excavation. In the long run, they did not
always succeed; a length of what is now Duke’s Place, inside the defences near Aldgate,
was enclosed by Holy Trinity Priory in the 13th century, and they grimly held on to it until
the Dissolution 300 years later, when the City finally got it reopened to traffic.42
Civic authorities were equally concerned about watercourses. Several smaller creeks or
streams flowed into the Thames, from both its banks. On the north side the most impor-
tant were the Tyburn, which at its meeting with the Thames split into two channels and
defined Thorney Island on which Westminster Abbey and later the royal palace was built;
and the Fleet river, the valley and wide mouth of which formed a natural western side
of the Roman and medieval city. The Fleet had two bridges across it but in 1307 was still
navigable by small boats, until the tanners and others obstructed it; in 1502 there was a
scouring of the channel so that oyster and herring boats could row up to Holborn bridge,
33
 London 1100–1600
and keep their markets as they had before.43 The Walbrook bisected the walled city, and
was a feature of the landscape in the early 14th century, but it had disappeared below
ground by 1600. Evidence of stone retaining walls for the stream have been seen behind
Skinners’ Hall in Dowgate.
Throughout the 14th and early 15th century, as shown by the records of the Assize of
Nuisance, the city authorities were concerned both to keep the streets clean and the
watercourses, especially the Walbrook, free of obstruction and filth. This concern with
the appearance and health of the town environment, embodied in local bye-laws today,
must have started in London in the early 13th century with the regulations about party
walls, roof materials and privies. Such regulations are a feature of many other European
towns, and although London may be an early example, it was not in the end as particular
as some others, for instance towns in north Italy.44 But in general there must have been
in London a perception, as in other European towns, that some spaces were public and
should be looked after, as part of the image the city wanted to project.

Landfill: the waterfront and the marsh to the north of the City
The City of London developed largely on one bank only of its river; this feature it shared
with many other European towns and cities, such as Bordeaux, Cologne, Vienna and War-
saw. An alternative configuration was for the town to occupy both banks of a river, in fairly
even proportions, as at Paris, Prague or Berlin, though in all cases this was the amalgama-
tion of neighbourhoods of different dates. In the late medieval period a city wall would be
thrown round this agglomeration. An intermediate type of plan was for the main town to be
on one side, and a suburb on the other, to be later incorporated with a wall, as at Toulouse.
Although London had a similar bridgehead suburb in Southwark, it was never included in
a city wall. The river, in this case the Thames, was seen to be a physical and legal boundary
of the City itself. But the river bank was changing shape throughout the period.
The waterfront area of the City of London, that is a strip of reclaimed land south of
Thames Street which is now a thundering multi-laned highway to get traffic through the
City, has seen much archaeological investigation since the early 1970s, as the new road
itself and regeneration of all the warehouses along it caused massive destruction; Billings-
gate Fishmarket closed its historic site in Lower Thames Street in 1981 and moved out to
the suburbs, just as the market at Covent Garden had done shortly before. A long pro-
gramme of excavations on development sites from 1972 continues even today, as build-
ings erected in the 1960s, the decade before the arrival of decent archaeological cover-
age, are themselves pulled down to make offices more suitable for the present century.
The waterfront buildings of the 1960s were very destructive, but around their edges the
waterfronts from the Roman period onwards are still being recorded.
Several aspects of the medieval and Tudor port will be dealt with in other chapters, par-
ticularly Chapter 5 which deals with trade and trading installations. Here we outline the
main features of waterfront excavations on the scores of private properties which in the
medieval period bordered the river, between the public landing places and impromptu
or public markets such as Queenhithe, Dowgate and Billingsgate.
By the beginning of our study period in 1100, reclamation on properties was common-
34
 Public buildings and concerns

Figure 2.18 The timber riverwall or revetment of about 1220 excavated at Billingsgate Lorry
Park in 1982, from the river side (MOLA). The wall of horizontal planks was pegged
to vertical timbers which were in turn held by a baseplate and supported by diagonal
braces going down into the river silt (scale 0.5m). This revetment was later con-
served and is now on display in the Museum of London’s medieval gallery.

place in all parts of Thames Street except the extreme east and west ends, which would
follow later. Embankments which included collections of logs, stones and earth were
being replaced by walls of wood up to 2m high or more, with soil and rubbish packed
behind and various methods of bracing to keep the wall vertical (Figure 2.18). Adjacent
properties kept up with the neighbours so that the edge of the reclaimed land moved in
rough concert into the river. Prominent tenements had in addition jetties which protrud-
ed further. From about 1200 stone river walls are found near the public landing places,
where they would have been normal, and from the 14th century stone walls gradually
take over from the wooden ones on private properties. This had the effect of halting the
reclamation, as the timber walls, eaten by the rising and falling tide, needed periodic
replacement, whereas the stone walls did not.45
As these waterfronts, locally called revetments when of wood, appeared, there was dis-
35
 London 1100–1600
cussion about the possible reasons for such widespread and fairly continuous reclamation
from 1100 to 1450. It might be simply to gain land on private properties, to increase their
value but also to provide space for industry or trade. According to one theory, there was
a need to create deeper berths for ships; though we now know that ships docked in the
larger inlets or stayed in the river, so this is discounted. At the time, the words ‘-wharf’
and ‘quay’ meant no more than the place where the land met the river.46 The river walls
of wood or stone may have been to maintain a frontage against periodic floods, when we
know the level of the river was gradually rising. And they were all backfilled with dumps
of household and trade waste, though probably not night soil; there must have been some
form of civic organisation of this activity.
Several important aspects of the waterfront excavations are discussed in subsequent
chapters. They have provided structures dated by dendrochronology and coins, which
then dated the multitude of artefacts and especially pottery in the reclamation units
behind the structures. On several sites, where excavation could take in the full length of
the medieval property or a large part of it, the units were arranged from north to south in
chronological order – the later ones were further out into the river – and thus the finds
were arranged in dated groups.
Waterfront archaeology, as it came to be known, was and is an exciting category of
urban investigation, involving buried structures of vivid size and complexity, and a rich
haul of finds. Perhaps in London there has been more of it, and therefore more infor-
mation, than in other port and river towns of Europe, but there have been plenty of
excavations in these other places even before London, such as at Bergen in Norway where
excavation started in 1955, and the results from all over northern Europe have been
compared in several publications.47 Some aspects of waterfront archaeology are better evi-
denced in other medieval cities, such as Lübeck near the Baltic coast of Germany, which
not only served like London as an interface between the outside world and inland, but
also from the 13th century, if not before, as a special kind of port, where goods from east
and west were trans-shipped and momentarily stored before being moved on to another
country. This function of entrepôt would really only come to London in the 17th century.
Lübeck was a much smaller city than London, so its reclamation projects of the 13th cen-
tury are even more spectacular: archaeological work has shown how the usable surface of
the town grew during that century by over 60%, from 70 hectares to about 113 hectares.
On this land, formerly meadow raised by several metres, as in London, houses in this case
of brick were soon built; and many survive. It has been calculated that in the 14th cen-
tury, the storage capacity of the houses of Lübeck was several times the size it would need
to store the annual grain requirement of the population. Thus the function of being an
international port greatly influenced the style and development of the secular architec-
ture.48 This matter is touched on when considering the London material, in Chapter 4.
Fifteenth- and 16th-century reclamations into the Thames on the City side were gener-
ally minimal, though there was a good deal of filling of marshes and former moats on
the south bank. In the 15th century there was much infilling of the City defensive ditch,
though this was periodically reversed in times of crisis by fresh digging. The marsh con-
tiguous to the City wall on the north side was filled in to form what we would call a public
36
 Public buildings and concerns
park in the early 16th century. Before that, further north, at least one immense artifical
mound of soil and rubbish was allowed to grow near one of the approach roads, now Gos-
well Road. A windmill stood on it around 1500. After this was destroyed in a storm, there
was a scheme to build a chapel on the mound in 1530, but this was demolished by 1547
and replaced by a second windmill which is shown on the Agas map of the 1560s. The
mound, still topped by its windmill, became one of the Civil War forts hastily thrown up by
the City in 1643. The site was investigated ahead of redevelopment in 1999. The mound
had been levelled in the 18th century, but the lowest levels, at least 4m deep, survived.49

Development and use of land in Westminster, Southwark and the suburbs

We have reached the area outside the City on the north. It is useful to look back at the
several concentrations of buildings which formed the centre of London, and to review
the various uses of the land immediately outside them.
Westminster and Southwark are both best studied as separate towns. Separate urban
status was claimed by and has always been granted to Westminster, but Southwark was an
awkward suburb until being incorporated into the City in 1550.50 Of the two, Southwark
was larger and archaeologically far more interesting; there has been far more archaeolog-
ical investigation there, though the majority of results until recently were findings of the
Roman period. Medieval Southwark was the same size and complexity as a county town
elsewhere. By 1300 it had two large religious houses (three when St Thomas’s Hospital
moved out of the priory) and three parish churches; as complex a range of urban house
forms as in the City; a court and markets; and a diversified economy, soon to be greatly
enriched by the settling of many foreign immigrants. By 1550 it had that most urban of
characteristics, a constant problem with traffic jams.51
Apart from ribbon-developments of housing along the major approach roads, however,
the built-up area was probably sharply differentiated from the surrounding landscape. We
can recognised this today in names such as St Martins-in-the-Fields, Lincoln’s Inn Fields
and Spitalfields. Until the 1240s the bishop of Winchester had direct management of the
fields west of his house and park in Southwark, so records of his crops survive: peas, beans
and leeks, along with barley, rye, wheat and oats.52 These fields would be in the view of
the people on the teeming waterfront opposite. A view of London from the north, drawn
probably in 1577–98, shows that the City and Westminster were surrounded by fields until
that time, though the next decades would fill the fields with new streets.
There were probably places in medieval London where people gathered to watch sports
such as bear- and bull-baiting; the meat from bulls which had been tormented by dogs
was thought to taste better. Londoners skated on the marsh of Moorfields, when it was
frozen, and apparently played football, though in the streets and not as far as we know
in dedicated stadia. Places of recreation were on the edges of the built-up area, and over
time, we can notice that people went out to the less crowded suburban areas, or further
into the fields, for their pleasure. By the time of the copperplate map of 1559, a bird’s-eye
view of the City of which three contiguous sheets out of 16 survive, there were separate
garden plots with ornamental trees and summer-houses in the area between Moorgate
and Bishopsgate. North of this, in Finsbury Fields, was a training ground for archers, laid
37
 London 1100–1600

Figure 2.19 The Bishopsgate suburb in 1577–98, from the drawing of London from the north,
though this part looks east (Saunders and Schofield 2001). What is probably the The-
atre is shown as a round or polygonal building among the houses. The Curtain thea-
tre is probably represented by the building with a flag on it, to the right. Just to the
right of this extract, several windmills can also be made out in the original drawing. As
is common. As is common in such views, the hills behind (in Hackney) are a fiction.

out with targets in the landscape like a modern golf course (Figure 5.5).
It is therefore no surprise that from the 1570s, when custom-built theatres were designed
and constructed to perform plays in more dedicated surroundings than the former set-
tings of inn yards, they should appear at the edges of the settlement. It may have also had
something to do, as scholars routinely say, with a wish to avoid City authorities. But I think
it also stemmed from an idea that to go to the theatre was to make a journey, to the more
pleasant air of the suburb, whether on the north side of town or over the river in South-
wark (the industrial areas in Southwark were largely downstream of the bridge, not near
the theatres). So there was an idea that recreation, whether respectable or indulgent,
could be carried out in the outer parts of the settled area.
The first theatres appeared in Shoreditch, the suburb at the outer end of Bishopsgate
Street (Figure 2.19). The earliest appears to be one called The Theatre, which was built
on land leased to Thomas Burbage in 1576, and was in use by August 1577. Little is known
about its form. It was pulled down in 1598, and on 20 January 1599 the timbers were taken
across the Thames for use in building another theatre, the Globe. Very near the Theatre
in Shoreditch, from 1577, was a second establishment called the Curtain. It was probably
round. It was still standing in 1627, though by then it was only hosting prize-fighting.
These two theatres may be shown in a view of London from the north, which from other
38
 Public buildings and concerns
internal evidence was drawn between 1577 and 1598.53
Part of the Theatre may have been excavated recently; but the most important archaeo-
logical investigations have been of two of the Southwark theatres, the Rose and the Globe.
The Rose was built in 1587, on a garden near the south bank of the Thames, immediately
west of what is now the south end of Blackfriars bridge. Like the other theatres, it had a
brief life, and was out of use by 1605. Excavations here in 1988, after a building of 1955
had been removed, found two-thirds of the theatre: much of the galleries round the edges,
two consecutive buildings of the stage, and the yard where most of the spectators stood.
Perhaps it held two thousand people when full. After some public agitation, the remains of
the Rose were allowed to survive in the basement of the new building, where their proper
conservation awaits substantial funding. The very next year, there was another Tudor thea-
tre: a small part of the Globe theatre was excavated behind Anchor Terrace, a sombre early
19th-century row of houses about 100 yards to the west, and a similar distance from the
new Globe erected by Sam Wanamaker. The Globe was built in 1599; Shakespeare’s works
were performed there. Indeed, the discharge of a cannon during a performance of his
Henry VIII in 1613 set fire to the theatre and burned it down. The Globe, rebuilt, lasted
until it was pulled down by order of Oliver Cromwell in 1644.54
These theatres, with others, enhanced Southwark’s reputation as a place to go to for a
good time. But their period of use and exuberance was short, until the 1640s; and they
may have already been in decline by then, as the idea of popular theatre gave way to a
more select, class-conscious theatre.55 Perhaps these theatres could only have existed in
the capital. Their period of efflorescence was extremely brief, and they had no effect on
the buildings of London, either in the short or long term. But they are an important epi-
sode in the history of the place. Golden Ages, it seems, have always been urban. Cultural
historians have created the Age of Shakespeare, and explained its occurrence in London
from the 1570s partly in terms of factors we can recognise and document, such as the
widespread disruptions and opportunities caused by the Reformation and Dissolution, or
massive immigration. It is surely no coincidence that Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres
appeared in a city which increased its population by four times in the 70 years after 1550.

Conclusions
Keeping London in perspective permeates the conclusions of this chapter. London’s
defences of gates and towers were impressive within England, but far short of the provi-
sions at Cologne, which had 22 gates and 50 towers in 1259. Nor did London’s defences
expand to house its growing population; the extension to the south-west in the 1270s was
around the new Blackfriars precinct. London did not have successive rings of walls like
Florence or Siena, or major extensions like Paris, or piecemeal extensions like the seven
extensions to the walls of Ghent undertaken in the 13th and 14th centuries. London
Bridge was in a class of its own within Britain, but not without parallel within Europe.
Stone bridges of some length were constructed in several continental towns in the 12th
century: at Rouen, a bridge of thirteen arches was built in 1144–5, and the bridge at
Avignon, rebuilt in the 13th century in stone (probably originally of timber) was longer
than that at London, with 22 arches.56 At the same time, in terms of its public buildings,
39
 London 1100–1600
London can be compared with other medieval cities where more has survived, such as
Florence. If London Bridge, Leadenhall, the entire Guildhall complex and some of the
gates had survived to the present day, then the apparent prominence of the large-scale
public building works in medieval Florence would not be so marked in our estimation.
It is as much a mistake to see towns like Florence as medieval world leaders in their public
buildings as it is to think of medieval London as a cultural backwater. In their civic con-
cerns, the two cities spoke the same language of authority and control, and erected the
same kind of buildings. Only the degree of survival is different. It is also interesting that
the City of London, around 1300, showed a similarity to Italian towns in a basic idea of
town-planning: the religious, political and commercial centres of the city had separated
into distinct areas which may have had more than convenience about it.
There have been notable recent studies of the archaeology of medieval London Bridge,
and of Guildhall, its chapel, library and other chambers; now we need a third major study
of the other public face of the City, its gates and turreted wall. London’s defences are
comparatively well known, from the dozens of excavations and scores of relevant plans
and engravings, but as a subject the wall, gates and ditches are in need of being sum-
marised and brought together. There is no comprehensive study of the wall and gates as
there is for several other individual towns, for instance York or Exeter.57
The archaeology of civic works is not only the archaeology of power, or corporate dis-
play, or vying with other towns in architectural splendour, though all of these are relevant.
There is also the archaeology of the local authority, which tried to manage the urban
environment rather like its successor today: standards of upkeep on the city streets, rub-
bish management, keeping the peace and public order. One aspect in which archaeology
has been particularly fruitful has been the study of waste management. We are begin-
ning to understand how medieval and Tudor London, over several centuries, moulded
the landscape around itself by dumping rubbish. This began by being a necessary con-
sequence of urban living (mounds of domestic and trade waste had to go somewhere),
but provided first a means of extending the ground surface of the city into the river, and
later of infilling the northern marshes for similar reclamation purposes. This infilling
on the north side at Moorfields, during the 16th century, facilitated and encouraged the
development of the northern suburbs, including their use as the sites of the first theatres.
The public walks of Moorfields, the nearby practice ground for archery which resembled
a modern golf course (Figure 5.5) and the Bishopsgate theatres were together an area
for leisure and enjoyment. The City authorities may not have liked the theatres, but their
policies created the setting for them.
The development of Westminster and Southwark is studied when opportunity arises,
and there have been historical syntheses of each place to assist.58 A recently published
work on Westminster is more about the palace and its immediate surroundings than the
town, and is noted in the next chapter. So far, there have not been sufficient excavations
on sites in the other suburban approaches to London, to chart how they developed. If, as
seems likely, London’s population was cut down by 48% by the Black Death in 1348–9,
then it might be expected that dramatic and visible effects would be seen in the archaeo-
logical record of peripheral places, as the edges of settlement crumbled and suburbs
40
 Public buildings and concerns
shrank back to the gates which had spawned them. This remains to be investigated, let
alone demonstrated.
This chapter has almost totally been about buildings, urban landscapes and structures
which embody the public aspects of London life. So far there has been little study of
the artefacts to go with these aspects, though the Tudor theatres have produced a small
amount of distinctive material. The largest archaeological report so far produced for a
post-Roman London site, that on the extensive Guildhall Yard excavations, is a study of a
large area of industrial, domestic, commercial and religious buildings surrounding Guild-
hall itself. Its main new findings were the lane of timber buildings in the 11th and 12th
centuries, a first extended archaeological study of London’s Jewry, Blackwell Hall in its
medieval and Tudor form, and the inns along Catteaton (now Gresham) Street; some of
these will be addressed in later chapters.59 We have no report on the artefactual trappings
of civic power or of life in the prisons, or yet in substance about the artefacts representing
administration of markets. There is probably an archaeology of crime and punishment
to be constructed.60
From the public aspects, we turn now to the interests of kings, and then to the general
population. Each group in society was negotiating for space.

41
 —3—

Castles, palaces and royal houses

The palaces and other houses of England’s kings and queens in London will be dealt
with only briefly in this book, which is mainly about the archaeology of everybody else,
the people who formed the backdrop to national events. But the lives of many revolved
around the monarch and the royal court, wherever it was, and we should outline what
innovations or revolutions in taste started in royal buildings. From the archaeological
viewpoint, these tend to be new or recently-fashionable (or plain cost-effective) ideas in
construction and layout of buildings, rather than royal artefacts. The themes of this chap-
ter, therefore, are constructional highlights or innovations at royal sites; archaeological
gathering of information on those palaces and royal houses which are less known because
their sites are built over; and the setting of some of the palaces, including their prehistory
as houses belonging to others.

The Tower of London, the western castles and Westminster Palace

The Tower of London has been the subject of several detailed studies since the early 20th
century,1 and only some recent pieces of research will be noted here. The royal castle
which despite being encircled now by very tall buildings still dominates the south-east cor-
ner of the City of London has always been called after its central feature, the White Tower.
In 1598 John Stow suggested a building date for the White Tower of 1078, and this has
stood as the accepted date until a recent study 400 years later, which was made possible by
the removal of much of the Tower’s contents to the new Armouries museum in Leeds and
a simultaneous repair programme.2 The new proposed dates of construction of the White
Tower are a start probably between 1075 and 1079, an interruption in the 1080s which is
signalled by a change in mortar, a slight change in the capital designs in St John’s Chapel,
less use of ashlar stone and a change in stone types, then completion in a second stage
(but without any alteration in the intended design) from the late 1080s to about 1100.
The line in the masonry which signifies the pause can be seen in the external wall 1.2m
up from the floor of the Chapel. Although we are used to the beauty of this space which
derives partly from its warm stone colours (Plate 1), it should be remembered that the
interior was originally plastered, probably with added paintings; the plaster was removed
by the restorer Salvin in the 19th century. The whitewashing which probably gave the
White Tower its name dates from 1240 and the ultra-fastidious Henry III. Later additions
42
 Castles, palaces and royal houses

break in
construction

Mortar 1: shelly Romanesque

Mortar 2: non-shelly Romanesque 0 10m

Figure 3.1 Elevation of the south side of the White Tower, showing different mortar types re-
vealed in recording of 1997–8 (after Impey 2008, fig 13). The types are: 1, shelly
Romanesque; 2, non-shelly Romanesque (with chalk). The proposed break in the
construction period, sometime in the 1080s, is shown by the upper edge of type 1,
as well as by study of the stonework inside the building. The original survey records
five further mortar types of the period after 1100, not shown here.

include the raising of the roof of the western half to its present level around 1490; a date
derived from the dendrochronology and other details, not from documents. The White
Tower was a royal palace, with architecture to suit; its false storey on the west half faced
the City and the river, heightening its threatening aspect. It was probably the Bucking-
ham Palace of its day, used for state occasions and ceremonies; though detailed evidence
about its royal use is so far lacking.
A crucial part of the recent analysis of the White Tower was the analysis of mortars (Fig-
ure 3.1). This is perhaps the most successful exercise in using mortar to distinguish build-
ing phases, or anything else, on a major post-Roman London building. London archae-
ologists tend to agree with their colleagues in York that there are too many unknown
variables, as in the published case of analysis of 15 mortar samples from the excavation of
the priory of St Andrew Fishergate in York, where it was concluded that ‘the archaeologi-
43
 London 1100–1600
cal questions which the geological examination of the mortars was intended to resolve are
largely incapable of resolution’ and ‘the variability of local sand supplies renders the analy-
sis of the sand aggregates in mortar of little value as an analytical tool.’3 The White Tower,
being a prestigious royal building, may be a special case, in that care would be taken with
the quality of mortars, as with all aspects of masonry, and it shows what is possible. Besides
later repairs and pointing, two original mortars were identified: the earlier and lower on
the walls of the building contained numerous bivalve shells, sometimes whole, with rolled
fragments of black and red gravels; evidently a sea sand. The second mortar, above the
proposed break in construction, lacked the shells, kept the gravels, and contained lumps
of unburnt chalk presumed to be from the incomplete burning of lime.4
The Tower grew with concentric rings of fortifications, which broke through the line
of the city wall probably during works by Henry III in the 13th century, and with some
outer works which are no longer visible.5 After 1400, building campaigns are ‘minor or
have left no trace (eg Henry VII’s improved lodgings)’.6 This growth over centuries and
frequent turnover of internal buildings is illustrated by piecemeal archaeological work
when new development takes place or is contemplated. In the early 1990s, for instance,
monitoring of trenches for cables and drains found that the Bowyer Tower, one of those
on the 13th-century north perimeter, overlay and reused the 3rd-century Roman city wall
as a foundation; possibly it was even sited on top of an internal turret in the Roman
wall. Details of medieval storehouses were also forthcoming.7 In 1995–7 a programme of
archaeological evaluations took place in the moat, which it was proposed to re-excavate
and reflood. An unexpected discovery was the remains of a towered entrance on the east
edge of the moat, aligned with Tower Street, which was built in 1240 and which collapsed
within a year.8 Many of the medieval buildings within the complex have also disappeared
over the centuries, and the present appearance of much of the Tower today is a product
of the 19th century. It has contained buildings for a mint, armoury, a small zoo, and of
course rooms or prisons for distinguished royal and noble guests on their way to execu-
tion. Genuine medieval details have to be hunted out. Several chambers in the smaller
towers still contain wall paintings, 13th- and 14th-century fireplaces, medieval tile floors,
and details such as arrow-loops. The buildings around the edges of the open spaces are
London’s best collection of genuine medieval and 16th-century timber framing, hidden
inside the restored work. The Queen’s House of 1528 contains the earliest known exam-
ple in England of a technical innovation which is followed today: the joists, rectangular
in section, are turned round from being laid on their wider sides, the medieval practice
everywhere, to being laid on their narrower sides.9 Nearby Traitor’s Gate or St Thomas’s
Tower, originally of 1275–9 and showing similarities to a barbican on the royal palace of
the Louvre in Paris, was altered on its northern, inner side by James Nedeham in 1532–3;
his timber framing is an early and dated example of S-shaped, serpentine braces which
are one of the trade-marks of Tudor building. A plan of the Tower in 1597 provides a view
at the end of our period.10
In the late 11th century, the City of London needed two further, smaller castles to
control the populace. At the west end of the City were two fortifications by 1100: the first
Baynard’s Castle (Figure 3.2) and Mountfichet’s Tower, which were later absorbed into
44
 Castles, palaces and royal houses

Figure 3.2 Extract from Hollar’s plan of the City as damaged in the Great Fire of 1666, sur-
veyed in December 1666 (GL). This shows the streets south of St Paul’s Cathedral
(top right). The rounded north corner of St Andrew’s Hill in the centre is probably
a clear sign of a moat of the first Baynard’s Castle, destroyed in 1212 and its site ab-
sorbed into the Blackfriars precinct. The second, 15th- and 16th-century Baynard’s
Castle is shown crudely on the waterfront (number 160).

the precinct of the Blackfriars friary. The name Baynard’s Castle was taken by a residence
further south, on the waterfront, which became a castle by the time of Richard III. Here
he engineered the offer of the crown by the citizen leaders of London, as recounted by
Shakespeare. Later, Henry VII had it rebuilt and extended.
Though excavation of the second Baynard’s Castle in 1972 is not yet published as a site,
a large proportion of the rich array of artefacts has been catalogued and studied. They
are not from within the castle walls, but from outside, and give hints of another nearby
royal facility. There is one large group which is exceptional, of finds tipped into the river
at the eastern watergate of the castle in the second half of the 14th century. This includes
395 pieces of textiles, along with shoes with engraved and open-work patterns, a variety
of spurs and horseshoes. It is possible that this dump is a clear-out from the nearby Great
Wardrobe, a royal store house for the use of the royal household which gave its name
eventually to the surviving Wren church of St Andrew by the Wardrobe. There is however
an alternative explanation for this rich deposit of textiles, that it results from the activities
45
 London 1100–1600
of the friperers or dealers in second-hand clothing. Even so, they might have originally
been intended for royal or noble use.11
At Westminster, the Norman kings took over and expanded the buildings of a royal
palace of Edward the Confessor. The abbey is dealt with in Chapter 6 below. The palace
has the air of an afterthought,12 sharing the original Thorney Island at the confluence of
the Tyburn stream and the Thames, but crammed in between the abbey and the river; so
that the first Westminster Hall of which we have record, built by William II, had its north
end in the waters of the Tyburn, and several phases of expansion into the Thames were
necessary in subsequent centuries. The history of the palace is by no means known in
detail, but from the 18th century there is a long tradition of recording during building
works or after fires, particularly that of 1834. Archaeological work of 1992–7 in conjunc-
tion with London Underground has provided a new framework for future investigations
(Figure 3.3).13
By 1200, it is proposed, the main buildings were arranged on a large platform which had
a stone river wall, jutting out for a considerable distance into the Thames. This remark-
able feature is now obscured to the north and south by more reclamation into the river
after the medieval period, including the 19th-century Embankment. A great hall lay with a
courtyard at its north end. To the south, the private chambers of the monarch included a
chapel and probably a cloister.14 The chapel dedicated to St Stephen was rebuilt in stages
from the 1290s, and by the end of the 14th century it rivalled the Sainte-Chapelle at the
royal palace in Paris as a work of royal patronage and prestige. The area of the palace was
about twice the size of the royal palace in Paris.
The present road called Old Palace Yard between the Houses of Parliament and the
Abbey did not exist, and the two complexes were side by side, with a wall between. The
abbey, its main periods of building assisted if not initiated by individual kings, was used
as an extension of the royal palace. Royal meetings, councils and wider parliaments were
held in its buildings; the famous decorated tile floor of about 1255 in the abbey chap-
ter house, using 36 different tile designs, may have used stocks of decorated tiles left
over from one or more floors, since lost without trace, in the palace itself (Figure 3.4).15
An odd aspect of the juxtaposition which requires some imagination to understand today
is the surviving Jewel Tower of 1365, the small stone tower at the south-west corner of the
palace, actually on land taken from the abbey, now marooned on the other side of the
modern road. When it was built, there was a small moat on its south side which went east
to the Thames and which also functioned as a royal fish pond.
In 1393–1402 the great Norman hall (Figure 3.5) was heightened by a couple of feet
and given its present hammerbeam roof, one of the most ambitious building projects of
the Middle Ages. It was reinforced with steel in the early 20th century when thought to be
in decay. The load of the roof is carried half way down the walls by the combined weight
of the main arch rib and the hammerbeams which protrude, garnished with angels.16
Presumably the rebuilding of the hall was ordered by Richard II to vie with the grand hall
within the royal palace of the French kings in Paris.17
The archaeological work of 1991–8 was in general piecemeal, but it had one new over-
all aspect. Within the area of the medieval palace, details of the foundations of the great
46
 Castles, palaces and royal houses

et
Stre
King
gatehouse

Thieving Lane
merchant’s
house gatehouse landing
gatehouse New Palace Yard stage
stone
building

Receipt of
belfry the Exchequer

St Margaret’s
church
Green Yard
Westminster Abbey
great
hall

gatehouse sacristy
thill Str
eet

St Stephen’s
church chapel
lesser
hall
Lady chapel king’s
cloister

cloister chapter king’s

house Old Palace chamber
Yard
queen’s
refectory chamber
dormitory
queen’s landing stage
chapel
infirmary s

Building14
Thame

reredorter

Westminster Abbey
River

drain
0 50m

Figure 3.3 Plan of the Palace of Westminster and the main buildings of the adjacent Westmin-
gate

ster Abbey, about 1350 (Thomas et al 2006, fig 45). Most of the area of the palace
was reclaimed
Riv
er T
land, jutting out into the Thames and fronting the abbey behind it.
From its origins
bridge ybu
r under
n Edward the Confessor in the 1050s, the palace was mainly
accessible by river. Shortly after the date of this plan, the surviving Jewel Tower of
1365 would be built at the south-west corner of the palace; its site is where the abbey
drain met the edge of the river.

hall and of St Stephen’s were recorded. The reclamation which pushed north and east
was established so that houses of the canons of the chapel were built on reclaimed land,
just as in the City downstream. Several other buildings, including what may have been an
inn, can now be added to the palace plan. A cesspit in the suggested inn contained not
47
 London 1100–1600

Figure 3.4 Some of the decorated tiles of the floor in the chapter house of Westminster Abbey,
of about 1255. These were drawn for the RCHM(E) volume on the abbey published
in 1924, and are important records because several show greater detail than now
survives. The four-tile design of the royal arms is the earliest representation of her-
aldry in tiles in England. The four-tiles rose window design was used in the floor
at least 47 times. The appearance of the pike is not fully explained; it was a special
dish for monks. The lettered tiles are from six inscriptions in the floor, celebrating
the building (Rodwell and Mortimer 2010).

only wooden vessels but ‘a very rich botanical assemblage’ comprising both food waste,
human waste, and used flooring materials. This building lay immediately inside a gate-
house for the palace, built in 1287–9, parts of which were also excavated. This was a gate
to the town of Westminster, then formed by King Street, the predecessor of Whitehall.
Though the royal palace was never fortified, like for instance the Tower, these decades
did produce some increased provision for defences at royal sites. The position of this gate
at the north-west of the palace is marked today in Parliament Square by the statue of Sir
Winston Churchill (1973, but the gate was found in a circular shaft dug beneath him for
the Underground in 1994).
The innovative new element to the research was an environmental archaeological study
of Thorney Island, on which both the palace and abbey lie, by sampling the water-laid
silts which had built up since the prehistoric period. The shape and nature of the origi-
nal island is now known. Three sites on the north side of the complex provided pollen
samples. They show that in the 12th century the Thames and the mouth of the Tyburn
were tidal and the water salty. Around were a variety of trees, including oak, pine, hazel,
alder, lime, ash and holly. There seem to have also been some spruce and fir, presumably
deliberately planted to produce softwood timber, as they grow fast. By 1500, the water at
the confluence of the major and minor river was less saline. From the 12th century, the
wetlands around the town of Westminster and the abbey were gradually being reclaimed
48
 Castles, palaces and royal houses

Figure 3.5 The north front of Westminster Hall, as engraved in about 1800. The rebuilt hall
of 1394–1402 had a ceremonial entrance flanked by new towers which resembled
the west end of the nearby Westminster Abbey (as does the ornate doorway). On
the walls of the towers were tall niches for statues, probably of kings. The new north
facade looked out onto New Palace Yard, an open space suitable for ceremonial use.
This had been reclaimed in stages from the marsh of the underlying northern arm
of the Tyburn stream.
and built over, though Tothill Fields remained a large boggy area immediate south of the
abbey until the 19th century. But when parts of the king’s government began to settle at
Westminster in the 12th and especially 13th centuries, they did so in a rural, out-of-town
setting, on the edge of the country’s largest city.

Other royal palaces in and around London

There has been work of varying extent at several royal houses besides the two main ones
just described. Together, these projects show the variety of evidence still to be gained by
archaeological study, especially when illuminating the known documents, which are often
themselves very detailed.
The only medieval royal site outside Westminster to be described as a palace was that
attached to the Norman castle at Guildford, but until recently its character was not much
known. The monumental study The King’s Works described how in the 13th century Henry
49
 London 1100–1600
III laid out much expense on buildings, decoration, and stained glass. It was evidently one
of his favourite residences. In 1990–4 the Surrey Archaeological Society held a training
excavation in an area south-west of the Norman keep, next to a fragment of standing me-
dieval wall, and found much of interest: the kind of domestic royal debris which is so far
lacking at both the Tower and Westminster. The pots were mundane, perhaps surprising
in this context, but of more luxurious note were 130 fragments, all small, of decorated
window glass, mostly grisaille but with some leafy designs. Excavated medieval window
glass from a royal context is very rare. The animal bones included many of deer, and the
survival of certain parts of the skeletons suggested they may have been dismembered and
skinned out at the hunt, presumably in the adjacent royal park.18
A second example of recording at a royal residence, one still occupied, was occasioned
by that unwelcome and unforeseen developer, fire. In 1992 a large area of buildings in
the Outer Ward within Windsor Castle was badly affected by a conflagration which took
some time to control. The worst loss were the decorations of the 19th-century St George’s
Hall, but the medieval Great Kitchen had also been affected. Study of its roof after the
fire, supported by tree-ring dating, showed that the presumed 19th-century roof was an
adaptation of a large medieval structure, repaired several times. The character of the
kitchen’s 14th-century walls and the medieval origin of St George’s Hall was more under-
stood; behind the 19th-century plaster, the gable of Henry III’s hall survived 16m (50ft)
high. A long undercroft beneath the hall, of the 14th century, was restored to integrity
from being subdivided. Other new details included unknown fireplaces and a fragment
of wall-painting in a small chamber which may have been a private retreat of Edward III.
This recording showed, as archaeologists suggest and often find, that later supposed dras-
tic restorations of stately buildings (in this case, several from the 17th century to the 19th)
rarely obliterate traces of earlier configure urations, and often preserve them.19
A particular purpose of archaeological work at royal sites is to provide information on
the previous use of the lands on which royal palaces were constructed, and especially
on the notable house which was usually there before the palace, or which was rebuilt to
perform a new role as a palace. This is illustrated by two sites investigated in the 1970s,
Greenwich Palace and Eltham Palace, both south-east of London.
Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, acquired an estate on the river bank at Greenwich in
1426, rebuilt an existing house there and enclosed a park. The ‘manor of Pleasaunce’
as it was known passed after his death in 1447 to Henry VI’s queen Margaret, who also
altered it. Now it was a royal palace with two courts, one for the king’s chambers and one
for the queen’s, with ranges of brick. Away from the river was a garden. Enlarged further
by Edward IV, Greenwich was to become a favourite residence of the Tudor monarchs.
The palace was demolished in 1662 to make way for Wren’s Royal Hospital, later the Royal
Naval College, which now occupies the site; but a vaulted undercroft of early 16th-century
date survives under the Queen Anne block, which is the nearer one on the left as you look
at the hospital today from the river. Of brick with stone ribs and piers, the undercroft was
thought to have stood beneath the great hall of the Tudor palace; it is known that in 1499
brickmakers were paid for making 600,000 bricks nearby.
Excavations of 1970–1 in the Grand Square of the college, between the Queen Anne
50
 Castles, palaces and royal houses

Figure 3.6 Excavations in 1970–1 in the Grand Square of the Naval College at Greenwich, orig-
inally a palace of Charles II, found much of the medieval and Tudor Greenwich
Palace. This is a view of the riverfront range from the east in 1970; subsequent exca-
vations would open up much of the other parts of the Square (P Dixon). Hampton
Court has similar capacity for producing monumental or large-scale archaeology
beneath its buildings
and the facing King Charles blocks, found several superimposed periods of building (Fig-
ure 3.7). The earliest was a 14th-century building, probably timber-framed on low stone
walls, in all likelihood part of the property of St Peter’s abbey of Ghent. Double garderobe
shafts of brick indicate it was of two storeys. In a second period this was extended to the
west with several rooms in brick, probably by the Duke of Gloucester in 1426–49. Further
modifications within the range are probably the work of Queen Margaret and Edward IV.
Around 1500 all this range was demolished, and a long palatial range with octagonal tow-
ers and several projecting bay windows was erected along the edge of the river. Behind,
there was a roughly square courtyard, like one of those at Hampton Court, and the surviv-
ing undercroft would have supported a building which stuck out at right angles from the
range forming its east side.20 Further evaluations from 1993 have found floor surfaces of
the Tudor palace, the foundations of the Tilt Yard to the east, as shown on Wyngaerde’s
views from north and south around 1558, and the east end of the royal chapel.
At Eltham, the royal hall of 1475–9 still stands. Excavations in front of it in 1975–9
revealed not only ranges of Edward IV’s palace, and a brick chapel built there by Henry
VIII, but beneath these structures the complex they had replaced, a manor house of
51
 London 1100–1600
N
Fleet Street

St. Bride’s
Church

Brid
e La
ne City Wall

Outer
Courtyard
Principal
Courtyard

Bishop of stair
Salisbury’s
House

Gallery
Fleet
River

0 50m River Thames

Figure 3.7 Reconstructed plan of Bridewell Palace, built 1515–22 south of Fleet Street in the
City, after excavations of 1978 (Gadd and Dyson 1981). No trace of the palace now
appears above ground, but its long foundations of brick, on arches through the
mud of the banks of the Fleet and Thames, almost certainly survive in large part
under present buildings. For a detail of the stair in the south-east (bottom right)
corner of the main courtyard, see Figure 3.8.
52
 Castles, palaces and royal houses

Figure 3.8 The south-east corner of the main court of Bridewell Palace, recording during
demolition in the early 19th century; this part was excavated in 1978, and founda-
tions of large brick arches going into the marshy ground recorded. Though most
of the windows and doors shown here are post-Fire and 18th-century work, when
Bridewell was a workhouse, the octagonal turret in the corner is no doubt from the
original building of 1522. We know from this and other drawings and plans that
Bridewell resembled Hampton Court, which it actually preceded in date.

Bishop Anthony Bek of about 1295 to 1305, when he granted it to the Crown. Excavation
revealed a large stone hall, with an area of its decorated medieval tile floor, at the dais
end, remaining, though damaged by burning timbers, presumably during demolition.
Behind the high end of the hall was a deep stone cellar, probably for the bishop’s wines,
which supported his chapel.21 Henry VIII’s chapel overlay the disused cellar and must
have replaced its predecessor, on exactly the same site; perhaps the bishop’s chapel was
allowed to remain even though the hall was cleared away. In this case the bishop’s build-
ing influenced the royal successsor in some way.
Henry VIII had many palaces in south-east England and especially in the London area.
Besides the well-known Hampton Court, there are others which are today totally lost
53
 London 1100–1600
above ground. One is Bridewell Palace south of Fleet Street, within the City of London
but just upstream of the walled city. Two excavations on separate developments, but both
within 1978, found ranges of this palace of 1515–22 and laid out a proposed ground plan
of the whole palace for the first time (Figure 3.7).22 By this time brick was the material of
choice for noble and royal palaces; and large arches of brick on piles went down into the
marshy land at the confluence of the Fleet and the Thames to support two courtyards of
buildings which resembled the contemporary Hampton Court, complete with a royal hall
and suites of royal chambers; some details survived into the 19th century to show these
similarities (Figure 3.8). From the main hall range, a two-storeyed gallery led a long dis-
tance alongside a large garden to a range along the Thames itself, no doubt used as an
access point to the river for royalty and their guests. Holbein the younger designed at
least one fireplace for the palace. Just on the edge of the larger excavation, but known
through drawings and plans, was a wide stair from the landward court up to the state
rooms, possibly the earliest stair built for state occasions in England. Henry used the pal-
ace as his chief London residence briefly, from its completion in 1522 until 1529 when he
acquired Wolsey’s palaces at York Place in Westminster and at Hampton Court upstream
of both London and Westminster. When not required by Henry himself, Bridewell was
used regularly as the official residence of the French ambassador, and so became perhaps
the first embassy building in England.23 In 1552 Edward VI granted the building to the
City to house the vagrant poor, and its name entered the English language to mean a
workhouse; Bridewells sprang up in other towns.
Medieval kings such as Edward I built royal houses in many parts of the country, but
under Edward III in the 14th century the houses, though numerous, began to concen-
trate in south-east England, and this trend was accentuated by the main building projects
of Henry VIII. The creation of Whitehall Palace reasserted the fixed association of the
monarch and the court with Westminster (Figure 3.9); from Henry VIII to William III,
Whitehall was the principal seat of the king. There have been several studies of the ram-
bling palace, and principally one of 1960-2 at the Old Treasury Building, Whitehall, which
uncovered fragmentary remains of four tennis courts. Pieces of Tudor walling had been
allowed to stand within the 19th-century building, and the most remarkable survival is
most of an octagonal turret on the corner of the Great Open Tennis Play, 40ft (12.2m)
high. Excavation next to it and to the west in 1961–3 found much evidence of several
known tennis plays or courts, lodgings, and buildings around the octagonal Cockpit as
shown on the copperplate map.24
Considerations of space preclude a survey of work on the other palaces of the Tudor
kings, such as Richmond (Sheen)25 and Hampton Court;26 the above is a brief survey of
the kind of archaeology provided by the larger royal houses in the London area.

Smaller royal houses, hunting lodges and standings

Kings also built smaller houses than palaces: hunting lodges and country houses in which
they liked to take time away from the hectic life of the full court. In the reign of Edward
III in the 14th century, there were over a dozen in the immediate London environs: those
about which most is known were at Eltham, Gravesend, the house of the Black Prince
54
 Castles, palaces and royal houses

Figure 3.9 Westminster Hall and its surroundings in the ‘Agas’ woodcut view of about 1570,
based on the copperplate map of about 1559. At the top, marked by two gates across
what is now Whitehall, is a crude representation but the earliest known view of the
buildings of Whitehall Palace. Immediately left of the upper gate is the Tudor ten-
nis court, one corner of which survives inside the 19th-century Old Treasury (now
Cabinet Office) building. Lower left is the east end of Westminster Abbey church,
and below it the remains of the palace wall which connected with the surviving Jew-
el Tower, shown as a small crenellated building abutting the abbey garden, as it still
does (GL and Harry Margary)
55
 London 1100–1600
(and childhood home of his son Richard II) at Kennington, Rotherhithe and Sheen. The
15th-century hall at Eltham remains, inside its moated enclosure; the house at Kenning-
ton has been partly excavated.27
Hunting was one of the main pastimes of royalty and the court during the medieval
and Tudor periods. This meant the creation of many royal parks and the management of
both the landscapes within and their stocks of animals to hunt. Parks were also attached
to rural manor houses (Chapter 8); their development on royal sites has perhaps been lit-
tle studied. The present St James’s Park, a swampy area drained by order of Henry VIII in
the 1530s, Hyde Park, abbey land enclosed by the same king in 1536, and Regent’s Park,
enclosed 1544, all have prehistories as royal hunting parks. St James’s was tacked onto the
existing town of Westminster, an area as large as the town itself.28 Besides archaeological
traces of park management both of beasts and trees, there will be evidence of special
buildings erected for royalty and their guests to view the hunt. One survives in good con-
dition: what is normally called Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge at Chingford (Essex),
owned and maintained by the Corporation of London. This was commissioned in 1542–3
by Henry VIII, as a royal standing or gallery to watch the hunting in the adjacent Epping
Forest. Its main rooms on three floors have originally unglazed windows to the country-
side on the north, and there is a wide staircase, perhaps for the king who by that time was
increasingly an invalid. The arch braces for the fine top-storey roof have quarter-round
or ovolo mouldings along their edges, an early trace of the classical touches to stone and
carpentry which were to characterise London work from the middle of the 16th century.29
There were similar stands which lasted until the 18th century in Hyde Park.
Archaeological work of the 1980s and 1990s, recently published, has pieced together
fragmentary evidence for two further small royal sites in south-east London which hint
at further pleasures. On the bank of the Thames downstream of the City, Edward III had
a house at Rotherhithe, the site of which is now a landscaped monument in a housing
estate.30 The fact that the site, once recognised during the weeks before its impending
destruction, was declared an Ancient Monument in 1987 and thus preserved, has con-
ditioned the archaeological access to it and therefore the history now proposed. The
amount of investigation, which by its nature destroys deposits and may expose fragile
masonry, was restricted to the minimum. In this case the main outline of the northern
half of the complex, a stone wall surrounded by a moat on three sides and the river on
the fourth, is clear. A range of buildings on the north, river side has been reconstructed
(Figure 3.10), but otherwise there has been very little excavation inside the complex,
and a second southern subsidiary court probably of larger extent is only surmised, now
beneath new housing. From 1349 to 1361 there are documented building works, some
by known masons and carpenters in the royal service. Perhaps Edward used this house to
indulge in one of his favourite sports of falconry over the river and adjacent marshes. Part
of the two-storey range along the Thames, which may have housed his falcons, survived to
be recorded in 1907. Two rows of large windows in the range not only gave superb views
of the river, but would have shown off the splendour and sparkle of the royal court, when
in residence, to all who passed along the river to and from London. This range was the
ancestor of the riverside pavilion at royal Bridewell in the 1520s.
56
 Castles, palaces and royal houses

Figure 3.10 Reconstruction of Edward III’s house at Rotherhithe around 1400, from recent ex-
cavations (by Faith Hardy: Blatherwick and Bluer 2009, fig 27). Like the much larg-
er complexes at Westminster and the Tower, and later at Greenwich and Bridewell,
the house was designed to be entered from the river, through a small stone gate-
house. The north range shown here had two sets of windows to view the river and
marshes; what remains unexplained is why the ground-floor windows were larger
than those on the first floor.

The main function of this small residence, if it had one, is not known. It was not a hunt-
ing lodge as there was no adjacent park. Perhaps the falcons provide a clue. Even more
mystery surrounds another royal place published in the same report, a moated enclosure
opposite the Tower built in 1324 by Edward II. This may never have been finished, as
the unfortunate king met his death three years later; damaged by floods, the site was ab-
sorbed into the semi-industrial development of the Southwark bank of the river (Chapter
5 and Figure 5.13). It is clear from these sites that kings were not contained by castles or
their main palaces, but initiated and funded a range of buildings for their pleasure.

Conclusions
This sketch of the archaeology of royalty in the medieval and Tudor periods has predomi-
nantly been about buildings, and others can produce contrasting pictures of the artefac-
tual evidence, especially of the luxuries, often from abroad, to be found at this level in
society. After religion, the royal court is probably the aspect of medieval and Tudor life in
Britain which is most represented by standing buildings and collections in museums. The
contribution of recent archaeological work has been along three lines: study of the main
royal buildings themselves; of the ancillary buildings which went with them and which
have usually escaped record in the past; and of the landscape setting of the palaces and
related buildings such as stands in the parks.
To what extent were kings the leaders in architectural style; to what extent did they
57
 London 1100–1600
express opinions, like certain members of the royal family today? Some kings were
assiduous builders. Notable among them was Henry III, with his passion for specific in-
ternal decorative designs and comfort. He may have been personally responsible for the
first widespread use of heraldry inside and outside buildings, such as in the nave of his
Westminster Abbey or on the window-shutters of his great chamber in the Tower, from
the 1240s, since earlier examples in English architecture are hard to find.31 But for royal
palaces and lesser houses up to 1500, there is little evidence of conscious design of the
whole complex or important parts of it; palaces are collections of buildings strung out in
all directions, and only at Windsor was a coherent group of domestic buildings provided
for the king’s use. Here, perhaps, Edward III’s court ‘expressed a concept of kingship
as surely as Versailles.’32 Elsewhere medieval royal buildings were hardly monumental.
The grouping of buildings on the Thames front at Westminster was functional and as a
consequence picturesque rather than formal. Edward III’s house at Rotherhithe looked
like the moated houses of his richer subjects. In the Tudor palaces, especially those
associated with Henry VIII, there is more formality, with the development of the grand
ceremonial staircase and a much finer gradation of rooms in their status and relation
to the monarch. The more formal style could reflect the inflated concept of monarchy
under the Tudors, when the king was addressed as ‘Your Majesty’, instead of the previous
ducal ‘Your Grace’.33 From the 12th century to the 16th, royal houses had to look mag-
nificent, and this is their contribution to London’s archaeology. Royal expenditure on
buildings, state occasions and visits from foreign potentates fed many mouths in London
by ordering expensive furnishings, clothes, jewels and furs.
Royal building projects were important for stimulating stone quarries, at home and
abroad, and for introducing or confirming new fashions in building. Whether or not
we believe that richer citizens followed royal innovations or fads which trickled down
to them, it is clear that royal palaces were often where new and up-to-date fashions in
construction and decoration could be seen. This also meant that royal projects often
employed craftsmen from continental countries, and thus formed one of the main con-
duits for the adoption of foreign architectural ideas in England. A most important exam-
ple of this must have been the introduction of brick to build the palace at Sheen by Henry
V in the second and third decades of the 15th century. In 1422, 114,000 bricks were sup-
plied from Calais; their freight cost one and a half times the cost of their manufacture.34
No wonder that domestic brick production around London then took off. Henry VIII
relied heavily on foreign craftsmen for much of the building and decoration work at
his palaces: brickmakers and bricklayers (even though the domestic industry was then
growing), joiners and glaziers, all identified as ‘Doche’, a term used for Flemings and
Germans, in the accounts.35 In due course, as they analyse the geological composition
of medieval and Tudor bricks, archaeological specialists will perhaps be able to identify
the bricks from abroad, as their colleagues have done with pottery now for over 30 years.
Palaces were also where new ideas in planning of rooms, and even new forms of rooms,
either first appeared or received an official boost of approval. Spectacular silhouettes
including small domes and galleries with many bay windows, not the smaller flat windows
of former times, began with Tudor royal houses such as Richmond.36
58
 Castles, palaces and royal houses
At the same time, archaeology is showing that smaller houses of kings were in most ways
indistinguishable from those of their noble followers, or of the more prominent church-
men who were often highly-placed civil servants and diplomats. Clearly some larger royal
buildings were in a class of their own, such as Westminster Hall, or the halls at Windsor
and Hampton Court. But kings and queens were not always the epicentres of style. Their
buildings are important for the introduction, or adoption, of high-class building methods
and occasionally decorative schemes of immense richness and expense. Royal palaces
were the most public buildings in the medieval and Tudor world, and thus by this excep-
tional character they radiated influence into both town and countryside around them.
But whether monarchs were leaders of style, or had personal tastes, is another matter.

59
 —4—

Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

Houses, possessions and food occupy much of our thoughts today, and did so for people
in the medieval and Tudor periods. Each of these subjects is a potent field of study to
understand how people in various social groups, or at various levels of income, lived and
indeed perceived themselves. Study may also help us to see how medieval London was
divided into neighbourhoods, both ethnic and either rich or poor.

Houses, urban and rural

Throughout the period 1100 to 1600, the majority of secular buildings in the London
area were timber-framed, that is built of wooden frames infilled with a variety of smaller
timbers, laths, plaster and earth, and later brick; and partly because of this, as well as
because of the frequent rebuilding, there are only a handful of examples surviving today.
But study of the available information in documents, drawings and excavations is showing
that houses can reveal much about the life conducted in and around them. This discus-
sion looks first at developments in the plans of houses, and then tightens the focus of
enquiry to some aspects of individual rooms and spaces, decoration and materials.
Because of the heavy bias of information towards the central conurbation in the Middle
Ages (the City, Westminster and Southwark), the first section is itself divided into a com-
paratively detailed treatment of the conurbation, followed by an outline of some of the
developments in rural housing.1

Houses from the 11th to the 15th centuries

By 1100 there was a variety of forms and constructional techniques in timber buildings,
at least in the City itself. Archaeological excavations, especially of the 1970s and 1980s,
have produced a corpus of buildings from the late 9th to the 12th century;2 important
evidence of carpentry techniques, and some pieces of timber buildings, have been found
in waterlogged contexts from the 10th century to the 14th century.3 In the 10th to 12th
centuries, there was a great variety of form and construction in secular buildings: the
majority were single-storeyed structures, but others had partly subterranean timber-lined
cellars which could be large. These cellared buildings, most often dated to the 11th centu-
ry, have now been found on many sites since they were first recorded by Professor Grimes
in the 1950s; the largest concentration, which includes his examples, is in the streets

60
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
north and south off Cheapside, the main mercantile or market area in the 11th century,
but examples have been recorded near several Saxon streets elsewhere in the City.4 On
individual plots, these cellars usually lay behind the street frontage, and were probably at
the back or at the side of yards (the predecessors of medieval courtyards). Around them,
and especially along streets, were buildings from surviving evidence probably of one sto-
rey, often contiguous, but not usually built in blocks. The construction of walls could
involve staves, wattles, horizontal planking or cob; roofs were thatched or occasionally
covered with oak shingles.5 A small street of buildings was excavated on the Guildhall site
in 1985–99 (Figure 4.1), adding further construction techniques of buildings with walls of
horizontal planks between grooved posts, a technique also used for extending the water-
front properties into the Thames at the same time, and buildings with rounded corners
in wattle. The extensive series of buildings on this large site will figure several times in the
chapters of this book, as we explore evidence for craftworking, their functions as shown
by archaeological evidence and their environment. Single-storey wooden buildings with
thatched roofs need not however mean poor people: the occupiers of some of the proper-
ties at Guildhall in the decades around 1100 used several kinds of imported pottery from
France and the Low Countries, and their houses had several rooms.6
Although buildings of timber were always in the majority, they were interspersed with
structures of stone: not only the many religious houses and parish churches, but secular
buildings also. By 1200, several parts of the city had stone buildings, especially along
Cheapside, the main street of the city, with streets immediately to the north and south,
and sections of the waterfront.7 At the east end of Cheapside in Poultry and Bucklers-
bury, increased density of occupation during the 12th century produced large stone-built
houses in previously unoccupied areas away from the major street frontages, but owing
some of their property layout to their timber predecessors with cellars.8
Larger residences for both religious and secular leaders were probably present in Lon-
don before the Conquest, but they become a clear feature of the city during the 12th
century. At this early period they concentrated in the City, for instance, the town house of
the abbot of Waltham in St Mary at Hill [street], partially recorded in 1982,9 and on the
south bank near the bridge. The largest archaeological investigation of a house of this
palatial type has been that of the house of the bishops of Winchester in Southwark, im-
mediately west of the priory of St Mary Overie (its church now Southwark Cathedral).10 A
substantial building on timber and stone foundations, about 20m from the river, probably
formed part of the property of the merchant Orgar which was purchased about 1144–9
by the bishop of Winchester. The earliest archaeological evidence for the development of
the bishop’s residence comprises a 12th-century east boundary wall and a stone-built two-
storey building, with a second masonry building to which an undercroft was added. The
excavators reconstruct this (Figure 4.2) as a very large chapel with a smaller hall attached,
but I think this unlikely; the excavated range is better reconstructed as a hall, with the
chapel (not found) to the east, and to the west a small vaulted room and then the kitchen.
The early 13th century saw major construction works. A long two-storey range was laid
out parallel with a new wharf and to the north of the older palace buildings, although the
west portion may not have been completed. A hall in the range’s eastern part connected

61
 London 1100–1600

N Guildhall N

Building 126 Building 126

Building 111

Building 101 Building 118

Building 102

road 101

Building 117
Building 106

churchyard churchyard

road 102 road 102

St Lawrence St Lawrence
Jewry Jewry

Cat Cat
Stre Stre
et et

1. early 12th Century 2. 1120-1140

Guildhall N Guildhall N

Building 126

Building 112
Building 111

Building 122

Building 124

Building 102
Building 123
Building 103

Building 117 Building 129

road 102 road 102

St Lawrence St Lawrence
Jewry Jewry

stone
Cat Cat house
Stre Stre
et et

3. mid 12th Century 4. 1150-1175

0 50m

62
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
Figure 4.1 (opposite) How a medieval lane was formed: four periods of building along the
lane leading to the 12th-century Guildhall, as excavated 1987–90 (after Bowsher et
al 2007). The street developed northwards towards the Guildhall; small buildings
along both sides were rebuilt frequently, and after about 1150 stone houses began
to be built along Cat or Catteaton Street (the present Gresham Street) to the south,
as the medieval Jewry expanded into this area.

Figure 4.2 The townhouse of the Bishop of Winchester in the 12th century, as excavated in the
1980s (Seeley et al 2006). The published room functions are given here, but an alter-
native would be to see Building 16 on the west as a kitchen, then a small vaulted room
A (the foundation in the middle supporting vaulting) and Building 17 to the east
as the hall. Whatever the functions of the buildings, they were near the bank of the
Thames in the 12th century, and would have been a feature of the view from the river.

63
 London 1100–1600
at first-floor level with a chapel to the south. Two further two-storey ranges built during
the 13th century created an inner courtyard that was open on the south side and fed into
the palace’s outer courtyard. These more peripheral parts, including stables around the
perimeter and a stone gateway, with a kitchen garden and pleasure gardens in the west
half of the palace enclosure, are known from documentary sources. A large complex like
this would continue to be added to and changed throughout the Middle Ages. The hall’s
west gable wall was reconstructed in the early 14th century with a rose window above
three first-floor doorways (to the kitchen and service rooms, as would be expected in a
large medieval hall). This gable, the doorways and the window survive today.
Nearby, on the downstream side of the bridge but close to it, were other residences:
the abbot of Battle in Tooley Street by perhaps the same time in the 12th century, and
property (probably town-houses) of Christ Church Canterbury and St Augustine’s Can-
terbury (Kent), Lewes (Sussex) and Malling (Kent).11 The larger of two stone undercrofts
recorded during the building of London Bridge station in 1829 seems in addition to have
been part of the town house of the Earls of Warenne, an early secular example.
No doubt other fragments of these important urban residences in Southwark remain to
be identified or discovered in the future. The 12th-century City was a powerful attraction
for rural landowners who wanted access to the markets and especially to luxuries, often
from abroad; the attractions of being near the court came later, since the court did not
settle at Westminster in a permanent fashion until the 13th century. But Westminster or
its environs were attracting important people by 1200, as shown by the formation of what
became the London establishment of the archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps based on the
buildings of a short-lived religious house, at Lambeth across the river.12 Archbishop Mor-
ton’s gatehouse of about 1490 (Figure 5.15) is still a prominent feature of the river bank.
Housing in towns all over northern Europe developed in similar ways, and generally
simultaneously.13 For its comparatively early development of stone houses, London should
be compared with the cities of continental Europe, such as Cologne, Prague or Regens-
burg.14 But not only the larger cities: whole quarters of Cluny were rebuilt in stone in the
first third of the 12th century, and many French cathedral towns had stone houses for
the canons in the 13th century.15 We know from documents that there were many stone
houses in London by 1300, and this also seems likely when we count the surviving houses
in larger English towns such as Norwich, in which records of 18 stone houses in exist-
ence by the early 14th century have been noted,16 and especially on the Continent: over
a hundred 13th-century stone buildings have been recorded in Zurich, at least 115 stone
buildings of 12th-century and later date in Ghent, and at least 170 buildings conserving
elements from the 12th to the 14th centuries in Montpellier. Some surviving examples
are of three storeys on cellars, all in stone, by the early 13th century.17 The continen-
tal parallels tell us a little about how 13th-century stone or brick houses were used: the
ground floor (often vaulted) for storage, and the main living accommodation on the first
floor, in examples at Cologne, Lübeck, and many French towns.18 At the same time, there
were probably as many properties with stone elements within a range of timber build-
ings, such as a stone tower, a chimney, or more often a stone cellar below a timber range.
This pattern has been seen in London, though evidence for towers is scarce, and at other

64
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
N

4 2
3

1
City
6

Westminster
Palace Lambeth
0 500m

Figure 4.3 Map of the medieval aristocratic residences between the City of London and West-
minster, mostly in Fleet Street, the Strand and Holborn, around 1400. This is meant
to give an impression of the suburb, since some of the locations (the main houses
shown as diamonds) are not certain. Sites mentioned in the text are: 1, Bath Inn
(later Arundel house); 2, Ely Place; 3, Furnival’s Inn; 4, Gray’s Inn; 5, Lincoln’s Inn
(formerly the house of the Bishop of Chichester); 6 the Savoy. The grey tone indi-
cates the extent of the main built-up area in 1400.
European towns outside the well-known examples in Italy, for instance in Ghent.19
Further, a large town would have several concentrations of residences of the rich and
powerful. In Bruges, four areas have been identified, on major streets and the water-
front.19 In London, these distinctive 12th-century areas might be Cheapside, Dowgate,
Gracechurch Street and areas of the river front around Vintry and Billingsgate. This is
where early (12th-century) stone buildings have been identified and excavated. As just
noted, some prestigious residences of the 12th-century are known or implied in South-
wark and Westminster; there may be others in the wider or more rural suburbs, a feature
of other towns such as Winchester.21
From the second quarter of the 13th century, with the establishment of several parts of
royal government at Westminster, a large number of town houses of both religious and
secular lords were established in a different place from those of the 12th century; the new
area for development was between the west side of the city and Westminster (Figure 4.3).

65
 London 1100–1600
Those south of Fleet Street and its continuation the Strand had watergates on the Thames, for
easy communication. The most royal of the mansions south of the Strand was the Savoy, built
in 1245 by the Earl of Savoy, uncle to Henry III’s queen Eleanor. This was held by the dukes
of Lancaster from the 1290s, and after damage in the Peasants’ Revolt it was repaired by John
of Gaunt (d 1399).22 A further group of such mansions, in the City and near the goldsmiths
and other suppliers to the aristocracy, were called wardrobes and would have combined the
characteristics of storehouse and accommodation for occasional family visitors.23
Such a house had four main functions: it was the lord’s London office, for purchasing,
storage and sale of the goods brought in from estates; it was a hostel for the lord and, if a
secular family, the lady; it was therefore a social centre in the capital; and it often gener-
ated income of its own, from the smaller properties and shops which would surround it,
and the gardens within when space allowed, for instance outside the city walls.24
Archaeological investigations of the Strand and Holborn mansions have been meagre.
Work at the site of the house of the bishop of Bath, later the Tudor Arundel House, has
located a timber waterfront of 13th- or 14th-century date with some similarities to City
examples.25 The 14th-century hall of the inn was quite close to the river’s edge, and would
have been a feature of the waterfront viewed from boats on the river. As shown by Wyn-
gaerde’s panorama of the early 1540s, the hall of the inn of the Bishop of Ely in Holborn,
on the north edge of the suburb, could be seen from across the river. The main medieval
buildings here, though rebuilt several times, were just outside the area of the Great Fire
and thus survived to be recorded before demolition in the 18th century. In the style of
town-houses to be followed by many subsequent examples in London, the hall lay at the
back of a courtyard, in this case with ornamented gate to the street, and behind the hall
lay a second private court and gardens (Figure 4.4). Here, as befitted a high official with
much business and many retainers, a cloister connected the hall and the bishop’s private
chapel, which has survived as St Etheldreda’s church, Ely Place; John de Kirkby, Treasurer
of England in 1298 and bishop in 1286, left the chapel newly built at his death in 1290.
Small excavations in 1990 found parts of the kitchen buildings and established that the
west walk of the cloister, paved with plain Flemish tiles, survives beneath the ground.26
St Etheldreda’s still has some of the character of a late 13th-century bishop’s chapel, there
would have been many such chapels, though less architecturally embellished, throughout
central London. Like others of its type such as St Stephen’s within the Palace of Westminster
the chapel at Holborn is raised on an undercroft, not vaulted but ceiled with what are prob-
ably the original 13th-century joists of the floor above. The supporting posts have had their
bases renewed, but they still hold up a large bridging joist which runs the full length of the
undercroft by being composed of several timbers jointed or scarfed together.27 This floor with
its posts is one of the very few pieces of surviving 13th-century carpentry in London. Between
Holborn and Fleet Street, in Chancery Lane, Lincoln’s Inn, formerly the house of the bishop
of Chichester, has only a fragment of 13th-century decorated masonry, reset in a modern wall,
to show for the medieval period; the remains of its Tudor legal period are mentioned later.
By about 1300, the idea of an aristocratic residence somewhere on the edge of London
or at a short distance out in the countryside was well established, and large houses, some-
times with moats, appeared on all sides of the city. In Southwark they had to mix with

66
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

Figure 4.4 Plan of the Inn of the Bishop of Ely in Holborn in the late 18th century, when its
main medieval features were still intact (MoL). The chapel survives as St Ethel-
dreda’s in Ely Place, which now crosses the site of the hall and the ‘quadrangle’
(private cloister). These three main elements dated largely from about 1290.

67
 London 1100–1600
riverfront industries such as mills and, later, breweries. One near London Bridge was on
a man-made island revetted in stone, surrounded by a moat on three sides and the river
on the fourth. The famous soldier Sir John Fastolf bought the estate in the 1440s and
probably rebuilt it as the London base of his many money-making activities, to match his
castle at Caister in Norfolk, which partly survives for comparison.28
Such urban depots or places in town for prominent people or families were a feature of
capital cities. By the 14th century there were many similar residences of quality in Paris,
where the process of prominent churchmen and other leaders being attracted to the
city followed the establishment of Paris as his capital by Philippe Auguste in 1190. Here
there was less emphasis on using the river as a highway, and many were away from the
river bank; although mainly grouped on the left bank of the Seine, they were also quite
near the centres of power, not suburban.29 Parts of two medieval residences, within later
restorations, survive above ground in this area at the Hôtel of the archbishop of Sens
(1500–7) and at the Hôtel of the abbot of Cluny (site acquired 1330, standing building
of 1485–98). So the remarkable concentration of mansions south of Fleet Street and the
Strand in London was not replicated in the larger city of Paris.
The great majority of people lived in much smaller houses. By the opening of the 14th
century in London a common type of house with two rooms on three floors or two with
half-storeys of garrets was to be found on many central streets; this compact arrangement,
with trade rooms or spaces on the ground floor supplemented by a cellar and domestic ac-
commodation starting on the first floor, must have developed in towns during the previous
century. London examples are known from documents such as building contracts and later
surveys, and surviving buildings of this type dating from the late 14th century still stand in
medieval towns such as Salisbury, Winchester and Ludlow. Although the great majority of
properties had a narrow end to the street, a feature inherited ultimately from the Roman
period, the properties were only long and narrow, as in other smaller towns, when space al-
lowed; which was only in suburban or otherwise unpressurised streets or in Southwark, or
along the waterfront where properties expanded into the river from the early 12th century.
From the early 13th century timber-framed buildings also became taller. Jettied buildings
are recorded and criticised for obstructing the narrow streets in London in 1246, and these
appear to be the earliest certain occurrences in the country, and among the earliest in
Europe.30 As they were then a nuisance, they must have developed earlier, but how much ear-
lier we do not know. The excavated sites on the waterfront have produced many examples
of timber joints dated by dendrochronology, which enable us to chart a growing confidence
as medieval carpenters worked out how to construct buildings of two and three storeys (on
which more below, Fig 4.12); three storeys were to be seen on London streets shortly after
1300. This increase in floor area for many City-centre buildings must have met a demand
for space and resulted in the observable growth in the rent value of properties.31
In the City and Southwark, even in the rich archaeological zone round Guildhall,
remains of buildings and their open spaces are fragmentary, being much damaged by
later constructions. Even so, general conclusions about property and street development
can often be drawn, and occasionally there are features of note such as fireplaces with
their implied chimneys, cesspits and wells.32 In the City of London, by 1300, an unknown

68
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

Figure 4.5 An undercroft of about 1290 at Gisors’ or Gerard’s Hall in Basing Lane, removed
for the extension of Cannon Street westwards in the 1850s (Society of Antiquaries).
This is the finest example of a vaulted medieval cellar in London, but others have
been recorded. At this expensive and cultured level, the masons who built it prob-
ably constructed churches also.
but large number of houses had stone cellars, and perhaps there were whole streets of
them, as in places like Chester33 or Lübeck. Vaulted undercrofts, some of 13th-century
date, survived to be recorded in the 19th century (Figure 4.5), and part of one of later in
the 14th century stands today beneath Merchant Taylors’ Hall in Threadneedle Street.
These cellars, on which much expense and architectural skill had been outlaid, are con-
sidered further in Chapter 5 on commercial buildings. These decorated undercrofts are
features of the 13th and 14th centuries, not later. In the 15th century houses of medium
and large sizes had undercrofts of brick, sometimes reinforced with simple stone arches,
but usually entered principally from within the property, not from the street.

Houses in the 16th and early 17th centuries

In the 16th century, like all other types of building, houses changed during and after the
convulsion of the Reformation. An immense amount of properties formerly belonging to
69
 London 1100–1600
the monasteries, and later the chantry property which had belonged to parish churches,
was thrown onto the market in the 1530s and 1540s. Property formerly belonging to mo-
nastic houses, in town or countryside, was snapped up to form sizeable estates, as shown
by the following examples. By the time of his death in 1565 Ralph Davenant, merchant
tailor, owned properties formerly belonging to Elsing Spital, the fraternity of the Blessed
Virgin at All Hallows Barking, the parish of St Giles Cripplegate, and Holy Trinity Priory.
Henry Clitheroe, another merchant tailor, acquired an estate in 1544–5 which he dis-
tributed among his three young sons at his death in 1566: fourteen blocks of property in
the City, including tenements formerly belonging to the Austin Friars, Crutched Friars,
the Blackfriars, St Mary Graces, the Charterhouse, Halliwell nunnery, St Albans Abbey
and Horsham Priory (Norfolk).34 A wealthy religious house such as Holy Trinity Priory
owned property, at some time in the medieval period, in 72 City parishes, Halliwell nun-
nery held property in at least 39 parishes, and the other major houses were similar, so the
pickings must have been great and the would-be landlords numerous. In the 1550s the
many properties which over the past 300 years had been bequeathed to parish churches
to pay for a chantry priest or for general charitable purposes were also on the market.
In June 1550, for instance, Francis Goldsmith paid the Court of Augmentations £807 2s,
or about 14 and a half times the yearly rent value of £55 4s 4d, for a total of 63 proper-
ties in the City, all with sitting tenants, spread through 13 parishes.35 Some new owners
wanted the properties not only for themselves in their own lives, but for bequeathing to
new charitable bodies or to the many crafts which had always had charity as a major part
of their mandate.
By 1600 there were timber-framed buildings five and even six storeys high, and stone
houses of the 13th and 14th centuries had almost disappeared, except at basement level
where many survived up to the Great Fire. There had been considerable development in
the evolution of rooms and spaces for specific purposes during the previous two centu-
ries. During the 15th century the warehouse made an appearance: a ground-floor room
for the storage and display of textiles and perhaps other goods, usually as a back part
to a shop. In the 16th century we first hear of galleries, towers, closets, studies, garden
houses and other special rooms; again, developments of building design which probably
occurred first in towns and first of all in London, and which can be paralleled in other
larger European cities such as Augsburg.36 During this century also the stair began to take
on a larger and more dignified form, leading to chambers on upper floors. In outlying
parts of the City, and commonly in the rural areas, by 1600 there was yet another type: the
lobby-entrance house, in which the insertion of a large brick chimney stack into an exist-
ing house, or its incorporation from the start, was combined with, as the name suggests, a
small lobby against the stack where the visitor could turn left or right into equally-heated
chambers. There are examples in the present outer London suburbs, for instance Sweet-
man’s Hall, Pinner, and in Essex at Witham.37
Around 1600, for the first time, there is sufficient information to suggest a range of
house plans from the smallest house to large mansions in the conurbation. This is pro-
vided by the work of Ralph Treswell (c 1540–1616) who surveyed many properties which
had by then passed to his two institutional clients, the City’s orphanage Christ’s Hospital

70
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

Sd

Wa
Type 1

K
G
K K K
Sd
K
Y Y C
Y H

W? W W W
Sh E K
K

Sh Sh Sh Sh
Sh P

Type 2 Type 3

0 30ft
0 10m

W K

St

W
K
Ch

KEY
P timber
brick
W stone

W W Sh

Type 4

Figure 4.6 The four types of house plans used in analysis of the Treswell surveys (Schofield
1987, 2003). Type 1 is shown by two adjacent 1-room houses; Type 2 by a block of
2-room houses, with various internal arrangements and with yards behind; Type 3 is
a wider property (in 1612 divided into three tenancies); and Type 4 is a large court-
yard house. The room and space functions given by Treswell are: C cellar, Ch cham-
ber, E entry, G garden, H hall, K kitchen, P parlour, Sh Shop, Sd shed, St study, W
warehouse, Wa waterhouse, Y yard.

71
 London 1100–1600
and the Clothworkers’ Company.38 A typology of house plans defines four main types:
(i) one-room plans (though up to six storeys high); (ii) two-room plans (the most com-
mon); (iii) three- to six-room plans; (iv) larger mansions (all courtyard houses) (Figure
4.6). Many of the houses surveyed by Treswell stood on properties formerly belonging to
monasteries, and may reflect rebuildings by new owners in the second half of the 16th
century. Unfortunately, these surveys cannot themselves be evaluated archaeologically as
the sites of all the buildings are now largely covered with modern (or 19th-century) base-
ments which have removed nearly all the relevant strata.39
Since publishing this proposed typology in 1987, I have come to think that the idea of
a typology of houses, which usually only means the plan of the ground floor, is of limited
value in the study of houses before 1700. A house built all at one time was a rarity, in Lon-
don as in other towns both in Britain and on the Continent. The plans seen in Treswell’s
surveys of 1610–12 are snapshots, configurations of rooms with their names and therefore
functions at the time, with little reference to the possible ages of the parts. A recent survey
of many standing houses in Rye (Sussex) is one of very few studies of surviving buildings
which have commented on the Treswell surveys from outside London. Treswell supplies
plans of nearly 200 London houses in 1610–12, so this might have been thought useful
for those who record surviving buildings. Many houses in Rye, by 1600, were buildings of
two, three or four phases and probably others for which evidence has not survived, origi-
nating in the 14th century. Fireplaces, doorways and stairs had been inserted, partitions
removed, buildings extended, garrets added, halls floored over. The authors of the Rye
survey have one house, 2–3 East Street, which is the ‘most urban’ of historic houses in the
town, in that it echoes the ‘chaotic ad hoc internal layouts’ depicted by Treswell.40 So the
houses of London were, according to this view, constrained, skewed, and chaotic, in com-
parison to more ordered, smaller, houses in smaller towns. This is perhaps why nobody
has attempted to analyse the Treswell plans in terms of dating their components.
There had also been much subdivision of properties so make smaller tenancies, prob-
ably from the 14th century at least, and by 1600 the household units were interleaved,
intricate, small and no doubt both unhygenic and largely without natural light. This is
illustrated by another of Treswell’s plans, of the White Hart brewhouse and its compan-
ion buildings in Knightrider Street, a short distance from Queenhithe, surveyed in 1610
for Christ’s Hospital (Figure 4.7). Nearly all the buildings here, even those down the
alley, were of three storeys with garrets, and those on the street mostly had cellars. Here
there were seven tenants (their ground-floor rooms marked 1–7 on the plan). Abraham
Fryth held the brewhouse with its drinking rooms; presumably he brewed his ale in the
large kitchen at the rear. His house was evidently the relic of an earlier building of stone.
Presumably the land to the west (left on the plan) was the courtyard of this early house,
but later filled with timber houses. Thomas Alcocke was tenant of the front part, but had
sublet part to a man called Eakines. Down the central alley were three further tenancies;
Treswell’s text which goes with the drawn survey describes how some of their rooms in-
terleaved above the ground. Those tenancies which do not show privies on the ground
floor (Rowse, Chilton) had them in upper chambers, linked by shafts to the presumed
pits below. The site of these buildings, now destroyed, is approximately the open space

72
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

Figure 4.7 Plan in 1610 of the White Hart brewhouse and its neighbours in Knightrider Street,
City of London, by Ralph Treswell. The tenants were: 1, Abraham Frithe; 2, Thomas
Alcocke; 3, George Eakines; 4, Robert Rowse; 5, Thomas Chilton; 6, ‘West’; 7, John
Welshaw (Schofield 2003). Sh=shop; the other functions are those mentioned by
Treswell.

73
 London 1100–1600
immediately west of Mansion House underground station in Queen Victoria Street, which
removed this part of Knightrider Street in the 1860s.
In the 16th century, houses grand and small assumed strange forms by being carved
out of religious houses which were dissolved in the 1530s. The domestic range formerly
of the prior or abbot was retained for the new grandee, and the large church stripped of
its valuable lead and timber. There was not much use for the unroofed skeleton of the
church, unless it had been allocated for some other use, for instance a parish church,
and so it often became an open space or a garden, its columns reduced to stumps. This
process can be followed most closely by the fate which befell Holy Trinity Priory Aldgate,
which was dissolved before all the others, in 1532. The site passed to Thomas Audley, who
built a house in the extensive priory buildings before his death in 1544. The precinct then
passed via his daughter to the Duke of Norfolk, who entertained Queen Elizabeth there.
The house, with its adaptation of the large church building as a gallery, banqueting house
and garden, can be partly reconstructed from plans of about 1585 (Figure 4.8). Other
examples of contrasting adaptation of the buildings can be followed at the Charterhouse,
where fabric of both the medieval and Tudor periods survives, and at excavated sites such
as Bermondsey Abbey, now about to be published.41 As the Holy Trinity example shows,
the large house was soon surrounded by smaller tenancies as the lord exploited the fast
rising population to increase his rents; but the smaller houses, to a greater extent, were
just grafted onto the old stone structures.
In 1600, as in 1300, a wealthy residence along ordinary streets similarly sought to be
expansive in the horizontal dimension, with a lofty open hall and a garden overlooked by
a gallery on the top of a parlour range. The great house was screened from the street by
smaller buildings, usually tenancies attached to it, which sometimes rose higher by one or
two storeys than the house behind.

Regulations and the problems of living together

A factor which London would have been shared with other major cities was an increas-
ing amount of civic regulation about the external design of secular buildings, to improve
them against fire, a scourge of timber-built towns since the Roman period, and to im-
prove the rudimentary hygiene. Building regulations of some sophistication were in force
in the City by 1200, and the observation of them, at least in the 13th and 14th centuries,
can be traced on archaeological sites, in the use of fire-break stone walls between proper-
ties, which had to be 3ft (0.9m) wide, and the increasing use of latrine pits made of stone.
The great majority of property boundaries in the City and Southwark are still on their
medieval lines, though almost always replaced with modern or 19th-century brick and
concrete;42 the outline of a modern development site is often medieval in origin, though
many properties have by now been amalgamated over time. From about 1150, many hous-
es had roofs of ceramic tiles; these were required by law from 1200. At first there were
several experimental forms of tiles, which settled down quickly to one standard form for
the medieval period. The first stone Guildhall of about 1120 had a roof of two kinds of
tile, curved and flanged, in the manner of Roman buildings, of which fragments, includ-
ing intact pieces of roofs, would still be visible as humps in the ground.43

74
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

Figure 4.8 Holy Trinity Priory Aldgate: reconstruction of part of the noble mansion in 1585,
from plans by John Symonds. The roofs of the choir and nave of the priory church
have been removed; the choir is a courtyard with its Romanesque arcades resem-
bling a contemporary Renaissance palazzo in Italy; the nave is a garden. Between,
the crossing has been rebuilt as an imposing chamber with large windows to the
open spaces. Around the choir, smaller tenancies have been built on top of the half-
demolished stonework (Schofield and Lea 2005).

Disputes between neighbours about boundary issues such as walls, overhanging build-
ings and latrines were referred to the City’s Viewers, two carpenters and two masons, in a
legal process called the Assize of Nuisance. The certificates from these cases have survived
for two periods, the earlier and longer of which is from 1301 to 1431.44 They furnish much
useful detail about buildings and other components of properties. Walls or houses some-
times overhung a neighbour’s land and had to be rebuilt; they could be of stone, wattle
and daub, or of earth, most often in outlying parts of the city. Walls could be imperilled
by adjacent pig-sties, seeping sewage, or just piles of firewood. Since downpipes to take
rainwater from a roof were not widely known or used, gutters threw water away from a
building via spouts, sometimes onto the next door property. Some gutters ran through

75
 London 1100–1600

Figure 4.9 A stone cesspit probably of 14th-century date on the Watling Court site, on the west
side of Bow Lane, in 1978; a common reservoir of finds, bones and seeds probably
specific to the medieval property which lay above (MoL). In this case the lowest part
of an intramural chute from the lost building survived, the sloping part of the wall
on the right.
a neighbour’s property, others were drains because they ran underground. By this time
cesspits of timber were being discouraged in favour of cesspits of stone, which would not
leak and which would last longer (Figure 4.9). Windows were normally unglazed, though
the occurrence of glass was increasing, so a priest could successfully stop neighbours
throwing rubbish through their windows onto church land; they were told to block up or
glaze the openings. For a time there was a rule that windows looking onto neighbouring
property could not be below 16ft (4.9m) above the ground, but this must have been hard
to enforce. A defendant in 1427 tried the argument that though her windows were 8ft
(2.45m) from the ground, they were glazed with thick glass and barred with iron, but she
was ordered to block them up. Some central City areas must have been quite congested
by this time: a widow in Bucklersbury, admittedly in one of the larger houses, protested in
1341 that she and her business were being snooped on by a total of five separate neigh-
bours.45 Wooden chimneys and roofs of thatch (‘reed’), mostly on sheds, were still being
complained of in 1465–83 in the eastern extramural ward of Portsoken,46 but by then
they must have been absent from the majority of the built-up area. Brick chimneys were
probably a common sight in the 14th century. Coal was sold by the sack from at least 1360,
and was probably used for domestic as well as industrial purposes. In 1434 the keepers of
Newgate and Ludgate jails were sworn to provide their prisoners with coal.

76
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
A second small group of viewers’ certificates survive for the period c 1508–88.47 The
disputes between neighbours are largely the same as they had been in the earlier period:
drains, walls, cesspits and windows. But there are some changes or developments. Down-
pipes, a feature of Tudor royal and episcopal palaces, had now appeared on houses (they
are mentioned in 1546) so rainwater was more controlled. There was still congestion and
resulting constraints: in one case of 1554, for example, a ground-level drain went through
one man’s kitchen and another man’s shop. The drain could not be stopped up. Further,
the shop owner had made a door near the open drain and filth came out through the
doorway into the drain; he was ordered to block up the door and replace it with a win-
dow. Most of all, there are many cases at this later period arising from lateral division of
buildings, when properties interlocked. This caused problems when one party wanted to
rebuild a single unit such as a kitchen or cellar. Sometimes the rooms of the two owners
were part of a single timber frame. In 1548 the owners of a decrepit garret in Old Jewry
used as a hayloft, which lay above rooms belonging to somebody else, faced a notice to
rebuild it; but as this would imperil the tenements beneath, they had to rebuild the entire
range, not just their portion. Several cases concerned property which had been owned
by churches or monasteries before 1548, suggesting that such buildings were generally in
a neglected state of repair. In the main, buildings were to be restored to their configura-
tions before the alleged offence, even if this meant a continuation of the interlocking.

Outside the central conurbation

So much for the crowded city; now to the rest of Greater London. Here the archaeologi-
cal account must be pieced together from more fragmentary, but sometimes more physi-
cal, evidence: excavation, study of standing buildings, and, as before, ancient drawings
and plans. By combining the increasing amount of archaeological excavation of medieval
building-sites with the standing medieval buildings or fragments of them in later rebuild-
ings which have survived, we can suggest some overall trends in the construction of hous-
es in the London area. Here are four examples of archaeological recording.
The first two sites show that house-sites from the 12th century can still be found beneath
London’s suburbia. A small site in Fulham High Street, excavated in 2002, shows the
potential of strata in a medieval village. Here occupation can be traced from the 12th
century, with refuse pits and simple wooden structures. A hearth of pitched rooftiles must
have come from a timber-framed building alongside the street, later removed with no
traces of its walls. There may have been a period when the property was empty, signified
by a garden soil, and then the first of two stouter ranges of brick buildings were built
against the street, starting in the 16th century. The replacement range of about 1630 sur-
vived to be demolished only in the middle of the 20th century.48
A comparable site was that excavated at Chipping Ongar, on the eastern side of Lon-
don, in 1995. Ongar is recorded in Domesday Book, and was important enough to have
a large motte and bailey castle imposed on it in the decades after the Norman Conquest.
The High Street of the little town crosses the outer bailey of the castle; and the excavation
was of one of the medieval house-sites on that street. Because of later removal of medieval
strata, which is called truncation, only the lower parts of post-holes and pits survived, cut

77
 London 1100–1600
into the natural subsoil; there were no horizontal deposits, and even the pits were only
up to about 0.6m (2ft) deep. But from this meagre survival, much could be proposed.
Two phases of timber buildings based on the posts extended back from the street front-
age in the 12th to 14th centuries, with a group of contemporary rubbish pits at the rear.
A ‘modest’ amount of pottery weighing 5.3kg was recovered. It included local or nearby
types from Harlow, Mill Green and Hedingham, but also the ‘London-type’ ware which
indicates contact with the capital or at least the Thames.49
The third and fourth examples are of rural manor houses. Excavation in 1997 ahead of
construction of a new housing estate in Walthamstow investigated the site of Low Hall, a
known manor house of ancient origin. Although dating evidence for the medieval phases
was sparse, the clarity of the development of the house was remarkable. By 1265 this
smaller manor had split off from the main manor (High Hall) of Walthamstow; by 1344,
the tree-ring date of timbers from a bridge, there was a square moat in which a hall, solar
and kitchen were erected, presumably of timber-framing on the low stone walls recorded.
In 1352 the manor was purchased by Simon Fraunceys, a prominent Londoner who had
already been mayor twice. Before his death in 1358 he may have carried out further
works recorded on the site as more buildings, a gatehouse and remodelling of the bridge.
The manor house went through three more phases of alteration in the 15th and 16th
centuries, before being demolished to make way for a new brick house in the early 17th
century, on a different part of the site but still inside the moat. This itself was altered over
time and suffered a drastic fate, being destroyed by the explosion just in front of it of a
V1 rocket in 1944; the crater itself was excavated. In this case, the promised low impact of
foundations of the future houses meant, in the main, that the earliest medieval walls were
left in situ, though the piles of the bridge had to be sacrificed.50
The fourth example is in fact just beyond the southern sweep of the M25, at Little Pick-
le, Bletchingley, Surrey.51 Here the expansion of a sand quarry required the excavation
before its destruction of the site of a manor house called Hextalls, about 1.5km north-
east of Bletchingley, in its day a thriving medieval town, in 1988–9. The site began as a
timber-framed hall and chamber, dignified by having its walls on stone sills, of the keeper
of two nearby deer parks in the later 13th century. In the early 14th century a new, larger
chamber was erected, and perhaps around 1400 this became part of a winged house with
a detached kitchen. This was increased in the early decades of the 16th century with walls
which defined a front court with a gatehouse, and a privy court behind, to make a Tudor
mansion (Figure 4.10). Clearly thought had been given to the design; the large gatehouse
was carefully aligned with the entrance into the hall itself, emphasising the view both for
a person coming in and for the owner looking out. As found at Low Hall, this idea had
been around since the 14th century. Hextalls manor house, some distance from London,
in its arrangement looked like Crosby Place in the City.
These two cases are of excavated manor houses, an elevated level of living. These houses
are like many others of the same type, still standing over all of England and parts of Wales.
A larger group of working farm houses which have medieval origins or parts are not as
well known. We are just at the beginning of synthetic thinking about houses in the coun-
tryside at all the levels below the manor house, and here the contribution of archaeology

78
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
N

north water
range tower

C14th chamber

privy
front court
court cellar

gate C15th
house porch hall

?stair

privy

C15th
kitchen

0 10m

Figure 4.10 Little Pickle, Bletchingley (Surrey): a medieval manor house extended and redevel-
oped c 1490 (phase 4) (Poulton 1998).

may in the end be greater, because far fewer farm houses, cottages or hovels have survived
to be seen today. But as with medieval buildings of all kinds, the study should combine
archaeological work with standing examples, however much rebuilt and therefore frag-
mentary, even in the London area.
In the current conservation-friendly climate more ancient buildings will be studied to
a higher level than ever before if they are recognised before redevelopment or repair. A
recent example has been the recording of Bromley Hall, to outward appearances an early
18th-century building in east London. The first volume of the Survey of London in 1900,
of the historic centre of Bromley (now in Tower Hamlets), identified that the core of a
building of about 1500 remained inside the later rebuilding; and more details accrued
in modern recording by archaeologists in 2002–4. What seems indicated is a brick tower
house, possibly with upper storeys of timber; and since many of the Tudor timbers, identi-
fied by their characteristic mouldings, were later used as floor joists and other members
in the rebuilding of about 1700, these could be analysed for tree-ring dating and produce
79
 London 1100–1600
felling dates of 1482–95.52 This underlines what could be suspected, that other Georgian
buildings in central London, both houses and churches, will contain reused timbers and
occasionally fragments of masonry from former, older configurations.
It is quite clear that secular buildings of all kinds can be studied over the whole region;
a barn in northern Kent probably resembles one in deepest Middlesex. There is little, if
any, evidence of different regional styles of timber construction meeting in London.
The development since about 1970 of tree-ring dating or dendrochronology has been
of the greatest importance (Table 4.1). The dendro-dates are from buildings outside the
central medieval conurbation, forming a complementary dataset to the dates obtained
from many excavated waterfront constructions in the City and Southwark.
We can also look further outside London for examples, in this case to the south-east and
to the north. A 1994 study of buildings between about 1270 and about 1550 in Kent, a rich
sample from 60 chosen parishes, was expressly of rural buildings, since medieval build-
ings in urban settings were thought too damaged.53 In the medieval and Tudor periods,
the great majority of what is now covered by Greater London was rural, and for this rea-
son, in the absence of a synthesis, it seems appropriate for the time being to assume that
the main trends in the development of rural house-types now chronicled for Kent, from
occasional stone buildings of the 13th century, as sophisticated as any in town, through
aisled farm houses of the 14th and 15th centuries, would also have been apparent in the
immediate London area. Another corpus of material is provided by a study of medieval
and post-medieval houses in Hertfordshire which does include urban buildings produced
in 1992. The county is ‘remarkable for the large number of houses built in the hundred
years before the Reformation’, a richness it shares with all the counties around London
except Middlesex.54
A third source is provided by those medieval and early 17th century buildings which
are preserved, often as local museums. These are found throughout the outer boroughs.
Sometimes they have been carefully studied, above and below ground, when the museum
was created, as notably at the Epping Forest District Museum in Sun Street, Waltham, in
the 1970s. Here a timber-framed house of about 1520 was recorded during restoration;
and limited excavation beneath and inside it found traces of occupation going back to
the earliest stage of the town in the late 11th century.55

The hall as centre of activities

The house was and is a social artefact, and its internal arrangement can tell us much about
the ways people lived and thought of themselves.56 We should be interested in any devel-
opments which happened in London before most other places, or which may be a conse-
quence of high-density urban living; that is, special arrangements of buildings or rooms
which tended to happen in towns. We could study the development of the kitchen, the par-
lour, or the bedroom; but here there is only space for the most important room, the hall.
There has traditionally been far more study of rural medieval buildings, because many
survive, and from this we understand that a house normally had a central main room
which we call, and they probably called, a hall. In rural contexts, and in the centuries
before the high Middle Ages, a hall would be long and broad, and have side aisles rather

80
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

Building type tree-ring dating

Fyfield Hall, Fyfield, Essex manor house 1167–85
Westwick Cottage, St Michael, Herts house 1184–1219
Sycamore Farm, Long Crendon, Bucks house 1205
Barley Barn, Cressing Temple, Essex barn 1220–5
Harlowbury Hall, Harlow, Essex manor house 1220–5
St Paul’s Hall, Belchamp, Essex barn 1240–75
Thorley Hall, Bishop’s Stortford, Herts house 1253–4
Wheat Barn, Cressing, Essex barn 1257–80
Headstone Manor, Harrow, Middlesex manor house 1310–15 and 1554–84
Turners, Belchamp St Paul, Essex house 1328/9
Kingsbury Manor, St Albans, Herts barn 1373/4
91–93 Church Street, Croydon shop (crown post roof) 1386–93
Croxley Hall Farm, Rickmansworth, Herts barn 1397/8
39–41 High Street, Kingston, Surrey house 1466–95
Bromley Hall, Bromley-by-Bow brick house 1482–95
44 High Street, Bagshot, Surrey galleried inn 1485–1517
Headstone Manor, Harrow, Middlesex tithe barn 1505
Little Wymondley Priory, Herts barn 1540/1
conversion of monastic
Reigate Priory School, Reigate, Surrey 1553–64
building at Dissolution
Ancient House, Walthamstow house 1564–92
Stables at Osterley House, Hounslow stables 1565–6
Table 4.1 Some standing medieval and Tudor buildings in the London area dated by den-
drochronology (mostly of timbers from their roofs) in recent years (from annual
reports in Vernacular Architecture).

like a church formed by stout posts, or columns in the case of stone buildings. There
were almost certainly some aisled halls in late Saxon and medieval London up to 1300, as
survive in fragmentary form in other towns such as Canterbury, and in the rural region,
for example at Manor Farm, Ruislip, of about 1300. There are now known to be five aisled
halls, or fragments, of the late 12th to early 13th century immediately north of London,
others in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, and it has been suggested that London ‘was at
the centre of a regional school of aisled construction in south-east England’ for the 12th
and 13th centuries.57 As the excavated example of Hextalls shows, early manor houses
were often of this form, since the hall acted as a formal estate office and thus had to
be imposing and preferably both grand and intimidating. But perhaps this design was
going out of fashion in the 14th century even in rural centres. By the 15th century,
81
 London 1100–1600
timber-framed houses contained halls without aisle posts, as at the Cross Keys pub in
Dagenham, or Great Tomkyns, Upminster. By this time the whole house often comprised
a hall with a wing at right-angles at one or both ends. At the same time a second plan
form placed the ancillary chambers in line with the hall, to make a single block, as at
East End Farm Cottage, Pinner. Closely related was a third type, the ‘Wealden’ house, so
called because it was first recognised in the Weald by modern scholars. This form is like
the second, but the first floors of the ancillary chambers are jettied on one or more sides,
and as the hall between was originally open to the common roof, it now looked almost
recessed. The Wealden name has stuck, though it is found throughout the Home Coun-
ties: there may be over 700 examples, many disguised by later work, in Kent alone, at least
25 in Essex, and one even survives in Middlesex as The Old Cottage, Cowley. The form is
found both in towns, where its compact plan would have been appropriate (28 have been
recorded in Coventry, and one likely example in York) and in the countryside. The idea
may have started in the capital,58 but we just do not have the evidence.
In the City, during and after the 14th century, the open hall of the larger house con-
tinued in vogue because of two specialist uses which required it: for the livery compa-
nies, whose halls are briefly considered in Chapter 5 below, and another special group in
the western suburb, the halls which functioned as the centres of the colleges of the law,
the Inns of Court and the lesser Inns of Chancery. When many other halls in ordinary
houses were replaced, according to the model taken from other towns, not yet evidenced
in London, these halls remained as communal assembly places, and thus are useful for
showing what would have been a widespread form in the 14th century; though what we
know of is largely of the two centuries after 1400 (Figure 4.11). The legal inns are a group
of collegiate establishments which have not yet had their archaeology written, largely
one suspects because they are preserved enclaves with little development to threaten a
remarkable rate of survival, despite war damage; there are notable medieval and pre-1500
buildings at the Temple and Lincoln’s Inn, and 16th-century buildings at these places and
at Staple Inn and Gray’s Inn.59
Some larger houses of nobles and other richer people continued to have open halls,
increasingly out of date and symbolic of an earlier period, until 1600 and after. An open
hall projected an image of grandeur, wealth, and noble ancestry among the civic elite; but
by 1600 it was old-fashioned. It is however likely that for the mass of working households
in the city, large rooms with lofty open roofs were irrelevant and a waste of valuable space;
though there was still a need for a communal space for the household to meet and per-
haps to eat in. From the early 14th century occur references to halls on the first floor of
timber-framed buildings which fronted onto streets, notably in three building contracts
between the owners of a property and carpenters of 1310, 1383 and 1410 for houses with
shops in the central area.60 It is clear that by 1550 the hall or social centre of this common
type of house was in the front room on the first floor. The placing of the most important
room on the first floor would be natural in small houses where all the ground floor was
dedicated to trade or merchandise. First-floor halls are common in the Treswell surveys of
around 1600, in houses of one-room and two-room plan form. In the two-room plan the
hall always occupied the front room over the street when the position is specified; and it is

82
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

Figure 4.11 Interior of the hall of Furnival’s Inn during demolition in the early 19th century,
by R B Schnebbelie (GL). This 15th-century roof, shown by the main trusses on fig-
ured corbels, was given a plaster ceiling in 1587, the probable date of the panelling
which is being removed. At the far end, light streams in from two oriel windows,
of 1587 but possibly with earlier precedents. This shows how a hall such as that at
Clothworkers’ Hall (Figure 7.5) would have appeared; two oriel windows intention-
ally pour light on the high end of the hall

83
 London 1100–1600
sometimes larger than the room to the rear. It is therefore not surprising that after 1550,
in London and other English towns, this room is the one with a decorated and painted
plaster ceiling, and the most expensive fireplace.
In other medieval towns, many small houses with a hall on the ground floor have been
found and recorded. In London, the abandonment of or indifference to the hall on the
ground floor and the creation of a higher, compact house form over a ground-floor shop,
by 1300, seems to be a product of the peculiar pressures on space in urban settings.

Decoration and building materials

There is little archaeological evidence, as yet, for the decoration and embellishment of
medieval houses in London. No waterfront timbers, which may from their array of redun-
dant joints have come from use formerly in houses, have yet borne paint. Some houses
may have been distinctively painted all over in a single colour, such as red or even black. It
is assumed that the close-set timbers on buildings such as the range at Staple Inn, though
a modern forgery, resembled other buildings with close studding at the time, and these
must have had painted, perhaps black, timbers for the show of opulence intended. From
engravings, we know of a very few instances of carved wooden corbels which might date
from before 1550, but there were clearly many houses with ornate, grotesque corbels for
their jetties and doorhoods in the second half of the century.61 The carpentry of the few
surviving medieval and Tudor timber buildings in central London includes some of the
finest examples in the country.62
Study of timbers used on medieval waterfront sites has produced two notable advances.
Timbers from houses and other buildings were no doubt reused in the waterfront revet-
ments on many occasions, but one collection of 11th- and 12th-century timbers from the
excavation at Billingsgate Lorry Park in 1982 has been particularly useful: many baseplates,
posts and studs are individually analysed and the traditions of house carpentry in these
obscure centuries (a period from which very few buildings survive above ground anywhere)
have now been summarised.63 Second, examples of carpentry joints begin to show how
medieval buildings were built, and their range of forms, at least in the 13th and 14th cen-
turies (Figure 4.12).64 In the absence of detailed evidence, it seems sensible to assume that
the buildings along some London streets in the 14th to 16th centuries resembled those
still standing in towns in the region, such as Rye (Sussex) and Sandwich (Kent).65
To what extent did London lead in architectural style or innovation in construction?
One source of innovations in timber structures from the 12th century would be the car-
penters who worked on the many rural buildings of monasteries, which included manor
houses and all types of agricultural buildings. The London area had a high concentra-
tion of such estates, and this probably gave the region’s timber buildings an up-to-date
character.66 Even so it is difficult to suggest, from the sparse evidence, that buildings in
and around the capital had new styles of timber-framed buildings before other regions.
London houses may have been in the forefront when crown-post roofs became popular
in the late 13th century; the archbishop of Canterbury had one at Headstone Manor in
1344. Possibly a couple of decades later, and certainly by about 1400, an expensive form
of filling in the timber panels with close-set timbers called studs, and hence the name

84
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

0 2.5m

Figure 4.12 Sketches of timber-framed buildings suggested by study of joints on excavated

waterfronts at Trig Lane. Above, from the early 13th century, note overlapping
baseplates and lapped braces; below, 14th century, with tenoned braces and jowled
timbers (larger heads) at the corners (Milne 1992b).
close studding, may also have been a metropolitan fashion which spread to the coun-
tryside; though the earliest clear examples we have now are from the countryside, not
the conurbation,67 so we have to be careful not to think London was the source of every
innovation or fashion. In the later 16th century, panels became longer, the studs more
emaciated (Figure 4.13). This may have set a trend, not as an expression of extravagance,
but of necessity born of the scarcity of timber. It could still have been an idea which took
hold first in the capital. It is also an error to expect carpenters to innovate all the time;
there wasLondon Medieval
an underlying framework of unchanging, constant tradition which Fig 4.14
ensured the
similarity of timber-framed construction, over much of southern England and
scale 1:100for much

85
 London 1100–1600

Figure 4.13 A late 16th-century range in Grub Street, Moorfields, which survived the Great Fire
to be recorded in the early 19th century (GL). Other views of this building make it
look grander.

of the period. This ‘grammar of carpentry’ can be detected in the use of a bay system and
other technical details of the frame; within this systematic framework regional changes
could take place.68
The provision and use of stone and brick, and to a lesser extent (because less has been
researched) of timber, is covered in Chapter 5 in a brief overview of the building indus-
tries. Here we record that from the second quarter of the 15th century, scattered over the
south-east of England were castles, manor houses and churches in brick. They had deco-
rative details, such as arches, window frames (Figure 4.14), stair rails and battlements in
brick.69 Caister Castle near Yarmouth, of 1424–59, was built by or for Sir John Fastolf, who
had made his fortune as a mercenary abroad; it gives us some hint what Fastolf’s other
house, Fastolf Place in Southwark, may have looked like, but all we have is the outline and
the moat. Further, it seems likely that houses in central London, the City and Southwark,
began to be built occasionally in brick; surviving examples in counties north of London
date from the 1420s. There is so far little evidence that brick was widespread in central
London at this date, even though London merchants and other travellers would have
seen some brick houses of four storeys in Bruges in the late 13th century, or brick houses

86
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

Figure 4.14 Detail of the Old Palace, Hatfield, of about 1485. From about this time bishops (in
this case, of Ely) and kings built their urban and rural palaces in brick, as being
both a cheap and at the same time a new and therefore trendsetting material. The
bricks are laid in English bond, the prevalent method until the 1650s.

in most Dutch towns in the 14th.70 Brick was a major building material throughout the
Low Countries, north Germany and much of East Anglia. But certainly by the 1440s brick
had become acceptable and even fashionable through its large-scale use in royal build-
ings. In the early 16th century there were probably more brick buildings than we know of;
hints are provided by such examples as the house of the prior at St Bartholomew Smith-
field, recorded in outline in the 19th century but now lost.
At this highest level, the early 16th century was the time of a new wave of decoration in a
related material, for a small number of elite residences. Excavation in the outer part of the
precinct of St John Clerkenwell, just outside the stone gate which still stands, found evidence
of a building of brick and stone which incorporated several architectural elements in ter-
racotta. Most notable was a lavish window frame made of pieces which came from the same
moulds as made a window at Layer Marney castle in Essex, built in 1525.71 This shows that
some London buildings outside the royal circle were being embellished in the new fashion.

Furnishings and inventories

People personalise their surroundings, especially their homes, with decoration and mov-
able items like furniture and curtains. The structure of a house may be long-lived, and
have an inbuilt memory of earlier times. Much of the present inner-city housing stock
87
 London 1100–1600
of London was built before 1900, when few houses had bathrooms; now bathrooms are
made out of original bedrooms. But the decoration and furnishing of the house may
change with each owner and each generation of users.
Inventories, that is lists of the assets and debts of a deceased person which often include
household contents, describe the detailed contents of rooms; but they are snapshots at
one instant, just like the surveys of Treswell or an archaeological phase-plan. In 1509, for
instance, the courtier Edmund Dudley was arrested for treason and the contents of his
house near Cannon Street listed. At a time when there were no banks, wealth was hoarded
in the form of luxury possessions, especially expensive textiles used for decoration. Many
rooms had hangings, some with imagery, or pieces of Arras tapestry, and equipment for
fireplaces. Several French chairs were scattered throughout. Most chambers had curtains
in the windows, then a luxury. The inventory compilers opened a press or large chest
containing a score of further hangings. Two chambers contained arms: in one, 152 bows
and many sheaves of arrows, and in the other, a vast pile of armour, some in English, some
in German fashion, so many visors and other pieces of helmets ‘I cannot tell how many’;
and four crossbows. In the great chamber, where the main bed stood, were several pieces
of carpet, and a spruce coffer containing many pieces of rich clothing, doublets and
gowns in satin and velvet, one furred with marten skins. Two further coffers in the room
contained more curtains and fabrics. Two chambers called wardrobes contained bed-
ding, tapestries, cushion covers in carpet work, books, furniture and even more clothes.
A closet nearby contained a large amount of silverware, that is cups, flagons, salts and
candlesticks. In the buttery were four hogsheads of red wine, probably barrels each con-
taining about 50 gallons, and two hogsheads of claret.72
Such exceptionally grand houses were a feature of London, but archaeological sites
tend to involve more ordinary properties. It would be useful to know, from inventories,
whether rooms in medieval and Tudor houses were furnished in ways which would allow
excavators to deduce their function (hall, parlour, kitchen and so on); or to do the same
from the character of objects left lying in the rooms.73 Here are two examples. The main
features of the inventory of Richard Toky, a rich grocer who died in 1391, are summarised
in Table 4.2. What is striking is that much of Toky’s moveable wealth lay in the sort of
items which archaeologists very rarely find, that is jewels and clothing.
Second, Table 4.3 summarises the contents of a house, the George at Billingsgate, which
was occupied by John Porth at his death in 1525 (though the inventory is inexplicably
dated 1531).74 Ten chambers are named and their contents described. Here, among the
swords, old clavichords, and printed books, one begins to sense a real person.
Archaeologists would like to suggest the function of rooms and spaces from the arte-
facts found in them on excavations, either fittings such as hooks and locks or finds which
ended up on floors, both trade and domestic items. But so far no study has been pub-
lished which includes household artefacts or furnishings in their original places, at least
for the period before 1600. There were no known large-scale fires in medieval London
between one in 1212 and the Great Fire of 1666, which is formally outside the scope of
this book. There are several sites where debris of the Great Fire seals objects in situ. One
study deals with the rich deposits of the period 1640–66 at Billingsgate (Figure 4.15). Here

88
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

Room Item Total value

hall wash-bowl with stand and other
basins
table with trestles
tapestry cushions
two chairs
iron candlestick
two sets of andirons
a crossbow
three forms including other items, £3 0s 2d
chamber three curtains
four beds with mattresses
two chests
a stool
much clothing including other items, £13 0s 10d
jewels in the chamber £11 12s 7d
pantry and buttery tablecloths, towels, trenchers, 58s 6d
[pewter] pots, dishes, a [probably
metal] candlestick weighing 86
pounds
kitchen brass pots, copper pans, other
utensils for cooking
counting house a large box bound with iron
a quire of paper
bows and arrows, armour
two images in alabaster, of the total with the items in the
Blessed Mary and of St John the kitchen, £4 12s 4d
Baptist
storehouse a large set of scales, smaller balances, including other items, £3 19s 5d.
three saddles, a ladder, two windows,
pieces of timber and broken tables,
eight locks and 120 keys

Table 4.2 Highlights of the inventory of Richard Toky, grocer, at his death in 1391. This inven-
tory, bound into the City’s official account of a dispute between the executors and
the heirs, lists only these seven rooms, and there were probably more in the house.

artefacts show the function of separate buildings, and agree with documentary evidence
for the use of those buildings: a storage space (a 15th-century undercroft) produced in its
floor layers the detritus of storage, and domestic pottery, personal effects and decorated
tiles were found in excavated rooms across the lane which are interpreted as domestic
accommodation.75 So in this case archaeological analysis is beginning to show that when
buildings are enveloped in a catastrophe such as the Great Fire, the finds in the debris as
at Pompeii do indicate the basic functions of the rooms (domestic, trade, storage); and

89
 London 1100–1600

Room Main items

hall hanging, 50 sq yds; cushions; two pieces of Kentish carpet;
table with folding trestles; an old cupboard; a form, two
turned chairs; two close chairs; a chair ‘of Spanish making’;
fire implements
parlour hanging, 36 sq yds; cushions, carpets; four joined wainscot
forms; two turned chairs; a round table of spruce; an old
round table with a foot; a round cupboard; fire implements
buttery many pewter vessels; candlesticks; five barber basins; a stone
mortar
his chamber hanging, 50 sq yds; curtains; a bedstead; two chests; a ‘skawer’
chest with a private altar on it; a crucifix and image of
the Virgin, and other religious implements; several chests
including two ships’ chests; a joint stool; two pieces of Kentish
carpet in the window
chamber over the hall old furniture, including a bed, a presses, chests and a garde-
vyanse
little chamber next hanging, 24 yds; a bed with bolster; a chest; a little table of
Spanish making; a long ‘standert’ chest containing much
clothing, some of velvet or leather
garret over the great chamber three pieces of old painted hangings; an old cupboard; an old
painted chest; an old pair of clavichords; pillows
chamber next the street three pieces of old hangings; a bed
shop firewood
counting house swords, printed books, an image of the Virgin with pearls,
silver beads, two old doublets

Table 4.3 Main items in the inventory of John Porth, 1531 (Littlehales 1904–5).

when the excavated area is decently large, how these functions fitted together in a group
of buildings.

Some conclusions and further questions about houses

Archaeological work all over Europe is demonstrating that domestic buildings in towns
evolved roughly in simultaneous stages: stone houses in the 12th century, three storeys of
jettied timber buildings on main streets by the opening of the 14th century, and a change
from timber- or wattle-lined cesspits to the more durable stone form during the 14th
century.76 Below the level of the stone house, that is on the majority of properties, timber-
framed buildings with structural posts set in the ground are replaced by buildings made
of frames on low walls. Houses in many towns around the North and Baltic Seas were built
of brick, which is a tradition largely absent from London or the area around.
By the early 14th century, timber buildings along streets in major towns were reaching
three storeys. It seems that in London, as in other medieval English towns, houses in the
later medieval period, after about 1400, were better built and afforded greater comfort
than a century before: probably more hygenic, with their greater proportion of stone
(and later brick) cesspits, the main walls and partitions off the ground on low walls, and

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Figure 4.15 Buildings of 1640–66 excavated at Billingsgate Lorry Park in 1982, on either side of
Botolph Wharf which led to the river (off the site to the right). These buildings con-
tained finds diagnostic of their likely uses. Building 7 (B7) was a vaulted undercroft,
its floor littered with cork bungs and other debris of storage; Building 8 (B8) to the
south was also probably a warehouse. In contrast, Buildings 10 and 11 (B10, B11)
were full of domestic objects. The whole collection of buildings perished in the
Great Fire of 1666 (Schofield and Pearce 2009; drawing by Carlos Lemos).
with more rooms and space because of the development of upper storeys. By 1600 there
may have been more exploitation of the roof space for storage and accommodation.77
Some new building-forms, or features of construction and decoration, may have started
first in London and then spread to other parts of England, both towns and countryside
(Table 4.4). So far, London can show the earliest evidence of a standard plan of house of
two rooms on three floors, houses with four and even five storeys with garrets, the earli-
est documentary evidence for jetties (perhaps the earliest in Europe, though other cities
were no doubt developing such forms at the same time), and within England, some of the
earliest examples of Tudor developments such as plaster ceilings and wide, stately stair-
cases. Other house forms and decorative schemes which may have started in London, but
for which evidence is lacking, include the Wealden plan and close-studding of timbers on
the sides of houses.
What progress has there been in the archaeological study of the activities carried out
in these buildings? The excavations at Guildhall Yard have shown that where deposits
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 London 1100–1600

Innovation for which there is Date Innovation Possible or

evidence which might be proposed date
suggested, no
evidence yet
New building forms, documented New building forms, possible
Standard plan of house of two 1390, probably earlier Wealden early 14th
rooms on 3 floors in 14thc century
houses 4 storeys high with 1612, possibly by 1556
garrets
houses 5 storeys high with 1611
garrets

New structural features or decoration, documented New structural features or decoration,

possible
tile roofs middle of 12th c
jetties 1246 crown posts 1270s
halls on first floor of timber- 1310 close studding 1440s
framed houses
decorated plaster ceilings 1570s, possibly 1550s+
wide staircase (open stairwell) 1570s
stair to first floor direct from 1612
street (separate entry)
Table 4.4 New building forms and new structural features or modes of decoration in ordinary
London houses, from the 12th to the 16th centuries: on the left, documented in-
novations, on the right, innovations which may have started in London or got an
important early boost.
survive, it is possible to suggest broad functions for buildings from a combination of struc-
tural, finds and environmental evidence. These 12th-century buildings include houses,
byres, workshops refining silver, and cookshops presumably offering fast food to those
attending Guildhall a few yards away; and sometimes a building had several purposes,
domestic or industrial.78
The rich quality of the evidence in London promotes studies of access patterns, the
development of notions of privacy, and the structuring of activity-specific spaces; for
example, the conscious or unconscious allocation of space and routes for trade and
domestic functions, or the contrast between public and private.79 We may note three
different kinds. First, the specialisation of certain rooms for trade and storage of manu-
factured goods. Some rooms, such as the shop, warehouse and especially the undercroft,
changed their size, importance and perhaps function over time, presumably as a result of
market forces which demanded different patterns of wholesale and retail trading; anoth-
er influence which would have been felt first in the larger cities or those most likely to be
exposed to new markets and new trading opportunities. In the most prestigious medieval
houses up to 1350, a vaulted undercroft formed a large, perhaps the main storage room.
The term warehouse was used by the early 16th century to signify something different

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 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
from an ordinary storehouse. It may have been especially a room required by drapers and
other people of the cloth trade.
Second, the increasing splitting of the large house into smaller compartments, and the
desire for privacy. The narrower a room is, the more formal it becomes, since the ways
of arranging the furniture are limited. So it may be no coincidence that the few plans
of parlours we have show long, thin rooms with only one entrance and, unlike the hall,
rarely any through communication (having more than one door). The medieval hall was
a hub and a public space; the parlour was a destination available only to the invited. The
garden was the most private, a space often at the furthest remove from the public street
and behind the greatest number of lockable doors and gates; it also had an association
with two other parts of the house, the parlour and the gallery, part of the house in larger
examples, which either bordered it or which looked down onto it, sometimes from the
top of the house.
A rich man was meant to be seen, to be accessible. His town house in London was where
he conducted business and heard petitions. The obligations of the rich in society, both
men and women, might well have consequences for architectural embellishment of pub-
lic rooms. It remains to be researched whether the large aristocratic house, down an alley
or approach from the street, was designed in part to have its doors always open, in the
manner of a rich Roman house.80
So little has survived of medieval and 16th-century houses in the London area, especial-
ly in the central conurbation, that we cannot say whether, as might be expected, London
led the way in new styles of architectural fittings such as doors, fireplaces and windows;
outside the capital many datable examples survive, to which London examples when they
are found might be compared.81 Students have nevertheless thought about urban and
rural standards of housing in general in England, and whether they were essentially dif-
ferent. The previous notion that the layout of buildings on an urban plot were in some
way an adaptation of rural ideas and forms is now discounted. The open hall with dais,
screen passage, upper and lower ends, is found in central London, but was rare and con-
fined to upper class houses and institutions. The majority of urban dwellers, the crafts-
men and labourers, had no need of this hierarchic, symbolic arrangement; the emphasis
was on trade and making things. Influences were the other way round: urban responses
to the problem of space, which included building higher and jetties, were exported to
the countryside as status symbols, just like the luxurious and redundant close-studding,
often for fronts only.82
Do London houses over the centuries suggest any periods of prosperity, such as by a
surge in building? A single period of spectacular rebuilding can be seen in towns where
buildings survive, such as 16th-century Lavenham in Suffolk, or abroad. At Rouen, there
were three phases of prosperity clearly shown by the surviving and studied housing stock:
the 13th century, the second half of the 15th century and the 18th century.83 At New
Winchelsea and Rye (Sussex), the extent and vigour of surviving buildings, including
submerged undercrofts, seem to correlate broadly with the periods of economic prosper-
ity of the town.84 In London, for all the evidence reviewed above, such a correlation is
only a dream. Only the broadest of strokes has been possible when it comes to placing

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 London 1100–1600
the archaeological remains in context. Perhaps the conurbation of medieval London was
too large to illustrate broad trends in its built landscape, since like other big cities, it was
essentially a collection of smaller neighbourhoods, even in the middle of the City. There-
fore we should study parts of London, localities and individual streets. Then we might be
able to say whether meaningful periods of construction or decline in groups of buildings
or localities did take place.

Possessions: artefacts from pits and reclamation dumps

Sites with intact Great Fire debris, or the debris of any other medieval or Tudor fire, are
rare. Many thousands of objects, ranging from personal possessions to tools for crafts-
men, have been found in London in the excavations of recent decades, but very few have
been found in a primary context, that is on a house floor or a yard surface. Even when
found in a deposit within a cesspit, an object is in a secondary context, thrown away and
mixed with others over a period which is often difficult to define. Great advances, of
national and international importance, have been made since 1970 in London in the
study of pottery and artefacts in wood, leather, bone and various metals; but the objects
have come almost totally from rubbish dumping. And there were two main kinds of rub-
bish dumping in medieval London. The first was in pits dug around buildings, on both
ordinary properties and at religious houses. Objects from these pits may be debris from
life and work in their immediate vicinity. The second kind of disposal is in landfill sites
and in larger ditches such as that around the City walls. Particular instances of this second
kind are sites along the Thames waterfront, particularly the north bank at the City, and to
a lesser extent the dumping of material to fill in and eradicate the marshes of Moorfields.
Dumps of this second kind are far more mixed, and may reflect, to an unknown extent,
laystalls or communal rubbish dumps which were cleared up and carted away at intervals,
sometimes of decades. The objects in these dumps may be interesting or important, and
roughly dated by their secondary context, but they are far away from their first sites of use.
All these caveats are relevant to the discussion which follows.
Let us start with pits. Occasionally, a single pit produces a wealth of artefacts and infor-
mation, and by analysing it in depth, we can gain an insight into what was happening on
the property and nearby. Such an opportunity arose with Pit 81 on the site at Milk Street
in 1976 (Figure 4.16) and a nearby pit to the south (Pit 116). A plan of the excavation
showing the location of these pits among many others is given below in Chapter 7, Figure
7.4. Pit 81 survived well, its sides reinforced with wattles and braced internally with cross-
timbers; either it originally had a working function (difficult to suggest, as it would not
have held water), or this was how timber-lined cesspits were built. In the layers which filled
it was a variety of pottery datable to the 12th century, including wares from several conti-
nental sources and a simple saucer-like oil lamp in a local grey ware. Other ceramic objects
included crucibles. There were fragments of iron objects (a buckle, a handle, a padlock
bolt), of wood (a barrel stave, maple bowls), of leather (shoes, girdle straps), silk (braid
and thread), glass and bone (mounts for boxes and a needlecase). A strip of copper, pos-
sibly designed for or taken from a reliquary, was inscribed with the name of the missing
object’s maker, Saleman. Four of the layers were also sampled for environmental material:
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 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

Figure 4.16 Pit 81 at Milk Street, looking east (0.5m scale) (MoL).

it is hard to imagine now with Milk Street lined with offices and banks, but in the 12th cen-
tury hereabouts there were buttercups, campions, goosefoot and knotgrass. Seeds from
fruit, presumably eaten by the inhabitants, included blackberry or raspberry, wild straw-
berry, sour cherry, and pear or apple (the diet of medieval Londoners is considered later
in this chapter).85 Pit 116, a later pit of the second half of the 13th century on the property
to the south, was a stone-lined cesspit. In Pit 116 were fragments of five bowls of maple,
one of ash which had been carefully repaired (Figure 4.17), a small box made of beech
(which seems to have been a favourite wood for small boxes), two lids of alder, a wooden
tally-stick, and a piece of linen textile.86 Overall, it seems that Milk Street was functioning
as an area of craft specialism for fine, possibly religious, objects in the 12th century; and
that this specialism may have gone back to the 10th century when the street extended,
possibly in stages, north from Cheapside, at a point just over a hundred yards from the
cathedral’s main gate (where the north-east gate into the present churchyard is).
Many thousands of artefacts and pieces of pottery have been recovered from landfill
sites on both sides of the Thames, but so far principally from the City waterfront. The
strata in which this wealth of objects is found are of two types: reclamation dumps and
river foreshores. In both cases the objects cannot be thought to have come from specific
properties, even those on which the reclamation has been found. They are from rubbish
dumps from unknown locations, and possibly from several dumps across the city. It seems

95
 London 1100–1600

Figure 4.17 A 13th-century ash bowl from Pit 116 at Milk Street; pairs of minute holes on either
side of two of the breaks indicate sewn repairs (MoL).

unlikely that the rubbish is night soil, that is the contents of domestic cesspits which were
emptied when full, since ordure would have a use as manure out in the fields. The dumps
were probably a combination of neighbourhood rubbish heaps, later called laystalls, and
debris from digging out new cellars and other building works: a medium-sized redevelop-
ment could produce scores of cartloads of such rubbish. The foreshores in front of the
reclaimed land might contain objects which came from the properties in question, but
the foreshore has been churned about by the river, and no such direct correspondence
has yet been demonstrated.
All this said, the waterfront structures now excavated on a dozen sites present sever-
al thousand artefacts in tightly dated groups, from the opening of the 12th century to
the end of the 15th century. So far, there is nothing like this from the rest of medieval
Europe, in size or date range. The dumps behind timber revetments are dated by den-
drochronology and coins, and provide a long series of accurately-dated artefacts of every
kind. The waterfront sites have therefore formed the basis of ceramic typology for the
City so that strata can now be dated to within 30 years in many cases.87 Volumes have
appeared on knives and scabbards, shoes and pattens (Figure 4.18), dress accessories,
textiles and clothing, the medieval horse and its equipment, objects illustrative of many
aspects of home life and weighing equipment, and pilgrim souvenirs and secular badg-
es.88 The medieval finds series is only the start of study of the vast array of artefacts, and
students are encouraged to take on other classes of material; small groups of objects make

96
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

Figure 4.18 Fourteenth-century shoes from excavations at Baynard’s Castle, Upper Thames
Street, in 1972 (MoL). The two small children’s shoes are laced at the front, but the
adults’ shoes are fastened with a buckle or latchet (thong).

admirable undergraduate projects.89

To aid reconstruction the insides of medieval houses, for instance, the examples of fur-
nishings include hinges, hooks and handles, metal mounts from caskets and chests, lead
cames from windows with fragments of glass adhering in one case, keys and padlocks,
heating and lighting equipment (candle holders and lanterns) (Figure 4.19), kitchen
tableware, and vessels for storage; not only in pottery, but often of wood (especially plates
and bowls) and occasionally of leather. Pewter table vessels are almost never found, as
they would have been saved and eventually melted down and recycled.
It is also important to be aware of how these artefacts came up, all mixed together, and
how reliable the dating of their context is, since so much research has been and contin-
ues to be based on the waterfront dumps. From a study of waterfront sites in prepara-
tion, here is description of a large reclamation dump of the first half of the 14th century
excavated at Swan Lane in the City in 1981. On this site the involvement of experienced
users of metal detectors, for the first time in the City, produced an exceptional number
of metal finds.90
In this case, the dump (Group A74) formed the riverwards end of two properties; the
14th-century date comes from the artefacts, particularly pottery and coins, since in the
difficult conditions of the excavation there was no chance of a detailed sampling for tree-
ring dating.
First, it contained a large group of pottery sherds, all in pieces from many pots, with at
least 1238 sherds weighing 28.2kg; as always with these rubbish deposits, the pots had been
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 London 1100–1600

Figure 4.19 A small lead candlestick from Swan Lane Group A49, found in reclamation of the
period 1180–1270; the object was probably old when thrown away (Schofield et al in
prep). Height 95mm.
smashed and their sherds dispersed well before they were put here. Several English and
foreign wares could be recognised: a local ‘London-type’ (so named because its precise kiln
site was not known, but see now news of a probable kiln from Woolwich noted in Chapter
5), Mill Green ware from rural Essex, with jugs of several sizes and some in French styles,
though possibly made in the London area. A variety of jugs came from the known kilns at
Kingston, including two which evidently copied metal forms, and others in Scarborough
ware. There were also fragments of drinking jugs, dripping dishes, cooking pots, a frying
pan and a skillet. Imports included pieces from Saintonge in south-west France, common
at this period, and sherds of pottery from the Low Countries and Spain; but also a small
amount of Magrebhi ware, exotic glazed pottery made in the late 13th and 14th centuries
in the Maghreb region of North Africa. An overall date of 1300–50 is thus suggested for this
phase of dumping from the pottery, but it could have taken place c 1340–60, and possibly
in the 1350s. Thirty-five coins from the 13th century were recovered, but are all residual. It
is not clear why an accumulation of household and trade waste included so many coins.
Besides the pottery and coins, 266 objects from the reclamation unit have been stud-
ied. They comprise buckles and pieces of belts, rings, keys, household implements, knife

98
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
blades and spoons, pilgrim souvenirs, wooden bowls and other items (Figures 4.20, 4.21).
There was no clear manufacturing waste, though broken articles may have been kept for
recycling; this waterfront dump was primarily composed of domestic rubbish, possibly
with tools from the world of work.
Wooden bowls, locks and keys, spoons, knives and scabbards are standard domestic
items. Some objects such as shears and a flesh-hook may have been used in the shop,
though shears were also used for cutting hair. There are many buckles, brooches, buttons
and other metal attachments for clothing. The occurrence of twenty horseshoes presuma-
bly indicates that a pile or store of them had been thrown out. A life-style of some status is
indicated by two rowel-spurs and the fragment of a large highly-decorated pewter brooch;
and most of all by several finger rings, including one of brass with a multicoloured glass
cameo showing either a scorpion or a crab. The pilgrim souvenirs from this reclamation
group are discussed in Chapter 6.
Knives and horseshoes were everyday items, so they are rarely indicative of luxury or
great expense. Elsewhere, fine distinctions between people, reinforced by authorities,
were an ingrained feature of life. Take clothing, and in particular, furs. According to
an Act of 1509, nobody below the degree of gentleman could wear fur of any animal
which usually came from abroad. These statutes comprising sumptuary legislation, that is
laws about luxury, were reinforced by Elizabeth: the statutes were to be observed by four
appointed men in each of the London wards, and there were even supposed to be men
at the city gates to ensure observance.91 Whether this happened, or for how long, is
unknown; but it indicates that people in authority were very concerned about who should
wear what kind of clothes. Occasionally, pieces of clothing are found in significant loca-
tions. Two pieces of silk cloth from a cesspit at Holy Trinity Priory Aldgate came from
worn-out monastic vestments. The quality of one suggests it was given to the priory in the
12th century by a wealthy patron, to be treasured and used by the priory for 200 years
before being finally cut up for its final lowly but practical purpose. The textiles dumped
into the dock at the east side of Baynard’s Castle in the third quarter of the 14th century,
mentioned in Chapter 3, include three woollen hoods, buttoned edges of garments, frag-
ments of hose, silk veils, pieces of tapestry, knitting and garters. During the earlier con-
struction of the dock in the 1330s or 1340s the dumping included a piece of Chinese silk.
It had a pattern of small stylised peonies with curling leaves, and traces or red and yellow
dyes were found, making it look orange.92
According to present knowledge, the waterfronts of the City stopped their significant
expansion about 1450, and in many places earlier, when stone walls became the norm.
On the north bank of the Thames, there are no comparable rich waterfront deposits
from the 16th century (though the City ditch takes over as a reservoir of artefacts to some
degree). This comparative dearth is however compensated by equivalent landfill deposits
in backfilled moats on the Southwark bank between what are now London Bridge and
Tower Bridge, which produced a multitude of objects of the 16th and early 17th centu-
ries. A large report on 1217 items is the equivalent in its subject matter of several of the
Medieval finds volumes from the City, and even a brief listing can bring out some of the
new fashions observed. There are pieces of leather jerkins, shoes including new varie-

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 London 1100–1600

6
1

Figure 4.20 Finds from Group A74 at Swan Lane, Upper Thames Street, 1981 (MoL): dress ac-
cessories - a buckle (1), strap-ends (2–3), mount (4), brooches (5–6), button (7)
and finger ring (8) (Schofield et al in prep), (1:1).

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Figure 4.21 Finds from Group A74 at Swan Lane: shears (1–2) and scabbards and knife (3–4),
the second embossed with the name Ricardie. Scale 1:1 for shears, 1:2 for scabbards
and knife. (Schofield et al in prep).

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 London 1100–1600
ties with heels, gloves and straps; buckles, mounts, strap-ends, brooches, buttons, pins,
rings, beads, bells, purses and other personal items; fragments of wooden furniture, keys,
candle holders and snuffers, knives, kitchen equipment, cutlery, medical equipment and
tools. One category present here but not yet explored in the medieval series is arms and
armour, including at this later period firearms. There was good and varied evidence of
manufacture of metal items such as knives and horseshoes; but by a comparison of the
excavated objects with lists in four contemporary documents which dealt with imports,
the catalogue underlines the current view that many of the artefacts found in the moats,
and by inference on medieval and Tudor London sites elsewhere in London, could be
from abroad. We do not yet have the appropriate analytical techniques to find out.93
The medieval finds series produced by the Museum is a catalogue of several classes of
artefact from the period 1100–1450 which is so far without parallel within Europe; we
look to colleagues elsewhere in Britain and in other countries to match it. The explana-
tion and context of this archaeological wealth is that London was the premier port for
the country, and the home at some time for most of the wealthiest and important people
in the kingdom.
The above summary has mostly been about ‘non-ceramic’ artefacts, those made of met-
al, wood or bone. The much more numerous pieces of pottery found on archaeological
sites are used to date the layers in which they are found, and to illustrate regional and
foreign trading contacts, as described below in Chapter 5. Beyond that, and in ways which
this book cannot encompass, pottery tells us about life in the household. Increasingly
after about 1400, a much wider range of attractive forms of pottery migrated from humble
uses in the kitchen to a central position on the table, replacing or complementing vessels
in wood and metal, and becoming part of the symbolic array of possessions to show off.94

Food
The largest item of day-to-day expenditure in aristocratic budgets, apart from occasional
building works, was food and drink.95 Richer people ate more luxurious food, not only
rare or prestigious meats such as swan and venison, but more expensive examples of
ordinary animals (veal, from young male cattle) and cuts of meat which imply greater
delicacy of taste, or at least greater spending power or the wish to demonstrate wealth
at a feast. Food was therefore a method for distinguishing richer people from others.
Other differences are also possible. Studies of excavated animal bones outside the Lon-
don area suggest that people in towns ate more beef than did their country cousins, that
is in proportion to the other main meats, mutton (or lamb) and pork (or bacon). This is
probably partly because before refrigeration, the slaughter and eating of a cow or ox was
a formidable decision for a rural household, whereas in the town there were butchers and
many consumers.96
There is abundant documentary evidence for the prices of joints of meat, fish and poul-
try bought for royal and noble households, and especially for the company feasts of the
guilds. There is even a menu from about 1430, in the earliest surviving account book
of the Merchant Taylors: over two courses, dishes included brawn, chine (backbone) of
pork, chickens, ‘snipes or quails’, sucking rabbits, fritters made from godwits, venison,
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 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
‘partridge or cock’, pheasant and swan; along with a clear soup thickened with rice, also
a luxury, and baked quince tart.97 Contemporary prices (e.g. Table 4.5, from the records
of the Carpenters’ and Goldsmiths’ Companies in the period 1473–1518) give some idea
of the variety of food at these feasts.
How much meat was on each joint, or on each fish? We cannot say. There were regula-
tions which stipulated the minimum length of some species of fish, to preserve stocks
(fishermen were not supposed to catch fish below certain sizes). While our specialists can
predict or calculate stature and therefore size of the domesticate species (cow, pig, sheep,
even horse), the transformation of this into a weight for medieval animals will not mirror
modern stock weights.
Animal bones survive in great quantity on London sites, as elsewhere, and they are
probably capable of subtle analysis. If we could specify clearly enough what animals, fish
and birds were considered luxury food at the time, or access to which was restricted in
official ways, then the dumps of food waste often found on sites of all kinds, from palaces
to monasteries, would have powerful implications for the status of the site.
There are some but not insuperable difficulties with what can be said about animal
bones. This is illustrated by the following examples drawn from the central City and the
region. At the large Guildhall Yard site which figures often in this study, animal bones were
found in quantity in general dumps and in timber or stone cesspits which functioned with
excavated buildings. A cesspit at the back of a property on Basinghall Street, which can
only be broadly dated to 1150–1230, contained bones of herring, fish of the cod family,
and eels; and the skeleton of half a young pig, which may have been the remnants of a
feast, but could also have died of an illness. Butchery marks on horse bones indicate that
some horse was eaten. Other contemporary cesspits along what is now Gresham Street to
the south included large amounts of cattle and sheep bones, but the occurrence of the
cores of sheep and goat horns indicates that bones were being collected to be processed
in the horn-working craft, and not for food. In the decades after 1230, nearby, an open
space on the north side of St Lawrence Jewry church was used for dumping all kinds of
rubbish but including food waste, which suggests that the civic leaders were dining at
Guildhall, a few yards away, on standard fare embellished with occasional roe deer and
hare. Civic feasting is more clearly suggested by the contents of a cesspit which served the
civic chambers: not only a lot of chicken legs, but bones of the expensive red, fallow and
roe deer, swan, heron, teal, partridge, woodcock and a variety of small birds like thrush-
es.98 More generally, a large project like this which covered many medieval properties
can make broad statements about the number of bone fragments from each of the main
meat-bearing animals at different times. On this site, from the 12th century to 1411, the
total number of fragments of cow bones through four periods of occupation was a fairly
constant 50%, though dipping in the period 1230–70 to 42%. The equivalent numbers
for sheep and goat, which are difficult to tell apart, fluctuated between 26% and 37%;
and for pig, there was a wider fluctuation between 14.5% in the years 1350–1411 and
23% in the immediately preceding period, 1270–1350.99 It is hard to know what to make
of these figures, since there would be roughly the same number of bones from the eaten
parts of each species, but far more meat on a cow than on a sheep or pig. So we cannot

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food item price range for one (smaller creatures often bought
in dozens) 1473–1518 (shillings and pence)
animals
rump of beef 2d
coney (rabbit) 2d–2.75d
neck of mutton 2d–3d
shoulder of mutton 2.1d–2.9d
leg of mutton 2.5d–3d
rib of beef 3.3d
lamb 1s–1s 4d
birds
sparrow 2s 1d for 100
pigeon 0.7d–0.8d
chicken 1.2d–1.5d
capon 1s 3d
pullet 2.3d
hen 2.5d–4.4d
goose 6d–9d
heron 2s
swan 3s–4s
fish
tench 6.6d–8d
bream 10d
ling 1s
pike 1s 3d–1s 4d
sturgeon 1s 8d
turbot 1s 8d–2s 7d
fresh salmon 2s–13s 4d

Table 4.5 Prices of joints of meat, birds and fish, paid by the Carpenters’ and Goldsmiths’ Com-
panies in 1473–1518 (RCC ii and Herbert 1836, 2, 237–40). The price has been calcu-
lated here for an individual piece, animal or fish, hence the strange-looking fractions
of pence for smaller and cheaper birds. Twelve pence made one shilling.

argue very much from the numbers of bone fragments to the proportions of each of the
main types of meat, beef, mutton and pork, which would have been eaten.
In the 15th century all kinds of rubbish dumping seem to have switched from the
waterfront area to filling the City ditch and the many quarry pits, which had been original-
ly dug for brickearth to make daub for houses and especially bricks, in the fields around.
These quarries, studied on a site excavated in 1992–4 at Finsbury, just north of Moorgate,
were rich in finds, bones and seeds, but like the waterfront dumps, the objects are at least
twice removed from their original sites of use. Nevertheless, if we find the study of arte-
facts from such dumps valuable, and say that they represent material culture of people

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 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
from all over the City without being more specific, then the approach taken over arte-
facts is also valid for the animal bones and seeds: it provides a general picture which will
be further informed by more particular, localised studies. On this basis a large quantity
of animal bones from the 16th-century backfilling of the brick pits at Finsbury can be
assessed. Cattle, sheep or goats and pigs were present in roughly the same proportions as
on other sites, though here there were fewer pig bones. There was abundant rabbit and
rare examples of red deer, fallow deer and roe deer. Thirteen species of bird were identi-
fied: on the domestic side, chicken, goose, duck and peacock, and of wild species, most
were to be eaten, teal, heron, crane, curlew, woodcock, green plover and thrush. Four-
teen species of fish, mostly from marine habitats, were identified. There were also dogs,
cats, small rodents, and a single horse bone with knife marks may indicate that horse flesh
was eaten. Thus animal bones from such dumps provide a broad-brush description of eat-
ing habits, but we cannot say whether of rich or poor people.100
Out in the countryside, there was perhaps less mixing of all kinds of bones in rubbish
pits and therefore less background noise in the message. Layers in several rubbish pits at
the manor of Hextalls at Little Pickle, Bletchingley, a manor in north Surrey mentioned
above, were very informative about what the people there ate, at least in the Tudor peri-
od.101 One cesspit layer contained the near-complete skeletons of seven fallow deer, which
may have been part of a feast; though perhaps if they had been eaten, their bones would
have been more mixed up, was this the throwing out of unwanted, possibly putrid meat
after a too-successful hunt? A second pit contained one layer with more than 5000 bone
fragments, not counting fish, in it. The species represented included cattle, numerous
adult rabbit, pig and fallow deer, with occasional cats, dogs and one horse. Birds included
inland waders, woodcock and lapwing; duck, goose, partridge, quail and pigeon; and
heron, but not swan or peacock. Fish such as pike may have come partly from the manor’s
own nearby pond; but in an assemblage called the ‘largest quantity of Tudor date to be
excavated in southern England’ they included many species from the sea. Some would
be salted, but complete skeletons of whiting and flatfish were probably bought fresh, per-
haps in Bletchingley. On one occasion, no doubt as a luxury, there was sturgeon.
It is also possible to study the vegetable component of diet from seeds left in archaeo-
logical deposits, particularly in rubbish pits. The study of pits at Milk Street of the 10th
to 13th centuries already quoted can be analysed again. A few species indicate delicacies:
people on these properties occasionally ate wild strawberries, and one 12th-century pit
contained a large number of fig seeds and some grape pips. It may need an effort of im-
agination to concede that people inhabiting the simple timber buildings, probably like
those built to the north in the lane approaching Guildhall, ate figs and grapes.
By bringing together information from the bones of mammals, birds and fish, and then
seeds, archaeologists can begin to construct diet. This may be clearer when a large but
relatively closed institution such as a monastery is considered; here are three examples.
The first lay in the fairly undeveloped medieval countryside. Much of the site of the priory
of St Mary Merton in south-west London was excavated between 1976 and 1990. The rural
environment alongside the river Wandle provided fresh running water, fish and locally
grown cereals and fruit. Over the long history of the priory from foundation in 1117 until

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 London 1100–1600
dissolution in 1538, its numerous personnel and their frequent noble and royal visitors,
with their entourages, would have consumed an incalculable but enormous amount of
meat. Only a tiny portion of the debris was excavated and bones recovered, and the main
buildings where bones would have been plentiful, the monastic kitchen and refectory,
were not excavated. Here cattle, sheep/goat and pig were represented in roughly the
same proportions, by number of fragments, as on the secular site at Guildhall. The can-
ons or their guests enjoyed occasional red, fallow and roe deer; a variety of birds again
including swan, heron and partridge; and, from a series of samples which were sieved in
the laboratory to obtain the smallest bones, a wide variety of fish. Eggshells and bones
of young chickens show that fowl were reared on the site or immediately nearby. From
the infirmary drain came a large number of whelk shells; this has been a popular food
through the ages, and is still a delicacy in many countries.102 But there is little about this
collection of animal bones or shells which indicates a rural setting. The monastery was an
essentially urban institution superimposed on the watery landscape. Further, monks, at
least at the richest establishments, did not go hungry: the good survival of internal docu-
mentation for Westminster Abbey enables the historian to declare that the monks’ diet
there was not only a form of upper-class diet, with very few restrictions, but a monk would
have eaten on average each day almost twice the number of calories as the level specified
today for a moderately active man.103 Whether study of their bones can reveal what this
did to their bodies and state of health is covered in Chapter 7 below.
Second, when several sites within a monastery have been studied, as in most of the Lon-
don examples, it is possible to make general statements about the variety of diet in that
house. If documentary evidence is available, it can be added to discussion of the animal,
bird and fish bone, plant remains and sometimes other material such as eggshells from
domestic fowl. This has been attempted for St John Clerkenwell, though only to a limited
extent due to the moderate survival of deposits of relevance. Pits in the inner, high-status
precinct can be compared with those in the outer, lower-status area. Staff and guests in
the inner precinct dined on suckling pig, goose, swan, probably skylarks and a wide range
of fish, including expensive conger and haddock from the sea. People in the outer pre-
cinct had a more restricted diet, being limited to chicken and duck. From environmental
sieving, it is clear that a variety of fruit was commonly eaten (some documentary histori-
ans have thought otherwise, presumably from lack of references to fruit in accounts). In
the period after 1480, in the outer precinct, more cooking utensils remained to be found,
perhaps indicating that people on the secular properties here prepared their own meals,
in contrast to the more stately communal feasting that would have taken place in the in-
ner precinct.104
Third, at the reclusive Charterhouse, rubbish pits of about 1500 in an inner court have
revealed something of the lives of the lay brothers and servants. One pit was clearly origi-
nally below a latrine. A sample of its contents contained a variety of fruit remains, both
stones and seeds, and remains of a wide range of wild plants. The fruit included plum or
bullace, sloe or blackthorn, cherry, walnut, grape, fig, apple, mulberry, strawberry and
blackberry or raspberry. The wild plants indicated food waste, but also stable sweepings
and fodder. The pit was home to many insects, especially flies, but material with death-

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 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
watch beetle and woodworm had also been thrown in. Beetles with specific habitat re-
quirements show that the ground around the privy was covered in weeds. The pit also
contained animal bones from meals, including wood pigeon and several varieties of fish;
and some old shoes and boots, eventually thrown away.105

Some conclusions about food

Despite many researches, the agenda for the archaeological study of medieval and Tudor
food has yet to be written. Museum stores throughout Britain hold many thousands of
fragments of animal bones from excavations since the 1970s, waiting for a research agen-
da and a methodology which is now being developed. The great majority of bones from
sites in London are from central sites, and in secondary if not tertiary contexts such as the
reclamation sites, they have been moved at least once and perhaps twice from where they
were thrown after a meal or during its preparation. Even so, written sources do not allow
much analysis of urban meat provision and it is up to the archaeologists to make progress.
Three suggestions are made here.
First archaeologists and their funding agencies might allow some concentrated effort
of analysis on the bones of game animals from rabbits to deer and fresh water fish; these
are poorly documented in household accounts, as they came in part from parks and
ponds and not from the market.106 Products of hunting also symbolised the aristocratic
way of life, which must be why they formed special treats at feasts of the richer townfolk.
We should explore this symbolism of certain foods on aristocratic sites. At the same time,
the management of several species such as rabbits and deer was a business. Rabbits ap-
peared in England, according to archaeologists, from the 11th century. At first, they were
managed. Warrens or coneygarths are known from the 1230s (there was a royal one at
Guildford) and the decades 1230–50 seem to be the period when rabbits and their war-
rens spread further. Rabbit bones are found at Merton Priory in the 12th century, but at
Guildhall Yard not until after 1270.107 At first the rabbit would have been a delicacy, cost-
ing four or five times as much as chicken, but was a widely available meat in London by
1400. By the 16th century rabbit skins were being exported in quantity.108 Thus, over time,
the rabbit ceased being a luxury food. When rabbits succeeded in escaping from warrens
and becoming feral, even a pest, on a large scale is not yet charted, but may have been by
the 17th century.
Second, another set of statements to be tested concerns regional differences in provi-
sion of meat, fish and vegetables; according to one historian of standards of living, there
were very few differences between parts of England, and between parts of Europe, in con-
sumption patterns of at least the aristocracy and those who left accounts. Within England,
regional differences seem to be of little consequence, though clearly there would be local
specialities, such as certain kinds of fish along the coasts and a higher proportion of game
birds in small rural places.109 There should be, by this theory, no distinctive London taste
in meat including fish and shellfish during these centuries. But documentary accounts
reveal the lifestyles of only a small portion of medieval society, the rich and famous, and
archaeology studies all levels of society. Thus the eating habits and tastes of the majority
of the urban and rural population are still to be explored.

107
 London 1100–1600
A third area of research concerns changing tastes in food over time, and the increas-
ingly privileged position customers had in central London because of the ease of imports.
It may be that Londoners appreciated veal, the meat of unwanted male calves, from an
early date. The cuts of meat as shown by animal bones may indicate a refinement in char-
cuterie. This could be compared to a development seen in pottery during the 15th cen-
tury, ‘a move towards the use of smaller, individual components of portions in a meal, and
away from the traditional methods of cooking large communal meals in a single vessel.’110
This coincided with an increase in the variety of exotic foodstuffs and spices from abroad:
by 1480–1 Londoners could enjoy a wide range of imported food, not only varieties of
fish, game, cheese, fruit and vegetables, but also almonds, lemons, oranges, nutmegs,
nuts and pomegranates. Archaeological work could chart fashion and snobbery in food.
This refinement in taste may have been more urban than rural; but somebody has to
prove that. An extension to this line of research would study whether butchery practices
changed over time in relation to changing consumer demands or taste.
These questions have concerned consumption. There are further avenues of research
in both seeds and animal bones from urban deposits. They may demonstrate when spe-
cialised and improved breeding of animals took place, to compare with the documentary
history of farming; and similarly, the introduction of new species of plants. There is more
consideration of this in Chapter 7 below.

Neighbourhoods: ethnic groups, rich and poor

Houses, possessions and food; these are three of the basics of life. A question in this do-
mestic chapter is whether these three material aspects of day-to-day living, when studied
separately or together, can differentiate one group of people from another. Group iden-
tity is established and reinforced by differences in buildings, clothes, eating habits and
neighbourhoods. In medieval and Tudor London, diversity was accentuated by the fact
that many London people, like town dwellers generally, were non-natives; both from oth-
er parts of Britain and from overseas. But there were also tensions between ethnic groups,
and perhaps between the rich and the poor. Here are some initial comments, looking at
two distinctions which if possible would be useful: ethnic groups within medieval society
(Jews and foreigners), and the difference between rich and poor.111
A distinctive feature of larger towns up to 1290, and especially London, was the pres-
ence of Jews. They came with William the Conqueror from his base at Rouen in France,
and seem to have stayed only in London until 1140, after which they expanded to other
towns such as York, Lincoln and Canterbury. Their numbers were always low; perhaps
5000 in England at the most. Jews prospered in the 12th century, but financial and other
pressures on them heightened during the long reign of Edward I in the 13th century. In
1278–9 over 280 Jews in London were hanged for alleged crimes of clipping coins. All
Jews were expelled from England in 1290 by royal command, and their properties in cen-
tral London were quickly taken over by Christians. Thereafter, there are records of a few
Jews in London, but their general return to England was not until 1657.112
In 12th-century London the Jewry extended over nine parishes, four of which were
sometimes described as being in the Jewry, such as St Lawrence Jewry. The modern street
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 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
name Old Jewry shows where the main Jewish neighbourhood was; it stretched from Milk
Street to Lothbury, and from Gresham Street to Cheapside. The London Jewry, like those
in other towns, was not demarcated by a wall or fence, and Christians also lived within
it. But it was a defined zone; in the 1270s Christians were fined for being in the Jewry at
night. It is surely significant that the Jewry was near, and over time grew even closer to,
the centre of law and no doubt financial dealings at Guildhall. The Jewry was next to the
town hall in some other European towns, for instance Hildersheim in Germany,113 though
not in Seville or Venice.
The Guildhall and Jewry area in London has been studied recently in the Guildhall Yard
excavations, which included frontages along Basinghall Street and Gresham Street.114 Sev-
eral stone houses on the north side of the latter, of the middle of the 12th century, were
in Jewish ownership a century later when the earliest documents survive; it seems likely
that they were also Jewish at the earlier date. The westernmost building of this group,
adjacent to the entrance to Guildhall, had a sunken stone feature in its rear room which
may be a mikveh or Jewish ritual bath; a second one has been identified in excavation in
Milk Street. One cannot help wondering if the Gresham Street case was intended to have
significance in where it was. As a 12th-century visitor approached Guildhall, there was
the small stone parish church of St Lawrence for Christians on the left, and this building
for Jews on the right; their synagogues, on several sites, lay in the surrounding streets.
Jews had their own cemeteries, though at first there was only one in England, in London
outside Cripplegate, and all English Jews had to be brought there for burial. In 1177
the Jews were allowed to establish burial grounds outside other towns, such as York and
Winchester; but for the 100 years before then, Jews from these other towns would have
brought their dead to the London cemetery, so it must have been an extensive graveyard
and impressive sight. Small areas of the London cemetery were archaeologically exca-
vated immediately after World War II, in the bombed cellars now covered by the Barbican
development. Seven graves were found, but they had all been emptied of their skeletons;
whether by Jews in 1290 or gentiles afterwards could not be established.115
Communities of foreigners tend to stick together. Groups of foreign merchants had
their own establishments on the waterfront; some may have been at Dowgate before the
Norman Conquest. In 1304 foreigners, known as ‘aliens’, included Gascon wine mer-
chants living around Dowgate, and merchants from Spain and Picardy (northern France)
in the central streets around there. The most distinctive compound of foreigners grew
into the Steelyard in Thames Street, which housed about 30 German merchants in 1304.
Some merchants from overseas became citizens of London; but there were also periods
of tension and xenophobia when the foreigners suffered. In the 13th century there were
periodic attacks on merchants in the city from Italy and central France (Cahors) as well
as on the Jews. In the next century some prominent Italians can be traced in several cen-
tral city wards; they did not stick together in one place.116 The Peasants’ Revolt in 1381
included ethnic assaults, and over a hundred Flemings and Lombards from north Italy
were killed by mobs. The Flemings had taken refuge in two churches which may indicate
their neighbourhoods at that time: St Martin Vintry by the waterfront and the Austin
Friars church.

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 London 1100–1600
After 1400 the largest influx of foreigners was from Flanders, Holland and Zeeland;
they were lumped together in the popular mind and called the Dutch. They are revealed
in taxation records of 1440–1 and 1483–4.117 At both dates they were spread through all
the wards of the City and in Southwark; there were high concentrations at both dates in
Cripplegate, Farringdon Without, Langbourn and Tower wards. But there had been shifts
in numbers between the two dates. The number of Dutch in Broad Street ward had more
than halved, and in Cripplegate and Farringdon Without wards the number had gone
down substantially. In Portsoken ward outside the city wall to the east, however, it had
gone up over five times. This warns us that immigrant groups could move from place to
place around the city, and thus be less easy to track archaeologically, in that they may not
be in one place for an extended period. The trades of foreigners in the Portsoken listing
of 1483 include armourer, barber, many beermen, cobbler, cooper, cordwainer, drayman,
hatmaker, pewterer, pinner, porter, shoemaker, shipman and tawyer. The aliens seem to
have worked in new ways, including having larger than usual work forces; foreigners in
the beer brewing, shoemaking and armouring trades were sometimes employing between
five and sixteen servants or workmen, also foreigners. At this date there were at least five
brewhouses run by Germans in Portsoken, all with a large (for the time) workforce.
The 445 alien taxpayers in Southwark in 1440 carried out 40 different occupations,
and although the trades were mostly to do with production of clothing and shoes, they
included eleven goldsmiths. Fifty of these households (11%) had servants. They were a
cohesive group, and lived together in the parish of St Olave Tooley Street. East South-
wark, by the 16th century, was an industrial zone largely occupied by the Dutch immi-
grants, producing clothing, beer, pottery and glass; they were also dyers, leatherworkers,
builders, joiners, cobblers and shoemakers. Near St Olave, between Tooley Street and the
river, lay the former sites of the moated houses including that of Sir John Fastolf, as noted
above. By 1600 this house and its grounds had disappeared in a warren of alleys and, from
documents, at least 103 separate household units; and excavation here, while uncovering
the grand mansions, also found that their moats had been filled in with a lot of interest-
ing rubbish in the 16th century. This included several kinds of foreign pottery. Was this
the debris of the Dutch community? The site was owned from 1589 by Wessell Webling,
a beer brewer who had emigrated from the duchy of Cleves in the Netherlands. But the
wide range of continental pottery in the reclamation dumps comes from several countries
including France, Spain and Germany, and is not particularly Dutch. The range may
reflect the role of this part of London in importing foreign pottery, or be the detritus of
nearby households with varied tastes. It may also seem remarkable only because very few
sites have produced large amounts of 16th-century material like this.118 But the material
does hold out the hopeful suggestion that archaeologists and historians, working togeth-
er on a specific street, area or locality of London, might in the future chart the fortunes
of a specific group of immigrants.
Another distinction between neighbourhoods might be between areas which were pre-
dominantly rich and predominantly poor. The quality of buildings may stand out as a
characteristic of neighbourhoods of similar standing or of a certain time. Evidence for
this may be of an early date in larger towns. The distribution of early stone houses in

110
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
London and Southwark may represent the 12th-century or earlier centres of activity and
even wealth, for instance in parts of the waterfront at Vintry and immediately downstream
of the bridge. For comparison, in Rouen the 12th-century stone buildings are relatively
numerous within the known extent of the 11th-century town, whereas outside this centre
the known medieval buildings are more often timber-framed.119
Taxation records tell us, from time to time, which wards produced more tax revenue
than others; but a total figure for a ward may be skewed by one or two very rich men liv-
ing there. As far as house-types can inform us, there were in general no rich enclaves in
medieval and Tudor London, though the high-class quarter within the large precinct of
St John Clerkenwell in the early 16th century has been mentioned above. A snapshot is
provided at the end of the period, when in 1595, at a time of difficulty after poor harvests,
the lord mayor Stephen Slany ordered a counting of ‘poor housekeepers’, i.e. house-
holds, in each ward, to organise some kind of relief for them. We cannot say much from
this listing as the 25 wards were of greatly differing sizes; but the largest numbers were in
wards which contained a large extramural element, that is Bishopsgate, Cripplegate and
Farringdon Without, which by itself accounted for one fifth of the city total of 4132 poor
households. In a second rank of poverty were other extramural wards Aldersgate, Aldgate
and Portsoken, along with Farringdon Within and the large Tower ward. The wards which
reported the smallest numbers of the poor were Langbourn around Lombard Street and
Cheap.120 Thus at the end of the 16th century, some if not most of the extramural areas
were of a deprived or economically poor character. But in general, as shown by the house
plans in the Treswell surveys, rich and poor (or at least, large and small) households lived
in a mixture on nearly every street (Figure 4.22). It is a safe assumption that the smallest
houses were for poor people, including those fallen on hard times, such as widows. Some
of the rooms were only 12ft (3.7m) square, and may have been the entire accommodation
for a family.
While it is relatively easy to demonstrate from artefactual evidence that a property
belonged to rich people, it is conversely not easy to suggest poverty just because no
objects survived to be recorded. People could just have been tidy or thrifty. There have
been excavations of poor urban areas in the early modern period, for instance in America
and Australia, but these had the advantage of being of areas which were known to be poor
from their fuller documentary histories.121 It is difficult to see how poor areas might be
confidently proposed. London presumably had shanty towns, probably on its outskirts, as
did medieval Paris.122 Some groups of people on the edge of ‘normal’ social life were forced
into, or took to, crime, and may have lived in such places; traditionally, prostitutes tended
to live and work in rundown, smaller properties. But there is no clear evidence yet that
there were geographical islands of crime and destitution in central London, which might
have been reflected in the built environment of the neighbourhood. It is more�over clear
that districts went up and down the ladder of fortunes, changing from rich to poor neigh-
bourhood and occasionally back again. When we look for sound evidence of poor houses in
London at this period, the conclusion must be, as in England at large, that neither existing
buildings nor documents provide a satisfactory account of housing of the poor.123 In the
London region, an adequate archaeological account has not been produced either.

111
 London 1100–1600

N
1

Ch Ch
9 8 K

Fleet
2

Lane
Blacksmiths’ K Sh
Court

K
7 6 5
4 P 3

Fleet Ditch

0 10m

Figure 4.22 Small houses on the edge of Fleet Ditch in 1612, from a Treswell survey. Black-
smiths’ Court lay on the north side of Fleet Lane, crammed in between a large man-
sion (top of the plan) and the Ditch. Properties 1, 2 and 3, fronting the lane, were
of 3½ or 2½ storeys; those in the Court were a storey less. Houses 4 and 5 contained
widows on the ground floor with other tenants in the rooms above. House 6 con-
tained one room on each of two floors, for separate tenants. House 7 was a single
room occupied by another widow. There would be little natural light in the Court,
as upper storeys jettied into it (Schofield 2003, 182, fig 49). For key to room func-
tions, see Figure 4.6.
Conclusions
This chapter has considered three important aspects, perhaps the most important for the
people concerned, of daily life: houses, possessions, and food. It then asked what contri-
bution archaeology can make to the differentiation of neighbourhoods, whether ethnic
or defined by wealth, in medieval and Tudor London.
Some interim conclusions were made in the sections on houses and food, and will not be
repeated here. Houses, in their form, decoration and furnishing, are a sensitive indicator
of fashion, of needs, of supply and demand. They have shown some London specialities,
such as the early jettied buildings, living on the first and upper floors, and high houses.
Food is less intensively studied by archaeologists as yet, but has potential for statements
about wealth and status, eating habits, and the design of food. It is possible that future
work on animal bones and seeds may tease out ethnic differences in food preferences.

112
 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods
For artefacts and possessions, I have not got very far at all. The most important product
of finds research in London in recent decades has been to suggest that we can study the
evolution of a consumer society in the medieval city, and this has been taken up enthusi-
astically by historians. They agree that there may have been a consumer boom after the
Black Death, when more money per person was available.124 Researchers in medieval and
Tudor pottery are thinking about how the introduction of artefacts used in food prepara-
tion might demonstrate changing tastes, or changing menus.
To delineate neighbourhoods or groups in society by archaeological methods remains
an objective not yet fully realised, or only in the broadest of terms. The approach of this
and the preceding chapter has been traditional, and the implication may seem that those
at the top of society’s pyramid in former times are more important to archaeologists than
those at the bottom. To some archaeologists, they are. But perhaps it is wrong to think of
society as a pyramid at all. Fashion, ideologies, reality did not always trickle down from
the top. One way forward is that expressed eloquently by the American anthropologist
Henry Glassie, that the way to study people is not from the top down or the bottom up,
but from the inside out, from the place where people are articulate to the place where
they are not, from the place where they are in control of their destinies to the place where
they are not.125

113
 —5—

Selling and making

The range of trades in London and their buildings

Today an important aspect of local government in the City of London are the Livery Com-
panies, the modern day descendents of the more important guilds or craft companies of
the Middle Ages. To be a Freeman of the City of London, and thus take active part in the
City’s politics and administration, you have to be a member of one of the existing compa-
nies, if only as a formality. Some of these are the most ancient and prestigious companies,
such as the Goldsmiths, Clothworkers, or Vintners; other more recent arrivals include the
Air Pilots and Air Navigators, the Builders’ Merchants, the Information Technologists and
the Security Professionals. Thirty-nine have bases or halls within the City, though these
buildings vary greatly in date and opulence. Some of the older buildings were damaged
or destroyed in the War; Brewers’ Hall, for instance, on its 15th-century site, is a building
of the 1960s; this replaced a fine building of the 1670s. Only a few medieval company
halls can be reconstructed from all kinds of evidence now. The Fishmongers, Drapers
and Clothworkers occupy 19th- and 20th-century buildings on their ancient sites, though
probably nothing of the medieval buildings remains beneath.
One characteristic of larger medieval towns in Europe is that the people in them had
many different occupations. A variety of crafts can be demonstrated in Lundenwic and
other Anglo-Saxon centres. In the City of London, more than 175 distinct occupations
are mentioned in taxation records of about 1300.1 Many, though by no means all, of the
crafts and trades are also visible as organised groups: clothworkers, vintners, blacksmiths
and so on. Goldsmiths, tanners and weavers are known in the 12th century, and there
were many such craft and trading groups in the 14th century. In 1364 the City sent a
present of money to Edward III, and the list of subscribers (comprising crafts and some
individuals) presumably reflects who was prosperous then (Table 5.1). By the end of the
15th century many more companies or associations are known in records, for instance 79
groups which contributed to a loan to the king in 1488; they came from trades concerned
with building, clothing, leather working, armaments, merchandise, and 18 different sorts
of workers in metals.2
Many of the guilds or companies have surviving documentary records from the 14th
and especially from the 15th century, which can be interrogated to compare with
archaeological evidence for the same trade; but there are limitations to the documents.

114
 Selling and making

armourers goldsmiths
brasiers grocers
brewers grocers in the Ropery [Thames Street]
butchers of Eastcheap ironmongers
butchers of les Stokkes [east end of Cheapside] mercers
butchers of St Nicholas [Shambles, in Newgate Street] pewterers
cappers plumber
chandlers pouchmakers
cook poulterers
cordwainers saddlers
cornmonger smith
curriers spicer
cutlers spurriers
drapers tailors
dyers tanners without Cripplegate
fishmongers tanners without Newgate
fuller tapicer
girdlers waxchandlers
glovers

Table 5.1 Crafts represented in a subscription to make a donation to Edward III, 1364 (Cal LB
G, 171–2).

The archaeologically important trade of making pottery for the table, kitchen and cellar,
for instance, is hardly mentioned in records; men who made pots were never prominent
in London history, and had no guild. So for the making of pots, archaeological work has
to construct its own chronology and propose how this particular industry fitted into the
medieval physical and manufacturing landscape.
This chapter makes a division, for the sake of presentation, between the two activities
of selling (trading) and making things. This is arbitrary as craftsmen who made things
naturally also sold them; but there were people, such as merchants, who sold things made
by others. First, however, there were three kinds of buildings which were characteristic
of most of the crafts of both sorts: shops (with the use of adjacent cellars), craft or livery
halls, and almshouses.
Documentary study shows that in the 13th century, on principal streets in the City,
there were hundreds of tiny shops or booths; running back from major streets such as
Cheapside were selds, bazaar-like enclosures often with stone walls which had stalls within
them. From their names, it appears that some, for instance Tanners’ Seld, specialised in
particular commodities. Some street names suggest concentrations of particular trades.
About 1220 the north part of Bow Lane, near Tanners’ Seld, was called ‘Corvesers’ Row’
or Cordwainer Street, suggesting shoemakers who used leather from Cordova. By this
time the Lane held some large houses behind the street ranges, but it was the activities of

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 London 1100–1600
the smaller artisan retailers in the shops along the street, with their visible and distinctive
activities, which gave the street its name; but sometimes the traders did not stay in a par-
ticular street for long.3 As in medieval Paris, streets in London had names associated with
trades by about 1200, and some of them stuck, but the artisans themselves moved to other
sites frequently in subsequent decades and centuries. Occasionally a name might move
with the trade. The name of the present Ironmonger Lane in the central part of Cheap-
side seems to refer to a concentration of ironmongers before they moved to Poultry, a
hundred metres to the east, in the 12th century. By 1200, a stone house at Poultry had a
row of eight stone shops between it and the street, then called Ironmongers’ Row.
By the middle of the 14th century there were long timber-framed blocks of shops, which
brought good rents to the institutions or wealthy individuals which built them. We know
of two from the survival of building contracts in the records of St Paul’s. In 1369 two car-
penters agreed to build a range 86 yards (79m) long, probably on two streets which met
at a corner, at the cathedral bakehouse just south of the cathedral. There would be twenty
shops, as large as the cellar beneath, probably two storeys high with garrets; the windows
on the street side were to be all of the same design, except at the corner where there
would be two bay windows (all in timber). The following year development of a site oppo-
site, next to the cathedral’s brewhouse, involved a mason constructing the groundworks
for a block of 18 shops.4 Where trades congregated, there might be, as in other towns,
a distinctive continuous set of buildings called a Row: Stockfishmongers’ Row (Thames
Street) or Bowyers’ Row (part of Ludgate Hill).
During the 15th century, especially around Cheapside, many of the tiniest shops and
stalls disappeared, and the character of shopping changed, with large retail units occu-
pying a whole property. Often a building or room called a warehouse stood behind the
shop, and any lingering domestic accommodation was forced to join other rooms in the
storeys above, so there was a natural pressure to build higher, at least in the principal
streets. The widespread appearance in London of the retail shop in the modern sense,
that is a place where many different goods are sold retail by a shopkeeper who buys them
wholesale, is placed in the early 17th century;5 but its antecedents in the previous decades
might be sought.
Medieval and Tudor shops along street frontages are unlikely to be found intact in Lon-
don excavations, due to later widening of streets and the ubiquitous 19th-century base-
ments, particularly on present street frontages. Treswell supplies the plans of many houses
which include rooms he calls shops, so their relation to other rooms and spaces can be
studied (Figure 5.1). The archaeological deficiency can also be compensated by detailed
documentary study, as has taken place for the central and eastern part of Cheapside in
the City. In such a study it is possible to say that by the 16th century the main thorough-
fares of Cheapside and Poultry were occupied by a variety of shopkeepers and traders,
but that in the side streets that led off them, there was a higher degree of specialisation.
In Bucklersbury, now lost beneath the James Stirling building in Poultry but excavated in
the 1990s, for instance, merchants from Lucca (Italy) probably established an area where
spices were sold in the late 13th century. Native pepperers, later called grocers, attached
themselves to this trade and to the street; as druggists or apothecaries they stayed here

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 Selling and making

Figure 5.1 Reconstruction of a block of five shops in Abchurch Lane, from the Treswell surveys
of the Clothworkers’ Company estate in 1612 (Schofield 1994b). The key to the
room and space functions is K kitchen, Sh shop, Sd shed, W warehouse. Various
forms of shop are shown, along with the fact that none of them had fireplaces, un-
like the domestic accommodation above (known from Treswell’s written descrip-
tion). The only hearths on the ground floor for these houses–cum–shops lay in the
kitchen behind the main range in four cases (in the fifth case the kitchen was on the
first floor).

until 1666.6 In general, however, as demonstrated on this large site, the archaeological
evidence for the 12th to 16th centuries has not survived as well as that for the 10th and
11th centuries. In terms of horizontal strata which would comprise important internal
floors and external yards, that is true of most sites within the City walls apart from those
south of Thames Street in the reclamation zone.
Other parts of primarily domestic properties, besides shops, were given over to trade.
From earliest times the larger houses, and some of the smaller, had cellars or under-
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 London 1100–1600
ground storage of some kind. In London there are records of only a handful of 12th-
century examples, but more from the 13th century and later. As noted in chapter 2, some
towns in Europe such as Lübeck had an extraordinarily high number of cellars beneath
their houses, far more than required for provisioning the town alone, and their frequency
is an index of the storage capacity of the place for merchandise arriving by cart or ship.
The town of Provins, in the middle of France, has evidence, in the form of standing build-
ings or excavated examples, of at least 200 buildings with vaulted undercrofts. At least 20
of these have two vaulted storeys, one on top of the other. These buildings were probably
erected to serve the great international Champagne fairs which took place in the area. In
London there is no evidence yet for vaults on two storeys, but the wider question of the
distribution and number of the vaulted undercrofts should be further researched. In the
meantime we admire studies of other English towns where more medieval fabric has sur-
vived, such as Chester, with its Rows, but also nearer London the port of New Winchelsea
(Sussex) on the south coast.7 Here 53 medieval stone cellars are known, most of which
are still accessible. A few have medieval houses above. All the details at Winchelsea could
be ported into medieval London.
There were in addition two forms of building, or building-complexes, created and used
by the richer crafts which had formed associations or guilds. These were the company hall,
and the group or range of almshouses for retired (‘decayed’) members and their widows.
Starting shortly before 1400, many of the more prosperous crafts acquired a hall to be a
centre of administration for their association, with a kitchen for preparing feasts and a gar-
den for recreation. Of the 60 companies which had places at the mayor’s feast at Guildhall
in 1532, 45 had halls. In every case the hall was based on a large, usually courtyard house,
often formerly belonging to one of the trade. No site of a company hall has been fully
excavated, though there have been partial investigations, for example at Vintners’ Hall,
and Merchant Taylors’ Hall, originally of the 14th century, survives despite being licked
by flames in the Great Fire and bombed in World War II. Many, such as Fishmongers’ Hall
(Figure 5.2), largely of 15th-century construction and on the waterfront, must have been
imposing buildings. As in other towns, some crafts took advantage of the Dissolution, via
the generosity of rich members, to move into and adapt monastic buildings, such as the
Leathersellers who occupied and adapted the 13th-century dormitory block of St Helen
Bishopsgate nunnery, keeping the vaults but rebuilding the first floor into an imposing
late 16th-century hall with an adjacent company parlour made out of the nuns’ chapter
house (Figure 5.3). The Apothecaries adapted part of the former Blackfriars; the Mercers
absorbed the adjacent hospital of St Thomas of Acon. In cannabalising the attractive build-
ings of the monasteries, the livery companies were as avaricious as anybody else.
These craft or livery company halls were an exceptional feature of medieval London. In
no other English or indeed European city, it seems, did the trades have specialist centres
in this way and in these numbers. There were buildings for some richer craft groups in
Nuremberg and Florence, where each of the 21 guilds had a hall, but little is known about
them, and a sort of analogy is supplied by the Venetian scuole, but they were different. In
Venice, from the 1260s, there were many scuole, the buildings of some of which survive.
Some were purely religious, what we call fraternities, while others were craftsmen’s and

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 Selling and making

Figure 5.2 The London waterfront immediately above the Bridge around 1540, by an un-
known artist (Ashmolean Museum). On the right-hand side, the 15th-century par-
lour range of Fishmongers’ Hall; behind, several of the City churches.
traders’ guilds. In contrast to their London counterparts, which tended to retain the form
of the courtyard house they had been given, the Venice fraternities were always modernis-
ing their premises, competing with each other to adopt new architectural styles.8
A second type of London building largely attributable to the crafts is the almshouse,
or rather a group of almshouses, arranged in a courtyard or sometimes along a quiet
street. The first recorded example is that of the Merchant Taylors, built from money
bequeathed to them by John Churchman, who died in 1413. This lay in Threadneedle
Street next to their hall, and the other 15th-century examples were usually also near
the hall of the sponsoring company; but later, in the 16th century, almshouses were at
increasing distances from the hall, often in the suburbs and later even further away, in the
countryside.9 This tradition of the establishment of an almshouse, usually by a prominent
and rich individual, continued beyond the Reformation into the 17th century. Some of
the courtyards of almshouses were built in brick from an early time, and thus may have
contributed to the wider adoption of brick for construction. The great transfer of land at
the Dissolution enabled the establishment of more almshouses, such as those endowed
by the Countess of Kent in 1538 on part of the former Whitefriars friary garden south of
Fleet Street, entrusted to the Clothworkers’ Company by her will of 1540. Here was an
alternative design, a timber-framed range with five single rooms on each of two floors,
all with individual chimneys and privies; those on the first floor were fronted by a gallery.
When surveyed by Treswell in 1612, they housed nine widows aged between 50 and 97,
and a similarly ancient porter. By this time other charitable institutions, such as Christ’s
Hospital, were administering almshouses, such as the group of six brick houses in St Pe-
ter’s Hill built expressly for widows in 1584 by David Smith, embroiderer to Elizabeth I;
their site is now beneath Queen Victoria Street, but they were also surveyed by Treswell.10
Companies let out many of their other smaller properties to former members and their
widows, in a similar spirit, at least in the 16th century when we have records.

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 5.3 Section through the dormitory range of the former St Helen’s nunnery, Bish-
opsgate, in 1799, showing the 13th-century vault below and the post-Dissolution
hall of the Leathersellers’ Company above (MoL). Members went into their parlour
through the retained medieval doorway (upper right), embellished with Gothic
heads.

These building types, shops, halls and almshouses, were the architectural vocabulary
of both trading and manufacturing groups. Beyond that, the archaeological evidence
begins to be more specialised.

Trade
Study of distribution and marketing, or commerce, requires perspectives which are at
first region-wide and secondly, because this is London, international in scope.11 Here the
rich evidence from the waterfront dumps make one of their most important contribu-
tions. We can study London’s place in the national development of units of weight and
measurement, of quality control of products, and in the evidence for increased commer-
cialisation of the economy. Other questions concern London’s international role. Prod-
ucts made in the London area and their distribution abroad might be identified. Histo-

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 Selling and making
rians suggest that by 1450 the North Sea was a coherent cultural and economic region.
How is this matched by the archaeological evidence? The towns and cities in Britain and
Europe trading with London could be specified. Many continental imports to Lon-
don were redistributed throughout England and further afield in Britain. Distribution
depends on the communication network. We are therefore interested in the history of
road transport around London at this period, the history of river transport along the
Thames and its creeks at this period, and how ships and boats developed.

Taverns, inns and the archaeology of land transport

The archaeology of business comprised the places in which deals were done, and the
means of transport by which goods travelled from their place of manufacture to the place
of sale.
Much local business was transacted in taverns and inns. Many taverns had back rooms
where meetings could be held, no doubt lubricated with wine and organised around
food. Property deals were often settled in taverns, as though a handshake in a public
place was more visible and recorded. In the 14th century, and presumably before, many
taverns were in the subterranean vaulted cellars called undercrofts, which were a favour-
ite form of store for the wine barrels in the vintners’ (wine-importers’) houses. By the
16th century, it is possible that cellars were in the minority as taverns. We have plans of
several taverns with rooms on the ground floor by Treswell in 1610–12: the Red Bull in
the Mealmarket, Southwark, just south of London Bridge, part of a frame of four similar
2½ storey houses; and the Sun in King Street, Westminster, which had been a tavern since
1388 in this lucrative position just north of the palace. The Sun had a parlour at the rear,
next to a kitchen with a large oven, the body of which projected into the rear yard.12 It
may have been in this form when frequented by Samuel Pepys several decades later. Thus
taverns resembled ordinary houses, and may have grown out of them. In the 17th century
both taverns and alehouses were noticeably common in the suburbs of the conurbation
and in Westminster, perhaps where church and moral hostility were weaker than in the
centre.13 Perhaps this meant that more local, small time business away from the City was
made easier.
From the 14th century the suburbs of London were also filled with inns for travellers
and business people of all kinds: notably in Fleet Street, Aldgate and in Southwark, where
22 innkeepers are noted in taxation records of 1381. Inns must have flourished in these
extramural locations partly because of their need for space for large stables and servicing
areas for horses and carts, though other inns are known on more restricted sites around
Cheapside. Not much is known about the medieval form of these lodging places, but
they presumably were similar to recorded examples in Oxford (the New Inn of 1386, a
model for the structure of a London inn)14 and other towns. They are known in the 17th-
century and later forms, particularly in Southwark but also on all the major approach
roads north of the river, that is Aldersgate, Bishopsgate and Aldgate. A plan of an inn in
pre-Fire London is provided by Treswell’s survey of the Crowne just outside Aldgate in
1610 (Figure 5.4). This comprised a front courtyard with the main rooms, including a hall
and parlour; then through a gatehouse or way beneath the rear range, a long stable yard

121
 London 1100–1600

Figure 5.4 Plan of the Crowne Inn, Aldgate, by Ralph Treswell in 1610. Key to the room func-
tions: Ch Chamber, H Hall, K Kitchen, P Parlour, Sb Stable, St Study, W Warehouse.
The street range and probably the other ranges were three storeys high; on the first
floor were 15 chambers, ten of them heated (i.e. with fireplaces), and on the second
floor a further six chambers, all but one heated. A stair from the front courtyard
indicates that the upper floors were partly reached by external galleries, as in other
examples in London and surviving in better condition elsewhere (Schofield 2003).

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 Selling and making
was reached, with its own back gate to the fields behind.15 As noted below in Chapter 8,
evidence of prosperity in small towns around London which were on major roads to the
capital can be seen in their 16th- and 17th-century inns. The galleried inn was a feature
of London streets in the 17th and 18th centuries, as exemplified today by the fragment
of the George in Southwark, probably of 1677.16 Several examples of this later date can
be seen on Ogilby and Morgan’s map of the City in 1676, in the part not destroyed by the
Fire, for instance in intramural Bishopsgate and extramural Aldgate High Street. What
illustrations we possess (watercolours, and a few early photographs) seem only to show
galleries and other features of this later post-Fire period, not the pre-Fire. It is the same
in Southwark; there is no manuscript or archaeological plan of the Tabard, from which
Chaucer’s pilgrims left for Canterbury, or any of the many other inns along Borough
High Street. The development of the medieval inn for travellers in London generally
remains a topic for future research, if material could be found or sites excavated. At such
places, in their cesspits, one might expect to find fancier pottery and foreign glass; and,
from the end of our period, a variety of clay tobacco pipes.
The goods and specialities to be obtained in London were transported out to their
new owners by road, river and sometimes by sea. The emphasis of archaeological study
has been on the River Thames, both upstream and downstream of London, but the
archaeology of road transport and haulage might be developed. One study of waterfront
finds has been of the medieval horse and its metal and leather fittings. Unsurprisingly, no
evidence of war horses or heavy farm horses has so far been forthcoming from medieval
London excavations, which have mainly been of the central urban part; measured horse
bones seem to be from pack animals. Horseshoes, bits, spurs and harness buckles have all
come up in quantity. From about AD 900 to 1450, there was broad development through
four styles of iron horseshoe, which did increase slightly in size. Prick spurs were gener-
ally replaced by rowel spurs in the 13th century. Carts for most uses within town and for
long-distance haulage usually had only two wheels and one to three horses, at least in the
medieval period;17 by the 16th century there were also carts with four wheels, as shown
in Figure 5.5, a London drawing of about 1598. Fragments of a late 16th-century wooden
cart wheel were found in one of the Southwark moats: the rim was made of beech, with
other parts in ash and oak. It had no metal rim, and probably came from a small cart.18 No
pieces of metalwork from carts have yet been published, and studies of methods of build-
ing carts are rare. Hopefully more might appear in the future, to develop an archaeology
of land transport around the capital.

London’s regional and international trade, mostly as illustrated by pottery

The following paragraphs outline an archaeological view of London’s national and
international trade. The evidence comprises trading installations, particularly on the
waterfront; and objects when they are known to have come from other parts of Britain or
abroad. Unfortunately, we cannot say where most of the artefacts made of wood, metals,
leather and bone found on London sites came from; they did not have ‘Made in X’ labels
on them.19 The only significant exception is pottery, which has been studied to a fine level
in recent years; the origin of the clay which made the pot can often be tied down to a local

123
 London 1100–1600

Figure 5.5 A long-distance carrier leaves London via Gray’s Inn Lane in a panorama of Lon-
don drawn from the north about 1598 (Schofield 2001). The landscape is no doubt
simplified, but also shows archers practicing by shooting at a target across the road
(part of an archery course called the Butts).
area, and styles of decoration changed continually according to fashion. The histogram
in Figure 5.6 and explanatory Table 5.2, of part of the wide range of local and foreign
pottery fabrics (that is, an identifiable sort of clay from which potters made a range of
vessels such as jugs, cups and plates), demonstrates the achievements of the students of
pottery in the last four decades, largely based at the Museum of London.20 This is why
an archaeological deposit in the London area can often be dated, by the sherds in it, to
a probable time span of as little as 30 years. Though not every type of pottery found in
London in 1100–1600 is shown in the figure, it does show a noteworthy increase in the
number of different wares available and presumably demanded, or at least consumed, by
Londoners: in the 12th century as a whole, only seven wares were available, then 11 in
the 13th century, 14 in the 14th century, 17 in the 15th century, with several starting in
the 1480s, and an impressive 28 in the 16th century, mainly after 1550. This might sug-
gest that as the period progressed, people appreciated a wider range of pottery for the
functions of food cooking, presentation and eating and drinking. But it could be a result,

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 Selling and making

Pottery fabric code Expansion (usual name) Date range in London

BISC biscuit-fired tin-glazed ware 1570–1800
BORD Surrey/Hampshire border whiteware 1550–1700
CBW coarse Surrey-Hampshire border ware 1270–1500
CHEA Cheam whiteware 1350–1500
CHEAR Cheam redware 1480–1550
CHPO Chinese porcelain 1580–1900
CITG central Italian tin-glazed ware 1480–1550
DUTR Dutch red earthenware (rare before 1350) 1300–1650
DUTSL Dutch slipped red earthenware 1300–1500
EARL Earlswood-type ware 1200–1400
EBORD early Surrey/Hampshire border whiteware 1480–1550
ERBOR early Surrey-Hampshire border redware 1480–1550
FREC Frechen stoneware 1550–1700
GERW German whiteware 1550–1630
KING Kingston-type ware (possibly from 1200) 1240–1400
KINGSL Kingston-type slipware 1240–1400
LANG Langerwehe stoneware 1350–1500
LCOAR coarse London-type ware 1080–1200
LCOARSH coarse London-type ware with shell inclusions 1080–1200
LCWW Low Countries whiteware 1480–1650
LLON late London-type ware 1400–1500
LMHG late medieval Hertfordshire glazed ware 1340–1450
LOGR London-area greyware 1050–1150
LOND London-type ware 1080–1350
MART1 Martincamp type stoneware 1480–1650
MG Mill Green ware 1270–1350
MGCOAR Mill Green coarseware 1270–1400
MPUR Midlands purple ware 1580–1750
NFM north French monochrome ware 1170–1300
NIMS north Italian marbled slipware 1550–1750
OLIV Spanish olive jar 1550–1750
PMBL post-medieval black-glazed ware 1580–1700
PMBR London-area post-medieval bichrome redware 1580–1700
PMFR post-medieval fine redware 1580–1700
PMR London-area post-medieval redware 1580–1900
PMSRG/Y London-area post-medieval slipped redware 1480–1660
RAER Raeren stoneware 1480–1610
RBOR Surrey/Hampshire border redware 1580–1800
SAIG Saintonge ware with even green glaze 1280–1350
SHER south Hertfordshire-type greyware 1170–1350
SIEG Siegburg stoneware 1300–1500
SIEGL late Siegburg stoneware 1500–1600
SSW shelly-sandy ware 1140–1220
TGW English tin-glazed ware 1570–1800
TUDG ‘Tudor green’ ware 1350–1500
WESE Weser slipware 1580–1630
WEST Westerwald stoneware 1590–1800
Table 5.2 Acronyms of pottery fabrics used in Fig 5.6, their usual names and date-ranges. This
list does not include every type of pottery found, but gives an impression of the vari-
ety of date-ranges and sources.

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 London 1100–1600

LOGR
LCOAR
LCOARSH
LOND
SSW
SHER
NFM
EARL
KING
KINGSL
MG
CBW
MGCOAR
SAIG
SIEG
DUTR
LMHG
CHEA
TUDG
LANG
LLON
CHEAR
CITG
EBORD
ERBOR
LCWW
MART1
PMSRG/Y
RAER
SIEGL
DUTSL
GERW
BORD
FREC
NIMS
OLIV
BISC
TGW
PMFR
WESE
MPUR
PMBR
PMBL
CHPO
PMR
RBOR
WEST
1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600

Figure 5.6 The proposed date-ranges of local, regional and imported pottery wares (fabrics) in
London, from 1100 to 1600 (from various MOLA publications). For the ware acro-
nyms, see Table 5.2. A bar open to the right means that the type of pottery contin-
ued in supply and use after 1600.

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 Selling and making
in part, of technological change within the pottery industry, providing ceramic forms for
vessels which people already had in wood, leather, horn or pewter.21
Unfortunately, there is a problem: identification of where a pot was made does not nec-
essarily tell us that there was direct trade between London and the place of origin. Most
trade took place through more than one port, and through middlemen. Most German
stoneware came to London through the Low Countries, and Italian pottery through Ant-
werp. Archaeological finds can only be a provisional contribution to wider discussion about
the complexities of medieval international trade.22 But with these caveats, let us proceed.
During the 12th century, London was no doubt an important port with British and
continental connections, but information on its trade is sparse, and comes more from
documentary than from archaeological sources. One boost had been in the late 11th cen-
tury when merchants of Rouen, Caen and other towns in Normandy had followed in the
Conqueror’s footsteps, to develop existing relationships in the City. At this time, London
did not deprive other English towns of overseas trade.23 The growth of English internal
commerce accelerated particularly in the two decades after 1180; during the forty years
after 1180, the currency in circulation in England increased many times over, whereas
the population doubled. Religious institutions and other rich clients wanted luxuries,
often from abroad. Archaeological work has produced evidence of imports of pottery in
the 12th century from Germany, France and the Low Countries, and locally-made imita-
tions.24 Italian merchants are known to have visited London in this century, and by the
late 12th century Londoners were living in Genoa.
During the 13th and early 14th centuries, London grew in wealth from its position as
the country’s largest port; by 1200 it was also the capital and the largest city, lying next to
the main royal palace at Westminster. By the 1320s London had most of the internal mar-
ket in England in cloth, furs, wine and spices; the capital had taken over from regional
fairs as the source of national and foreign luxuries. In the 13th and 14th centuries the
presence in London of many secular and religious lords, staying at their urban bases or
inns, would have made the city a centre of consumption and good living for the rich, as
was happening at the same time in Paris. In the 16th century London’s function as the
centre for fashionable clothes meant a great increase in the number of tailors and others
working in the clothing trades.25
London’s trading network with other places in Britain and Ireland has been illuminated
by new evidence from medieval pottery. In the 1980s it was recognised that a small but
significant proportion of the glazed wares found on Scottish port sites such as Aberdeen
and Perth was of London origin. London-type wares have also been identified on the
coast of Ireland at Waterford.26 London’s overseas trade grew in volume and its contacts
widened: with Gascony (south-west France), the Low Countries, the Rhineland, Italy and
Spain. At this time all Europe was an economic zone, tied together with a cat’s cradle of
land and sea routes. Its area can be seen in the letters of Francesco di Marco, a merchant
of Prato in Italy: his letters went to Bruges, London, Lisbon, Fez, Damascus and Venice.
Confirmation of London’s foreign contacts at this period is the variety of foreign pottery
found in the City and its environs. In the early 13th century there was a new wave of imi-
tations of French pottery by English potters in the London area. French pottery, mainly

127
 London 1100–1600

Figure 5.7 Medieval jugs in the museum’s collection from Saintonge in south-west France,
found in London (MoL). These attractive jugs seem to have reached many castle
sites in England, presumably through the capital, in the late 13th and early 14th
centuries.

from Saintonge in south-west France, is common by about 1270 (Figure 5.7); there are
small amounts of Spanish, Italian and other Mediterranean pottery, though little Ger-
man until after 1350.27 By this time, as shown by taxation lists, there were foreigners or
people with foreign-sounding names of several nationalities living in London, though
not necessarily for very long in individual cases. In 1292 there were French merchants
from Paris, Cahors and Arras; several Flemings around Dowgate; and Germans, including
one from Hamburg. Italian companies based in London were favoured by Edward I and
were prominent in supplying the royal household.28 By 1306 Genoese galleys were taking
significant amounts of wool out of London.
In the period before 1350, bulk commodities were sometimes landed at specific places,
which took names from the material coming in. Thus Seacoal Lane, on the east bank of

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 Selling and making
the Fleet River, is first mentioned in 1228, and presumably reflects the landing of coal
from Newcastle here; though as the cargo would have had to come through the bridge,
this seems a long way round to service the City. Perhaps the lane attracted this name
because at the time there were kilns for making tiles nearby.29 Haywharf (its site next to
Cannon Street railway station) is mentioned in 1235. Other public alleys down to the
Thames included Oystergate just above the bridge from 1259, and Rothersgate, from its
name for the landing of cattle, just below the bridge, mentioned in 1108–48,30 and shown
to be older by excavation at the New Fresh Wharf site in 1974. Ships would have come
through London Bridge if necessary and anchored in the river nearby; the cargoes would
have been taken off by smaller boats, and there were no facilities for ocean-going ships at
the shoreline itself except at Queenhithe and Billingsgate.
A further centre of import and export was the Steelyard, the complex of foreign mer-
chants now covered by the section of Cannon Street railway station south of Thames
Street, as it (like the Steelyard) juts out into the Thames. The merchants of Rouen and
after about 1170 those of Cologne had their own establishments at Dowgate; the depot
of Cologne later became the Steelyard, for merchants from all German cities. By 1280,
London was emerging as the political centre for all Germans trading in England.31 One
historian has vividly called the Steelyard ‘a little Hong Kong’.32 The site was investigated
in 1987–8. On Saxon embankments were the fragmentary remains of a masonry build-
ing 10.3m wide east–west and at least 17m long north-south, probably of late 12th cen-
tury date, which would seem to be the Guildhall of the merchants of Cologne. Since
the mouth of the Walbrook was then wider than later in the medieval period, the stone
building may have bordered the stream to its west, adapting the Roman riverside wall at
its north end and forming a corner to the embankment which would have enabled the
landing of commodities such as wine barrels.33 This is the complex, probably at its full-
est extent by the end of the 15th century, which is shown by Hollar in 1647 (Figure 5.8).
Though he may have got the tower in the wrong place, the ranges running to the river
are shown in the other panoramas. It was not fortified, but it was secure, which was a
necessity for its foreign occupants: in 1494 a mob briefly besieged the Steelyard, and an
official enquiry afterwards found the causes to be unemployment and envy of the Hanse’s
commercial success.34 The Steelyard did not look German, but English; it resembled the
other main Hanse establishment in England, which still largely survives, at King’s Lynn.35
Similarly, foreign depots of English merchants in continental towns did not look English,
but took on the appearance of buildings in their host country. This shows how foreign
merchants in towns often kept to themselves: in Bergen (Norway), it has been argued that
despite a large influx of German craftsmen, the buildings of the town did not display any
characteristics of the Hanse which dominated the business of the place for 400 years.36 On
the other hand, the ‘Hanse’ form of brick house is commonly found around the Baltic,
and is generally thought to be a form of cultural colonisation.
By 1350, there had been another change in the emphasis of foreign trade; much of
London’s cultural and material life was shared with the Low Countries across the North
Sea, and later with the Baltic countries. During the 14th and 15th centuries, perhaps
from as early as the 1330s, England’s and London’s main trading routes led to the cities

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 5.8 The London Steelyard, as shown by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1647 (MoL). The strange
row of weatherboarded shacks just behind the wharf is a misdrawing of a crane. Two
stairs to the river are also shown. That on the left, at which the boats for hire are
gathering, was a public access point; the stair to the right was a private landing place
of the Clothworkers’ Company, who owned the buildings in the lane behind. Here
they stepped onto their own barge for ceremonial trips.

of Flanders, especially Bruges and Ghent.37 The amount of Low Countries pottery in Lon-
don increases dramatically; attractive pots in a new, highly fired fabric called stoneware,
especially drinking jugs and bottles, came from several production centres in the Rhine-
land, and continued to do so to the late 16th century.38 The great bulk of the Rhenish
stoneware must have come through Low Countries ports. At the end of the 15th century,
however, due in part to silting of its access waterways to the sea, Bruges declined and was
eclipsed by Antwerp which dominated the English trade by 1500 and thereafter. By, or
possibly in, the middle of the 14th century, English trade expanded with towns around
the Baltic, particularly Gdansk, where some English merchants settled.39 At the same
time, the traditional trade with the north coast of Spain for iron, woad and the oil used in
cleaning of wool continued,40 and may have increased during the 15th century; finds of
Spanish pottery in London, though rare, also increase in number.
In 1478–82, London’s share of overseas trade both inward and outward, as measured
by taxes and customs on both imports and exports, was 61% of the revenue generated by
England’s fifteen largest ports; its nearest rival, Southampton, could claim only 7.7%.41
Thus by the end of the 15th century, London’s port was generating more customs income
than the other fourteen English ports combined. The main export was cloth, but also
wool, tin and lead, agricultural products, skins and pewter vessels.

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 Selling and making
Naturally, exports from London would not figure in the archaeological evidence here;
but imports would. Imports included many kinds of consumer items such as knives, books,
hats, napkins and mirrors, along with raw materials such as iron, tar, resin, wax, and the
madder and woad which dyers would need. A snapshot of London’s imports and exports
in 1480–1 has been provided by the publication of a calendar of the Petty Customs Ac-
count for that year in the royal exchequer, with other documents.42 This lists many ships
and their cargoes which paid custom, with an emphasis on those belonging to foreign
merchants, especially the Hanse. Unfortunately these accounts throw very little light on
the nature of the waterfront installations. No wharf is mentioned, nor Billingsgate nor
Queenhithe. The ships which came to London in that year were from ports from Bergen
and the Baltic to northern Spain, but most were from a London-Brabant, especially Ant-
werp, axis. Occasional spectacular arrivals would have been Venetian galleys, such as that
which docked in London, no doubt in the middle of the river, in June 1481. The customs
accounts record goods of 116 merchants or sailors on this ship, mostly carpets, soap,
luxurious textiles, ‘raisins of Corinth’ and pepper, but including many other exotic items
(Table 5.3). Little of this would survive into the archaeological record, but there have
been finds of Italian drinking glasses, one in Tower Street near the waterfront (Plate 2),
and the bones of the apes would be recognised if they were found.
In recent years it has been realised that the materials of which artefacts are made are a
better guide than their style to finding their place of origin. This enables us to approach
the questions both of production and distribution of traded goods. So far this has been
exploited for the many types of regional and foreign pottery, but may not be possible for
objects of the various metals or wood. The artefacts so far catalogued which can be identified
as being made abroad are few; but they could include the mundane, such as copper-alloy
padlocks and keys which probably came from the Continent, before being ousted by local
iron variants around 1350. Analysis of metal objects by inductively coupled-plasma spectros-
copy (ICPS) to identify if possible where the constituent metals or some of them were origi-
nally mined has been inconclusive or is perhaps at an early stage. There are very few objects
certainly from outside western Europe in these deposits: one example is a small fragment of
enamelled Near Eastern vessel glass, probably a drinking glass, found at Swan Lane.43
Even so, many of the objects in these dumps and foreshores must have been imported
from continental Europe, and from earliest times (for these waterfront sites, the 12th
century). Exceptional items such as the 15th-century bone spectacle frames found at Trig
Lane in 197444 are thought to be imports; as are fragments of Italian glass beakers, like
that found in a cesspit on a property south of Tower Street. A feature of the medieval
finds presented here has been the apparently large number of buckles and other dress
fittings on the one hand, and knives on the other hand. But in the single year 1480–1,
about 28,000 leather, latten, wire, thread and silk girdles were imported into London by
aliens; and over 46,000 knives and daggers of various sorts.45 The archaeological artefactual
material tends to fade out on these waterfront sites by 1450; so at the moment we cannot
compare London’s material culture around 1480 with the evidence of these documents.
In the 1550s there was a reorganisation and raising of customs duties on many imported
commodities, and an associated reorganisation of the London quaysides. This reform, by

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 London 1100–1600

2 apes nutmegs
books oil
brazil wood orpiment (yellow arsenic, used as a pigment)
carpets pen and ink stands
cinnamon pepper
cloves prunes
coral raisins of Corinth
Cyprus kerchiefs sarcocolla (gum resin)
dates silk
glass beads soap
glass beakers sponges
glass bottles succade (candied fruit)
knives treacle
Moorish wax

Table 5.3 Some of the items imported in a Venetian galley in 1481 (Cobb 1980).

the lord treasurer the Marquis of Winchester, followed a report of a commission on royal
revenues in 1552. A revised Book of Rates (customs charges on imports) was issued in 1558;
an Act of 1559 established general regulations for the loading and unloading of cargoes and
set up a commission to survey the quays. This established what became known as the Legal
Quays, that is nominated quays on the north bank of the Thames for the permitted loading
and unloading of goods. Twenty-four quays are named, with twenty in the crowded space be-
tween Custom House and the bridge, and a further four spread out at locations between the
bridge and Three Cranes Wharf, approximately on the site of the present Southwark Bridge.
A ‘quay’ meant an open area at the south end of a riverside property. Although small and
medium-sized ships probably docked alongside some of them, it is likely that most sea-going
ships stayed in the middle of the river and were unloaded, once customs duty had been
paid, by lighter. For one example year of 1567/8, details of most of the ships bringing goods
into the port and their cargoes have been published. Ships came from Amsterdam, Antwerp
(source of the widest range of items by far), Arnemuiden, ‘Barbary’ (the Atlantic coast of
Morocco), Bilbao, Bordeaux, Bruges, Cadiz, Danzig, Dieppe, Dordrecht, Flushing, Ham-
burg, Haarlem, La Rochelle, Nantes, Ostend, Rouen, Russia, St Malo, Spain and Venice.46
The establishment of the Legal Quays in 1559 probably assisted a change in character
of the waterfront below the bridge, to form the nucleus of the Tudor port and the future
international entrepot, i.e. place where a portion of imported goods were re-exported on
a large scale, and thus warehouses were required in quantity. By 1617 there were regula-
tions for the movement of carts servicing the quays which stipulated streets in which the
carts could stand while waiting; these streets were all east of the bridge line, and south of
Fenchurch Street.47 From the 1550s, also, former riverside villages downstream of the city
were developing into their later role as starting-points for longer voyages: in 1553 Sir Hugh
Willoughby set off from Radcliffe (or Ratcliffe) on his voyage to Russia. So the formation
of the Legal Quays may have followed an existing trend which had already started.

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 Selling and making
The Tudor voyages of exploration and especially the colonisation of the east coast of
America are a topic of archaeological study, though the trade with America, including the
export or emigration of many people, only really began in the 1630s. Artefacts of all kinds
probably made in London or sent out from it are found on many sites there, so catalogues
of London material are of international significance.48 London alnage seals of the late
16th century are found in wrecks off Norway and Brazil. Material and cultural traffic is a
two-way affair: archaeological botanists study the introduction of exotic plants and seeds
in Elizabethan layers in London (reviewed further in Chapter 7).49

The river, boats and ships

By 1600, it has been estimated, England had nearly 700 miles of navigable rivers, and
its much-indented coast allowed coastwise and foreign trade to penetrate far inland.50
Throughout its 2000-year history, London has been dependent on the Thames for its
livelihood and prosperity. Trade along the River Thames would be affected by two factors
which can be studied archaeologically: the navigability of the Thames (and as an exten-
sion, its contributory creeks) and developments in the design, especially the capacity, of
boats which used it. A third factor of relevance is probably where the tidal head, i.e. the
effect of the daily tides of the sea, reached up river. This would affect where ships of any
size might reach, since they would need the tide when travelling upstream and to get
going back downstream if laden.
There are projects in progress to record the constantly-shifting layers of the foreshore
of the river on both banks. This contains archaeological sites and loose debris from all
periods of London’s history, from deep in prehistory to the present.51 Structures which
would have impeded navigability were principally fish-weirs, put down by lords of manors
who owned the adjacent riverside lands, and mill dams, which generally attempted to ob-
struct the whole width of the stream, or as much as possible; 25 medieval examples have
been identified above Maidenhead, but none below. Mill operators opened flash locks
in the dams, though sometimes they took their time and delayed boats.52 The Thames
linked its riverside towns, in order upstream Kingston-upon-Thames, Staines, Windsor,
Maidenhead, Marlow, Henley-on-Thames, and beyond to Oxford. But the upper end of
the river for London merchants with bulk cargoes was Henley. By the 14th century, the
river upstream to Oxford was apparently too obstructed with locks and dams, and, fur-
ther, meandered too much: the goods which came to and went from Oxford, textiles and
leather products, were more easily transported by road. The road from Henley to Walling-
ford or Oxford was more direct than the river. Thus it may have been economics as much
as the character of the river which made Henley a major transhipment point between
river and road. River traffic, as far as Oxford, revived in the 16th century.
The lack of flash locks downstream of Maidenhead may have had something to do with
the tidal head on the river, since mill-dams and locks could not have easily withstood
the reverses of flow and changes in water height brought on by the tidal surge. Possibly
the known force of the tide was one of the factors discouraging the building of bridges
upstream of London Bridge all the way to Kingston before piling techniques were de-
veloped for the construction of Westminster Bridge in the middle of the 18th century.

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 London 1100–1600
But where was the tidal head in these centuries? Today the tide is halted at Teddington.
The study of Thorney Island, the core of Westminster, summarised in Chapter 3 studied
salinity in the river there. Brackish, estuarine waters lapped the island edges in prehistory.
Tide levels rose in the Roman period, pushing the tidal head upstream. By the medieval
period, the tidal range at Westminster, as downstream at the City, was in the order of three
metres. The tidal head of the Thames in the medieval and Tudor periods at present is
unclear, and requires further research to identify where it was; and presumably it shifted
over the centuries.53
The archaeology of boats and ships, based on excavated examples, is a significant com-
ponent of study in the London region. In 1400 many of the ships which came to London,
many of them with cargoes from the Low Countries, were still small, hardly larger than
river craft, and may have been equally at home in rivers. Portuguese explorers of the Afri-
can coast after 1415 were usually in ships of 20 to 40 (metric) tons.54 But there were always
larger ships if required: one type known by the end of the 12th century was called the
cog, a flat-bottomed ship with high sides, an example of which, dated by dendrochronol-
ogy to 1380, is preserved at Bremen (N Germany) after discovery in 1962; it had a capac-
ity of around 85 tons. Documentary records speak of ships of up to 200 tons, two and a
half times the capacity of the Bremen cog, coming to London in 1289 and 1318.55 Ships
with two or more masts appeared in northern seas shortly after 1400; more masts meant
more sails and bigger ships. Larger ships had several consequences for medieval ports and
their archaeology. Places which were formerly bustling ports on rivers could no longer be
reached by the new ships; not only English towns like York and Boston, but more impor-
tantly for London, some of its continental contacts, such as Bruges, which had to develop
a string of outports (especially Damme and Sluis) and dig a canal to get merchandise and
people to them.56 The small towns along the outer parts of the Thames, downstream of
London, began to function as outports, that is places where ships unloaded onto carts and
the road transport system, and conversely took on goods brought by road for export. Thus
London’s maritime centre of gravity started to move east, downstream, as already noted.
The larger ships also required better harbour facilities, so shipyards, which had probably
always been present on a small scale on the Thames, became features of the riverside
landscape. The first dry dock in Europe was built at Portsmouth in 1495. Royal dockyards
developed at Deptford, Woolwich and Chatham, all east of London and on the south side
of the Thames, in the first half of the 16th century. The dock built at Deptford in 1517 was
to be large enough to hold five of the king’s largest ships, including the Mary Rose.57
A review of ships as indicators of trade in northern Europe in the period AD 600–1200
has claimed that ‘the seagoing ship was probably the largest and most complex ‘machine’
built by man in pre-industrialized European society’ as well as ‘definitely the best pre-
served to the present among large and complex movable structures’.58 Boat construction
of the medieval and early modern periods has been a focus of study in London. Ship-
wrights or ship builders are mentioned sporadically throughout the medieval and Tudor
records of London.59 A good number of fragments of boats have been recorded, from
sites on both sides of the river. Most were reused as parts of wooden revetments; contracts
stipulate the incorporation of boat structures in such waterfronts.60 An almost complete

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 Selling and making
river barge at Blackfriars; originally built around 1400, it sank between 1480 and 1500
(Figure 5.9). Nearby was part of another vessel, probably of the 15th century, with a cargo
of ragstone. It is possible that both sank after a collision with each other. Recent work
on the Southwark waterfront shows the complexity of what can be gained from study of
individual pieces of wood from boats. A site just east of modern London Bridge, already
noted for its moated residences, produced many kinds of wooden artefacts in excep-
tional condition. Apart from a mill and revetment structures, including a dock wall and
timber tank, cogwheel, joinery and furniture fragments, there were numerous bits of old
boats. Most of them came from clinker planking from the 14th to 17th centuries, but one
site produced pieces from the carvel tradition, reused in a late 16th-century dock inlet.
Another piece was from the frame of a vessel. Several ships and large boats of 16th- and
17th-century date are indicated from this and surrounding sites.61 The sites of several
16th-century ships are known in the Thames estuary; despite centuries of dredging, it is
only a matter of time before a substantially intact medieval or Tudor wreck is found in
the Thames in or near London, as demonstrated by the two Blackfriars vessels. There
was also, it seems, a continuous and old industry of ship breaking, at the moment better
known in its 18th- and 19th-century form, the time of The Fighting Temeraire. Scenes like
the one in Turner’s painting, but with smaller ships, must have been commonplace.

Some conclusions about trade

This part of the text has been about trade in its many manifestations, only some of which
are perceptible through archaeological work. Some aspects I leave to others: the some-
times inscrutable world of weights and measures, and the archaeology of money (archae-
ological finds, which are quite numerous, of coins, jettons and tokens).62 Presumably the
great increase in production and availability of small denomination coins such as half
pence and farthings from the late 13th century lubricated trade at all levels and led to a
money economy. At the same time it should be remembered that there has always been
an economy, a way of trading, which does not use money. This continues to the present,
even in parts of central London.
Trading, at both a local and international level, probably has an effect on standards
of living. By extending its study of consumer choices and commercialisation, medieval
archaeology of both towns and countryside can respond to the models or suggestions
put forward by documentary historians. One is the following: that in the two and half
centuries leading up to 1300, commercialisation, that is all manner of internal trade and
increased availability of money, had supported a growing number of people, but actually
only been to the real benefit of the upper ranks of society. After 1350, trade itself adapted
or changed to supply a better standard of living to the overall smaller number of people
everywhere.63 Archaeological work has still to test this.
Paradoxically, if Londoners were good at trading, then there would be very little artefac-
tual evidence; apart from those used or consumed in the city itself, the objects would be
elsewhere. So archaeological study of trade is hampered. It is different with manufactur-
ing, since there is much archaeological debris from making things.

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 5.9 Reconstruction of the barge of about 1400 from Blackfriars (ship 3) (Peter Warner,
MoL). It may have been a common form of river boat called a shout. It could have
carried 7.5 tonnes of material; the vessel, almost a century old when it sank, was
empty when found.

Manufacturing
Trades which produced smoke, stench, noise or much industrial waste were generally to
be found, in London as in other towns, towards the periphery of the intramural settle-
ment or beyond the walls, or even further out in surrounding villages; but there were also
many kinds of manufacturing within the city. The archaeological contribution is to study
a craft at three levels: the reasons for any topographical concentration of its practicioners;
any special machinery or plant; and what can be deduced from the byproducts of manu-
facture, that is usually waste material, manufacturing residues or unfinished artefacts. To
measure the extent of a specific craft in a street or locality, we need the wider survey net of
detailed documentary history. Thus archaeology might uncover a medieval foundry, but
documentary research is necessary to establish if it was in a street of founders.
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 Selling and making
The study of artefactual evidence from specific trades, particularly their tools, has been
made easier since the development in the 1990s of the current method of arranging the
analysis and publication of objects from rich urban sites into categories such as dress and
personal possessions, household equipment, industry and crafts, religious observance
and diversions. This was the character of an important corpus of material from Norwich
in 1993,64 and was followed in most major London publications from the mid 1990s.
Before, the objects were usually published by their material of origin, whether stone,
wood, metal or bone. Now, they are grouped by their probable use or function, and study
of medieval industry or craftworking is more sharply focused.
Here we survey a number of areas of manufacturing to measure the contribution of
archaeological research: textiles and clothing including shoes and other leather items;
the provision of food and drink, sometimes called victualling; metalworking; the building
industry; the production of pottery; and briefly other industries such as those concerned
with items of high artistic and cultural value such as monumental brasses for tombs.65
The archaeological evidence so far available, and discussed here, is very largely from
urban centres. But towns had no monopoly on manufacturing; far from it. At the time of
Domesday Book in 1086, a high proportion of craft trades were in villages or the coun-
tryside. This continued: at the village of Laleham (Middlesex), for instance, wool was
prepared, spun, woven, fulled and made into finished cloth on the manor of Westminster
Abbey, as revealed in fragmentary records of the 1290s.66

Textiles, clothing and leather

All over Europe, one of the industries of the 8th to 12th centuries for which there is most
archaeological evidence is the production of textiles. From the 10th century in Islamic
Spain, and from the 11th century in the rest of Europe, the previous usual vertical loom,
often inferred from a row of loom-weights left on a floor, was replaced by the horizontal
loom, which was many times more productive. In London the production of textiles and
of clothing occupied many crafts, from spinning of wool to weaving, fulling and dyeing,
sewing of clothes, knitting and cobbling of shoes. The majority of these activities were
done in small establishments or in rooms within ordinary houses.
Evidence of dyeing, in the form of pots with internal purple staining which may be
from madder, has been found in 11th- and 12th-century levels at Poultry, but the best
example of large-scale premises concerned with the finishing of cloth comes from the
waterfront. At Swan Lane in Upper Thames Street just above the medieval and modern
London Bridges, on the four tenements which lay in the area of excavation in 1981–2, up
to thirteen buildings were recorded (Figure 5.10). They are dated as a group to the 12th
century, lasting perhaps to about 1220. There is no documentary evidence for the proper-
ties at the time of these buildings (in the City it starts in good quantity about 1270), and
their character and development are deduced only from archaeological evidence.
Building 11 (B11 on the plan) on Tenement 3 and Building 13 (B13) on Tenement
4, facing it across the alley later called Old Swan Lane, were large buildings containing
hearths. It seems possible that they were both large dyehouses. The occurrence of fuller’s
earth in pits and around these hearths in the second half of the 12th century may suggest

137
 London 1100–1600

T1 T2 T3 T4
N

B8

OA6 B13
B5 B6 alley

B11

42

W10

32 0 10m

Figure 5.10 Swan Lane, City of London, site plan for the late 12th century to about 1220
(Schofield et al in prep). The site included four medieval tenements or properties
(T1 to T4); the numbers in circles indicate the general position of relevant reclama-
tion and foreshore groups of deposits, which contained many finds. At the foot of
the plan are braced wooden waterfront walls fronting the contemporary Thames
(Waterfront 10, W10).

that fulling also took place, presumably in troughs or wooden vats; but fuller’s earth was
used as a general cleaning agent, and it would have been useful in a dyer’s workshop. To
have fulling and dyeing taking place on the same property is not unusual; the same is indi-
cated by a conjunction of archaeological and documentary evidence for a small dyehouse
of 14th-century date in Tanner Street (now Lower Brook Street) Winchester.67 As in other
towns, fulling was also undertaken at special mills in the countryside around London.
Perhaps we should think of these tenements in Thames Street as a concentration of cloth-
finishing establishments on the riverfront, south of Cannon Street, where there may have
been a centre of cloth-sellers called burellers, at least from the 1220s to 1320; as in many
crafts, the selling was in a different but usually adjacent area of the city from the manu-
facturing zone. This central area near the bridge was however not the only riverside area

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 Selling and making
used by the dyers, who were clearly scattered through several waterfront parishes. At the
Trig Lane-Millennium Bridge site, excavated in 1974 and 1998, several properties owned
or occupied by dyers from the early 14th to the 15th centuries have been identified and
excavated; it may be that the town house of the abbots of Chertsey, on the Trig Lane site
by 1307, was at least partly leased to a dyer for a Dyhous in the 1480s.68
At Swan Lane, the early connections with dyeing continued. The Dyers established their
company hall on the westernmost property on the excavated site probably from 1484,
though no portions remained. By the early 16th century one of the properties belonged
to the Mercers’ Company. A lease of 1638 notes that the company had leased it in 1606
to John Bennett, dyer, on condition that he would spend 500 marks (£166 12s 8d) during
the following ten years constructing a dwelling house, warehouses and other rooms nec-
essary for dyers to use. Though we do not know the accurate configuration of these build-
ings, the riverwards end of the waterfront is shown in the panorama by Hollar published
in 1647 (Figure 5.11). In what can be suggested to be the riverwards end of the property,
a large building is shown with cloths hanging from poles or racks on the wall. This could
well be part of the premises built by Bennett after 1606.
Thus some aspects of the finishing of cloth can be seen to be concentrated on the
waterfront, apparently throughout our period from the 12th to the 17th centuries. But
otherwise the many crafts involved in production and finishing of cloth cannot be pinned
down to specific locations. The Weavers’ Company had a hall on the east side of Basing-
hall Street, opposite Blackwell Hall where their products were sold, but we know very
little about the archaeology of the weaving industry in London.69 Outside the City, what
were probably fulling pits and tenter yards, identified by rows of post-holes, have been
recorded in Southwark, and more pits in Croydon. Tenter-yards are shown on the Tudor
bird’s-eye views of the City, in the area now occupied by Liverpool Street station and
Broadgate. Later maps show them in districts further out, as pressure on land for more
lucrative housing developments grew. Many of the activities which contributed to the
production of cloth, such as carding and spinning, were probably domestic in scale, and
often done by women.
The leather industry also comprised many different trades and specialisms, from the
tanners, tawyers and curriers70 through to those who applied decoration to shoes, jerkins
and saddles. London was the place to go for furs by 1300; these luxurious items came
from Russia and the Baltic, but they were handled and sold by the London skinners.
Fragments of bones from squirrels and cats indicate a flourishing trade in their skins for
furs. In London and Winchester skinners are sometimes to be found near running water,
which was used in the early stages of leather processing. Skinners’ Hall in Dowgate, on its
present site probably since the 13th century, was a large courtyard house with a garden at
the back bordered by the Walbrook stream itself; the gradual embanking and covering of
the stream has been located in several excavations.
Tanning pits of the 14th or 15th century may have been identified in excavations of
1974–6 at the south end of Borough High Street, on the edge of the settlement.71 In the
13th century the tanners were a barely-tolerated but significant element in the Fleet val-
ley, where the Farringdon Road now is. Presumably they used the creek’s waters. Some-

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 5.11 Part of Hollar’s view of the City in 1647, from drawings in the 1630s, showing cloths
hanging from the window of a building suggested to be a dyehouse built or rebuilt
after 1606 (Schofield et al in prep).

times, the variety and concentration of leather waste indicates an area of leather working,
as found next to Moorgate in the City in 1999. Timber-lined pits may originally have been
for hanging hides being tanned, a smelly process which took months. Offcuts included
pieces from ornate shoes of 12th-century style, pouches and bags.72 Leather waste from
making shoes or other items has been found on scores of sites all round London, as the
leather workers sought out every possible place to dump their rubbish. At Poultry, in
the 10th to 12th centuries, waste leather came from open areas, pits, and the local road
surfaces. Leather objects can occasionally be spectacular: a largely complete saddle was
unearthed in 1988, with only some of its leather cut off for use elsewhere before it was
discarded and thrown into landfill on the Southwark bank of the river in 1580–1600. It
appears to be the most complete 16th-century saddle in Britain, but so far analysis has
not established where it was made.73 Other finds have included a leather jug or bombard,
from Watling Court (Bow Lane) in 1978, and an ornate costrel, a water bottle used by
pilgrims or other travellers, from Baynard’s Castle in 1972.
Another industry which received its raw material from animal butchery was horn work-
ing, which produced objects in a material rather like modern plastics, and small translucent
panels for lanterns and windows. Sites with debris of this craft have been located on many
fringes of the conurbation, but a synthesis of the archaeological material is required.

Food and drink (victualling)

The ways foodstuffs were gathered or supplied to the capital are touched on elsewhere,
for instance in Chapter 8. Two important subjects are treated here, that is the basics of

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 Selling and making
bread and beer. Both needed specialist and occasionally large establishments for their
production.
First, flour for bread. Though hand milling with stone querns seems to have continued
in the household,74 but the milling of grain was mechanised to a considerable degree.
Though post mills are known by the 13th century, Domesday Book mentions 36 water
mills in Middlesex and 203 in Essex. By the early 13th century London had a string of
mills along the south bank of the Thames, as well as others but fewer in number on the
north bank, though there was an important mill of the Templars at the mouth of the Fleet
next to the City from 1159, which was removed in 1307. An industrial zone of mills grew
up on the Lea, several miles east of the City. In 1539 there were four mills attached to the
former Cistercian abbey of Stratford Langthorne in West Ham, for instance, and their site
has recently been plotted in relation to the abbey buildings.75
Two sets or pairs of mills on the southern riverfront immediately east of London Bridge
have been studied following excavations of the 1980s which preceded the striking new
building called London Bridge City (Figure 5.12). The western pair were built on the
contemporary river wall by Malling Abbey in the early 13th century. These were bought
and rebuilt by Henry Yevele, the royal mason, in 1388. An excavated timber-lined water-
course is perhaps part of the tidal watercourse that fed the mills. After being leased by the
famous soldier Sir John Fastolf in the 15th century, the mills were acquired by Magdalen
College, and documentary evidence suggests that in 1523 the college added a dock, the
west side of which was also found. The excavation found substantial remains of a tidal mill
dating to around 1500 (Figure 5.12).
These mills, and others to east and west on the south bank known from documents and
early maps, a total of seventeen by the 14th century, were tidal because of their location
on the bank of the Thames, where the tidal amplitude (the difference between mean
high tide and mean low tide) in the late 15th century would have been around 5m.76
Medieval towns elsewhere often had groups of mills on their river, but the London ones
are more spaced out, though often in pairs. In the 16th century there were floating mills
on the Thames, at first at Queenhithe in 1519 and at the south end of London Bridge
from 1580.77 Mills were used in the medieval period for grinding malt or pigments, dyeing
and fulling, sawing, or making iron or paper; but mostly for milling grain, which seems to
have been the main purpose of the mills in and around London. Sir John Fastolf’s mills
(on Figure 5.12) in the 1450s milled wheat, barley, rye, beans and hops.78
Mills were therefore impressive pieces of machinery which were tied down to their situ-
ation on streams and on the River Thames.79 Tidal mills required artificial channels or
leats of great length cut into the surrounding landscape to enable them to work. In con-
trast, other sites where crops or foodstuffs were prepared could be or had to be local,
built into the contemporary buildings and widespread. Barley was converted into malt for
use in the brewing and later distilling processes; medieval malting kilns have been found
in Poplar, where a charred deposit on the floor of an adjacent brick cellar seems to be
evidence of the straw fuel used.80
The production places of bread and other baked food, the bakers’ ovens and shops,
were generally spread all over the urban settlement with no concentration; the baker was

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 London 1100–1600

N
Riv
er
brewery Tha
me
mills s
garner
(later brewery
tenement)
Dunley’s mills
former tenement
Yevele property

Fastolf Place
am

ho
stre

use
sa
nd
Mill

ga
rde
ns
High House

kitchens

Fastolf property moated garden

H
or
se
ly
do
w
n
La
ne

0 100m

Figure 5.12 Mills and noble houses on the Southwark waterfront: excavation and documentary
study have reconstructed how Sir John Fastolf’s London residence, bought with
his proceeds of war in France, lay between two existing sets or pairs of water mills,
which used the tide coming up the Thames to function (after Blatherwick and
Bluer 2009, Figure 58). On the former Yevele property (left), 13th-century mills
belonging to Henry Yevele (not excavated); in the middle, the High House or ware-
house (the rectangle); to the right, Dunley’s mills, acquired by Fastolf and demol-
ished around 1446; here excavation found remains of a successor mill built about
1500, well after Fastolf’s time.

where the customers happened to be. In the centre of London there were fast-food shops
which occasionally formed groups, like restaurants in the more public streets today. In
the 12th century, in the lane leading to Guildhall, among the small timber buildings prob-
ably of artisans, one building thrust an oven into the lane and impeded access along it,
always a good marketing ploy (Figure 4.1). By 1610, as surveyed by Ralph Treswell, a block

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 Selling and making
of ramshackle buildings containing exceptionally large ovens which projected into back
yards stood at the junction of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane, probably serving the large
temporary crowds at Smithfield to the north. This was called Pie Corner, and though the
name may perhaps have derived from a house sign of a magpie, the function of the four
adjacent properties fronting Giltspur Street as fast-food joints is clear from the survey.81
Second, the brewing of ale, and with the import of hops after about 1400, what we
would recognise as beer. The introduction of hops on a large scale into England is con-
ventionally put in the early 15th century, though some historians dispute this and say that
beer with hops, perhaps invented in Bremen around 1200, must have been imported to
England on a small scale.82
From the 15th century, breweries could be large buildings, and may have led a move
towards the idea of larger and therefore more effective and lucrative industrial premises.
Next to the excavated mill on the London Bridge City site was a plain but large and well-
built structure, at right angles to the river and served by an inlet (Figure 5.12). This build-
ing was 26m (85ft) long and 13m (42.5ft) wide, with a central foundation probably for
stout timber supports for one or more upper floors; it was known as the High House. Its
north end, forming the inner end of the small inlet, was of ashlar stone, resembling the
best contemporary river walls on City sites, as at Trig Lane. This building, it is suggested,
was a brewhouse, which may have been there by 1428, perhaps by 1467, and certainly by
1473. It also may have functioned as a granary. It formed part of a ribbon of industrial
buildings along the river which Fastolf ran as part of his otherwise luxurious London
establishment. This suggests that concentrations of industrial buildings, or industrial
estates as we would term them, were rare in medieval and Tudor London. Industrial
buildings mixed with others of all kinds.
Further, the industries mixed with each other. Dyers and brewers often used the same
equipment; they both needed a large supply of water, and boiled it in vats over large
hearths. This interrelationship of the two crafts is shown at Swan Lane by the history
of the properties in the centuries after the phase illustrated by Fig 5.10. By the end of
the 14th century there were brewhouses on one or more of these properties: a brew-
house called le Cok on the Hoop (a hoop, perhaps the metal strip binding a wooden bar-
rel, was often part of the sign of a brewhouse) as well as a building called le Stewehous
with its adjacent wharf. The equipment specifically for brewing is mentioned in a will of
1450 bequeathing the property; but by 1459 the tenement had passed to a dyer. Three
doors away in Thames Street, the brewhouse of the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s called
le Mone on the Hop is mentioned in 1401. By the early 16th century one of the properties
was divided into the Swan, occupied by a brewer, and three dyehouses of varying sizes. The
availability of Thames water was an important consideration for both trades, as shown by a
water-raising device called the sweep on the next property which served both a dyehouse
and a brewhouse in 1522, and which seems to be the crane-like device shown in a drawing
of the whole waterfront above the bridge of a few years later, already given above (Figure
5.2, extreme left). Unfortunately this phase of the site’s archaeology did not figure in the
excavation; the survival of strata was affected by the ubiquitous 19th-century basements of
warehouses and by construction of a multi-storey carpark in 1961.83

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 London 1100–1600
This section has considered two of life’s essentials, bread and beer. I leave to others
an archaeological study of the provision of meat, apart from remarks about meat in the
urban diet in Chapter 4.

Metalworking
Metalworking has been called the most distinctive industry in medieval London, on
account of the number of men engaged in the various crafts and the number of spe-
cialisms into which it was divided. The products ranged from bells to spoons, jewels to
nails. Medieval metalworking sites, evidenced by fragments of clay moulds to make metal
objects and traces of the buildings which were probably the foundries, have been found
on several sites within the city walls of London, in the 11th and 12th centuries at the east
end of Cheapside in the stretch called Poultry, and later round the northern periphery of
the settled area or outside to the east, in Whitechapel.84 From the 14th century, founders
were concentrated in a few northern parishes near St Margaret Lothbury, where there is
still a Founders’ Court. The excavation at Moorgate in 1999 already mentioned found
slag, furnace linings, and moulds for copper-alloy casting, perhaps from the 12th cen-
tury. An area of metalworking associated with the Girdlers’ Company, who made metal
fittings for their girdles, has been explored at the Guildhall site, near the medieval and
present Girdlers’ Hall. To the north west, where Aldermanbury met London Wall street
before it was realigned after the War, observation in 1961 recorded dumps 8ft (2.4m)
thick containing many fragments of bronze waste and slag, probably of the 13th century;
the street is called Gaysporelane in 1332, perhaps an allusion to bright, showy spurs which
may have been available here.85 The objects being made in this large intramural indus-
trial area ranged from buckles to candlesticks, and on a larger scale, copper vessels and
bells for churches and monasteries; London bells were sold to churches over southern
England from the late 13th century. Bells were also made on a site in St Mary Axe [street],
excavated in 1995 before its transformation into the Gherkin. Here many pits produced
fragments of the clay moulds from which bells were made, smashed when the bell was
finished and thrown away. A foundry operating from about 1350 to well after 1500 is in-
dicated.86 From 1300 there was a flourishing industry making pewter tableware and other
objects in central London, but only some plates survive on archaeological sites; the great
majority of pewter objects were no doubt melted down to make new ones.87 Blacksmiths
were everywhere; debris from one of the moats in Southwark is from a smith’s workshop,
where he may also have dabbled in working in wire and even making knives.88
Production of metal goods, however small-scale, was not an industry for the middle of
the city. The evidence from Poultry suggests that in the 12th century, there was a flourish-
ing area of production of metalwork, and had been for two centuries; but that by the early
13th century, ironmongers who sold the finished product were more numerous than
smiths or other trades who made items. By 1300 the area began to specialise in the sale
of armour, and there were concentrations of cutlers and furbishers, who polished metal.
The shops predominated, and the forges moved out to more marginal locations.89 Again,
the areas of production and selling were topographically separate, and economic forces
such as rent had presumably made them so.

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 Selling and making
Building materials: timber, stone and brick
The construction industry was the primary industrial activity in the medieval and Tudor
periods. The provision of timber, stone and brick for building work in London must have
been a continuous industry involving many people; as other chapters of this book make
clear, the City and its immediate environs were one continual building-site from the late
11th century to the 17th century. Some building contractors ran large projects with many
people, and supplied all the materials for them to work, so perhaps here were the begin-
nings of capitalism in industry.
The sources of timber were primarily the counties around London, which must have
been gradually denuded of good building timber. Oak and other timber from the exten-
sive woodlands at Ruislip were used in the 14th century for repairs and building at the
Tower, Windsor Castle and Westminster Palace; but depleted by the 17th century. In the
14th and 15th centuries, oak and elm could still be got from woods in Croydon, Lewisham
or other places now in Inner London; but from the 13th century the supply was augment-
ed with imports, notably from the Baltic. This continued throughout the period: boards
were supplied for Hampton Court by a merchant at the Steelyard. Imported wood tended
to be better seasoned, so was preferred for items such as doors and tables, or church stalls
and pews. Larger boards from Riga (Latvia) were favoured for making carts.90
Much of the everyday pieces of wood however came from areas around London, such
as when St Paul’s had a small block of houses in Aldermanbury rebuilt in 1532, it brought
in timber from the cathedral’s own lands at Navestock in Essex. Archaeological study
has therefore been made of the management of woodland and the development of car-
pentry from excavated pieces, at least for the 11th and 12th centuries. Larger timbers
for posts and wall boards came from oak trees which by their thin rings show they were
standing in wildwood, that is the uncleared ancient woodland which no longer survives
in southern England. Small oak and ash provided wattles, and probably came from sys-
tematically managed coppices, as in rural areas today. As for carpentry, around 1180, sub-
stantial changes took place: sawing of timber, which had been practised by the Romans,
was reintroduced, and there seems to have been a new demand for accurately squared
timber for prefabricated buildings, now timber-framed.91 Carpenters would have been in
constant demand, and their skills can be appreciated on the few occasions that tools are
found (Figure 5.13).
Archaeological sites in London, particularly on both sides of the riverfront, have pro-
duced spectacular examples of boats and timber walls which held back the units of recla-
mation; but the technically most sophisticated examples of carpentry are the remains of
water mills, several of which have been found in recent years, and one recently published.
The south bank of the Thames east of London Bridge, by 1300, had at least eight mills on
it, almost an industrial zone (part of it shown in Figure 5.12). A considerable fragment
of a wheel-pit from a mill of about 1500 has been recorded; many timbers of various sizes
were jointed carefully, as a mill is subject to much vibration. Oak, elm and ash were used,
probably selected for specific purposes: the oak for main beams, the elm for beams and
water-tight cladding planks, and ash for the retaining piles in the water. This structure was
meant to resist the ravages of the tidal river.92
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 London 1100–1600

Figure 5.13 Eleventh- or 12th-century carpenter’s axe from Milk Street, 1976 (MoL). It came
from Pit 55 shown on the site plan in Figure 7.4 below. The T-shaped iron blade
was damaged, perhaps the reason for throwing it away. The curved handle is revers-
ible, for use by either hand.
Apart from Baltic oak and later fir, London got its timber from the surrounding coun-
ties, though increasingly from further away. In contrast, central London has no building
stone, so it has always had to be brought in, from Roman times onwards; either from
quarries usually towards the outside of the immediate region, or from what is now north-
ern France and the Low Countries. Caen stone, from Calvados in Normandy, was in use
throughout south-east England by the late 11th century; at Edward the Confessor’s West-
minster Abbey, it is employed in the dorter undercroft of the abbey at that period or
shortly after.93 According to Stow, bishop Maurice had Caen stone brought for the cathe-
dral in construction after 1087.94 Caen was employed throughout the medieval period on
prestigious sites in London and elsewhere, into the 1530s; it was easily transported by sea,
and its quality ensured a long use after Normandy was lost by the English in 1204. Caen
was used for plinths, edges of doors and windows, loopholes and for parapets; also for
statuary, such as those of the queen on some of the Eleanor crosses. It seems likely that
most if not all of the window tracery in the New Work of 1269–1314 at St Paul’s cathedral
was in Caen stone.95
Taynton or Tainton stone, from the Windrush valley in Oxfordshire, is mentioned in
Domesday Book and the quarries were old by that date.96 In London, the stone has been
identified in the arcade capitals of the chapel of St John at the White Tower, of the late
11th century;97 and in great quantity at the Romanesque cathedral. Taynton stone was
clearly a major component of the shafts of the piers, especially in the 12th-century nave.
This leads to the suggestion that the establishment of Paul’s Wharf on the waterfront
below the cathedral around 1127 may have been for the landing of large amounts of
Taynton stone, coming down the Thames from Oxfordshire. This stone has been tenta-
tively identified in worked stones elsewhere, including capitals and corbel table with chev-

146
 Selling and making
rons, at St John Clerkenwell, and more certainly on an extensive scale in the 12th-century
church at Merton Priory.98 Taynton stone was used throughout the medieval period into at
least the early 16th century for royal works throughout the Thames valley.99 At Eton it was
a substitute for Caen stone, and came down the river from Culham, though due to weirs in
the river and other obstructions some later consignments came overland to Henley before
being put into barges. Caen and Taynton are similar in colour, but medieval builders did
not mind a variety of colour in their walling, which was often rendered or painted in any
case. Here is a case of import substitution, the exploitation of Taynton stone as a more
available and presumably cheaper stone than Caen stone from across the Channel.
Reigate stone, a glauconite sand/limestone, was used in Roman London. In the
medieval period it was also known as Merstham or Chaldon stone. The Reigate quarries
were in use by the middle of the 11th century, since the respond bases of Edward the
Confessor’s Westminster Abbey, located beneath the floor of the choir in the 1920s, are
in this stone; and there are contemporary examples in the City, for instance debris from a
construction layer probably from building the parish church of St Lawrence Jewry in the
1070s.100 Thereafter, as suggested by the few examples from St Paul’s, Reigate was used
for decorative work and occasionally elsewhere in the 12th century;101 it has nearly eve-
rywhere not survived because of the passage of time and the softness of the stone. Some
was used on the outside of Westminster Abbey, where it was recently identified hidden by
later work; all the original external Reigate has long ago perished. Recent work on the
medieval predecessor of Wren’s St Bride Fleet Street has identified a buttress to the late
12th-century choir with Reigate dressings (stones along the corners) but this had been
rendered, no doubt to protect it as well as to give this part of the church a bright aspect.102
An early example of carved work to match those at the cathedral is a capital from Holy
Trinity Priory, Aldgate, of about 1160, recovered from a 17th-century wall in 1986 (Figure
5.14);103 this was no doubt painted originally, but has lost all its paint. Reigate stone was
used for window and door frames, fireplaces, statues, capitals and tracery, for instance
the rose window at the bishop of Winchester’s palace in Southwark, or the vaulting of the
chapel on the Bridge.
Use of ‘Purbeck marble’ (Viviparus limestone) was common in churches throughout
south-east England from the 12th century, and the earliest documented case in London
are the piers in the round nave of the Temple Church south of Fleet Street, finished
by 1161.104 Purbeck marble was used to give an air of imperial eternity to columns and
tombs; Henry III purchased five shiploads of the stone for the Tower, though for what
precise purpose is not known. The requirements of the royal works at Westminster in the
middle of the 13th century probably stimulated Purbeck marblers, some based at Corfe
in Dorset, to settle in London, and especially on the north side of St Paul’s Churchyard;
they were firmly established by 1280. The main parts of the Eleanor cross in Cheapside
of 1290 are of Purbeck, as illustrated by the fragments now in the Museum of London.
Another kind of rougher, shelly Purbeck was widely used for flooring and other places
were slabs were needed; the 13th-century great drain at the bishop of Winchester’s palace
in Southwark was of Purbeck slabs, and so were the paved walks of the 14th-century south
cloister at the cathedral.105

147
 London 1100–1600

Figure 5.14 Twelfth-century capital in Reigate stone from excavations at Holy Trinity Priory,
Aldgate (Schofield and Lea 2005). Height 190mm.

These four main types of stone were employed on prestigious buildings, and were often
carved. Two other types were more utilitarian, but more widespread. Kentish ragstone,
which is strong and weather-proof, was much used for external walling, of both buildings
and river defences. Chalk, which cannot be tied down to a local origin like the other
types, was also widely quarried and brought to London to fill in behind Kentish rag and
to make vaults in stone buildings, whether houses or churches. This was probably partly
on account of its light weight: depending on its density, a cubic foot of chalk can weigh up
to 30 per cent less than a cubic foot of Kentish rag. In an era when all stones were lifted
by human muscle, it would have been important to use the lighter stone towards the top
of a building.
Bereft of natural building stone, London embraced the technology of brick production,
but not quite as early as some places in East Anglia. Small imported bricks were used in
fortifications at the Tower of London in 1278, and are found on a number of city sites in
the 14th century; there may have been a small amount of local production. In a building

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 Selling and making
contract of 1370, the cathedral stipulated that its range of 18 shops to be built south of
the precinct would contain fireplaces with flues of ‘Flanders tiles’, and they advanced the
mason money to buy a shipload of these imported bricks.106 By this time Flanders tiles
were used both as firebacks and as flooring. There was importing of Flemish tiles, from the
archaeological evidence far more than the meagre documents imply, but this cannot have
been very economic, and the great majority of medieval and Tudor bricks in south-east
England were locally made, though perhaps initially with Dutch expertise. The term flan-
derstile was obsolete, or perhaps used for an English product, by the early 15th century.
Bricks were used in quantity from the early 15th century, when Henry Sondergyltes, pre-
sumably a Fleming, had an establishment of three kilns at Deptford from which he sup-
plied the wardens of London Bridge, perhaps for repairs to their many properties rather
than the bridge itself, from 1418. The rebuilding of a house in brick probably by the Duke
of Norfolk at Greenwich in 1426–49 was noted in Chapter 3; it became part of the royal
palace. Slightly earlier, Henry V had a large amount of brick brought in from Calais for
his palace at Shene, and in the 1440s the house in Southwark of Sir John Fastolf was prob-
ably surrounded by a brick wall of Flemish bricks. One of the first lavish uses of brick with
stone was the cloister court of Eton College (Berkshire), part of Henry VI’s foundation,
in 1441–9. Local red brick was used behind stone facing, for example at Crosby Place
(1466), and later brick with stone details (quoins, surrounds of doors and windows); an
early example survives as Morton’s imposing gateway to Lambeth Palace of about 1490
(Figure 5.15). Bishops and the archbishop spread the word about the suitability of brick.
Vaulting of cellars in brick begins in the middle of the 15th century, as at Crosby Place,
and brick walls now appeared around the grounds of noble houses. By the 16th century
they were commonplace.
Diapering, diagonal latticing or standalone designs in burnt or glazed bricks, was a fea-
ture of Jocelyn’s new parapet on the City wall in 1477. Both diapering and the early style
of laying bricks called English bond, replaced by Flemish bond in the 1650s, were prob-
ably introduced from France, a result of cultural contact with the enemy during wars.
Brick was much used at Tudor royal palaces and government buildings throughout the
16th century, and because of their long conservative history and escape from the Great
Fire, brick architecture can be studied at legal institutions west of the City, the Inns of
Court (e.g. the halls of Lincoln’s Inn, 1492; Middle Temple, 1572; Staple Inn, 1581). In
Treswell’s surveys buildings completely of brick, for example Clothworkers’ Hall, 1549
(Figure 7.5), or almshouses of 1584 noted above, are rare, and it seems secular buildings
entirely of brick were exceptional before 1600. Off Bishopsgate outside the gate, Jasper
Fisher, warden of the Goldsmiths, built a brick house by 1579 so sumptuous it was called
Fisher’s Folly; part of the basement storey of the house was recorded in 1989.107 By 1500
brick had also become an acceptable building material for churches though perhaps
rendered, and a few examples remain, such as the porch at All Hallows Tottenham or the
entire church at St Mary, Stoke Newington, in 1563; or brick was fronted in stone, as at
the tower of St Mary Hornsey. In general, during the 15th and 16th centuries, brick was
increasingly used as a substitute for stone, but not often as a substitute for timber-framing.
That would change after 1600.

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 5.15 Morton’s gatehouse of brick with stone dressings, of about 1490, at Lambeth Palace
(author). This is one of very few substantial 15th-century buildings remaining in
the London area. Such gatehouses would have been regular features of the City and
Westminster, though rarely of this size. The gate held four floors of lodgings for the
archbishop’s household. The porter’s lodge is still in use after 500 years.
The character of the brick can be perhaps best seen in buildings in the countryside, es-
pecially north and east of London from the 1480s, which have survived with more original
detail, for example part of the Bishop of Ely’s palace at Hatfield (1480s, see Figure 4.14)
or Eastbury Manor House, Barking (c 1566–73, a date indicated by dendrochronology),
erected for another wealthy City merchant (below, Chapter 8, Figure 8.4).108 Sutton House
in Hackney, which survives, was first known as Bryk Place when it was built about 1535;
at least two houses in the Tudor countryside, at Tower Place Woolwich and Bruce Castle
Tottenham, had prominent brick towers, an occasional feature of a large house in the
City itself, as shown by Treswell in 1612.109 By this time, and throughout the 17th century,
most country houses in the London area were built of brick, often with stone dressings,
especially windows and doorways; though these details could also be of brick with a thin
covering of plaster to imitate stone, as at Barking. Some farm houses were built of brick,
as shown by the survival of Church Farm House, Hendon, now a local museum; just like
a City house, its parlour has a bay window overlooking what must have been the garden.
Brick enabled a farm house to have a fashionable plan and up-to-date appearance.110
The sandy loess which forms the subsoil of much of Greater London, at least along the
floodplain of the Thames, is called brickearth, and was much excavated to make bricks
150
 Selling and making

Figure 5.16 A kiln either for bricks or for lime shown on the Agas map of about 1570, a copy
of the copperplate map of about 1559. In 1510–15 a kiln at Charing Cross of John
Lawrence supplied many bricks for building the nearby Savoy Hospital (just out of
the picture to the right). This may have been an ancestor of the kiln shown here, 45
years later.
into the 20th century. Little is known about the sites of medieval brick making, the kilns
or clamps, since no excavation of one has been published; waste probably from brick
making, perhaps for Jocelyn’s fortifications, has been found at Moorfields. Brick clamps
were temporary structures for burning bricks, but kilns were more substantial and their
remains might survive (Figure 5.16). Brick sizes are only a rough guide to date, since
there was great variety of sizes, even within the same wall or building, especially in the
15th century. There were attempts to standardise sizes in 1572 and 1625, after which
there is less variety.
A further kind of building material can be noted here: tiled floors, some using deco-
rated tiles. In the second half of the 13th century there developed an industry which
made ‘Westminster’ tiles, so called by modern scholars after they were first recognised in a
floor which survives in the Muniment Room, part of Westminster Abbey. Tiles of this type
were almost certainly made in a kiln found in Farringdon Road, immediately east of the
city wall, in the late 19th century; and recent work has suggested a second tilery lay some
distance to the north. Both of these lay in the Fleet valley, and the products were probably
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transported out in boats down the Fleet river, which was navigable up to Holborn at this
time. ‘Westminster’ tiles, which should now perhaps be called Farringdon Road tiles, have
been called ‘probably the worst medieval tiles ever to be commercially successful’ and they
are found at sites throughout south-east England. In the London area they come from
almost every monastic site, perhaps from the cathedral, from many parish church sites,
and from many secular sites including houses and perhaps Guildhall itself. So far over 160
crude but attractive designs have been catalogued. The ‘Westminster’ tiles seem to have
stopped production in the early 14th century, perhaps ousted by Flemish tiles which were
being imported then and which are also found on many secular and ecclesiastical sites.
A second tile industry serving London in the second half of the 14th century was based at
Penn in Buckinghamshire.111 No doubt the conurbation of London was the largest market
for these rural tilemakers, and their tiles, presumably brought down by river, would there-
after have been spread further throughout south-east England. It is possible that some of
the stamps used by ‘Westminster’ tilers in London found their way to Warwickshire.

Pottery produced in region

Pottery, the traditional and still principal method of archaeological dating of layers, even
when supplemented by coins, dendrochronology or documents, can be studied in many
ways. One is to consider the pottery produced locally, that is in the London region or at
least within south-east England, separately from the pottery imported from a range of
foreign places. Here we consider the former; imports are treated as objects of trade or
cultural contact, and have been briefly dealt with in the section on trade.
No single source dominated the London pottery market from the late 10th century
until the middle of the 12th century, when a local industry started somewhere near the
City. Because the kiln sites were not until recently known for certain, this was called ‘Lon-
don-type’ ware. In 2007 a complex of medieval pottery kilns was found in Woolwich, and
two of these of 13th- to 14th-century date are probably for this ware.112 In contrast to pre-
vious types, the pots were thrown on a wheel, not hand-made. Numerous potteries were
also established at this time in Hertfordshire and Middlesex. Possibly the London-type
wares concentrated on table wares, and those from out of town produced cooking pots.
From about 1150 the London-type ware jugs became very decorative. From about 1230,
Kingston-upon-Thames started producing its own distinctive pottery, using white-firing
clay in imitation of fashionable French imports. Several kilns have been found in King-
ston, and a complex of four dating to the 14th century was excavated in 1993 and 1995
at Eden Street (Figure 5.17). Its market was London, reached by water; the royal palace
ordered pitchers or jugs by the thousand. Again the main output was table wares, with
cooking pots in second place, along with other items such as crucibles for metalworking
and money-boxes (Plate 3). Other sites in the region contributed their own styles to the
London area: from Mill Green in Essex, and the Surrey/Hampshire border, both in the
late 13th century. Some of these industries were affected by the Black Death in 1348;
London-type ware stops, and Mill Green wares were no longer available in quantity in the
capital. The Kingston industry however continued until about 1400, and the Coarse Bor-
der ware of Surrey/Hampshire gained a near monopoly of supply during the later 14th

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 Selling and making

Figure 5.17 Excavation of a waster pit from a 14th-century pottery kiln at Eden Street, Kingston
(MOLA).
and 15th centuries. This became ‘one of the most successful and versatile pottery indus-
tries operating in southern England in the late 16th and 17th centuries.’ This must have
been primarily because it marketed the pots through London, to the region and to places
overseas; by 1607, Jamestown in Virginia.113 From about 1450, also, the ceramic market in
southern England was influenced by several kinds of continental pottery which innovated
in their manufacture: well-fired stoneware and later the shiny and attractive tin-glazed
wares.114 At this time and in the 16th century, it seems, the significance of pottery in well-
off houses would have been diminishing, with most pots used for storage, since meals
were cooked and presented largely with metal equipment.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries, in its own way, allowed pottery and glass produc-
tion to move inside the City walls or nearby, though only briefly in most cases. Sudden-
ly a large number of stone buildings, the former cloisters and their surroundings, were
no longer required for religious purposes and were catapulted into secular ownership.
As we have seen in chapter 4, some cloisters became the site of prestigious residences.
But at other places, away from the central area of the City, stone buildings were attrac-
tive to immigrants setting up dangerous installations to make glass and pottery. There
was briefly a glass-making factory within the former buildings of the Crutched Friars, in
the street which bears that name south of Fenchurch Street, but the premises caught
fire. Two monastic sites have produced evidence of the new technology of tin-glazed pot-
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 London 1100–1600
tery, associated with known Dutch immigrants. At Holy Trinity Priory Aldgate, excavation
has found pottery wasters in a pit, and in the locality are other finds from the pottery
run by Jacob Jansen and his successors from about 1570 to about 1620. Here there is no
direct evidence of industrial plant such as a kiln, adapting the buildings.115 But across
the Thames at Southwark Cathedral, there is more. At the Dissolution, the buildings of
the priory of St Mary Overie, like those at all the other monasteries, went through a pe-
riod of great uncertainty and much encroachment for secular purposes; land was valu-
able. At Southwark in the 1550s a bakery and pigsty occupied what is now the retrochoir
behind the altar. A pothouse was established in 1612; though the lease taken out for this
purpose mentions the frater, which would form the north side of the monastic cloister
north of the church, two excavated kilns have been found adapting the stone walls of the
chapter house, next to the north transept, that is right against the church. The first kiln,
found in the 1970s, probably dates from the earliest years; the second, recorded in 1996–
2000 and partly displayed now, probably took over production in the 1680s until 1755.116
By this time there had been or were other larger production sites in the suburbs to the
east, at Rotherhithe and Wapping. It seems therefore that former monastic buildings were
attractive, for a time, to these potentially dangerous industries; but that as in the medi-
eval period, the locations of industries changed sometimes rapidly over time and space in
response to market forces and no doubt the price of land. Occasionally, as at Southwark,
they used old medieval buildings, particularly when of stone, for two further centuries.

Other industries
The above pages have dealt with the clearest examples of industries which archaeologists
might study. There were of course many others which have so far not appeared on the
archaeological radar. Industrial sites can be expected in certain locations. It seems likely that
the industries which developed their facilities south of Thames Street on the waterfront in
the medieval period were those which needed Thames water, especially for dyeing and brew-
ing; or trades which were naturally on the river’s edge, such as shipbuilders, known near the
Tower from the late 13th century until about 1400,117 or ropemakers, who brought the local
names Roperie or Corderie to Thames Street next to All Hallows the Great, by Dowgate.
A variety of tools has been excavated from both inland and waterfront sites, though they
have not yet been used to construct a picture of any particular industry in or around the
capital. Few offer clues as to the location of workshops or activity on more than a domestic
scale. The range is shown by a published synthesis of Saxo-Norman material from exca-
vations in the City of 1976–85, which includes material of the 11th and 12th centuries.
There are tongs and punches for metalworking, woolcombs for processing wool, awls and
fish-hooks, and the carpenter’s axe shown in Figure 5.13.118
Despite the highlight given to trade at the beginning of this chapter, by the 16th century
nearly 60% of the occupations of Londoners involved production of goods, especially
transforming raw materials into meat, bread and light.119 So far archaeological work, the
circumstances of which in the modern world allow little time for analysis and reflection,
has not made much progress in the study of production of things. For the period after
about 1500, also, relevant deposits are comparatively rare all over the city and its environs.

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 Selling and making
For the late 15th and 16th centuries, metalworking, leatherworking and woodworking are
all suggested in the vicinity of the Southwark waterfront downstream of the bridge, from
survival of waste and tools in the backfilled moats of the several prestigious houses there
(shown in Figure 5.12).120 The tools include needles (one of iron probably for working
with sailcloth), thimbles, tools made of bone used in pin-making, the head of a sledge
hammer, tanners’ knives, iron saws, augers, a rasp, iron blades for the ends of spades,
caulking irons, punches, fishing hooks and weights. The waste includes scraps of copper-
alloy sheeting, wire, iron slag, partly finished horseshoes, keys, rings and knives, lead/tin
ingots, pieces of window cames, bone- and antler-working waste and glass-working waste.
Here is evidence of manufacturing in London, even though it was supplemented if not
overshadowed by colossal amounts of imports probably at all periods.

Production of luxuries
In 1292 the chapter of Beverley Minster (E Yorks) decided to erect a new shrine for the
relics of St John of Beverley, but to employ London goldsmiths for the complete new
shrine, 5ft 6in (1.7m) long, of architectural character with statues.121 This illustrates a
special dimension to the manufacturing sector in London, but one which would only be
occasionally apparent in the archaeological record, and sometimes by chance. By 1300,
London was a national centre of cultural production in fine clothes, jewellery, brasses
(eg Figure 5.18), and in general all kinds of luxuries; many of the luxury objects were
made in the City itself, or finished or repaired there. Very few of these objects have sur-
vived, but they can be appreciated in museums both in Britain and abroad: one of the
finest devotional pieces for a private chapel, a reliquary of gold embroidered with gems
made perhaps in London in 1390–1410, is now in the Louvre Museum.122 Fortunately for
archaeologists, something occasionally went wrong, resulting in debris such as a group
of damaged expensive foreign enamelled drinking glasses of about 1400 thrown into a
latrine pit on a property in Foster Lane, dug up in 1982.123
This area of luxury production was a small central part of the City. The goldsmiths were
centred in a stretch of Cheapside next to Foster Lane. By 1490 the south side of Cheap-
side here was called Goldsmiths’ Row, and about that time was rebuilt as a long range
of shops with houses comprising several storeys above. It lay next to the main gate into
St Paul’s Churchyard, where many important and rich ecclesiastical visitors from Brit-
ain and abroad would pass by. An alternative for those seeking expensive but enduring
monuments to themselves was a turning at the same end of Cheapside into Paternoster
Row, where from the late 13th century memorials or grave-covers in stone, and brasses to
be laid in stone, were made. The slabs were brought by ship from Purbeck in Devon, the
brass plates probably imported from Cologne. From this street monuments were taken
long distances to churches in far off parts of the kingdom; from about 1360 the London
workshops had a virtual monopoly on brasses produced in England.124 Monarchs, or their
executors, came to the city for effigies of the highest order. Two of the most splendid cop-
per and bronze effigies in Westminster Abbey were made in the parish of St Alban Wood
Street, where two coppersmiths of London worked on the effigies of Richard II and his
queen for four years in the 1390s.125 Paternoster Row is now totally destroyed, but the

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 5.18 Monumental brass on the tomb of Ralph de Hengham (d 1311), drawn in St Paul’s
Cathedral by Hollar in 1657. Hengham was a canon of the cathedral but also Chief
Justice of Common Pleas. He is in a judge’s costume. The plate was powdered with
heraldic figures of stars and either lions or sheep. It would be remarkable if this
brass had survived the destruction of the Reformation years and the Common-
wealth; Hollar was evidently working from a drawing provided by another draughts-
man, and probably did not see the brass himself.
workplaces of other craftsmen at this level might be identified on sites in the area around
Cheapside in the future. For the moment, we cannot identify London much further as
a national or international centre of medieval art, like for instance Toulouse in the 12th
century. Perhaps the evidence remains in the ground, to be uncovered.

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 Selling and making
Some conclusions about manufacturing
This has been a review of a few areas of manufacturing where archaeology hopes to make
its contribution: textiles and leatherworking, food and drink, metalworking, the con-
struction industry, pottery, and the prospect of collecting evidence for the production or
repair of luxury items. From this brief survey I offer four interim suggestions.
In the period considered in this book, invention and innovation were not praised or
welcomed as they are today. Science had few correct answers. But archaeologists might
ask what evidence they can produce for manufacturing techniques and therefore new
ideas in the production of things. This would be done by analysis of manufacturing waste,
which has been undertaken in a few reports. Little manufacturing waste has been identi-
fied from the large medieval waterfront dumps excavated and analysed so far. Possibly the
only type of material which might be waste is the considerable amount of scraps of leath-
er, but they have not been studied as a whole. It has not been possible from the waterfront
assemblages to identify the products of a particular workshop. Some of the manufactur-
ing methods seem labour-intensive, such as adding punched decoration to cast fittings
like copper alloy mirror cases.126 As all these thousands of artefacts, from both sides of the
river, have been analysed it has become clear that with some exceptions, the finds in the
City waterfront dumps and foreshores, and the 16th-century backfilling of moats on the
south side of the river, whether imported or made in Britain, were mass-produced.
This is illustrated most clearly by dress accessories from before and after 1500. The qual-
ity of the excavated artefacts varies, with a preponderance of humble or cheap materials.
Ordinary people’s clothes and belts were decorated with items made from lead and tin,
not iron and certainly not gold or silver. Around 1500 there was a new line in cheaply-
made buckles, and an expansion in the availability and use of wound-wire jewellery.127
Other artefacts seem to have deteriorated in quality also. On knives, decoration in silver
and brass is found in 13th-century examples, but thereafter alloys of copper, zinc and tin
were employed. A group of five pairs of shears and ten knives, analysed for the quality of
their construction and constituent metals, found a wide range of quality of metal from
excellent to very poor.128 The research potential of the partly published corpora of medi-
eval finds, particularly for evidence of manufacture and therefore technology, is far from
exhausted. Our understanding of industrial processes and technological innovation in
this period is deficient.
Second, there should be more investigation of production sites. Very few sites of manu-
facturing, that is work places, from medieval and Tudor London have so far been excavat-
ed and published in detail, though there have frequently been small key-hole views. In the
central area this lack of information is mainly a product of the horizontal strata being bad-
ly damaged by 19th- and 20th-century basements. It is doubtful that this will ever be reme-
died, except by chance discovery of a sufficiently large pocket of intact and relevant strata.
Thus we envy smaller British towns where deposits containing hearths, buildings, pits and
industrial facilities are deep and, more important, intact, such as at Beverley or Hartlepool
(Cleveland).129 There is little detailed information about London’s manufacturing indus-
tries in the surviving documents of the period, their location, processes, buildings and
impact on their surroundings. It is therefore up to archaeology to take the lead in this study.
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 London 1100–1600
Third, there can be much fruitful comparison of London with other towns. When evi-
dence of crafts, such as workshops or the more plentiful production waste, is found,
evidence from London can be compared to that from contemporary towns and cities all
over northern Europe, Scandinavia and well into the eastern Baltic sea. What is striking
is that studies of industries in other British towns, and further afield in northern Europe,
produce a similar range, with greater variety at the larger towns, of artefacts and evidence
of craft working. For instance, within England, excavations at Norwich, Beverley and York
have produced artefactual and structural evidence, backed up with documents when avail-
able and in some cases better than in London, for working in wood, leather, bone, horn,
metals, along with the various parts of the textile finishing industries, brewing and distill-
ing. York would be large enough to be like London in having specialist industries, in the
York case the painting of the stained glass for which its churches are justly famous today.130
On the Continent, the same general range is demonstrated by excavations at dozens of
towns.131 It is probably the case that the vitality of a town can be measured by the variety
of its industries or crafts, and that towns across Europe can be compared in this way, just
as we might compare their numbers of parish churches or monasteries.
Fourth, there is a need to explore the relationship between production and mass con-
sumption. Clothmaking and cloth-finishing industries are being studied archaeologically;
we should move to the industries which used leather to provide clothing, shoes, bottles
and other useful items. The horn- and bone-working industries are hardly studied in
London, yet there is abundant evidence in the archaeological archive. Much more can be
done to explore the way people made, sold and enjoyed things.
This chapter has divided business activities into selling and manufacture. In the end, for
a place like London, trading has always been more important than making things, though
its manufactures were a formidable array, in size and variety more than any other British
town. The two activities fed off each other; but the City whizzkid of today, wheeling and
dealing in millions and working from a neighbourhood coffee bar with his or her mobile
phone, has a medieval predecessor.

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 —6—

Religion and religious ways of life

It is difficult, today, to appreciate the hold that religion had on people’s lives and think-
ing in the medieval and Tudor periods. In London, the influence or direction of the
church was impossible to avoid. There were so many parish churches; the City had over a
hundred, many of them of great age. There were also almost 30 monastic houses in and
around the central conurbation, each of them built largely of stone, surrounded by a
wall with its own gates. They were formidable topographical blockages, which had to be
walked round, rarely through. The churches were usually the only buildings with clocks
and sundials; the regulation of time, it seemed, belonged to the church. When curfew
tolled from three prominent church towers, the City gates closed. This powerful influ-
ence on people’s lives was overthrown in a few years in the 1530s and 1540s; first the mon-
asteries were dissolved, then parish churches were cleansed of all superstitious imagery.
The underlying themes of this chapter are first the centrality of the church, both parish
churches and religious houses, in London life and its economy over more than four cen-
turies from 1100, and second the rapid, unsettling changes of the Reformation decades.
We consider the archaeological contribution to study of medieval St Paul’s Cathedral,
parish churches, religious artefacts, burials and monuments, and selected aspects of the
monasteries.

St Paul’s Cathedral
The medieval cathedral, wrecked in the Fire of 1666, lay beneath the succeeding Wren
building (Figure 6.1) and is largely destroyed by it; but small parts survive in the ground
outside the Wren cathedral.
Wherever the 7th-century and later Anglo-Saxon church lay (either beneath the later
medieval nave or perhaps to the south), it was swept away by a colossal rebuilding started
after a widespread fire in 1087. The new presbytery (choir) of four bays and underlying
crypt place Romanesque St Paul’s alongside the major church projects at Winchester
and Bury St Edmunds; its long nave also suggests that its building was intended to rival
or stand as an equal to Winchester (Figure 6.2). The analysis of moulded stones from
the recent excavations, probably originally from the 12th-century nave, has filled out this
picture (Figure 6.3).1
The nave and transepts were probably finished by about 1190. Like other cathedrals,

159
 London 1100–1600

Figure 6.1 Plan of the medieval cathedral as rebuilt after 1087, in its proposed relationship to
its Wren successor (Schofield 2011). The Romanesque cathedral of about 1190 is
shown against the outline, in grey tone, of the Wren building. The medieval cathe-
dral (which would be extended after 1269) is reconstructed from a small number of
observations in the ground, engravings by Hollar and other drawings; none of it can
be seen today. The two arrows half way down the nave suggest where there may have
been a break or pause in construction during the 12th century.

such as Ely, Peterborough and Rochester, St Paul’s kept its 12th-century nave but
expanded the choir in the 13th century, to make it a glorious setting for a saint’s shrine,
in this case St Erkenwald. The rose window in the east gable, the largest in Britain, bore a
close resemblance to the rose in the south transept of Notre Dame, the cathedral of Paris.
This new choir was called the New Work, right up to the 17th century, and the shrine was
a holy attraction for tombs of bishops and nobles such as John of Gaunt, and later Eliza-
bethan dignitaries. Around 1420 the Pardon Cloister on the north side of the nave was
rebuilt, and that became a favoured burial place for the civic elite, as well as all levels of
officials of the cathedral itself. By the time of Hollar’s invaluable engravings of the build-
ing, both inside and out, in 1656–8, the building was in decay, a patchwork of phases of
many different ages going back more than 500 years (Figure 6.4).
A new octagonal chapter house at first-floor level surrounded by a square cloister, also
on two floors, was constructed south of the nave from 1332; it is now reproduced in new
stone, a couple of feet above the known remains, laid out as part of a flat or gently slop-
ing approach to the Wren cathedral for disabled visitors (Plate 10). Other works followed,
and like other cathedrals St Paul’s would have been surrounded by stone houses of the

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 Religion and religious ways of life

Figure 6.2 The 12th-century nave of St Paul’s, by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1657. The long nave
resembled those surviving at Ely, Peterborough and Norwich; and large Norman
churches such as St Etienne, Caen.
dean and the canons; the close had a crenellated wall round it, with gates and posterns.
Like the present cathedrals in Canterbury, Lincoln, Norwich and York, the cathedral
dominated its city physically, spiritually and symbolically. But further, in the 14th and
15th centuries, St Paul’s was a place where significant events for the whole kingdom
were publicised; illustrated perhaps most potently by its use for displaying the bodies of
kings, or defeated rivals for the throne, or prominent rebels. Here Richard II’s body was

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 6.3 Moulded stones from recent excavations, when compared with Hollar’s engraving
and drawings by Christopher Wren, enable reconstruction of details such as the
nave piers and arches at gallery level. These particular drawings are of the base of a
nave pier, see Figure 6.2 (Mark Samuel; from Schofield 2011).

displayed so that all could see he was dead, a process repeated with the leaders of the
rebels defeated at Barnet in 1471; here the dead Henry V lay in state, and the body of
Henry VII was brought to St Paul’s for a funeral sermon by Bishop John Fisher in 1509.
These references perhaps demonstrate the early development of the idea that the cathe-
dral, like Paul’s Cross in its churchyard, was the place where important royal announce-
ments were made to the kingdom. This was already evident by the reign of Henry III in
the middle of the 13th century.
Much of the stone fabric of the medieval building survives in jumbled form in the walls
of the Wren crypt, and probably higher in his walls, reused as rubble. Since 1996, refur-
bishment work in the crypt involving two new passages has produced over 200 stones from
the Romanesque and later building, including many from the classical portico added to
the west end by Inigo Jones in 1635–42. These pieces, which include fluting and frag-
ments of Corinthian capitals, are covered in the soot of the Great Fire.
Thus from all these sources the medieval cathedral, rather forgotten in the past, comes
to the surface like an enormous shipwreck, in pieces, to be reconstructed on paper and
in the computer.
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 Religion and religious ways of life

1256

support for 1108-27 1108-27

tower
1330-1600 new work
1269-1314

1300s
C13th

1108-27
to Norman
crypt
(blocked) to treasury

choir screen 1327 cresting ?1632

steps by 1100

Figure 6.4 The entrance to the choir or New Work in 1656, by Hollar. Added to this engraving
are proposed dates for various parts of the masonry (Schofield 2011). Although some
details are difficult to understand, this major drawing can be analysed 350 years later.
Until its removal in 1548, there would have been a massive possibly 3-dimensional
representation of the crucifixion here, probably above the choir screen.
Parish churches
In the London area, there were perhaps 200 medieval parish churches; 108 of which were
an extraordinary concentration in the City itself. The present number of parish churches
now in the City of London is 39, just over a third of its medieval total. These sites remain,
for the moment, fairly intact on their medieval sites; and built-over parts of other now de-
stroyed churches with their graveyards probably survive fortuitously elsewhere. In further
cases, the church has been totally removed; which makes the survival of churchwardens’
accounts and other documents welcome in reconstructing the church and parish life.
The small, poor church of St Andrew Hubbard in Eastcheap, for instance, had a parish of
only two acres (the city average was 4.4 acres) and only 282 households to support it in the
middle of the 16th century. The church was destroyed in the Great Fire and not rebuilt;
its site was eaten into by generations of 18th- and 19th-century commercial buildings, and
nothing of the church remained when archaeologists got to it in 1988. Meanwhile publi-
cation of the churchwardens’ accounts for the period 1450–1570 fills the gap; we can im-
agine the altars, candlesticks, images, pews and liturgical equipment, including books.2
In the greater medieval towns of England such as Lincoln, London, Norwich, Winches-
ter and York, a large number of parishes which each of these towns had reflected their
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 London 1100–1600
prosperity and the size of their populations, at least in the 12th century when parishes and
their boundaries were becoming defined and explicit.3 Although we only have evidence
for a portion, it seems likely that most of the parish churches in the London conurbation
and the countryside around were founded by the end of the 12th century, and in many
cases a long time before. It is likely that some Anglo-Saxon churches were of wood, like
the ‘old’ church of St Andrew Holborn mentioned in AD 959, or St Andrew Greensted,
near Chipping Ongar in Essex, which has a wall of vertical logs dated by dendrochronol-
ogy to after 1053.4 To date, no excavation of a medieval parish church site in the London
area has produced clear evidence of a timber church preceding the usual one of stone,
but this is probably because the stone church and its many burials have removed the
traces of posts, even when quite deep. The only exception is an excavation within the
13th-century church of St Mary Ilford in 1984, which uncovered large post holes for a
timber building; it is claimed as a church, but the distinctive east end of a church, a nar-
rower or apsidal chancel, was not found.5 Many churches in their first probably private
phases are likely to have been built of stone from the beginning, because it was relatively
plentiful in the City and in those places where ruined Roman buildings could be dug up.
The 13th century is roughly the latest date at which Roman tiles were incorporated in the
arches above windows.
Notable medieval and 16th-century churches have survived in the area around, par-
ticularly to the west and north of London, now well within the suburbs.6 Some contain
surviving medieval features which would have been replicated in the lost City churches,
such as ornate and well-built roofs, decorated doorways, and more rarely glass and wall-
paintings; there is an impressive series of early 16th-century tombs in Renaissance style.
The rural churches were often the burial places of rich City merchants and their families,
further emphasising their similarity to City churches which are now being understood by
excavation.
A starting-point for surveying many of the parish churches in the City is provided by the
copperplate map of 1559 (Figure 6.5).
Let us first deal with the way the church developed, over time, as a building.7 This is
illustrated by recent reports on two churches, St Bride Fleet Street and St Alban Wood
Street, both Wren churches which were badly damaged in the War. St Bride’s was rebuilt;
St Alban is left only as a Wren tower. St Bride’s was investigated by Professor Grimes in
the 1950s and 1960s, and his work has been reanalysed and more recording undertaken
by a team from the Institute of Archaeology of University College London, where Grimes
himself was director (Figure 6.6).8 A separate project on St Alban by the same group
reinterpreted Grimes’s work there also.
The evolving plans of these two parish churches, with one or two idiosyncrasies, are typi-
cal of churches both in central London and in the surrounding area. The church, in its
various periods of growth, was reflecting contemporary and changing religious and social
forces. A church is a building for special needs, and these change over time. In the 11th
century, and possibly before (their origins are unknown), these two churches were sim-
ple rectangular stone buildings, but prominent in their surroundings of timber-framed
houses. By 1100, the east end, the focus of worship, had been extended with a chancel, an

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 Religion and religious ways of life

2 4

1 3 7
6

10

9
8

12

15
14
11 13
Figure 6.5 Some of the City churches on the copperplate map of c 1559 (Schofield 1994): 1, St
Dunstan in the East; 2, St Edmund the King; 3, St George Botolph Lane; 4, St Ethel-
burga Bishopsgate; 5, St Gabriel Fenchurch; 6, St Helen Bishopsgate; 7, St James
Garlickhithe; 8, St John the Baptist Cloak Lane (Walbrook); 9, St Katherine Cree;
10, St Lawrence Jewry; 11, St Magnus the Martyr; 12, St Margaret Fish Street Hill;
13, St Margaret Lothbury; 14, St Lawrence Pountney; 15, St Margaret Pattens.
extra chamber. At St Bride’s this was further emphasised with an apse, and later a longer
rectangular chancel.
Apsidal chancels, a feature of 12th-century churches outside London, are found in the
City at St Martin Orgar, St Michael Bassishaw and St Pancras; and out in the immediate
region at St Mary Magdalene, East Ham. The extension of the chancel to the east to form
a rectangular chamber usually over twice as long as the previous arrangement is not only
seen at St Bride’s, but frequently elsewhere, for instance at St Mary Hayes and St Mary
Magdalene Littleton, both in historic Middlesex and now in west London; in the latter

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Figure 6.6 The development of two parish churches as revealed by excavation. Top, St Bride
Fleet Street, as reinterpreted by Milne (1997): a, 11th century; b, 11th/12th cen-
tury; c, 12th century; d, late 12th century; e, early 13th century; f, late 13th or early
14th century; g, early to mid 15th century (tower by about 1420, aisles by 1450); h,
15th century. Bottom, St Alban Wood Street, as reinterpreted by Milne with Cohen
(2002): a, mid 11th century; b, mid 11th century; c, 11th or early 12th century; d,
13th century; e, 14th century; f, 15th century; g, late 15th century. The comparative
plans also show a difference in size between St Bride, which could expand, and St
Alban which was more restricted on a corner site in the middle of town.

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case the new 13th-century chancel is longer than the nave. The replacement of an apsidal
chancel by a longer, rectangular one is a feature of many parish churches in England after
about 1150, and is presumably to be explained as an architectural response to a change
in ritual; there was a need to move the altar eastwards. From the late 13th century the
extended chancel often became the focus of prestigious burials, but they cannot have
been the original motivation.
The development of the nave, on the other hand, reflected more closely the wishes of
the parish. There was a traditional division of responsibility for upkeep and rebuilding
between the rector of the parish who was responsible for the chancel and presumably its
chapels and the parish, which looked after the nave; while it is not clear if this division was
rigorously observed in London, there are examples like that of Henry Rede, armourer,
who in 1420–1 made a bequest to St Augustine Watling Street to provide bells for the
belfry and ornamenting the nave ceiling to the glory of God, on condition that the rector
did the same for the chancel.9
Aisles were added to naves, perhaps to accommodate the larger number of burials
allowed within the building from the 12th century. The earliest documented extension
of a parish church in the City with an aisle may be that of St Magnus, ‘enlarged’ in 1234.
All Hallows Barking had two aisles in the second quarter of the 13th century, as shown
formerly, before War damage, by the style of its north and south arcades. During the
13th century, also, a north aisle was built at All Hallows Lombard Street, and a south and
probably a north aisle at St Michael Bassishaw. The evidence outside London, which has
survived better, argues that the addition of aisles to the nave begins to appear in Norman
churches after 1100. In Middlesex, a few churches retain evidence of single aisles (Har-
mondsworth, Littleton) or even both aisles (Laleham) in the 12th century, and others in
the 13th century (Harrow, Ruislip, Stanwell); presumably this reflects the pattern in Lon-
don. Apart from Harrow, these places were always small settlements. Aisles are increasing-
ly mentioned in London documents in the 14th century. St Giles Cripplegate had a south
aisle by 1339, and St Dunstan in the East was extended with a south aisle, designed by
Henry Yevele, in 1381. Tiny St Ethelburga was rebuilt with a south aisle at about this time
(Figure 6.8), and St Botolph Aldersgate had a new south aisle in about 1400. The build-
ing of north aisles is not well documented, but some are later, eg that of St Olave Jewry
in 1436. Elsewhere in England, north aisles were often built first, before south aisles, and
that perhaps one reason for this besides finances was that building a south aisle would
mean moving or rebuilding the south porch;10 but this theory has yet to be tested in the
London area, and in any case the porch was in many City churches through a south-west
tower, as shortly to be described.
A comprehensive rebuilding of the site could result in a nave and two aisles of a sin-
gle period. This is suggested at St Botolph Aldersgate where the ‘new aisle’ of 1431 is
demonstrably the south aisle, and yet the church had a nave and two aisles by the time
of the Great Fire in 1666. By 1400, a nave and two aisles was becoming the norm, as
illustrated by the cumulative plans of churches and those which were rebuilt afresh, as
in 15th-century rebuildings, some taking decades, at All Hallows Barking, St Alban Wood
Street, St Bride, St Michael Bassishaw, St Olave Hart Street, St Sepulchre and St Swithin,

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 6.7 St Mary Willesden, in an engraving of 1807 (Society of Antiquaries). This shows
the church before extensions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Though of moderate
size, this medieval church had a cult of the Black Madonna, which produced crude
pilgrim badges. Here, presumably because it was a centre of what he opposed, the
Protestant reformer Thomas Bilney preached before he was taken to Norwich and
burnt at the stake. The present church has problems of seeping water, possibly a
relic of its medieval holy well.
one of the earliest examples in its rebuilding of 1400–20. In Middlesex this pattern is
broadly corroborated, with examples of churches completely rebuilt with both aisles and
a western tower at St John Pinner (1321), or rebuilt with aisles in the 15th century as at
St Martin West Drayton. St Dunstan Stepney, a large church with an enormous parish in
the sparsely-populated area east of London, was rebuilt and extended in the 15th century.
There are or were fine rebuildings of the early 16th century at Enfield and Hackney. By
this time, to all intents and purposes, these former villages were parts of London, and
their churches expressed this.
In the 12th century St Bride’s had a tower on the south side, the base of which survives,
and this seems to have had a quasi-civic purpose, as its bell tolled the curfew. St Alban’s
had a similar structure which may be a tower, at its north-east corner. A tower for bells
could be attached in various relationships to the nave: north, centrally, or to the south of
the nave, as at St Mary Willesden, notable for being a local pilgrimage centre, Figure 6.7.
Pre-Reformation towers survive in the City largely intact at All Hallows Staining, St Andrew
Undershaft, St Giles Cripplegate, St Olave Hart Street and St Sepulchre; parts of towers

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Figure 6.8 St Ethelburga Bishopsgate, plan in 1929 (RCHM[E]). After damage in 1993, the
church was rebuilt as a Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, with offices inserted
into and above the south aisle; the vestry was removed.
survive within later rebuildings at St Andrew Holborn, St Anne and Agnes (including part
of a 14th-century doorway at the second stage), and at St Katherine Cree (1504), shown
on Figure 6.5. Earlier towers no doubt survive within towers of other Wren churches. In
the 16th century, some churches probably still retained their Romanesque towers. There
are no traces on the copperplate of round church towers, though the foundations of one
were reportedly seen in 1914 pre-dating the late medieval tower at St Michael Paternoster
Royal, and round towers have been noted in the surrounding countryside, for example
formerly at Tooting, and surviving at South Ockenden, Essex. Towers expressly to hang
bells were apparently attached to some churches for the first time from the beginning of
the 15th century (1418–20 at St Swithin; 1429 at St Michael Wood Street).
In the panoramas of the middle of the 16th century, many church towers appear to
date from the 14th and 15th centuries. The largest group are of the type called Kentish,
although they are distributed throughout north Kent, Middlesex, north Surrey and south
Essex. The type was built from the late 14th century to the Reformation; two of the earli-
est seem to be that at St Mary, Lambeth, built in 1370, and the tower of Maidstone (Kent)
collegiate church in 1395–8, attributed to Henry Yevele.11 An example dated to 1440–1
survives at All Saints, Fulham; this was built by Richard Garald, who lived in the parish of
St Sepulchre.12
There were also spires or broaches; the Corporation of London seal, perhaps of about
1220, shows that by then the City was known to be a place of many spires, and the cathe-
dral had the highest, possibly one of the first large spires in the land on top of a tower
which was amongst the highest in Europe. The much smaller but still ambitious spires
of City churches were occasionally of stone, as at All Hallows Watling Street, but were
probably more often of timber covered with lead. St Edmund had a small spire, while St
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 London 1100–1600
Dunstan in the East and St Lawrence Pountney were prominent in all the panoramas for
their tall, possibly 13th-century spires.
By 1559 St Ethelburga had a timber broach, which can be seen in its representation on
the copperplate map (Figure 6.5, no 4). Timbers probably from this structure have been
studied in extraordinary circumstances. In 1993 came an opportunity to take most of a
medieval London parish church to pieces and put it back at least in part. The small medi-
eval church of St Ethelburga the Virgin, in the north-eastern part of the City of London,
survived the Great Fire and two World Wars (Figure 6.8), but was severely damaged by
a terrorist bomb intended for the banks and communications infrastructure of the City.
The movable debris, comprising carved stones, rubble, the roof, timber screens, pews and
bricks, were removed to a Museum of London site in Hackney, where they were laid out
on the ground on pallets, in rows.
The church was probably in existence in the 12th century, according to documentary
evidence. St Ethelburga was a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon saint and no other dedication
to her is known in the London area. The church was completely rebuilt, however, in
1387–1446, and nothing definitely survives from any earlier church. Some fragments of
stone with decorative mouldings that are dated to as early as the 12th century were found
reused in the core of the l4th- and 15th-century walls, but there is no certainty that they
originated in a previous church there, and they could easily have come from a different,
relatively fine secular or ecclesiastical building. Components of the chief architectural
features of the l4th- and 15th-century church could be identified among the debris off-
site, and these comprised less than half the west window, some of the west arch dividing
nave from porch (most of the rest remained in situ), parts of the main west door and
some fragments from the north windows. The rebuilt east window, south windows and the
arcade dividing nave from aisle remain.13 Some of the architectural fragments, dislodged
by bombing, were put back in place during the restoration.
The church is documented as having had a bell tower and a steeple by the 16th century,
and many timbers from the upper stages of the belfry of the medieval church were identi-
fied off-site. The survival of a medieval belfry in the City is extremely rare, and the extant
timbers constitute one of the most important groups of medieval timbers in the City to
have been recorded (Figure 6.9). It is possible that the belfry timbers were installed dur-
ing the comprehensive rebuilding of the church, or a little later; unfortunately it has not
proved possible to obtain a dendrochronological date from them. Parts of a 15th-century
timber porch with carved decoration that stood in front of the west end of the church,
between two shops, were removed in 1932–3 when the shops were demolished for road-
widening; these carved timbers are displayed in the Museum of London.
Whenever the ground floor stage of the church tower can be seen on the copperplate
map of the City, the main entrance to the church is very often in the tower’s south side
(eg St Antholin, St Augustine Papey, St Bartholomew Exchange (noted in roadworks in
2010), St Benet Sherehog and St Dionis Backchurch). This even occurs in the suburban
churches of St Botolph Aldgate and St Botolph Bishopsgate, where constrictions of space
would apply less. It therefore seems that the entrance through the south side of the tower
is a London tradition or fashion. By the time of the Great Fire in 1666, the entrance

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Figure 6.9 Timbers from the belfry of St Ethelburga’s church being assembled in a car park
in north London by members of the Museum’s archaeology service, after transport
from the wrecked church site (MoL).
through the tower had been fossilised by custom. The tower was usually the most sub-
stantial part of the ruin confronting Christopher Wren and his colleagues in the years
after the Fire, and he retained the pre-Fire tower in the majority of his rebuildings. In
many cases, the entrance through the tower was also retained. Entrances also moved: in
1584 the parishioners of St Andrew Holborn had placed pews in front of a disused stone
doorway in the south aisle, so they now moved the doorway to replace a wooden one, only
eleven years old, in the north porch, and blocked up the hole in the south wall.14
The interior of the parish church contained fixtures reflecting this mix of religious and
social functions, and which the archaeologist might record: the roof, the rood screen,
font, pulpit and pews; glazing and images, either paintings or statues; floortiles and mon-
uments.15 Parishioners’ wills sometimes specified where they would like to be buried, and
thus we hear that in the church of St Mary-at-Hill there was an image of the Annuncia-
tion, presumably a painting, in 1342, and its new south aisle had a window representing
the Seven Works of Mercy in 1514.16 For the central conurbation, very few of these items
have survived or have been recorded, but documentary evidence gives an outline which
suggests that central churches were like their counterparts in surrounding counties. They
had rood screens from at least the early 14th century, and the octagonal projection for
the rood stair which incidentally marks the division between the nave and chancel can

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 London 1100–1600
be seen on both surviving examples (St Andrew Undershaft) and in engravings. Pre-
Reformation woodwork also survives out in the region, but barely in the centre. In a large,
central church such as St Michael Cornhill, pews with doors were assigned to named
individuals from at least 1457; and in the same church, there were separate areas of pews
for men and women, if not before. ‘Writing of the pews’ in 1469–70 at All Hallows Lon-
don Wall is taken to refer to a plan of the allotment of prominent pews to parishioners,
no doubt for an annual fee. This renting of pews, often by individual families, was to be-
come a source of friction in the second half of the 16th century, but clearly was an estab-
lished practice in certain London churches a hundred years before. Apart from a general
review of church archaeology and a few specific archaeological reports on individual
parish churches, the archaeology of church fittings (bells, screens, altars, window glass,
shrines, floor tiles and memorials) has not yet been brought together either for the City
or its archaeologically rich region.17
For the new report on St Bride’s, 108 architectural fragments from the excavations were
studied. The stones came from vault ribs, windows, doorways, and external features such
as plinths. They were of a wide range of dates, from about 1180 to the 16th century. Some
of the elements were of Caen stone, showing that this parish church in London could
order stone as fine as that at the cathedral up the road. In general these architectural
details can be fitted onto the various churches proposed from excavation of their founda-
tions. One fragment of an internal rib of the period 1150–1250 was painted many times
throughout a long life, but four major schemes could be identified. First, it was yellow;
then red with white stripes; then bright blue; then, white with red stripes. The blue was
the expensive ultramarine, the name of which literally means ‘from over the seas’, the
pigment may have been produced in present-day Afghanistan.18 This is why architectural
fragments from medieval churches, which may seem to be bulky, too heavy to move and
durable, need to be properly housed and delicately conserved. From them missing ele-
ments in the building can be reconstructed.
Chapels at these churches are mentioned in wills of the late 13th and early 14th century
in London, as at St Michael Bassishaw in 1278, and at St Botolph Bishopsgate in 1303.
Chapels took a range of forms, from special buildings attached to the body of the church
(most often, the chancel), to simple modifications of space by the use of timber partitions.
The new work at St Bride’s has reconstructed the plan of the church in the 15th century
(Figure 6.6, g) and suggests that the east end comprised the main altar of St Bridget, a
Lady chapel on the north, chapels of St John the Baptist and St Anne to the south, and
altars in the nave to Jesus, St Katherine and St Michael. Elsewhere in the church were
images of St Nicholas, St Christopher and St Anthony.19 Records of many London parish
chapels are however too vague to specify what kind of construction was involved. Some
chapels were described by Stow as ‘built’ within the church, implying substantial struc-
tures, as for instance that of William Hariot, draper and mayor, in 1481 at St Dunstan
in the East, or that of Sir James Yarford, mercer and mayor, ‘in a special chapel by him
builded on the north side of the Quire’ of St Michael Bassishaw. Many chapels would have
employed screens of timber and occasionally of stone, but were otherwise not integral
to the structure of the church itself. Some churches did have chapels protruding from

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the fabric, and these were no doubt more substantial structures. Often the endowment
proved insufficient within 50 years, and the plethora of both under-funded chantries and
chantry priests led to the foundation of colleges for the priests. Several London parish
churches (St Lawrence Pountney, St Anthonin) had a group of priests called a college,
sometimes endowed with special buildings or accommodation near the church.20
The occurrence of crypts in churches is a rarity and governed by individual or special
circumstances. The first was that several churches stood above a vault or vaults let out to
secular occupation as at All Hallows Honey Lane, All Hallows the Less Thames Street and
St Mary Colechurch. On the waterfront, at the Billingsgate Lorry Park site in 1982, exca-
vation revealed a 15th-century undercroft of a house, later incorporated into the adjacent
St Botolph Billingsgate church. In the light of this practice, the two-bay crypt of c 1270
which survives under the west end of the nave of St Olave Hart Street is of interest. There
are no parallels for an ecclesiastical crypt or undercroft in this position. The entrance,
formerly directly to the open air, was later incorporated within the tower. The crypt may
therefore have been part of a previous house on the site, later subsumed into the body of
the church; or it may have been a further case of a church over a separate vault intended
for secular use. The date of construction of this undercroft was near the beginning of the
period when a good number of secular vaulted undercrofts were built in the City, includ-
ing several nearby in Fenchurch and Aldgate Streets.
A second group of crypts inside or attached to churches were smaller structures, and
probably acted as basements or podia for chapels at the east end of the church. Two
churches had small crypts under an aisle or chapel at their east ends in the 14th century,
both of which survive: at the south-east corner of All Hallows Barking and beneath the
north-east corner of St Bride (Figure 6.6, g). The crypt at the latter, running north-south,
was entered from outside the church, and had a window in its east side. The crypt at All
Hallows Barking also appears to have had an exterior entrance, this time to the east. Per-
haps these small vaults were charnel houses, with windows to the outside world so people
could see the heaped up bones within.
Churches should be studied not only as religious buildings, but within their context in
the street and neighbourhood. Churches in London were often physically constrained,
and at a local level, the distinction between ecclesiastical and secular boundaries was
sometimes either intricate or, as a result, blurred. Several churches stood on vaults which
were let out to secular interests (All Hallows Honey Lane, All Hallows the Less, St Mary
Colechurch); the surviving undercroft at St Olave Hart Street may be an example of this.
A church expanded, if necessary, over an adjacent property, for example at St Nicholas
Cole Abbey in 1377 and at St Mary at Hill in 1500–1. At nearby St Leonard Eastcheap,
Thomas Doget gave a portion of his house for the enlargement of the chapel of the Bless-
ed Virgin on condition that he could have a window into the chapel from his house in
1337, and in 1544 the vestry lay under another neighbour’s house. The parish church was
also a landmark in the local topography, besides being one of the relatively few buildings
of stone in the locality. Here, often, was a public well, later turned into the parish pump.
All kinds of local meetings, including legal investigations, took place within churches as
convenient and appropriate meeting places. The medieval parish church was as much a

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 London 1100–1600
community centre as its successor is today. As in other medieval European cities, the par-
ish churches were of local significance in their architecture, in comparison to the cathe-
dral and monastic houses which had international connections. This does not diminish
their interest and importance.
Medieval churchyards can be archaeologically surprising places. They were used for
illicit activities and muggings, as sometimes today; and excavation at Guildhall Yard has
shown, as might be expected, that a churchyard, in this case of St Lawrence Jewry, was
used in the 12th century, and no doubt earlier and later, for tipping of rubbish including
dress fastenings, metalworking waste, old shoes, broken pottery, stable refuse and human
excrement; possibly it had the character of a dung-heap, since worms had begun to be
active.21
It is possible that the width and destination of some lanes were governed by annual
and other parish processions around the locality. When the route for beating the parish
bounds or boundaries went through a person’s house, permanent doorways had to be
provided for the procession as part of the folk memory. From the late 16th century, at
least, parish markers went up on the outsides of buildings, perhaps like the 18th-century
metal examples which still adorn older London facades. The comprehensive panoramic
bird’s-eye views show a number of wayside crosses standing in the streets, often at junc-
tions: on the Agas panorama of about 1570, but based on the copperplate map of about
1559, at least three crosses can be seen in the streets, that is in addition to those shown
in churchyards. There were certainly more; one in suburban Bishopsgate on the copper-
plate map has not survived on the cruder Agas drawing. Cheapside, a street of civic and
religious monuments, had its main Cross from about 1296 (the Eleanor Cross erected
by Edward I), but also a probably older cross at the east end of St Michael-le-Querne
church, at the west end of Cheapside and in front of the main gate into the cathedral,
a position for crosses in other towns with large churches. This was known as the Broken
Cross, a point for street traders, until it was replaced by the Little Conduit there in the
1390s. Thus London had a religious topography, a geography of religious practice and
ceremony. This would have drawn attention to selected buildings, routes and points on
the map. Sometimes prominent crosses marked civic boundaries, as in the case of Croy-
don, where five crosses (the sites of four are certainly known) delimited the Old and
New Towns together; in this case they were cut into trees or large stones. They marked
the legal privileges, mostly of a financial nature, enjoyed by the townspeople within the
boundary. The four certain sites were marked by commemorative plaques in 1977, a laud-
able piece of civic memory enhancing.22

Religious artefacts
Artefacts which were made and used for religious purposes are varied and distinctive.
They include not only the chalice and paten (metal plate) sometimes buried with priests,
but rosaries of beads and small devotional figures in metal, especially of Christ on the
cross. From the middle of the 15th century there are examples of a devotion to the holy
name of Jesus, which was painted, stamped or incised on pots, notably on the new fashion
of lustreware from Valencia, leather and personal seals.23 But the most numerous arte-
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 Religion and religious ways of life
facts with religious overtones, in their hundreds, have been pilgrim souvenirs, also called
badges.
A notable contribution to study of popular religious thought in medieval London has
been the work of the late Brian Spencer on pilgrim souvenirs or badges, the material
coming largely from the waterfront excavations of the 1970s to early 1990s.24 Spencer
studied 265 different styles of pilgrim souvenir along with 67 secular badges. The former
became common in the 13th and especially 14th century, as churches such as Canterbury
Cathedral exploited the rich potential of religious tourism by promoting their shrine
of Thomas Becket, the London boy and archbishop who was murdered in 1170. The
souvenirs may also have been encouraged by church authorities to stop the erosion of
the shrines, as pilgrims chipped pieces of holy fabric off for themselves. These souvenirs,
especially when containing holy blood or other detritus, had healing powers (they reput-
edly raised some from the dead) or warded off evil or bad luck, so they were sometimes
nailed up in the pilgrim’s house on return; or, quite often, carefully folded up (they are of
soft metal) and thrown into the Thames, from which they were recovered recently. They
comprised a colossal mass market, and identifying the shrines shows how far people trav-
elled. Spencer’s catalogue identifies 58 pilgrimage sites in continental Europe, from Vad-
stena in Sweden to Seville in Spain and Bari in southern Italy as well as 39 sites in England
and Scotland. Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury, or their forebears, could find numerous
different badges of Thomas Becket there: the martyred archibshop’s head, or perhaps a
representation of a reliquary in the form of a bust, him on a horse, in a ship (these two
commemorating his famous return from exile) and small crude replicas of his shrine;
even a badge version of the sword that sliced off his scalp. For some major shrines, such
as Walsingham, Our Lady Undercroft at Canterbury (Figure 6.10) and the Carmelites of
Toulouse, the badges may be modelled on or resemble the holy shrines themselves, now
destroyed.
The pilgrim souvenirs tell us about regional and even international cultural contacts
which Londoners or people passing through London had. The souvenirs can also tell us
about pilgrimage sites in the London area, to which less ambitious but perhaps more fre-
quent journeys were made. Holy sites which produced souvenirs included St Edward the
Confessor at Westminster (a badge of his was found in King’s Lynn), possibly Our Lady of
Willesden (ie from the church, with its holy well, shown in Figure 6.7), Our Lady of Eton
(college), St Bridget of Syon Abbey (Isleworth) and the miracle-working tomb of the
saintly king Henry VI in his final resting place at Windsor. Pilgrims were still flocking here
as late as 1543. More work might be done on linking these local religious journeys to the
occurrence of wayside shrines or statues, such as four figures of the Virgin which figure in
a gazetteer for pilgrims of about 1520, on Crome’s Hill Greenwich, Willesden (as above,
probably in the church), Muswell Hill and at a prominent oak tree on the way between
Highgate and Islington. Within the City itself, strangely, holy sites were not exploited in
this way; there are no certain badges from the cathedral, which housed shrines of several
saints, and only the little hospital of St Anthony in Threadneedle Street issued badges.
A 15th-century terracotta mould found in Old Bailey many years ago shows St Catherine
and her wheel. This object has been interpreted as being for stamping the saint’s image on

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 6.10 Pilgrim souvenir badge from Our Lady Undercroft at Canterbury Cathedral, found
at Billingsgate in 1983. This badge is exceptionally large (140mm high). The archi-
tectural references and costume details place this in the second half of the 14th cen-
tury, when the original image enjoyed wide appeal including donations by the Black
Prince. This badge may have been created as part of the national grief at his death
in 1376, to be brought back to London by one who was there (Spencer 1998).
cakes, perhaps sold in the nearby Smithfield fair; but in contrast as a mould for making a
pipeclay figurine of the saint.25 From the 15th century, London imported such figurines,
and parts of earthenware stoves decorated with holy scenes, from the Rhineland and else-
where. So far the evidence suggests the stoves were employed in monasteries: the largest
group from London is from excavations on the site of St Mary Graces, East Smithfield,
representing one or more stoves within the abbey buildings in the first three decades of
the 16th century. In this case Neutron Activation Analysis of samples indicated that they
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were made in the south Netherlands, around Antwerp.26 But such stoves were meant to
heat all kinds of buildings, not just monastic, and they will probably be found in secular
contexts in the future. Nor were these items confined to the urban area. The excavation
at Low Hall, Walthamstow found part of a small round pipeclay plaque which would have
been mounted in a wooden frame on a wall; it shows Joseph leading the donkey on the
Flight into Egypt, and was probably made in Cologne. As the Reformation spread from
continental Europe, the religious imagery fades away and other more secular, vaguely
Renaissance images are used. The large immigrant community in London, with their own
cultural tastes, may have assisted these changes.

Monasteries in London 1100–1532

Of the religious houses which stood in London and its immediate region from the 12th to
the 16th centuries, many books could be written.27 Parts or isolated scraps of a few remain
above ground. Since 1997 a series of archaeological reports have appeared, one mono-
graph per monastery, prompted by recent excavations but pulling together all previous
ones, some observations going back over 200 years. So far these reports largely concern
monastic houses in the centre of London or immediately around, with only two in the
wider region. These two lines of information are tabulated in Table 6.1.
I can attempt only to bring out some archaeological aspects of these great institutions
which consumed so much space in the City and the countryside, especially around the
walls (Figure 6.11).

Examples from the City

By 1100, there were several monasteries in the London area, but not much is known about
them: Chertsey and Barking Abbeys, founded in the 7th century, and Westminster, which
may go back to the same time, but which was certainly in place by the 10th century. In the
later decades of the 11th century many religious houses in England were founded by the
royal house or nobles, but one near London was founded by Alwin Child, a citizen: Ber-
mondsey Abbey in 1089. But in general Anglo-Saxon and the first Norman monasteries
were not very interested in London, or saw any point in being based there. This changed
in the 12th century, as the royal and therefore government functions transferred from
Winchester to London. The concentration of so many monasteries in and immediately
around London thereafter may be one of the main reasons that from the 12th century
onwards there are notably fewer establishments of monastic houses in parts of the wider
countryside further out, by comparison with other parts of England; there are few in Sur-
rey, west Kent and north Sussex.28
Two examples of 12th-century foundations in the City, one studied recently and the
other ready for such study, can be given here: Holy Trinity Priory Aldgate and St Helen
Bishopsgate. At Holy Trinity, founded in 1108 just inside the Roman and medieval gate
of Aldgate, a church had been established by the late 11th century, and a cemetery found
on several sites in the area may have functioned with it or with the new priory church,
which was built in the first half of the 12th century. Due to an unusually high survival of
varied evidence, in the form of surveyed plans of about 1585, many antiquarian drawings

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 London 1100–1600

N
9

15

4
19
Rive
r Fle 22

13
e

city wa
t

12 ll 18
6

7 1
17
14
24 11 8
23
27 10
26 3

20
River
Thame
s
The Tower

16
21

25

0 1000m

Figure 6.11 Map of the religious institutions in and immediately around the City by 1400. Key:
1, Austin Friars; 2, Bermondsey Priory (later Abbey); 3, Blackfriars (Dominicans); 4,
Charterhouse; 5, Crutched Friars; 6, Elsing Spital; 7, Greyfriars (Franciscans); 8, Holy
Trinity Priory Aldgate; 9, St John Haliwell; 10, Abbey of St Clare (Minoresses); 11,
Hospital of St Anthony; 12, St Bartholomew’s Hospital; 13, St Bartholomew Smith-
field; 14, St Helen Bishopsgate; 15, St Mary Clerkenwell; 16, St Katharine’s Hospital;
17, St Martin le Grand; 18, St Mary Bethlehem; 19, St John Clerkenwell; 20, St Mary
Graces; 21, St Mary Overie; 22, St Mary Spital; 23, St Paul’s Cathedral; 24, St Thomas
of Acon Hospital; 25, St Thomas Hospital; 26, Temple; 27, Whitefriars (Carmelites).

(as it lay outside the area of the Great Fire, and pieces of fabric survived well into the 19th
century), two pieces of the church now incorporated into an office building, and several
excavations, much of the architecture of the priory church can be reconstructed (Plate 4;
see also Figure 4.8). The cloister lay to the north of the church, and the main buildings

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 Religion and religious ways of life

Religious community Foundation date, Standing remains Main recent publication, Map
Order or in preparation No.
Bermondsey Abbey late 11thc, Cluniac Steele et al in prep 2
Charterhouse 1371, Carthusian parts of priory buildings, Barber and Thomas 2002; 4
Dissolution mansion also Temple 2010
Elsing Spital 1331 central crossing of church Milne with Cohen 2002 6
Holy Trinity Priory 1108, Augustinian two fragments inside a Schofield and Lea 2005 8
Aldgate modern building
Knights Templar c 1128 Holborn, round nave 1161; 26
moved to Fleet chancel 13thc
Street 1161
St Bartholomew 1123, Augustinian choir c 1140; part of 12, 13
Smithfield; and cloister walk 14thc;
Hospital Dissolution changes
St Helen Bishopsgate before 1216; joint nunnery and parish 14
Benedictine nuns church, 12thc–16thc
St John Haliwell before 1127 Lewis 2010 9
St John of Jerusalem c 1144 church and crypt; Sloane and Malcolm 2004 19
Clerkenwell (Knights gatehouse
Hospitallers)
St Mary Clerkenwell c 1145 traces of cloister Sloane in prep 15
St Mary Graces 1350, Cistercian Grainger et al 2011 20
St Mary Overie c 1106, church: retrochoir 1212, Divers et al 2009 21
Southwark Augustinian tower 15thc
St Mary Spital 1197, Augustinian Thomas et al 1997 22
Merton Abbey 1117, Augustinian Miller and Saxby 2007
St Mary Stratford 1135, Savigniac, Barber et al 2004
Langthorne then Cistercian

Table 6.1 Religious houses in the immediate London area which either have standing medi-
eval or Tudor masonry remaining (sometimes within modern buildings) and/or are
or will be the subject of individual archaeological reports. Numbers refer to Figure
6.11. There were many other religious houses about which something is known, but
they are not the focus of current study.
around it were probably laid out in the 12th century. From then on the priory made vari-
ous attempts to close the lane which ran from the gate of Aldgate along the back of the
city wall and through what the priory must have claimed as its precinct.
Holy Trinity was established just inside the city wall, presumably in an area unpressu-
rised by development around 1100, where the large tract of land could be easily acquired.
It joined one other major house inside the walls, at St Martin-le-Grand, now commemo-
rated by a street name. Shortly after, three new houses were established, but in the open
or less-occupied land north-west of the City, so that when they had established their pre-
cincts with exclusive walls, the area outside Aldersgate, where Smithfield and Clerkenwell
now are, was in effect a zone of monasteries. First in 1123 came the joint foundation of
St Bartholomew Smithfield priory and the adjacent hospital. The priory church, reduced
to half its size at the Reformation (Figure 6.16 below), survives as one of London’s best
Norman buildings.29 A generation later, the London base of one of the crusading orders,
the Knights Hospitaller, was established at St John Clerkenwell in about 1144, and next

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 London 1100–1600
to it, at about the same time, the nunnery of St Mary Clerkenwell.30 The clerks’ well from
which these two houses took their local name was the focus of religious plays in the 12th
century, and no doubt this west, upwind side of the medieval city was very pleasant; but
little by little over the subsequent centuries the adjacent Fleet river became polluted
with human and trade waste, particularly from the tanners and butchers. In general, the
foundation of several rich priories by royal or noble sponsors in the first half of the 12th
century signalled that London was the place to be, and must have helped tilt the balance
against the old royal centre of Winchester.
One theme capable of further exploration in the future is the life of religious women in
nunneries, both in the City and in the surrounding rural area. Piecemeal archaeological
work over the last few decades should be brought together for the most important nun-
nery in the City, St Helen Bishopsgate, which seems to have been attached to an existing
12th-century parish church (Figure 6.12); the conventual buildings to the north have
been lost, some surviving in their lower parts to the late 19th century, being outside the
area of the Great Fire. The church stands today as a thriving religious centre, though the
explosion of a second terrorist bomb (before that at St Ethelburga’s, this time in April
1992) nearby at Baltic Exchange prompted a radical re-ordering of the interior.31

Westminster Abbey
‘Westminster Abbey’, said the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for England
in 1924, ‘is the premier historical monument of England’.32 At the same time, what we see
to day is almost all the result of restorations, starting in the 17th century but mostly from
the last 200 years, and it is by no means always a faithful copy. On the exterior, there is
only a minute portion of original medieval fabric showing; inside, which cannot concern
us here, is a national and nationalistic treasure house of monuments, statues, glass and
tiles of both native and foreign workmanship.33 The Abbey remains, patched up and in
modern dress, the most extensive collection of medieval monastic buildings in the Lon-
don area, at least above ground.
The Anglo-Saxon abbey church was rebuilt by Edward the Confessor and consecrated
in 1065; parts of the standing conventual buildings date from this time. A Lady chapel
was added at the east end of the Romanesque church after 1220. Henry III began a total
reconstruction of the church in 1245; this produced the present east end and crossing,
its spaces adapted for temporary seating required at coronations. Sculpture and orna-
ment was extravagant, the style French to match the royal style of Henry’s cousin Louis
IX especially in Paris. This rebuilding by Henry has been called the ‘most lavish act of
architectural patronage by a single individual in the history of Western Europe during the
central Middle Ages.’34 The west front received its existing doorway in the middle of the
14th century, but the west end was never finished before the Reformation. In 1503, the
Lady chapel at the east end of the building was replaced by the Henry VII chapel.
The abbey (for its plan, Figure 3.3) has lost many of its peripheral buildings, such as
a west gate and beyond it an almonry, a north gate and a separate belfry, but south of
the church there are still many medieval buildings of great importance, though there
has been much restoration and some war damage. After a fire in 1298 the Romanesque

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Figure 6.12 Plan of St Helen Bishopsgate, a combined nunnery and parish church (RCHME
1929). The church has been reordered after bomb damage in 1992; the church of-
fices at the south-west were replaced in 1955–7. The present south wall of the church,
with traces of previous windows and the original south door, is one of the City’s best
fragments of a 12th-century building (shown in heavy diagonal lines). The subsequent
phases of standing fabric are of the 13th to 16th centuries (various types of thin lines).

cloister was replaced in stages in the 13th and 14th centuries; an octagonal chapter house
was added on the east side in the 1250s.35 Its crypt probably served as a royal treasury,
another use prompted by the royal palace being next door. Like Merton, Westminster
had a separate infirmary around a cloister, in this case originally 12th-century but rebuilt
in the 14th. On the other, more public west side of the cloister is the dean’s (formerly the
abbot’s) house, of the 1370s, with its later parlour block of two storeys. All these parts can
be seen or glimpsed down restricted corridors by visitors today.
Archaeological work has been in small projects, usually prompted by restoration or
refurbishment. Lowering of the floor in the undercroft east of the cloister in 1986 found
evidence of flooding in the 11th century, and perhaps timber buildings of the early ab-
bey.36 Fragments of the Norman west towers have been identified within the present lat-
er medieval and 18th-century west towers of Hawksmoor.37 Restoration of the Henry VII
chapel in 1973–96 resulted in much research on that building, and a detailed report has
recently appeared concerning the Chapter House.38 The precinct wall seems to date from
the 13th century, and it survives to a height of about 8.5m (28ft) south of the medieval Jew-
el Tower; beneath the wall a length of the main abbey drain, well-built of stone, has been
recorded as it ran east to the river.39 Artefactual and environmental evidence from the me-
dieval monastery in recent excavations is not large, but a small excavation has produced

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 London 1100–1600
evidence of more than twenty varieties of fish being consumed.40 Future excavations in the
abbey, particularly if human burials are revealed, can profit from a detailed documentary
study on the health, diet and life expectancy of the monks and their servants.41
In the countryside: Merton and Stratford Langthorne
Further out in the countryside, a monastery could truly spread itself with a precinct which
would dwarf any neighbouring village, such as at Merton, 11km to the south-west of Lon-
don. Here an Augustinian priory was founded in 1117 on the banks of the small river
Wandle.42 The existing road pattern was altered as the precinct established itself. There
must have been a stone church and probably a cloister from the beginning, from which
some loose decorated pieces were found, but the structures of which they were part remain
unlocated. The church which formed the centre of the medieval complex was completed by
about 1200. The findings from this large project are noted in other chapters of this book.
One highlight of the Merton excavations was that although most of the layers and the
artefacts they contained had been removed at the Dissolution, a few items remained
which hinted at both the religious life and the status of the many secular people who
lived in the monastery, and the visitors. There were fragments of sacring bells, rung when
the sacred wafer was elevated in the Mass, rosary beads, and three sets of a chalice and
paten (plate), of base metal, probably used in life, but in these cases buried with men who
were presumably priests or canons. Apart from the numerous cooking pots, there were six
turned wooden bowls for use at table, three with marks of ownership carved or burned
onto the base. Wooden bowls and platters have now been recovered from a number of
London monastic sites. The production of written documents is attested by the finding
of nine styli, one of bone and the rest of lead, and there were several paint palettes made
from large shells, containing residues. Knives, keys and buckles from belts could have
come from religious or secular residents; there was also a gold finger ring inscribed with
the words ‘I am not seeking to love anyone but you’ in French, found in the 16th-century
demolition rubble of the infirmary hall.
Merton illustrates one of the most important aspects of these excavations of religious
houses, their rich architecture. Fragments come from a very ornate late 14th-century
cloister, specifically from the tracery of the screen which formed the side of the cloister
giving onto a central space (Figure 6.13). As the illustration shows, five pieces of tracery
form the basis of the reconstruction, which is of half the bay; it would be mirrored to the
left to form the whole bay, so there were four window-like openings or lights in each bay.
These pieces are also remarkable because they were not found on the excavations on the
priory site, but had been taken in the 16th century to be reused by the king at Nonsuch
Palace, a few kilometres away, and found there in 1959. The mouldings were so well pre-
served that there may have been an intention to reuse the structure at Nonsuch, but in
the end they were reused as foundation rubble.43 Now they have not only been reunited
with other carved stones in a history of the priory, but also form part of the display in the
Museum’s new Medieval Gallery. This is architecture of the highest quality.
Other monasteries in the medieval countryside have been explored, such as the Cister-
cian (originally Sauvignac) house at Stratford Langthorne, on the river Lea in east Lon-

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Figure 6.13 Reconstruction of half of one bay of the tracery from a cloister of the late 14th cen-
tury at Merton Abbey (Mark Samuel, based on work by Terry Ball). These pieces
were taken at the Dissolution to nearby Nonsuch Palace, possibly to be re-erected;
but they were then used as rubble in the walls of Henry VIII’s palace, to be found
there in 1959. This rebuilt masterpiece can now be seen in the Medieval Gallery of
the Museum of London.
don. This was excavated between 1973 and 1998 in the unpromising setting of a railway
depot and its railway lines. The archaeological product was limited as far as the monas-
tery buildings were concerned, but rich in details of burials in the monastic graveyard.44
In general, the religious houses explored in recent decades in the Greater London Area
have not produced as much material, structural or artefactual, as their colleagues nearer
the centre. Both the Merton and Stratford Langthorne complexes were badly damaged
by later suburban building.

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 London 1100–1600
Hospitals and friaries
Hospitals, perhaps a Norman innovation, surrounded London by the middle of the 12th
century, but much of the new information about them is from the 13th century. The
development of a hospital has been studied at St Mary Spital, outside Bishopsgate, in
excavations between 1982 and 1991.45 The hospital was founded in 1197, but the exca-
vated areas relate to its development from a refoundation in 1235. A stone infirmary and
chapel were built, forming a large single T-shaped building, and a cemetery laid out.
At the end of the 13th century a second, smaller building was added to the infirmary on
the Bishopsgate side, perhaps because features of the chapel, such as tombs and altars,
were encroaching into the infirmary. A cloister with buildings around it was added to
the complex, and there is evidence of timber buildings. A couple of decades later the
extension was itself widened. The architecture of these buildings, evidenced particularly
by recovered fragments of worked stone, has been called ‘functional but accomplished’.
During the 14th century accommodation for the hospital staff of lay sisters was added,
and there were houses for wealthy residents (corrodians), as shown again by stone details
such as windows of secular character and fireplaces. Life in this hospital will be touched
on in Chapter 7 concerning human health.
A new development of the 13th century was the arrival of the mendicant orders or the
friars. Because their mission was to urban populations, and they were supposed to live by
begging, they are only found in towns. North of Newgate [street] in the City of London,
the Greyfriars began acquiring their site in 1222. Eventually they would have a church
only exceeded in length and height by the cathedral itself, no mean feat. Between 1243
and 1337 there were between 70 and 80 friars there. Several queens and other nobility
chose to be buried or have their hearts buried at the Greyfriars, and by the time of the
Dissolution, it held more prestigious tombs than the cathedral. A piece of Purbeck mar-
ble flooring thought to be part of the original floor of 1310 was still in the choir of the
Wren church on the site in 1929;46 it was finally destroyed in the bombing of the church
in the last War. The foundation of the south side of the Greyfriars’ church, later the
Wren church and now a garden within a ruin, was seen in 1976.47 The Dominicans were
established in their new house next to St Andrew Holborn by 1224, and this must have
been a substantial construction, since it held 80 friars, and in 1263 a general chapter of
the order met there, with 700 friars.48 But very little is known about this site and it is now
probably destroyed. In the 1270s the Blackfriars moved to a new site within the city, next
to the cathedral (which was distinctly unneighbourly about this at first), acquiring the
site of the first Baynard’s Castle and the adjacent Montfichet’s Tower. They rebuilt the
city wall around their new precinct, the only extension of the wall in the medieval peri-
od.49 The Whitefriars were established in 1247 south of Fleet Street, and shortly after two
further houses in the east part of the city, where street names still recall them: the Austin
Friars in 1253 and the Crutched Friars before 1269. There has been piecemeal work on
all these sites in recent years, but no large publication, though some is intended. Friaries
are found in a few towns in the region, and have been occasionally excavated, as with the
Blackfriars at Guildford, where much of the medieval church and part of its graveyard
were recorded in 1974 and 1978.50

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Order London Paris

Dominicans (Blackfriars) 1221 1217
Franciscans (Greyfriars) 1224 1230
Carmelites (Whitefriars) 1241 1259
Austin Friars 1253 1259
Order of St Clare (Minoresses) 1293 1270s
Carthusians (Charterhouse) 1371 1257
Table 6.2 Dates of foundation of mendicant orders in Paris and London.
How many friaries a town had is a broad index of its vitality and population. Friaries
were urban institutions, and the London friaries should be compared with those in other
British towns, especially those larger towns which had several friaries, and with those in
continental towns, for instance in France.51 One of the most important additions to the
concreting townscape of medieval Paris in the 13th century was a series of new friaries,
just as in London (Table 6.2). The coincidence of dates of foundation for the friaries in
the two capitals demonstrates the rapid international rise in enthusiasm for the mendi-
cant orders, and would suggest that the two sets of friaries might be studied in parallel.
It is probably also the case that in both cities the design of parish churches, at least the
large ones which could stretch to a nave and two aisles as at St Bride’s, within earshot of
the Blackfriars, was influenced by the new internal architecture of friary churches, with
their wide spaces intended for maximum preaching effectiveness. At the same time, the
two main London friaries, the Blackfriars and the Greyfriars, were quickly filled with
noble and other prestigious tombs, rivalling those of the cathedral itself.

Building at religious houses before and after the Black Death

In the 13th century and the 14th century up to 1348, the main monasteries continued
to expand and bring their buildings up to date. At Temple the rectangular, aisled 13th-
century chancel we see today (Plate 6) was built; at St John Clerkenwell a major redevel-
opment of the early 14th century replaced the chancel with one of three aisles, presum-
ably with liturgical significance. A nave with one aisle, probably a cloister to the south,
and several new conventual buildings filled out the picture; an outer, secular court south
of the main complex was developed with buildings, some of which lined the approach
streets and those skirting the sides. The monastery was the national centre of the Knights
Hospitaller order, and its precinct began to resemble a modern diplomatic quarter where
officials and dignitaries of many nations lodged when in London. The inner precinct
was in effect a palace, with a gatehouse, inner and outer courts, halls and chambers, to
compare with the larger Westminster Palace as well as similar residences of bishops and
archbishops in the capital.
Sporadic additions or rebuildings can be charted at the houses studied in recent
archaeological projects. At Holy Trinity Priory a period of concerted rebuilding from the
late 12th century to about 1350 is indicated by a combination of the documentary and
archaeological evidence. The canons had a latrine or reredorter, of the late 13th century,
over the city ditch on the north side of the precinct, and a doorway through the city

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 London 1100–1600
wall. Merton Priory suffered the fall of its church tower in 1222, and there was thereafter
much rebuilding and new construction, including a cloister, chapter house and a large
infirmary complex with its own cloister and chapel (it is not clear which of the cloisters,
if either, was the site of the stonework shown in Figure 6.13). Henry III was a frequent
visitor, and the architectural details of the buildings were often of the highest quality. In
the 14th century the church was extended to the east with a lavish Lady chapel, to make
it one of the longest Augustinian churches.
After 1348, there were very few new religious foundations in England; but there were
two in London, as it continued to have a special attraction. The Cistercian abbey of
St Mary Graces was established east of the Tower in 1350; a report on its development,
after excavations of the 1980s, is about to be published.52 On the north-west edge of the
City, on ground which was still marshy, the Charterhouse, a friary of the Carthusian order,
was established in 1371, on one side of a large plague cemetery. By 1392 its precinct was
over twice the area of the cathedral in the city centre. As with all the religious houses, the
ground was landscaped and stream valleys filled in to make a level place for the buildings,
despite opposition from local residents who regarded the fields as public space. The fri-
ary’s foundation, by Sir Walter Manny, owed much to urging from the bishop of London,
Michael Northburgh (1355–61), who while on a journey to and from Rome had become
acquainted with and had admired the Charterhouse in Paris. The London house closely
resembles that in Paris in layout and size.53 A considerable amount of the medieval fab-
ric and evidence of its later transformation into a post-Dissolution noble residence and
then school survives. There has been archaeological work here after damage in the War;
recent investigation has been on the periphery, bringing to light subsidiary courtyards
and service buildings, but also details of some of the cells for individual monks. In this
case there are also several versions of a 15th-century plan of the elaborate water supply for
the monastery, and parts of the system are occasionally found.54
The archaeological attraction of monasteries is not just their religious buildings and
artefacts or ecofacts which illustrate a cloistered life. The outer courts of monasteries
contained service buildings such as barns and stables, but also workshops for craftsmen
(this important aspect of London religious houses as centres of craft production is hardly
studied) and houses for corrodians, lay people who had paid to live there. In the decades
before the Dissolution, it also seems that several London monasteries were cashing in on
the lucrative urban housing market by renting out large parts of their outer precincts to
be the sites of houses, some of them high-class.55 This has been observed at many religious
houses of different orders around England.

Burial, the after life and memory

What monastic and parish churches shared was a role in burying the dead. How and
where the dead were buried tells us much about social importance and beliefs about the
afterlife. In general, the rich and powerful secured burial in the best and holiest part of
the church, whether cathedral, monastery or parish church; and conversely those without
power or money tended to be buried on the periphery, either on the holy site or increas-
ingly, with the development of new graveyards on the edge of the built-up area of London
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 Religion and religious ways of life
in the 16th and 17th centuries, on the edge of town itself. At a parish church, burial
places were graded by the fee: at St Mary at Hill, around 1500, it cost 13s 4d to bury some-
body in the chancel or a chapel, sometimes the nave (‘the body of the church’) cost 6s 8d
(ie half the previous fee), and outside in the churchyard only 2s (less than a sixth).56 But
there were many factors which complicated any simple arrangements. Prominent people,
who left wills, often wanted burials next to previously deceased family members: husband
and wife, father, son or daughter. In the case of a married couple, the grave was often
reopened to accept the widow or widower. Parishioners could also specify other places
of burial, such as in the porch, or a certain spot in the graveyard. In 1361 Thomas de
Lillyngston specified that he should be buried in the church of St Botolph Aldersgate
‘opposite the place where Cristina his wife is accustomed to stand’; presumably the wom-
en’s side of the church did not have pews.57 He did leave his wife most of his City property,
so perhaps this constant reminder was borne patiently.
People were buried in a variety of ways, from the elaborate to the makeshift. At the
top end of the social scale were lead coffins beneath monuments, as in the cathedral, or
stone coffins with lids, especially at monastic sites. It is difficult, with the passage of time,
to estimate how many people were buried in wooden coffins; examples have been found
in complete condition, as at St Lawrence Jewry and elsewhere. Whether or not in a coffin,
a body was often bound in a shroud, and pins survive. Cistercian monks were buried in
their habits or normal clothing, and priests were sometimes buried with a pewter chalice
and paten. At the lower end of the scale, no doubt, there were many burials where a body,
perhaps in a shroud or perhaps not, was simply laid in a grave; and in one excavated case
at Stratford Langthorne abbey, an 18-month old child was apparently buried in a basket,
laid into the floor of the church.58 Archaeology also demonstrates that burials took place
in their thousands, over the centuries, in places for which relevant documents have not
survived: there is little in the documentary record, for instance, to indicate that St Mary
Spital was a major place of burial in medieval London.59 But the several thousand human
skeletons excavated on various sites within the St Mary Spital precinct in the last few years
need not astonish: at the contemporary Hôtel Dieu in Paris, records for several years
between 1428 and 1466, and not especially epidemic years, show that between 400 and
700 people died at the hospital each year.60
An illustration of the common grouping of prestigious, expensive tombs or brasses
around the altars in a church is shown by the plan of 1929 of St Helen Bishopsgate above
(Figure 6.12); although peculiar with its two naves (the northern one for the nuns) the
church shows what we mean. On both sides of the high altar at the east end of the chan-
cel are tombs, that of John Crosby and his wife of the 1470s on the south. Beyond to the
south in a chapel added in the 1370s, in 1929, were several brasses, one of which is shown.
This was of Thomas Wylliams, who died in 1495, and his wife (Figure 6.14). For those
who could pay or had influence, this attraction to the holiness of the east end continued
after the Reformation: the tomb on the north side of the high altar is that of Sir William
Pickering in 1574, with its effigy in Elizabethan armour in a stone canopy supported by
Corinthian columns. In the newly claimed former nuns’ choir are two other tombs, of
Sir Thomas Gresham in 1579 (the tomb perhaps purchased in Antwerp and shipped

187
 London 1100–1600

Figure 6.14 A brass rubber at work at St Helen Bishopsgate in 1972 (English Heritage, NMR:
John Gay). Since 1992, the floor has been raised to the level of the foot of the ad-
jacent tomb of Sir John Crosby and his first wife (left), and the 19th-century screen
removed. The brasses, also shown in the plan of Figure 6.12, are still to be seen at the
church, in a different location. The windows were blown in by the explosion of 1992.

over) and another of 1636. St Helen’s also contains several notable medieval tombs from
another, demolished church, St Martin Outwich, transferred in the late 19th century, so
they are not relevant to the historic arrangement and preferences. It does however make
St Helen’s the best museum of London’s medieval ecclesiastical and Tudor funerary art.
From the early 16th century, some leaders of the community chose burial in vaults;
Henry Keble (d 1518), grocer and mayor, included a vault for himself on the north side
of the choir in his rebuilding of St Mary Aldermary; the vault was later used for two
other grocer-mayors in 1556 and 1565, reinforcing its significance. At the same time,

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 Religion and religious ways of life
burial both outside and inside parish churches must have been becoming a tiresome
and packed affair; a chapel called a charnel was added to St Mary Woolnoth by Sir Hugh
Brice, goldsmith, before his death in 1496, and charnel houses are mentioned at several
other parish churches. The possible use as charnels of vaulted rooms, accessible from
outside, beneath the east ends of churches has already been noted.
Until their 19th-century clearances, London churches were therefore honeycombed
with many generations of burials, both outside and within. The richest people, in their
tombs and exceptionally personally-endowed chapels, strove to be remembered. Today
the few remaining medieval churches in London look little like what they did in the Mid-
dle Ages, so it requires considerable imagination to reconstruct how medieval people
used churches to illustrate their beliefs and to provide memorials for themselves. At the
church with the greatest number of medieval and Tudor monuments in central London,
St Helen Bishopsgate, there is a cacophony of memorial statements, the range of which
has been noted above, further disturbed and distorted by the recent refurbishment. A
matching survival is a run of thirteen 15th-century stalls from the nuns’ choir, currently
standing against the east wall of their nave where their altar would have been. But with its
sea of movable chairs and tables for bible study, St Helen’s has moved on; and its function
as a framework of memory is perhaps fading. It is important, to protect this memory, that
those older tombs which are still in their original positions (such as that of the Crosby
couple, but there are others) should stay put.

Dissolution and Reformation, 1532 to 1600

In the 1530s, the many monasteries, priories and hospitals in and around London suffered
a variety of violent fates. Most, to differing extents, were granted by the Crown in pieces,
some large and some small, so that their previously exclusive and walled precincts were
claimed for secular ownership and broken up. In the City, the church of St Bartholomew
Smithfield was cut in two, since the lead roof of its nave was an attractive asset, but the east
half survived as a parish church, as happened at Greyfriars and Austin Friars. Other sites
passed entirely to courtiers, such as Holy Trinity Priory, dissolved in 1532, which became
one of the houses of the Duke of Norfolk (hence the present street name, Duke’s Place,
west of Aldgate), or Bermondsey Priory. Some of the hospitals were grasped by the City
to make a creditable stack of civic institutions for the poor and sick by 1600. Others were
put to various royal uses: St Mary Graces became the Victualling Yard for the navy. Mer-
ton Abbey’s copious stonework was plundered to help make Nonsuch Palace in Surrey.
On many monastic sites, the buildings were pulled down and their architectural finery
reused as rubble (Figure 6.15). In London, as in many places elsewhere, the demolition
phases of religious houses often contain stonework, sometimes with its paint intact, from
the unwanted parts of the complex.61 As has already been noted several times, all kinds of
religious buildings were rebuilt into something else: for instance, Thomas Hobson, hab-
erdasher, bought the redundant chapel of St Mary de Coneyhopelane, on the north side
of Cheapside, and made it into a warehouse with shops and lodgings above, which John
Stow, 50 years later, had to admit looked well.62

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 6.15 Two pieces of a mullion from a large window at Holy Trinity Priory, reused in a
rough foundation of brick about 1600. They probably originally joined to each oth-
er; the groove on the right-hand piece was for the original glazing, torn out during
demolition (MoLAS). Scale is 0.5m.
For the City, the example of St Bartholomew Smithfield can still be studied above ground
(Figure 6.16). The nave became the site of the graveyard for the post-Reformation parish
church, which lived in the walled-off choir; the parish school occupied the gallery. The
two transepts and the Lady chapel, all unwanted spaces, were destroyed or made into
secular buildings, like all the rich stone buildings of the priory itself to the south. The
door to the cloister, now also surrendered to secular uses, was blocked; today, as restored,
it houses what is probably the original medieval wooden door with its decorated straps,
which has survived through being used elsewhere. New timber-framed houses of impos-
ing size encroached on the site, including along the former west end which fronted onto
Smithfield. These included one which is still there, in restored form; its timber-framing,
hidden behind tile cladding, was only revealed in 1917 when a bomb dropped from a
Zeppelin exploded nearby.
In the outer, rural parts of the London region, parts of monastic buildings often survive,
when they were adapted at the Dissolution into grand houses. A rare example within the
present conurbation is Syon House, Isleworth, where an undercroft from the nunnery is
preserved beneath the 16th-century and later house. Others were retained as agricultural
buildings such as barns. They are a fertile research topic for the student of how monastic
complexes were taken over, hacked about, and reused by demolition contractors or new
owners. In Hertfordshire, for instance, a county of small monastic houses apart from the
regional giant of St Albans Abbey, there are fragments of medieval buildings within later

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 Religion and religious ways of life

N
house on
site of north
transept
by 1600 Cloth Fair

houses by 1600

parish school above

1
houses Nave demolished medieval
becomes parish new Lady Chapel
by 1600 choir screen
churchyard tower wall secular by 1600
of 1628
2
C13th
vaulting
retained
cloister

blocked

Chapter house former

to Dominicans prior’s
house

0 25m

Figure 6.16 The effects of the Dissolution at St Bartholomew Smithfield, by about 1630. The
new parish church of St Bartholomew the Great was compact, only half the monastic
church. The parish school occupied the north gallery of the choir; its brickwork can
be seen today in Cloth Fair. Key: 1 the tomb of the founder, Rahere, 15th century; 2,
the original position of the post-Dissolution burial of Sir Walter Mildmay, 1589.

constructions, which may reflect the cloister, at The Biggin, Hitchin; and a well-preserved
gatehouse within a post-medieval building at King’s Langley, probably due to the site
being used only as a farm for generations after 1540. In Hertfordshire documentary refer-
ences suggest that the eastern range of the cloister, containing the chapter house, dormi-
tory and sometimes library, was often deliberately targeted by the commissioners, intent
on stamping out the old religious ways.63 In the City of London, as far as we know, this did
not happen; the chapter house at St Bartholomew Smithfield survived a couple of dec-
ades to be given briefly to returning Dominicans in Mary’s reign, and the chapter house
at Holy Trinity Priory, though in unknown condition, became St James Dukes Place, a new
parish church, in 1622.
The dissolution of the monasteries was a prelude to, and set the scene for, the reforma-
tion of religion at the parish level. In the reign of Edward VI, especially in 1547–50, there
were severe official changes in religious practices which had dire consequences for cathe-
drals and parish churches all over England. Statues and other forms of imagery, such as
in stained glass, were taken down or destroyed; wall paintings were painted over as church
interiors were ‘whitened’. The cult of saints was abolished, so that was the end of chapels
and subsidiary altars. Inscriptions asking for prayers for the dead, laid in brass letters on
their gravestones, were chiselled out. Brasses were sold, and often reused elsewhere by

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 London 1100–1600
being turned over; brasses from several City churches, and from two London friaries,
have been found in churches in the surrounding counties.64
The Reformation and the related dissolution of the monasteries affected both church-
es and secular buildings in both strident and subtle ways. There must have been a great
feeling of liberation, of tearing down anything that was redolent of the past. The English
Reformation was also an assertion of English nationalism against foreign potentates: the
Pope, and countries like Spain which were his servants. It has been suggested that classi-
cal forms in the most polite architecture from the 1540s, such as the notable front to the
Strand of Somerset House, were deliberately espoused by the Protestant leaders of society
to make this complete break with the past.65 The monument of Chancellor of the Excheq-
uer Sir Walter Mildmay and his wife which survives at St Bartholomew Smithfield (he died
in 1589) is eloquent: classical, with use of marble and his crest, but no statuary or other
images. He had founded Emmanuel College Cambridge on the site of a closed-down friary;
this foundation is declared on his tomb as the work he would like to be remembered for.
The great majority of religious works of art in London were destroyed at the Reforma-
tion, or in the succeeding purges of the 17th century; but some were buried, and some
perhaps taken abroad or sold there for reuse in more sympathetic countries. A statue of
St Christopher with Christ on his shoulder was found in a wall near Newgate, perhaps
one of the prison walls, in 1903 and is now on display in the Museum of London. In 1882,
excavation in Mark Lane found twenty fragments of English alabaster sculpture ‘embed-
ded in a brick culvert’; they were from several panels which would have been a focal point
of worship in a church or possibly a rich household in the 15th century, and featured the
Betrayal of Christ, the beheading of a female saint, probably St Katherine of Alexandria,
the Nativity, and the Assumption of the Virgin.66 Whether the pieces were buried by a
reforming zealot or a person clinging to the old religion will never be known. Equally
intriguing are the claims sometimes made for objects or church furnishings now found
outside London, even abroad. A life-size wooden statue of the Virgin and Child which
was exported by a merchant called John Dutton to northern Spain, and is now vener-
ated in the cathedral at the small town of Mondoñedo near Lugo (Figure 6.17). This has
attracted a local legend that it came from medieval St Paul’s; but sadly this story is without
foundation. A suite of 18 fine 15th-century choir stalls with carved misericords at the par-
ish church of St Michael, Bishop’s Stortford (Herts), are also said to have come from the
cathedral. This story may have arisen because the Precentor of St Paul’s was rector of the
parish; but they fit the church too well, and were almost certainly made for it.
Churchwardens’ accounts tell a vivid story, for example at St Martin in the Fields at
Westminster, that is the medieval church which preceded the present building by James
Gibbs of 1726. The parish sold its communion silver, a bronze cross, alabaster images,
and even some of the images embroidered in the altar cloths. A plasterer whitened the
interior; painters then wrote approved texts, probably including the Commandments, on
the wall. They appear to have been paid by the yard, and wrote over 200 yards of edifying
words. A workman took three days to take down an unspecified number of altars. New
glass, probably clear or translucent, was put in the broken windows; where gravestones
had been removed, the floor was tiled over.67

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 Religion and religious ways of life

Figure 6.17 Wooden effigy of the Virgin and Child in Mondoñedo Cathedral, Spain. The cher-
ubs at the base were added in the Baroque period. All that can be said for certain
is that an Englishman called John Dutton provided the statue; there is no evidence
(yet) it came from England (author).

All these actions would leave archaeological traces, and they were repeated at every par-
ish church, so the Reformation can be studied at churches which, unlike St Martin’s, still
might have some 16th-century fabric left. There is not yet much archaeological analysis of
churches in the London area at this time, probably from lack of opportunity. One exam-
ple, the small parish church of St Botolph Billingsgate, was partly excavated in 1982. One
end of the south aisle had a 15th-century wall of chequerwork, of alternating white stone
(probably chalk) and flint (Figure 6.18); this was crudely pecked to take a layer of plaster,
probably originally white, some time in the 16th century. Vertical marks in the plaster

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 6.18 Wall at the east end of the south aisle of St Botolph Billingsgate church, which was
destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, excavated 1982 (scale 10 x 0.1m). This cheq-
uerwork facing was to be covered in anonymous plaster some time during the 16th
century, probably at the Reformation; the chalk blocks of the chequerwork were
covered with indentations to make the plaster adhere (MoLAS).

showed that an altar was placed against the newly decorated wall. Burials continued in
front of it, and the medieval floor tiles were relaid as each new burial was inserted.
One aspect not discussed here for lack of space is the tolerance for the faiths of immi-
grants from abroad (apart from catholics), which was generally the case in Elizabethan
London; Protestants from several countries were allowed to organise their own places of
worship here. It may be that in London, as is suggested for Antwerp, a policy of religious
tolerance was of great assistance in commercial expansion.68

Conclusions: the archaeology of religion

This chapter has attempted to summarise the form and meaning of parish churches; ar-
tefacts with religious connotations; the development and importance of monastic houses;
and archaeological study of burials and monuments. In London it should be easier to
study religion in the centuries from 1100 to 1600 than, for instance, housing or manu-
facturing. Besides copious documentary evidence for parish churches and monasteries,
quite a few medieval churches survive in the region; others lie beneath later rebuildings,
such as beneath every Wren church in the City. Over the centuries there have been losses:
of the seven medieval parish churches in the City surviving until World War II, three were
badly bombed; and then of the remainder, three others were damaged by terrorist bombs
in 1992 and 1993. But we can go into a dozen churches in outer London and step back
partly into the Middle Ages, which is more than we can for a medieval shop or farmhouse.
This good survival of basic physical evidence means that study of parish churches can be

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 Religion and religious ways of life
based on a combination of scrutiny of standing walls and below-ground excavation. To
study the character and development of medieval monasteries, since a very small number
of prestigious buildings have survived, the archaeologist has to be more patient and put
together the history of a monastery, friary or hospital from many excavations which have
taken place over decades, or even a couple of centuries. The occurrence of artefacts with
religious purposes or symbolism will be unpredictable, like that of most secular objects.

Parish churches
A list of objectives in church archaeology is easily drawn up; it will concern the settings
of churches and the landscapes into which they were inserted; the detailed process of
construction; furnishings, tombs and decoration;69 or, put another way, how churches
grew, how the building and its spaces helped to make the liturgy or services work; what
the fittings and architecture tell us about patronage and the way people used churches;
and how churches reflected the resources and failures of their localities.70
In all large European cities, it seems – Paris, Ghent and Bruges are examples – churches
were nuclei of the later settlement, forming hamlets at street corners, or small districts
sometimes surrounded by a ditch or other token boundary, which gradually coalesced
into the larger city during the 11th and 12th centuries. The medieval parish then reflect-
ed an older structure of the townscape, and was a form of communal or neighbourhood
memory. An extreme example of the parish churches being the centres of settlement
within a larger city is Venice, where each of the many component islands had a parish
church on it (60 by 1200), and each church had a campo or space in front. Whether this
process can be seen in the City and its immediate environs has still to be researched. The
City of London was smaller than Paris, and the tight cordon of the city wall would have
reinforced a notion of a single entity from early post-Roman times. It is however clear that
the early histories of London churches will come from excavation, since, as in other towns
with many churches, archaeological and structural studies have more to contribute than
the written record.71
London area churches shared a common plan (nave and side aisles, western tower usu-
ally in line with the nave) and general architectural style, perhaps as we might expect; if
there was more information about medieval churches in the City itself, we would probably
call that a London style which was used throughout the region. It is also clear that the
village and town churches in the area around London shared the same range of sizes as
those in the City, from small churches like St Mary Bedfont and All Saints Laleham up to
big rectangular churches, especially those in towns to the north, such as All Hallows Tot-
tenham and St Andrew Enfield.
After 1350, many towns suffered decay; nationally, ‘more town churches disappeared
in the century between 1450 and 1550 than ever before or since’;72 but not in London
or its immediate region. Religious observance, and money in its support, were constant.
Pruning of churches came only in the 1550s, and then only in a few City corners; a kind
of reorganisation which maintained the overall number of churches. This was perhaps
because London’s population was growing rapidly; and people needed churches. What
happened to individual parish churches at the Reformation, a critical time in London as

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 London 1100–1600
elsewhere, has hardly been studied and needs to be taken up by archaeologists. The Ref-
ormation, in Britain and in continental Europe, started in towns.Via its influential print-
ing industry, London colonised the rest of England with the new religious ideas. And in
some way, over which there is much argument, the Reformation was a kind of midwife to
the modern world.73 All was changing; and it is evident that protestantism itself, a new or
modified religion, was largely a product of urban debate and agonies.

Monasteries and the cathedral

The 13th and early 14th centuries were an era of ambitious building on the cathedral and
other religious sites which provided London with many of its landmark buildings for the
next 350 years. One drive was for hospitals, predominantly out in the suburbs, such as
St Mary Spital. By 1269 there were five orders of friars present in the city. Thus the extension
of St Paul’s from the 1250s to 1314 was probably as large a construction project as the works
at Westminster Abbey, but only one of many in and around London during that period.
After 1350, in the slightly longer period to 1530, it might be supposed that there was less
building. In fact, perhaps because of the increase in documentary and graphic sources,
there is more information. The character of new building is however different. There
were new foundations, at St Mary Graces and Charterhouse; but in the main the known
building works are piecemeal, adaptations or new buildings on a smaller scale. There is
no perceptible hiatus in building at major London churches during the 14th century.
The amount of construction at religious houses in the 1370s and 1380s is remarkable, and
it continued through the 15th century.
As shown in the map (Figure 6.11), the medieval City and its immediate environs had
at least 27 religious institutions (there were also several short-lived ones), with others at
Westminster; but of these, we can reconstruct the detailed plan of the precinct and its
main buildings in only half a dozen cases, with partial or hypothetical plans of perhaps a
dozen more. Paris, a larger place, had 31 ecclesiastical communities, of which at least 11
can be reconstructed in detailed plan, and there were far more in Venice.74 In addition to
the impressive series of reports on London’s monastic houses since 1997, several others
have been excavated but remain to be published: for instance the important Anglo-Saxon
and medieval nunnery at Barking, the subject of nearly twenty excavations and evalua-
tions since the 1720s. Here the plan of the great 12th-century church is laid out on the
ground, but the architectural fragments or worked stone from earlier investigations have
disappeared.75 The six friaries are all yet to be tackled, and archaeological work can make
a contribution here, since for historians there is a chronic lack of written sources about
all mendicant houses.76
In 1992, a national survey of monastic archaeology in Britain and Ireland took the view
that excavation of urban monasteries was a ‘problem’, mainly because only part of any
one monastic complex could be seen at any one time, and that was often pitifully small
and almost meaningless.77 To one looking for a vista across an entire monastery at once,
as one can still do in the countryside, that may seem so. But each of the London monastic
monographs has pieced together a bulky and informative record of the house by inter-
rogating antiquarian and excavation records which go back to John Carter in the 1790s,

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 Religion and religious ways of life
who recorded remains at more than half a dozen, and before him. This both produces
a catalogue of the buildings, burials and so on, and nominates research questions for
the future. Thus one of the largest of the monastic reports, that on the priory of St John
of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell, describes work on 19 excavations of 1978 to 2000 within the
suburban precinct, outside the City to the north-west. Twenty-six buildings were record-
ed, starting with the round nave of the church of the Hospitallers of 1144, charting the
development of the precinct up to and beyond 1600. Gradually these enormous building-
blocks are assembling into a library of hitherto unknown, or unrealised, information
about the important contributions of religious houses to all aspects of life, not only spir-
itual, in London and its environs (Table 6.1).
The great majority of the monasteries built in and around medieval London were
grander than those elsewhere in England, largely because of their wealth and their situa-
tion in or near the capital; St John Clerkenwell takes on additional national importance
as the provincial headquarters of an international military order. This gave its many fine
buildings an extra level of appropriate as well as necessary dignity and splendour. At the
same time, there are disappointments: the character of artefacts recovered from these
excavations has not been particularly international, and is characterised as much less
monastic than on most other London monasteries. More local research questions are
posed for future investigation, despite the amount that has already taken place: to inves-
tigate any early buildings and accommodation, to hunt for a possible infirmary, to gather
more material culture (artefacts) from pits, especially near the kitchen, and to explore
hitherto blank areas of the outer precinct.78 The contribution of the London monasteries
to national study of monastic life, for instance their food and drink, and their water man-
agement, or their probable crucial role in monastic architecture, has still to be summa-
rised.79 The archaeology of nunneries has not been addressed, though hopefully current
excavations at Syon Abbey, a Bridgettine nunnery, will begin the study, and there has been
excavation at the site of Holywell (Haliwell) Nunnery in Bishopsgate, where part of the
church was revealed in 2006–7: the bases of two of the columns of the late 12th-century
south arcade remained in the soil, intact up to a yard high.80 The archaeology of religion
is flourishing and productive, but there is still much to do.

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 —7—

Human health and the environment

So far in this study, the approach to each topic has been to start with the wider view
and gradually focus on smaller elements, down to the smallest detail. With houses, for
instance, we started with plans, then room functions and furnishings, then materials
which included individual timbers and bricks. This chapter, on examples of archaeologi-
cal reconstruction of the medieval and Tudor environment, works the other way; from the
bones of individual people, to reconstruction of their immediate environment, though by
studying the smallest of creatures and seeds, and finally the largest factors in the environ-
ment, that is the River Thames, the sea and the weather. From all these we can perhaps
make suggestions about the quality of life during these centuries.

Human health
Over the 500 years surveyed in this book, perhaps three million people died in the Lon-
don area. Another large number lived and worked here before moving on or going back
to their rural roots. We can sketch out the growing contribution of archaeological studies
of human skeletons, usually found in graveyards, to an overview of human health at this
time. There are many factors to consider: those influencing health and predisposition to
disease today, and in all likelihood in the past, include intrinsic factors such as a person’s
immune system (which is related to diet), age (young and old people tend to get more
diseases than adults in their prime), genetic disorders or susceptibility, sex and ethnic-
ity; extrinsic factors include diet, occupation, social status, population density, levels of
hygiene, environmental pollution, climate and weather (including its seasonality, such as
the prevalence of bronchitis in winter and asthma in summer).1

Basic characteristics
First, some of the things which excavated human skeletons can tell us. The main samples
used are 234 skeletons of the 11th and 12th centuries from the parish churchyard of
St Nicholas Shambles, north of Newgate Street, excavated in 1975–9;2 126 skeletons from
the burial ground at St Mary Spital, Bishopsgate, excavated in the late 1980s;3 664 buri-
als at the priory of St Mary Merton, excavated in 1976–90;4 and 634 victims of the Black
Death of 1348–50 excavated at the Royal Mint, immediately east of the Tower in 1986–8;5
with incidental details of some other smaller excavated groups. Before we begin, the

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 Human health and the environment

Figure 7.1 Skeleton of a man aged 32–35, 10th to 12th century, from the St Nicholas Shambles
site excavated in 1975–9 (MoLAS). His lower limbs did not survive, but his height
could be suggested from a formula using the length of his arm bones. He lost six
teeth during life, but was otherwise healthy. Scale is 2 x 0.1m.
possible differences between the groups of people buried in these four situations should
be stressed. The St Nicholas group, besides being early, is from a parish church, and the
majority of people buried would be local. The St Mary Spital group is from a hospital,
which would have drawn its clientele from the whole City and no doubt further afield,
including immigrants from other parts of England. The St Mary Merton or Merton Priory
group was overwhelmingly male, reflecting the predominantly male community though
with some female burials from outside. The Royal Mint skeletons comprise a catastrophe
group, from an epidemic by comparison with the other groups of very short duration,
only two years at most.
Here are two typical medieval skeletons as they were excavated, from the St Nicholas
Shambles site: a man (Figure 7.1) and a woman (Figure 7.2) of the same age. Their iden-
tities, and what they died of, are equally unknown.
Certain questions can be tackled fairly easily: the height of the skeleton (when most of it
survives), the sex and age, and any widespread conditions such as those attached to old age.
Average heights for men and women in the four London groups are given in Table 7.1.
These heights are within the range known from other medieval cemeteries outside Lon-
don: a survey of reports from many excavations of cemeteries in Britain dating from 1050
to 1550 calculated an average (mean height) for 8494 male skeletons as 5ft 7¼in (171cm)
and for 7929 females as 5ft 2½in (159cm). In the period before, AD 410 to 1050, with a

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 7.2 Skeleton of a woman aged 32–35, also from St Nicholas Shambles (MoLAS). Later
digging had removed her lower legs. Though in her early thirties, she suffered from
vertebral osteo-arthritis. Scale is 5 x 0.1m.

national total about one tenth in size of the medieval, the average male height was 5ft
7¾in (172cm) and average female height 5ft 3½in (161cm). In the period after, 1550 to
1850, with a total sample about one fifth of the medieval number, the figures were virtu-
ally the same as for the medieval period, 5ft 7in (170cm) for males and 5ft 2in (157cm)
for females.6 So it seems in general that medieval and Tudor men and women were slight-
ly shorter than their predecessors, but the same heights as those who came after them,
despite the supposedly improved diet of later centuries. It would be speculative to suggest
that the two slightly taller groups of London male skeletons, from St Nicholas and St Mary
Spital, show perhaps that people in London were taller. This is a valid, if unanswered,
question.
Calculating age at death from excavated skeletons like these is difficult, since only a
portion of the skeleton usually survives to be recorded, particularly in crowded cemeter-
ies where bodies would have been disturbed by others shortly after interment; and lack
of evidence on some skeletons for their age, except in the broadest of terms. Similarly,
calculating the proportion of men to women in any cemetery is beset by problems; mod-
ern practice is not to seek to assign sex to the skeleton of a person under the age of 18,
as changes caused by growth can interfere with any sexual dimorphism of the skeleton.7
Bones of babies are rarely found, as they are soft and can be easily disturbed by subse-
quent burials or burrowing animals. So neither of these statistics will be attempted here.
To comprehend the fragility of childhood, we can say that in 17th-century large towns

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 Human health and the environment

Excavated group Men Women

St Nicholas 5ft 8in (172.8cm) 5ft 2in (157.5cm)
St Mary Spital 5ft 8in (173 cm) 5ft 2½in (159cm)
St Mary Merton 5ft 7½in (172 cm) 5ft 4½in (164cm) [only 4 cases]
Royal Mint 5ft 6½in (169cm) 5ft 2in (158cm)
Table 7.1 Average heights for men and women in four London medieval graveyards.

generally only about half of all children reached the age of ten,8 and there is no reason
to suppose that this figure was less in the centuries before. Documentary evidence of age
at death is only available for the richest people, who no doubt had good food and a cush-
ioned life; a sample of 97 London merchants who were members of a livery company and
who died between 1448 and 1520 reveals that 48 of them, just under 50%, were over 50
when they died, and ten, or 10%, died in their seventies.9 We have no comparable figures
for women.
Some further characteristics of people can be suggested from their bones, as illustrated
by the large and comparatively undisturbed sample of 664 skeletons recovered from the
excavations at Merton Priory. Understandably, as this was a monastery, the male skeletons
outnumbered the female by a factor of over 11:1, so this group told more about men than
women. Three out of 37 male skeletons which could be assessed had a longer humerus on
the left side, indicating they were left-handed; at 8.1% this is similar to the modern figure
of about 10%, but lower than greater proportions of left-handed people at some other
medieval London monasteries, such as 19% of a sample at St Mary Stratford Langthorne.
Many of the old men and women had problems with their backs; there was no difference
between the sexes, as sometimes might be thought. Men and women frequently bore
heavy loads.

Disease, trauma and causes of death; plague

Most people die of something that does not affect their bones. Study of skeletons can
only report diseases which affect bones; and in all excavated cases, we never have all the
skeletons from a churchyard or church. But medieval skeletons do furnish examples of
known conditions which are of use to researchers and present day doctors, and specialists
can chart and sometimes extend the history of specific diseases.
Diseases of bones have included congenital (abnormalities in development, which may
be inherited), especially to the spine and hip; and degenerative (joint disease), including
vertebral osteoarthritis, which was common, osteophytosis, intervertebral disc disease, and
Schmorl’s nodes in the spine. A notable find at St Mary Spital, and confirmed in lesser num-
bers on many other sites since, was a high incidence of diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperosto-
sis (DISH), when ligaments on the spine ossify, which is taken to be a hazard of eating well,
especially in older men as in this example; today it is associated with obesity and late onset
diabetes. Deformities of the toes might have been a result of wearing tight shoes.
Infectious diseases identified include tuberculosis, traditionally associated with poverty
and overcrowding, and osteomyelitis. There have also been examples of tumours, usually
thought to be benign, and circulatory disease. One widespread condition has been cribra
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orbitalia, small pits in the bone behind the eyes, which is taken to indicate lack of iron in
the diet and therefore anaemia; it has also been associated with stress. There were exam-
ples of this at St Nicholas Shambles, in the early group, and it continued in the other later
samples. Dietary deficiencies may also have been the cause of two possible cases of scurvy,
which is associated with lack of vitamin C, at St Mary Merton.
Another individual there with severe tooth wear could only have eaten sloppy, cooked
or processed food in later life. The state of dental hygiene and disease among these skel-
etons can be studied in detail. There were high incidences of dental caries, examples
of dental abscesses, periodontal disease, calculus, ante-mortem tooth loss, and enamel
hypoplasia.10 This last may be due to childhood problems with nutritional or psychological
stress, or severe illness. From research into parasite eggs in human faecal matter found in
cesspits it seems likely that maw worm, whip-worm and various species of tapeworm were
common in the intestines of medieval Londoners of all classes.11
Fractures have included broken arms, fractured vertebrae, collar bones and legs, and
one example of a man who survived being shot through by some kind of projectile like
an arrow. Another had been hit on the head with a sword, and probably died shortly after
since the edge of the wound did not heal. One man buried at St Mary Spital had several
injuries, including two broken ribs. The discussion of violent blows to seven skulls which
left traces at Merton Priory concludes that an element of violence was not unusual on
London monastic sites, from the bone evidence.12 Accidents from work would be interest-
ing if they could be identified, but reported cases are few and there may be wishful think-
ing in attributing any particular fracture or condition to a possible cause.
Can archaeology inform on the nature and standard of medical care in London? So
far no clear examples of medieval or Tudor surgery have been reported, though other
aspects of care can be inferred when skeletons of older people show they lived with
increasing immobility. Many women must have died in childbirth, and one example has
been excavated at St Nicholas Shambles.13 The most extensive excavation of a medie-
val London hospital, its largest, was at St Mary Spital Bishopsgate, founded in 1197 and
expanded several times. This hospital took in pilgrims, the poor, the sick and pregnant
women. Few medical instruments were found, probably because doctors were peripatetic
and valued their equipment. By 1300 there was a new infirmary block with two floors,
probably to segregate the sexes. The building was heated and the patients had lamps
and perhaps individual lockers (suggested by a large number of keys). Small ceramic ves-
sels called pipkins may have been used by the lay sisters to make herbal remedies which
might have contained hemp, poppy, mustard, mallow and hemlock.14 A second phase of
excavation in more recent years has uncovered several thousand graves (the hospital was
functioning for over 300 years) and undoubtedly there will be more to say on this topic.
There are two medical matters of considerable importance in the medieval world which
can be reviewed from the archaeological point of view: leprosy and plague.
Leprosy was particularly rife in Britain in the medieval period, but opportunities for
studying it in London so far have been few. London was ringed around, by 1300, with a
number of leper hospitals, which tended to be on roads or in outlying villages: at Kensing-
ton, Camden, Barking, Highgate, as well as in Westminster (the later St James’s Palace)

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and in Southwark. A recent count has listed at least ten. In a way, the number of leper hos-
pitals round a town is an index of the number of people there. One hospital was St Giles-
in-the-Fields, Holborn, beneath the present 18th-century church there. It was founded in
the early 12th century by Queen Maud, wife of Henry I, who also founded Holy Trinity
Priory Aldgate. It was quickly endowed with royal income and gifts from London citizens,
including one who was a leper himself. The lepers tried to live as a religious community,
farming gardens and lands around the hospital. In 1402 the number of lepers here was
between nine and fourteen.15 Leprosy was still a problem: fishmonger William Baybroke
thought a bequest to ‘lepers in London’ appropriate when he drew up his will in 1413.16
The disease can affect both skin and bones, so it should be perceptible in excavated skel-
etons. It can also be detected by ancient DNA analysis of human bone. If a leper hospital
burial ground could be excavated, it would be important in that medieval society expelled
sufferers, and that the diseased were socially excluded. It is one of archaeology’s priorities
to explore the lives of excluded groups.
The Black Death was the most destructive plague in medieval Europe, which it devas-
tated quickly and briefly in 1348–50. But many basic things about it are still disputed,
even the nature of the epidemic itself and what caused it to spread so rapidly. In Britain,
though archaeologists on site are often asked ‘Have you ever found a Plague Pit?’, the
answer is that despite many cemeteries being excavated, for research purposes or ahead
of redevelopments, very few from the Black Death have been identified. This is strange,
given that in Britain between 1 million and 1.8 million people, and possibly more, are
thought to have died of it.17
In the City, we know from wills that family members died within days of each other;
sometimes the son before the father. The parish churches, monastic houses and cathe-
dral, numbering over 100 establishments, would have taken the first brunt of the hor-
rendous casualties. We know that two supplementary plague graveyards were established
in 1348–9, at West Smithfield or Charterhouse, where the burial ground remains largely
intact, a research resource for future study, and at East Smithfield, where some parts
also remain but which was largely excavated at the Royal Mint site in 1986–8. Two long
trenches forming mass graves and many other individual graves were excavated; 759 skel-
etons were recovered. The men, women and children here exhibited the normal range
of bone conditions and fractures. Whatever the plague was, it did not affect the bones, so
study of the Black Death itself from this population is limited. The excavators do however
make some suggestions which should be tested in future excavations of plague cemeteries
when they can be reliably identified. One was that both men and women in this group,
clearly victims of the plague in 1348–50, were on the whole shorter in stature than several
comparable groups: those in the parish cemetery of St Nicholas Shambles, generally of
almost two centuries before; those buried on the Royal Mint site during its use after 1350
as St Mary Graces abbey; and most other English medieval populations studied from
skeletons. This smaller size was more marked in women. An adult’s height depends on
genetic make-up, health and nutrition, but it might be suggested that these people had
endured a starvation diet during their early lives. The excavators do not speculate further,
but the inference is that the known economic difficulties of the first two decades of the

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14th century rendered the population, particularly of poorer folk who seem to be in this
graveyard, vulnerable to the plague when it came.18 In the end, we do not know accurate-
ly, or even approximately, how many people in London died of the plague. A stone cross
erected at the Charterhouse cemetery, at an unknown date, had an inscription which said
that more than 50,000 people were buried in this cemetery alone;19 one modern estimate
has been that the total of all deaths was about 20,000.20 Some form of plague returned
to London on several occasions after 1349, and its occurrence in 1361 prompted a royal
order from Edward III which would have archaeological consequences: because the infec-
tion was thought to be aided or caused by the blood of killed beasts running in the streets
and by offal thrown into the Thames (a major source of drinking water), butchers were
told to take their waste products and dump them at ‘the town of Stratford’ in the east and
‘the town of Knightsbridge’ in the west, a cordon sanitaire of several miles.21
If the conurbation of London suffered a loss of up to 50% or more (that is about 40,000
deaths) from the plague, it was not alone among European cities. Towns in France and
Germany were particularly badly hit. Rheims lost 55% of its people between 1300 and
1422, Toulouse lost 77% of its population between 1300 and 1450; it is calculated that
Florence lost two-thirds and Hamburg lost 76% in the plague. Venice lost 60% of its popu-
lation between 1347 and 1349.22 But in no European medieval city yet has there been an
archaeological study of the consequences of the plague.
The special graveyards set up to deal with the thousands of corpses from the Black
Death in 1348–9 are an important archaeological topic, in that the plague cut down all
sections of society and all ages in a very short time. It is also a case where death by a means
which leaves no traces on the bones can be identified; the victims of plague are identified
by the location and arrangement of the graveyard from documentary records, not from
osteological characteristics. But otherwise, diseases which affected the body but not the
bones are invisible to us: so that study of the incidence of apparently widespread diseases
which would inform on poverty and poor living environments such as typhoid, cholera
and dysentery cannot make significant progress.
Unfortunately, the St Nicholas Shambles cemetery is still the only London medieval par-
ish church graveyard to have been excavated and analysed, samples from other churches
such as St Lawrence Jewry and St Benet Sherehog being too small for meaningful analysis.
Thus a comparable medieval parish sample is needed in order to demonstrate whether
the St Nicholas group is truly representative.23
Meanwhile, the basic characteristics of the skeletal samples from all the above excava-
tions are on a database which can be consulted. The size and quality of the London in-
formation is attractive to outside researchers: a project is studying teeth from the Black
Death victims, in an attempt to determine via ancient DNA analysis whether the disease
was really caused by Yersina pestis as long supposed, rather than another agent similar to
the Ebola virus, which has been recently proposed. The post-Plague burials from St Mary
Graces, in the abbey itself, will be investigated by DNA analysis to see if the later epidemic
of 1361 can likewise be detected. Research also continues on the older victims of the
Black Death, who will have lived through the famines of 1315–17. Diet, and places of
geographic origin of the people, may be illuminated by scientific analysis. Research also

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continues on the victims of diseases where the bones were affected, such as tuberculosis,
syphilis and leprosy.

The environment of buildings and of sites; gardens and cultivation of herbs

How much can be deduced about the environment of buildings, ditches and pits on prop-
erties in old towns? This has been an issue since the onset of concerted thinking about
urban archaeology in the 1970s, and embraces more than the strictly environmental. An
impressive pioneering project studied seeds, insects and shellfish on the 10th-century and
later site at Coppergate, York, excavated in 1976–81. The resulting report is candid about
its successes and failures, but registers that in generally damp conditions surrounding
timber buildings, craft activities could be suggested by study of samples from the dirt on
floors: there was evidence of plants used in dyeing, sheep lice no doubt from processing
of fleeces, and an abundance of timber shavings. Further, there could be speculation
about general uses of buildings: human lice were less present in floors of the late 10th–
early 11th century than in floors of the 50 years before 975, perhaps indicating that the
later structures were less domestic or perhaps that the people were cleaner. Some of the
insects even indicated that the buildings may have been used more in summer, a remark-
able seasonal note for a place like York, where occupation of properties all the year round
would be expected.24
One objective in the study of seeds is to explore their possible medical use. The bulk
of medieval medicines were based on herbs, and there was a formidable literature which
apothecaries used, a tradition blending alleged wisdom of ancient Greek and Roman
authors with their own experience. Scores of diseases or conditions could be alleviated
and often cured by specific plants, all found in the countryside or roundabout the town
itself. Sage and tansey prevented premature child-birth, several plants improved eyesight
or hearing, white lilies and wall-rue cured baldness, marigolds and saffron combatted
smallpox. Vomiting could be induced or stopped, ulcers and wounds cleared up. White
teeth and clear skin were easily attained; the seeds of the herb rocket, mixed with vinegar
and the bile (secretion from the liver) of an ox, banished freckles. This particular recom-
mendation comes from John Gerard, apothecary and botanist who had a garden in Hol-
born. In 1597 he published his great Herbal, which is a fascinating source of information
on the medical uses of scores of native and foreign plants. For the present purpose two
of Gerard’s activities can be noted. First, he and his colleague apothecaries scoured the
lanes, woods and heaths around London for plants which they used: he found horse rad-
ish, which was thought to alleviate sciatica and several other conditions, at Hoxton, ‘in the
field next to a farmhouse leading to Kingsland’, or betony, a remedy against the bitings
of mad dogs and serpents, in a wood at Hampstead. Second, perhaps more important for
archaeological research, he experimented in his garden with new species, often from
seeds brought or sent to him by colleagues who had travelled abroad: ginger, red pepper,
potatoes, tobacco (the ‘henbane of Peru’), which was chewed and smoked, and maize.
Gerard did not think much of maize, but allowed that ‘the barbarous Indians, which
know no better, are constrained to make a virtue of necessity and think it a good food’.26
The effort to extract all possible information from studies of seeds in archaeological
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 London 1100–1600

Figure 7.3 Reconstruction, cutaway without the end wall, of Building 103 of the third quarter
of the 12th century on the Guildhall site (Faith Vardy, after Damian Goodburn).

deposits of these centuries is however a blunt tool. Seeds can survive for centuries and
thus contribute to ‘background noise’, that is be relics from an earlier period, even the
Roman. Many plants grew both wild and in gardens. How many poppy seeds do we need
in a sample before we suggest that it was being used for medicinal purposes? Although
the following paragraphs try to reconstruct medieval and Tudor gardens, it may be that
analysis from seeds is better value at a more general level, such as when it undoubtedly
shows a change in a local landscape due to human encroachment or developments. This
is the case at the excavation of 1 Poultry, of strata from the 11th century. This area near
the open Walbrook stream, or several contributory parts of it, was previously waterlogged,
as shown by the plant remains. But in the 11th century there are more perennial plants
which grow in relatively dry situations with a moderately high level of nitrogen, for exam-
ple on roadsides and besides walls. The improvement of drainage and ordered disposal
of rubbish is shown by these plants, such as white horehound, scotch thistle, henbane,
burdock and greater celandine.27
Let us see what the environmental archaeologists can do. A first example comes from
the Guildhall excavations where a street of early 12th-century buildings was excavated
(Figure 4.1 above). Among them was Building 103 (Figure 7.3), the uses of which could
be suggested by animal bones and insects.
This low building with rounded corners was part of a row along the lane which led to
the 12th-century Guildhall. The lack of a hearth suggested it was not for human use, but
was at some time probably a byre for animals. From within it came bones of lambs and
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 Human health and the environment

60

et
tre
S
59 51
lk

55
Mi

53
6
s
47
ing

bo
ild

un 7
da 81
bu

ry
by
bly

13
00
ba
pro

94
88 116

96

0 10m

Figure 7.4 Pits on medieval properties at Milk Street, City of London, excavated in 1977 (after
Schofield et al 1990). The shaded pits are those sampled as listed in Table 7.2. The
stone-lined cesspit 116, with material in it dated to 1270–1300, produced the wood-
en bowl shown in Figure 4.17.
piglets. But human refuse (household and craft waste, human faecal material) thrown
outside it suggests it may also have functioned as a habitation. Beetles and flies in these
deposits were those which like foul and fluid urban settlement waste. Plant remains from
the yard included cultivated plants, wild fruit seeds, and plants possibly used as medi-
cines. On the street side of the building were wattle structures which were probably ani-
mal pens, in the street.28
Second, a study of botanical material from rubbish pits on medieval London properties
was published in 1991.29 This concerned 106 samples from pits and occupation layers of
the 10th to 12th centuries on sites around Cheapside, so the evidence is from the begin-
ning of our period, but it forms a useful starting-point. The illustration here (Figure 7.4)
is of one phase of pits dug on properties at Milk Street, assigned to the period 1050–1100.
These must have lain behind timber buildings on the street, layers of which did not sur-
vive to be recorded. A property boundary dividing the pits into two groups is known by

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Northern property
Pit 6 goosefoot, hemlock, celery, stinging nettle, elder, rushes, spike-rush, sedges
Pit 7 fumitory, corn cockle, blackberry/raspberry, pear/apple, stinking mayweed
Pit 47 buttercup, opium poppy, fumitory, lesser stichwort, blackberry/raspberry, docks, nettle,
henbane, elder, sedges, oat, wheat
Pit 51 buttercup, opium poppy, campions, goosefoot, oraches, wild strawberry, plum/bullace,
pear/apple, sun spurge, knotgrass, pale persicaria, black bindweed, docks, nettle, elder,
spike-rush, sedges, barley, rye
Pit 53 buttercup, campions, fat hen, oraches, blackberry/raspberry, pear/apple, pale
persicaria, docks, elder, rushes
Pit 55 buttercup, lesser spearwort, opium poppy, shepherd’s purse, dyer’s rocket, campions,
lesser stichwort, fat hen, goosefoot, oraches, blackberry/raspberry, wild strawberry,
sloe/blackthorn, plum/bullace, pear/apple, carrot, knotgrass, pale persicaria, black
bindweed, docks, nettle, henbane, elder, stinking mayweed, knapweed/thistle,
nipplewort, rushes, wheat
Pit 59 buttercup, opium poppy, fat hen, oraches, vine, blackberry/raspberry, plum/bullace,
knotgrass, nettles, elder, spike-rush, sedges
Pit 60 blackberry/raspberry, black bindweed, nettles, henbane, elder, cat’s ear, rushes, sedges
Pit 80 buttercup, opium poppy, corn cockle, campions, lesser stichwort, fat hen, oraches,
cultivated flax, blackberry/raspberry, sloe/blackthorn, plum/bullace, sour cherry,
pear/apple, chervil, hare’s ear, water dropwort, fool’s parsley, dill, knotgrass, pale
persicaria, black bindweed, docks, nettle, henbane, elder, self-heal, stinking mayweed,
corn marigold, creeping thistle, cornflower, lesser knapweed, nipplewort, cat’s ear,
hawkbit, bristly ox-tongue, thistle, rushes, spike-rush, sedges, oat, wheat
Southern property
Pit 88 buttercup, campions, ragged robin, chickweed, greater stichwort, fat hen, oraches,
blackberry/raspberry, pear/apple, fool’s parsley, knotgrass, pale persicaria, black
bindweed, docks, nettles, henbane, black nightshade, yellow rattle, stinking mayweed,
dandelion, rushes, spike-rush, sedges
Pit 94 buttercup, ragged robin, bog stichwort, chickweed, goosefoot, blackberry/raspberry,
cinquefoil/tormentil, wild strawberry, hemlock, nettles, water-plantain, spike-rush,
sedges
Pit 96 blackberry/raspberry, elder, sedges

Table 7.2 Seeds from 10th- to 12th-century pits on properties at Milk Street (Jones et al 1991).
1300, and it is likely that there were several properties here, but only two can be distin-
guished.
Nine pits on the northern property were sampled, and three on the south. The seeds
from them are shown in Table 7.2.
Remains of some plants are widespread. Sedges and rushes were used as floor covering
or, at this early date, roof covering. Small quantities of food and medicinal plants may
represent spillage from food preparation. Ubiquitous fruit seeds and pips probably came
through the human gut, confirming the interpretation of most of these pits as cesspits.
Also present were potential garden plants (opium poppy, flax, dyer’s rocket, celery) and

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weeds, suggesting cultivated areas nearby. Large numbers of elder seeds were found in
many pits both on this site and on other sites in the study, but it is impossible to say wheth-
er these were the remains of food, waste from tanning, or came off nearby bushes. This
analysis shows what medieval pits produce: a wide variety of plant species which may be
from a multitude of origins and functions. But it does prompt questions about the mean-
ing of all the seemingly rural or hedgerow plants in this supposedly urban context.
These two examples, from Guildhall Yard and nearby at Milk Street, are both sites of the
early medieval period and from the centre of the medieval conurbation. Other reports
are available.30 There do not seem to be any examples of comprehensive environmental
studies of individual properties or buildings from later in the period, or from the country-
side. It would be illuminating to study, in similar ways, a medieval farmyard or a medieval
barn in the London area.
Monastic sites were more limited in their day-to-day functions than secular buildings
on a city street, with less turnover of owners and functions, and they offer cleaner, less
adulterated information about immediate surroundings. Here are two cases, one small
and the other large. The first is a rubbish pit attached to a 13th-century stable in the outer
precinct of St John Clerkenwell. It occasionally held standing water, and was periodically
filled with vegetable debris, rather like modern garden cuttings. This included flowers
indicating meadow, such as buttercup, daisy and dandelion; others characteristic of
arable fields such as poppy, corn cockle, and sheep’s sorrel. These probably came from
fodder provided for horses in the adjacent stable; or from stable sweepings. Compost and
dung heaps are suggested by the insects present.31
A battery of environmental analyses employed on samples from the excavations at
Merton Priory widens our focus to the surroundings and possible ecological footprint of
an entire community, in this case an important monastery with royal connections. The
priory was founded in 1117 on top of a Roman road in marshy ground percolated by
many slow-moving streams of the River Wandle, a southern tributary of the Thames. The
environmental archaeologists were (as usual) asked to investigate many things, including
monastic diet, the use of herbs in medicine, the functions of buildings and open areas,
and the nature of the surrounding landscape. Their analyses were of animal bones, seeds,
molluscs, beetles and pollen, and the whole period from 1117 to after the dissolution
of the monastery in the 1530s could be considered.32 Many different plants were identi-
fied, but the majority are catholic in their choice of habitats (cultivated land, disturbed
ground, wet or damp environments, and so on), so argument about them is constrained.
Plants like dock (Rumex sp) and nettle (Urtica dioica L) could be found in many situations,
both natural and man-made, and therefore are of limited use in analysis of what was
going on. Plants which conversely favour only one type of habitat are very infrequent, and
include the likes of fool’s parsley, a weed of cultivated land, and in the Merton case several
plants from the water’s edge, such as water dropwort, bullrush and crowfoot.33
Freshwater snails indicated still or slow-moving weedy water in drains. The priory man-
aged to keep its many water channels clean, as evidenced by whelks. Some of the beetles
liked feeding on weeds of rough ground. Herbivores such as sheep probably grazed near-
by, since there were some dung beetles; yet other kinds are associated with ash and elm

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trees. Post-Dissolution use of part of the site for dyeing may be indicated by finds of dyer’s
rocket and weld in quantity; dyeing is one industry which can be detected by analysis of
seeds.34
The pollen spectra, taken from a single sample in the silt in a fishpond within the
abbey, its deposition datable only to the medieval period and 16th century, confirmed a
landscape of free-standing water, possibly a reed swamp with bullrushes, but with beech,
ash and elm trees growing close to the site. Pollen of trees which were probably deliber-
ately planted included walnut, juniper and yew. The pollen of cereals was present, but
could have been derived not only from fields, but from amounts brought in to feed the
residents and their horses.35
One recent development in archaeological studies has been the archaeology of gar-
dens, but so far much of the published work about London concerns gardens of the 17th
century and later.36 A combination of good documentary evidence and careful sampling
can be used to develop the archaeology of gardens in medieval and Tudor London, even
in the centre. First, an example of the documentary evidence. Many details of the garden
at Carpenters’ Hall in London Wall [street] are known from the company accounts.37 The
Carpenters’ Company had established their hall there in the 1420s. In 1490, box trees
were planted in the forecourt of the hall, and herbs were set in knots, a general term
introduced around this time for intricate designs, including mazes.38 There was a vine,
for which a frame was made in 1491. A vine, or a small number of vines, was one of the
features of several gardens in London in both medieval and Tudor periods; vineyards are
mentioned as such in the 15th century, including one in Gold Lane north of Holborn,
though clearly they were by then unusual. The Carpenters’ garden contained a great
arbour with roses in 1547, and bundles of poles were a frequent purchase in the accounts.
In 1572–3, some ‘twykes’ (?twigs, or possibly poles or fastenings) were bought for the
roses. The garden had at least one piece of turf, since the grass was cut in 1583–4. Privet
and honeysuckle were bought to plant over the arbour. From purchases in 1565 and
1568 the following seed list of mainly vegetables with a couple of annual flowers can be
constructed: beet, bugloss, camomile, chicory, clary (Salvia sclarea L., ‘Clear-eye’), endive,
gilly-flower (clove), hyssop, langue-de-boeuf, lavender, lettuce, marigold, parsley, rose-
mary, sage, sorrel, spinach, stock, sweet marjoram and thyme. In 1577–8, when the five
gardeners were involved with maintenance, the seeds included costmarie (balsam herb),
hyssop, lavender, marjoram, ‘mawdelin’ (sweet maudlin), parsley, primrose, rosemary,
sweet john, thyme and winter savory. The colours of the flowers would be whitish-blue
(clary) or yellow (langue-de�boeuf), besides those of the well-known herbs. The flower-
ing period for most of the species would be June and July. Such details are available for
several other company gardens from the 15th century.
Second, the information from a plan. A plan of the Clothworkers’ garden in 1612
(Figure 7.5) is not quite the earliest example in London to show the ornamental beds
called knots: a plan of the Erber, a large house whose site lies beneath Cannon Street
railway station, of 1596 shows a larger garden with two rectangular beds, in which are a
total of ten knots of two sizes.39 But the Clothworkers’ plan shows how the garden was
highly regarded as an essential and graceful part of the hall complex. Clothworkers’ Hall

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Figure 7.5 Plan by Ralph Treswell of Clothworkers’ Hall, Mincing Lane, and its garden in 1612.
The parlour (P) ended in a bay-window which deliberately overlooked the garden.
The other room functions are: B buttery, H hall, K kitchen, Pa pantry, and W ware-
house (Schofield 2003).

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 London 1100–1600
was rebuilt in 1548, and the parlour in 1594, both in brick. A vine was planted in 1530–1;
it was regularly pruned, and by 1611 had covered one of the brick walls. The garden was
managed by the beadle, who lived in the block fronting Mincing Lane. A few plants are
mentioned, such as eglantine, hyssop, rosemary, winter savory, thyme and ‘Jarmander
speedwell to set the knot’ in 1570–1; presumably one or both of the knots had blue flow-
ers. The knots would have been at least partly made with plants, especially flowers, but
there is no further information in this case. Here is also a clear example of a parlour
window, with canted sides, arranged to look into the garden. When this indulgence in a
formal gaze began, some time in the medieval period, is not yet apparent. To look out
over a garden was to be one of the purposes of a long gallery, in Tudor mansions in town
and country. That must be why galleries are usually on the top floor of the house. A for-
mal garden was to be admired from a viewing point, not just walked through.
London can claim to be the setting of the earliest dated plan of a specific garden in Brit-
ain, that of 1562–5 of the gardens around William Cecil’s large house on the north side
of the Strand. Although the plants are not known, the garden included a spiral mount, a
central section crossed by paths, and an orchard planted in quincunxes (diamondwise).40
Though they were rare in the central city, orchards are occasionally shown on Treswell’s
surveys: there was one in Tothill Street, now in central Westminster, in 1586, and another
off Fenchurch Street in the City itself in 1612. By this time individual larger trees were
almost absent in the intramural city, though the copperplate map of about 1559 shows
one in the courtyard of the bishop’s palace at the west end of St Paul’s. Just beyond
the city walls, for the moment and before the great expansion of building around 1600,
there were still clumps of trees, hedgerows and ornamental gardens, some with summer
houses.
At a high social level gardens became more formal, arranged, polite; but in other parts
of town, they could still grow vegetables or fruit. Two extracts from Hollar’s remarkable
bird’s-eye view of central London of about 1658 close this brief survey, to show the differ-
ent sorts of gardens including orchards and vegetable plots immediately west of the City.
South of the Strand, Elizabethan and Jacobean mansions had formal gardens in Renais-
sance style (Figure 7.6). These gardens, in a tradition started by Henry VIII at Hampton
Court in the 1530s, were expressions of stately, quasi-royal control of the surroundings
of grand mansions; all was pomp, order and symmetry, places suitable for promenading.
They were symbols of power, prestige and noble magnificence.41 The extensive lawns of
Somerset House were previously the gardens of Anne of Denmark and then Henrietta
Maria, queens of James I and Charles I, but now denuded of their statuary. Further east,
however, formal designs were much in evidence.
In contrast, half a mile to the north-west, there were what must be market gardens, like
modern allotments, in the area immediately south of St Giles in the Fields, now Denmark
Street and the streets around Charing Cross Road (Figure 7.7).
So much for the rich documentary evidence for gardens and vegetable plots. Some
progress has been made on the archaeology of London gardens, but chiefly from the
16th century; in general, the range of seeds recovered from 16th-century deposits in
London is similar to that from medieval deposits.42 The only sites reported in detail were

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Figure 7.6 Formal gardens south of the Strand, as shown by Hollar in about 1658 (GL). The
houses, from left to right, are Somerset House, Arundel House, and Essex House.
The line of the main ranges of the first two houses was still based on the 14th-cen-
tury bishops’ residences around which they grew; the 17th-century gallery at Arun-
del House (centre) had bay windows overlooking the garden, in a tradition which
began with the royal palaces such as Bridewell in the 1520s, a short distance to the
east. There are very few trees in these gardens. In the garden of Somerset House, a
game of bowls is under way.
within the monastery of St John Clerkenwell. The buildings of the monastery from the
14th century, increasingly resembling the headquarters of an international order, which
it was, would have had gardens around them from the foundation in the 12th century, but
they were recorded archaeologically only from the 14th. Several gardens were identified,
but their deposits were layers of earth or occasional rubbish pits. A well nearby had, in
its lowest silty fill, a late 15th- or 16th-century pottery sprinkler pot, used as a watering-
can. One of the gardens displayed evidence of bedding trenches, though for unknown
plants. Pits dug in the garden contained seeds of plant food remains and weeds, but also
of plants which may have been grown there: columbine, opium poppy, fumitory and St
John’s wort.43
After the Dissolution, an area on the west side of St John’s Street just outside the inner
gate of the monastery (the one which still stands) was cleared of its medieval buildings
and a Tudor mansion, Berkeley House, erected on the site around 1580. Behind the
main buildings, overlooked by a short terrace with an open arcade in the manner of such

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Figure 7.7 St Giles in the Fields church and gardens, by Hollar around 1658 (GL). This shows
the former leper hospital church after rebuilding in 1624–30 but before rebuilding
into its present form in the 1730s. The boundaries of the garden plots and orchards
were probably of some antiquity. They were covered with streets and houses in the
1680s, shortly after this view.
houses, was a formal garden of four squares divided by gravel paths, surrounded by a
brick wall. Excavation here in 1986 found a small area of bedding trenches in one of the
squares, a privy in the garden, a position known on other London house-sites, and garden
soil which was comparatively rich in debris of pottery sherds and animal bones, indicat-
ing both that perhaps rubbish heaps had been added to the soil, and that it would have
crunched underfoot. Chickens may have been kept here.44
Finds of ceramic watering-pots are made on London sites (sprinkling pots from the late
14th century, larger watering cans in pottery from the 17th century), and from Radcliffe,
east of the City, has come an isolated sundial gnomon, of 16th-century date.45 But gener-
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ally the archaeology of medieval and Tudor gardens in the London area has not got very
far, though it is ahead of the comparable archaeology of gardens in Londinium in the
Roman period. Garden archaeology is a prime example of a subject where archaeologi-
cal work can fill out and yet be informed by the availability of considerable documentary
evidence.

The Thames, water pollution and floods; earthquakes

The now standard array of environmental analyses, as undertaken at Merton and else-
where, was employed to study a whole town, that is Westminster or at least the south
end comprising the Abbey and Palace, in excavations mainly of 1991–8 associated with
the construction of the Jubilee Line extension of London Underground. The individual
sites were small, but the resulting overview was large: of how Thorney Island, between
the two streams of the Tyburn river as it met the larger Thames, was gradually occupied,
extended and eventually obscured from the landscape by human agency over a thou-
sand or more years. The excavators claim that ‘a high degree of confidence can now be
placed on our understanding of the nature, shape and size of the island from the post-
glacial period [10000 BC] to the present’. Until some time after 4500 BC, Thorney Island
was only a sandbank in the curve of the Thames. By 3000 BC, it was an island covered
with vegetation, and may have had a human population. Evidence of diatoms, unicellular
algae which are sensitive to the salinity, alkalinity, and nutrient status of water, shows that
the Thames was sometimes saline here, as the tide occasionally surged up the river. By the
time of the establishment of the abbey in the 10th century and the palace in the 11th cen-
tury, the Thames was fully tidal at Westminster. Major floods deposited silt on the island,
yet despite this the abbey and palace held fast and in the latter case expanded. The north
end of the 11th-century Westminster hall, which still stands as rebuilt in the 1390s, looked
out at first over the marshy edge of the northern arm of the Tyburn as it met the Thames,
hardly a royal forecourt, which it was to become by the 12th century, with its fountain.
But then, as the report notes, ‘the process of urbanisation makes detailed ecological
reconstruction difficult’ because of human interference or perhaps we should say the
conduct of human life, and by the later medieval period, ‘the ecological signal is hope-
lessly confused.’ The environmental analyses suggest that by 1500 there were very few
clumps of trees around, though there were ornamental trees and orchards (compare with
the engravings and property surveys, as mentioned above), and the flora were confined
to open areas on the fringes of the town or ditches. Thus a picture of broad strokes, not
detail, is possible, as we study the ecological footprint of a complete urban community
over centuries, from the landscape which preceded it up to its fullest urban state.46
The analysis of Westminster touches on several questions: the quality of Thames water,
which many people drank – how salty or polluted was it? – and broader matters of the
frequency of river floods or inundations by the sea, which would radically affect people’s
lives.
A custom from the time of Ernulf, bishop of Rochester in 1114–24, was that his man-
or at Lambeth should produce one salmon a year from the Thames for the monks of
Rochester.47 We know from documentary accounts and from the evidence of fish bones
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on archaeological sites that many types of freshwater fish were eaten in London: eels,
sprats, shad, salmon and the occasional sturgeon. Neither of these sources tells us cat-
egorically how much came from the rivers of the region, and some would have come from
managed ponds. Monks and nuns ate a lot of fish, but a national survey concludes that
sea fish were far more important in the monastic diet than freshwater fish, which seem to
have been rather a special dish.48 There should be more research on fishing in medieval
rivers and streams, and perhaps a strategy could be devised to thereby study how fresh
or unpolluted the rivers were, especially the Thames itself. In 1756 William Maitland
claimed that many species, including pike, salmon and sturgeon, were still being success-
fully fished in the Thames above London Bridge.49 As to fishponds, excavation of them
may not provide a useful range of species in them, since they were frequently cleaned out.
The consumption sites are better indicators (see Chapter 4 above for brief references to
fish in people’s diet).50
One fruitful topic of research concerns the history of the River Thames at this time,
together with study of sea surges and floods. Along both its banks, many structures sur-
vive in the foreshore, and the medieval history of its silts can be outlined since medieval
foreshores are often trapped below landfill sites, to be recorded when the sites are exca-
vated. Thus archaeologists can suggest that the building of the stone bridge in 1176–1209
caused silting to its west from the start; foreshores built up, and wharves had to stand
higher both against the rising water and because their foundations were higher. Archae-
ologists have now demonstrated that tides and the general level of the Thames were pro-
gressively higher from about AD 700 onwards, a trend which is perhaps still underway.51
The top of a 13th-century waterfront riverwall or revetment was fully a metre above its
more ancient Roman predecessor. This rise in the river level was in concert with a general
rise in sea-level.
There are many documented freak tides, floods and destructive breaches of river
defences; inundations could be particularly disastrous in the flat countryside downstream
of the City. Destruction and silting left by floods are recorded archaeologically on the
Southwark waterfront, even close to the bridge. What might be worth study is how these
documented floods coincided with similar occurrences on rivers in continental Europe,
even those well away from the coast. There was a bad flood in Southwark in 1297, and
in the winter of 1296–7 the level of the Seine in Paris rose temporarily to a new height.52
Does this indicate a generally very wet winter? In October 1294, according to chronicles,
‘there arose so great a flood on the Thames that it drowned a great part of the lands of
Bermondeseye and of all the country round about, which is still called the Breach’. The
revenues of the nuns of Barking Abbey were reduced in the 14th century by flood damage
to their lands north of the river. Settlement and development on the entire Isle of Dogs
area, the surface of which was several feet below river level each day, was a constant bat-
tle, and at least one hamlet here was abandoned in the 15th century probably because of
recent floods.53 London Bridge was constantly being attacked by sea surges or exception-
ally high tides, and Kingston bridge was damaged by a flood in 1435.54 Sea floods and in-
undation of marshes or estuaries were destructive around the coast of south-east England
in the late 14th and especially early 15th centuries: a flood of 1421 wrought havoc on both

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sides of the North Sea, and in Sussex the Pevensey Levels, rich farmland, were lost to the
sea.55 Fifteenth- and 16th-century floods had a radical effect on the history of the Neth-
erlands: villages were lost, ports put out of action. People began to think differently. But
earlier, in the early 12th century, the Flemish towns of Ypres and Saint-Omer had profited
greatly from flooding, which had opened up and increased their waterways and access to
international trade.56 Perhaps we should investigate the effects of floods and tidal surges
on the material and mental history of London. This is one aspect where London, great
though it may have been, was weak; the forces of nature were greater.
Finally, south-east England was not immune to earthquakes, though they appear to have
been rare. In 1381 a tremor was felt in Canterbury and London, where it may have dam-
aged the cathedral. Another more harmful occurred in London in 1580, when several
people lost their lives, and many churches and houses were affected; clocks and bells in
many church towers, and the Great Bell in the belfry at Westminster, struck by themselves
for the duration of the tremor.57 There might be evidence of this in remains of buildings.

Weather, volcanoes and air pollution

I am not equipped to survey the possible effects of climate and the weather on standards
of living, which is by no means a straightforward task. In general, long-term climatic shifts
influenced economic change, but did not determine living standards; whereas short-term
fluctuations, such as extended wet winters or droughts, certainly had effects.58 Wet sum-
mers affected the harvest, then far more than today. There were clearly fluctuations in
temperature, sometimes severe: the Thames froze at intervals, not only after the stone
bridge of 1209 created a slow-moving pool, but even before, in 1150; in 1262 the freezing
lasted three weeks. In 1281 the ice on the river was so massive it took away five arches of
the bridge itself. When the Thames was frozen, the Venetian ambassador reported to his
masters in 1609, ‘the City is in a state of siege’. But what may seem to be a climatic factor
influencing life may be economic instead. The bishop of Winchester had vineyards plant-
ed in his fields in Southwark in 1285–6 and again in 1308–9; but English vineyards seem
to have declined due to competition from Gascon producers, not from colder weather.59
Archaeologists and scientists are now discussing the archaeology of pollution. The black
cloud of coal smoke over London was a concern from the 17th to the 20th centuries, but
it is not yet clear whether there was much pollution in the centuries considered here
(though kings occasionally complained). In the 17th century, it was thought that the
development of the West End was partly a result of rich people wanting to avoid the fumes
of the city to the east. Pollution in the medieval and Tudor periods still has to be brought
together as a topic. At a local level, people were concerned about the smoke produced
by industries, particularly in metals, which were carried out within houses. In 1371, for
instance, the good folks of Cannon Street and Eastcheap complained about two plumb-
ers who melted their solder in a yard called Woodhawe, ‘to the great damage and peril of
death of all who shall smell the said smoke’ and they cited witnesses who said ‘whosoever
has smelt the smoke therefrom has never escaped without mischief.’60 After enquiry, how-
ever, the plumbers were allowed to continue, only raising the shaft of their furnace so that
the neighbours would be less offended. There are many anecdotes like this in the rich
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 London 1100–1600
documentary record, but archaeologists have not yet systematically compared them with
the archaeological evidence.
One recently-explored subject is the possible effect on medieval European climate of
volcanic eruptions far away. Mass burial pits of 13th-century date have been excavated
at St Mary Spital in Bishopsgate. These may represent one or more catastrophic events,
that is food shortages, epidemics, or disastrous natural events. One of the largest volcanic
eruptions in the last 1000 years occurred in the 13th century, as evidenced by ice cores
from both the northern hemisphere and the Antarctic. The exact culprit is difficult to es-
tablish, but one possibility is a volcano called El Chichón in Mexico, which after centuries
of dormancy erupted again in 1982. A spell of bad weather in 1258 and a very cold Euro-
pean winter in 1260–1 (a pattern which is usual after volcanic eruptions) may have been
caused by an eruption in 1258. According to medieval chronicles, many poor people died
in London from either hunger or pestilence at this time.61

Conclusions
From broken bones and worm infestations to the effects of sea surges and possibly even
climatic change, the medieval and Tudor environment can be reconstructed at the
human or (perhaps) at the global level. By studying sanitary arrangements and the way
the colossal amounts of everyday rubbish was dealt with around the town, we can begin
to make suggestions about the quality of life for people. We must however be careful to
note that standards changed over the centuries. The 12th-century lane at Guildhall con-
tained unhygienic timber buildings where cattle lived with people; but there can have
been very few such joint residences, if any, in London of the 16th century. By then houses
were probably cleaner, had more windows and they opened; indoor privies were wide-
spread, but facilities for washing and bathing were minimal. Prominent clothworkers or
carpenters could walk through their gardens redolent with perfumed flowers and pick
grapes from a vine, but most of their water came from a river which when tides were high,
or the freshwater flow was weak, was too saline to drink. In 1600, moreover, there would
be much about central London which reeked perhaps literally of the countryside. This
continued: milkmaids brought their cows into Georgian squares in the 18th century, and
sheep still walked into Aldgate for slaughter in the early 19th century.
Study of animal bones and seeds as information on people’s diet is discussed above in
Chapter 4. Bones of animals, birds and fish as indicators of the ecology or immediate
environment of London and its surrounding settlements might be brought together
when a sufficient number of sites, where the methods of recovery of bones were similar,
has been excavated within a small area of a village or a section of the conurbation. For
comparison, notable results are now available from decades of intense work at York. A
synthesis of results from 13 sites across medieval York, spread over a roughly circular
area 1.1km in diameter, suggested that bones were disposed of in whatever corners and
spaces became available; the Gilbertine priory at Fishergate may have been a compara-
tively clean place, but they tipped their debris into the adjacent river. The ecology of the
city was modified by the rubbish heaps: decomposing bones encouraged certain plants,
which encouraged insects, then birds, and so on. Scavenging birds such as red kites are
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known from deposits in York and London; and in York, though not definitely yet (to my
knowledge) in the capital, white-tailed eagles as scavengers.62 Clearly the human food
chain brings about its own environmental consequences.
It seems likely that pollen analysis will have greater success in rural areas than in medi-
eval town centres, producing a clearer picture of the landscape; in towns we know from
documentary and archaeological sources that rubbish dumps lay around for decades, in
some cases probably up to a century, and such a mixture, which includes pollen trans-
ported by domesticated animals in their stomachs, has to be taken into account. Having
said that, there is still a future for pollen analysis of urban deposits; work outside London
has suggested that Roman towns, with their efficient drains, were generally clean places,
with rubbish disposal carefully organised, whereas medieval towns were filthy. They also
used far more organic materials in their construction, which involved wattle and daub
walls and at least until 1200 in central London thatched roofs.63

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 —8—

London’s region

This chapter considers the archaeology of the towns, villages, farms and rural landscapes
around London, roughly out to the present orbital motorway the M25. This is a conven-
ient and totally arbitrary boundary.
Archaeologically, the London region is difficult to define. Indeed, it is best to think of
London as in many different regions, depending on the question.1 London’s region, its
area of influence, was expressed not only in the exploitation of natural resources and
agrarian practice, but also in the movement of people, the transport of goods, the pat-
tern of settlement and the transmission of ideas; even the extent of distinctive speech.2
London’s pull was unlike that of other major medieval English towns: in comparison say
to Leicester, Nottingham, Norwich and York, London had many more immigrants from
distances greater than 50 miles (80km) away, at least in the early 14th century, and prob-
ably at other times.
The immediate surroundings of London, Westminster and Southwark have been cov-
ered with buildings in countless uncoordinated stages since the 16th century. A sharp
transition from the built-up area to arable and pasture was probably a feature of the me-
dieval and Tudor conurbation (see Figure 5.5). When detailed maps illuminate the scene,
from the later 17th century, there is a similar crisp edge to the conurbation, though with
spikes along the major roads and with new streets being laid out into the fields. In the
1750s, as shown on Rocque’s map, there was a farm just over half a mile north of Oxford
Street, and another a similar distance east of St Leonard Shoreditch, in the fields before
Bethnal Green was reached. Further out, the metropolis took longer to cover the rural
landscape. Even in the opening years of the 20th century, hayricks could be found in
Cricklewood and Pinner, country lanes bordered by hedges in Edgware and Tottenham,
and what may have been traces of medieval ridge-and-furrow fields seen at Wembley.3 This
part of north London was still farmland.
A national survey of the countryside in medieval England, in 1988, emphasised the
inadequacy of the available information, on the one hand, and the apparent lethargy of
medieval farmers on the other. Rural sites have poor stratigraphy and even poorer meth-
ods of dating the strata. Pits were not filled with refuse, as helpfully in towns, but left to silt
up; presumably human waste was valuable and was spread with its animal equivalent over
the fields. By comparison to modern methods, the agricultural performance whether in

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 London’s region
raising stock or crops was pitiful, and did not improve over time. Medieval farmers failed
to realise the potential of their animals, either through ignorance or lack of resources.
Their agricultural tools did not change for centuries, indicating complacency. Only in the
16th century did things begin to change in all these matters.4 Further, study of medieval
plant resources concentrates on deposits in towns, at least so far.5 Though this may be the
national picture, however, the area around London was different.
Many of the features of the countryside and small towns around London have been al-
luded to and briefly mentioned in previous chapters: public buildings, houses, churches,
lifestyles and so on. This small chapter overlies those surveys with some themes of re-
gional importance or questions not yet dealt with.

Farms, manor houses and villages

By the 1170s, as described by William Fitzstephen, the area around the City of London
had rudimentary agricultural zones: gardens and orchards in the immediate suburbs,
pasture and meadow outside that, then woodland, and finally fields of corn. By 1200
most of the rural landscape we now know, or in the case of London can reconstruct,
was in place. By the close of the 13th century London appears regularly to have drawn
on an area of over 4000 square miles to obtain its annual grain requirement. Normally
it satisfied its requirements from within a 60 to 90 mile radius. A certain emphasis on
growing of oats in the region may have been related to London’s need for fodder for all
its horses. Low value grain crops such as oats and rye were grown close to the city, with
wheat further out – its higher price made transport worthwhile.6 The perishable products
of market-gardening and dairying assumed importance on manors within a few miles of
the city, as did firewood and charcoal sales on manors close to London or those with easy
access by water. West of London, in the medieval period, agriculture was comparatively
unintensive, but east of London, influenced partly by markets other than London across
the North Sea, production was intensively arable. Rural cornmarkets and the availability
of wood fuel meant that many bakers supplying London lived in villages within a radius
of about five miles.7
By the early 14th century, over a third of the land in England was owned by religious
houses. It has been estimated that only 3% was in possession of the Crown, but 37% of
monasteries.8 One feature of the countryside, from the 12th century, would have been
farms which belonged to a religious houses, including those based in London such as St
Paul’s or Westminster Abbey. Although the system of paying rent changed later to one
involving money only, at this early time the tenants of the cathedral paid money and pro-
vided barley, wheat and oats for the cathedral bakehouse to make bread for the canons
and brewery to make their ale. A specified amount of cereals was delivered to the bake-
house each Sunday by the manors in strict rotation. Each manor had to do this just over
three times a year; so they would have to store the crop on the farm, besides producing a
constant amount. One consequence of this is the size of the barns on some of the St Paul’s
estates, which are described in documents of the 12th century. At Ardleigh (Herts), there
were two barns, one in the farmyard, the other on the estate. The first was 80ft long by

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 8.1 Section and plan of the Harmondsworth barn in 1937 (RCHME Middlesex). Like
the village around it, the barn appears to have been spared through the cancella-
tion in 2010 of the project to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport.

40ft wide (24.4m by 12.1m), and 19ft (5.8m)high to the beams; the second was 58ft long
by 32ft (17.7m by 9.8m) wide, and 25ft (7.6m) high, which was probably to the ridge of
the roof. A barn at Walton on the Naze (Essex) was 168ft long by 53ft (51.2m by 16.2m)
wide, and a total of 33ft (10.1m) high. The barns would have resembled those surviving
in Essex, such as the contemporary Grange Barn at Coggeshall. A fragment of a St Paul’s
barn has survived at Belchamp St Paul’s in north-east Essex, though the structure may
have been moved; a pre-Conquest date has been claimed for it.9 An important standing
example in west London is the barn at Harmondsworth of the 1430s, on a moated site
which belonged to the Benedictine abbey of Holy Trinity Rouen; this has twelve bays,
and is 185ft (56.4m) long (Figure 8.1). Barns also formed important components of the
monastic houses themselves, to store the produce which was contributed from the farms.
One has been excavated at Waltham Abbey. A five-bay barn of about 1200 was extended
in the 13th century to an impressive twelve bays, a colossal 211ft (64.4m) long and 38ft
(11.6m) wide, making it the third longest medieval aisled barn in England, with a storage
capacity of 2500 cubic metres (90,000 cu ft).10 So it remains a possibility that excavated
examples, like this one, may be larger than the already impressive standing survivors.
It may be useful to consider as models investigations of medieval farms which have been

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 London’s region
possible towards or beyond the outer region, such as that at Stebbingford Farm, Felsted,
excavated in 1993, claimed to be ‘apart from Writtle... the largest and most complete
excavation undertaken to date on a medieval rural settlement in Essex’.11 This comprised
a farm developing between the mid 12th century and the mid 14th, with four buildings,
yard and field system; the range of evidence is impressive. Equally notable is that the farm
was permanently abandoned around 1350.
There still are some fields within the M25, and more outside. In counties blessed with
a higher proportion of rural landscape, there have been notable exercises to emulate,
such as a programme of concentrated field-walking in three adjacent parishes in south-
east Norfolk, reported in 1990.12 This found over 200 ‘sites’ (findings of pottery or other
archaeological evidence) of all periods from prehistory onwards in the three parishes, an
area about 5km square. Although some of these finds were no doubt from muck-spread-
ing over fields, the overall conclusions can point to high and low points in the history of
medieval settlement hereabouts, from the volume and extent of datable pottery. Perhaps
we could try field-walking in the London area; it would have to be on the edges of the
present conurbation, but that might have the merit of any recovered artefacts being more
meaningful in that muck from medieval and Tudor London or Westminster would not
have travelled that far. To study late medieval enclosure, dating of hedgerows from the
number of species found within sample lengths could be developed, if its methodology
could be clarified.13
Some aspects of rural houses in the London area have been outlined above, in Chapter
4. In the outer parts of the present conurbation, but far more in the countryside around,
there are hundreds of medieval and Tudor houses standing in part, patched up, as dwell-
ings. Study has concentrated in Essex, the south part of Surrey but especially in Kent,
where a survey of selected rural buildings in 60 parishes in the county was published in
1994. Kent has an unusual number of such houses (halls, farmhouses, cottages) surviv-
ing. Three main questions were addressed in this work, and can only be alluded to here:
the extent to which the survival of the buildings, and their forms, reflects different status
groups; what might have preceded the houses which exist today; and the degree of cer-
tainty with which standing buildings can be accurately dated by style of construction and/
or dendrochronology.14 These are completely archaeological questions, and the evidence
from excavations within London should be compared with these numerous standing
examples.
What is interesting is their links with London: how they resembled London houses, and
were often owned by rich Londoners. After all, Penshurst Place in Kent was built by John
Pultney, a London draper.
From the 13th century Londoners can be found as owners of land both in the country-
side and in the towns. By 1300 London merchants held manors at such places as Cray-
ford, Erith, Gravesend, and Walthamstow.15 Retirement into the countryside continued
to be popular in the 15th century; rich Londoners bought lands in all the surrounding
counties. In Hertfordshire, land values already reflected distance from the capital as early
as 1270; throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages, a line drawn between Sawbridge-
worth in the east and Langley in the south-west would divide the county into two almost

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 London 1100–1600
separate regions. This can be followed in the vernacular architecture, settlement patterns
and manorial customs.16 The southern of these two areas presumably reflected London
fashions and innovations more. Such a division might be found in Essex.
Northolt, now part of the borough of Ealing in west London, was a small parish of just
over 2000 acres (800 ha) with Anglo-Saxon origins. Excavation in the 1950s (in fact one
of the most important rural medieval excavations in England of the immediately post-
War years) on the site of the manor house, on a hill overlooking the village, found buri-
als and dwellings probably of 8th-century date.17 The manor of Northolt was in place by
1086; three timber buildings, ditches and palisades of the period 1050–1150 were found.
Subsequent timber buildings were surrounded by a moat, and the main excavation was of
about one-third of the area within it, the kitchen and outbuildings forming one side of a
subsidiary court. The manor house was first built in stone in the 14th century; its window
frames seem to have been made of moulded yellow bricks, very fashionable for the time.
In 1339 the manor was leased to the first of a succession of London merchants, lords of
the manor from 1342. Most important of these City men was Nicholas Brembre, several
times mayor and sheriff of London, who was executed for treason in 1388. The excavators
suggested that he pulled down the main stone building and replaced it with a timber-
framed structure on low walls; he also refurbished the kitchen (Figure 8.2). In 1399 the
manor passed to Westminster Abbey, which retained it until 1540.
The association with Brembre is notable in that an inquisition of four of his manors,
after his execution, found crops, animals and agricultural implements at three of them,
but at Northolt there were also substantial household furnishings: tables, cupboards,
chests, and several kinds of metal pots including a cauldron. Evidently this was a favourite
rural retreat for one who moved, to his final destruction, in high circles. Unfortunately
the excavation did not find much artefactual evidence of this period, apart from the
possibility that some of the stone mortars were 14th-century, though its groups of Anglo-
Saxon and early medieval pottery were important for development of the subject.
Part of the moat remains in a small park. Nearby is the small parish church of St Mary,
with medieval and 16th-century parts, and a notable stone font bearing Brembre’s arms
and therefore of the 1380s, presumably his gift to his rural dependents. But the outlook
for easily studying more about the rural setting of this manor and village is bleak. In the
1930s the large Western Avenue was cut through the parish, skirting the village, and other
trunk roads followed. After 1945 Northolt was intensively developed as a dormitory sub-
urb. At its historic centre, a diminutive village green has been preserved as an historical
remnant.
The excavations at other manor houses in the region have been described in Chapter
4, and their details are not repeated here. The great majority of rural manor houses, and
even some of those on the edge of the built-up area of London, were moated. The sub-
ject could be further explored in the London area and adjacent counties: there are 761
recorded moats in Essex.18 Often the medieval house within the moat has been destroyed
or rebuilt out of recognition in post-medieval centuries; but parts of the moat, if not
cleared out, will be reservoirs of particular archaeological information about life in this
elevated social setting. One example from many, illustrated by an engraving of 1796 but

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 London’s region

BRIDGE
DRY
MOAT
OUTB
U IL D IN
GS
OUTER

ENS
COURTYARD
BANK

CH
KIT
CEL
LAR
S

SITE DAI HALL

S
OF
TUDOR
A T
BUILDINGS M O

OUTER BANK

REFERENCE
N CHURCH
OVEN
HEARTH

0 25m

Figure 8.2 Plan of the medieval manor at Northolt, from excavation in the early 1950s (after
Hurst 1961).

not yet by archaeology, is the manor house of Marks, Dagenham (Figure 8.3). Robert de
Merk is first mentioned in 1352, when he sold it to a widow who then married a London
fishmonger. In 1461 it was acquired by Thomas Urswick, MP for the City in the 1460s, who
was knighted for his participation in the defence of the City against the Lancastrians in
1471. An inventory of the house in 1479 describes twenty rooms including a chapel and
included a ‘great new chamber’. This is the only clue as to the building history, though
in 1775 it was said to be 300 years old. The house was demolished in 1808, but part of the
moat survives, in Whalebone Lane, Chadwell Heath, Dagenham.19
One feature of these estates, which are often now stately homes in the countryside, is
an associated park, and a recent study of medieval parks in Hertfordshire is noteworthy.
Despite the overlaying of some parks with housing (Welwyn Garden City), railways and
roads (the Baldock bypass) or golf courses, the existence of about 70 parks in the county
can be suggested, with perhaps about 35 functioning at any one time in the Middle Ages.

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 8.3 Marks manor house, Dagenham, drawn for Lysons’ Environs of London in 1796; the
house was demolished shortly after, though the moat partly survives.

Many were small, of only a few score acres, but several were of more than 400 acres (162
ha) and one straddling the parishes of Essendon and Little Berkhamsted, based on two
existing manors, totalled 800 acres (324 ha) in 1406. We tend to think of medieval parks
as being primarily large open spaces used for hunting, but this was rarely the case. They
were used for their many assets: deer (the Normans introduced fallow deer to England)
and rabbits, grazing for all kinds of farm animals, but primarily for their timber (trees,
wood from pollarding, even thorns). Today their boundaries, in the form of banks often
with ancient trees and ditches, can be traced in non-destructive survey. The parks are sig-
nificant archaeological sites today because documents illuminate their use, and they still
form a part of the countryside which can be studied on the ground. Away from the glitter-
ing lights of London which are the main focus of this book, the interaction of people and
nature and a rural way of life might be investigated. The medieval parks will inform not
only about the management of quasi-domesticated species like deer and rabbit, but also
about true wildlife: in the second decade of the 14th century at the royal park at King’s
Langley, a carpenter was employed making wolf-traps.20
These sites were often not just pleasant rural retreats or investments for retirement, but
parts of the economic strategies and fortunes of entrepreneurs. Manors in Norfolk came
with mills; merchants had inland fisheries in Kent and Hertfordshire. Water-mills were

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 London’s region
another source of income; Sir John Pulteney, who at his death in 1349 owned 23 manors
in five counties, including Penshurst Place in Kent, owned mills in East Smithfield and
restored a fulling-mill in Stepney.21 Archaeological study of a house in its place within the
assets of a prominent London merchant could well be fruitful.
It would also be useful to compare the development of manor houses in the London
region with other regions of England. A working hypothesis would be that there are more
fairly high-status sites in the immediate area around London, reflecting the need for
rural estates as a source of wealth by City families, and that because of their proximity to
the capital, they may have a richer archaeological content than elsewhere; but they must
necessarily survive far less. There is a similar scattering of residences of notable men of
the city around Paris from about the same time as in London, the end of the 13th centu-
ry.22 Perhaps it is stretching the evidence to think of rich medieval Londoners dotting the
countryside around with their villas, as their equivalents did around medieval Florence,23
but there might be research to be done in how the originally independent, largely self-
contained manor house became a sometimes-used rural retreat of an owner whose main
establishment was in the city.
For the well-heeled, the house in the immediate countryside continued to be popular
up to 1600 and beyond, and not just in isolation. Certain villages around London became
favoured spots for houses of notables in the 16th century, illustrated most clearly from
recent work at Hackney, immediately east of the City. Here were several mansions of
people who enjoyed the alleged fresh air of the place. One was Ralph Sadleir, servant to
Thomas Cromwell, who seems to have built what is now known as Sutton House about
1535, rescued from neglect in the 1990s by the National Trust and English Heritage. This
house was modest for a would-be high-flying courtier, of brick with diapers three storeys
high and with a great chamber over the hall.24 Fifteen years later, he moved on to larger
premises. But Sutton House, which remains in Hackney, is a precious example of a type
of house which must have formerly been more widespread throughout London.
In the last quarter of the 16th century, and in the 17th century up to 1640 and the Civil
War, the effects of the dissolution of the monasteries, with their large rural land holdings,
was seen round London in the acquisition of estates not only by traditional landowners
such as the aristocracy, but also a wave of men made wealthy through the pursuit of pro-
fessional or business careers in London. They put up new houses, though not necessarily
in the most up-to-date style. One surviving example is Eastbury Manor House in Barking
(Figure 8.4), almost certainly built for a wealthy City merchant in about 1556–73, a date
indicated by dendrochronology. The courtyard is at the rear, so the main range faces the
visitor with the new confidence of the times, not like a house in the medieval city. Like
Sutton House in Hackney, this house is in brick, with many details in moulded brick (the
porch, handrails in the stairs); though by then Elizabethan country houses elsewhere
were making this style old-fashioned.25 Perhaps businessmen had different tastes from
dukes and other lords.
After individual farms or estates, then manor houses and rural houses of some stand-
ing, we turn to the medieval village. Of the three kinds of settlement, the village in the
London area is the least investigated and therefore least understood.

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 8.4 Rear view of Eastbury House, Barking, in 1796 (Lysons), in its original rural setting.
Now it is surrounded by 20th-century streets and suburbia. The eastern (right-hand)
stair turret was demolished around 1814, shortly after this view. The house, which
now belongs to the National Trust, contains several original features including early
17th-century wall paintings. For the location of this house and Marks manor house,
see Figure 8.7.
The closest we can really come to most medieval villages, according to some archaeolo-
gists, is through the investigation of deserted villages.26 Elsewhere in England, there were
desertions, and study of such village sites is a vigorous archaeological activity; and studies
in places like Norfolk are suggesting that abandonment of villages happened all the time.
But deserted villages near London may hardly exist. In 1327, in the decade after known
economic hardships, 356 settlements in Essex contributed to a tax on movable wealth
to finance defence against the Scots; and since then few medieval villages in Essex have
disappeared.27 Two deserted medieval villages have been excavated in the far north of
Hertfordshire, at the border of the region or beyond, at Broadfield, where house plat-
forms and a church with its graveyard were briefly uncovered before deep ploughing in

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 London’s region
1965,28 and Caldecote.29 Village sites have been photographed from the air at Burston
and Quarrendon in Buckinghamshire;30 but studies of rural landscapes nearer the capital
are very rare. The map of medieval rural settlement forming part of the assessment of
archaeological evidence for London published in 200031 lists at least six settlement sites as
‘deserted’: an unnamed place in Ealing, Hackbridge (LB Sutton), a possible case in Croy-
don, the village or hamlet of Rugmere beneath Regent’s Park (LB Camden), and Crofton
(LB Bromley). So perhaps somebody could look into this. No doubt the construction of
the M25 orbital motorway in the 1970s and 1980s seriously depleted and damaged their
sites, such as that of Yeoveney, just north of Staines. Small holes in the ground will not suf-
fice, since a village needs to be studied in its entirety to make any sense. Rural settlement
is very difficult to study through rescue archaeology.
There are, perhaps surprisingly, some places in Greater London where all or most of
the previously-mentioned elements can be studied together, to form an impression of the
rural landscape. The following example is Ruislip, in west London, formerly in Middle-
sex, about 16 miles from the City of London; in other words, up to two days’ travel from
the capital, by most methods, in the medieval period.
Ruislip, a parish containing several hamlets, has a formidable amount of heritage
remaining, and an active local history society with archaeological interests, along with oth-
er conservation bodies, protecting it.32 There was probably a settlement here in the 11th
century, and perhaps before; an Anglo-Saxon manorial centre may have been usurped
and built over by a small presumably Norman fortification with a motte and bailey, and
an attached park, both of which remain in part. The nearby church of St Martin, of many
periods and with wall-paintings from two of them, produced a piece of chevron moulding
in 1986 which shows it was standing in the 12th century. The 11th-century lord Ernulf
de Hesdin gave much of the land to the Abbey of Bec in Normandy before leaving on a
crusade, from which he did not return, around 1086. Until 1404 Ruislip was an overseas
possession of Bec, and in 1294 an inventory or extent of the lands lists all the animals (not
only oxen, cows, sheep and pigs, but 17 peacocks) and fields sown with wheat, barley and
oats. The yield of these crops per acre was approximately that obtained on English farms
in the early 20th century. There was also a windmill and a watermill, and substantial areas
of woodland which on one occasion provided oaks for structural works at Kennington
Palace for the Black Prince. The castle, if such it was, became the centre for the admin-
istration of all Bec’s estates in England, and by 1435 comprised several chambers and a
chapel, no doubt resembling contemporary manor houses. Good survival of records (the
church passed to St George’s Windsor in 1422 and the main manor to King’s College
Cambridge in 1451) enable us to say that there was a wide range of sizes of land-holding in
1245, and the number of houses which had lands in the common fields was slightly larger
in 1565 than in 1245; if there had been depletions after 1350, they had been repaired. A
King’s College terrier or land-roll of 1565 lists 135 houses, of which a remarkable 43 were
still standing, many of course rebuilt, but with original elements, in 1986. One standing
house with 16th-century parts in the north of the parish is at or near the location of tile
kilns; Ruislip was producing bricks and tiles in the 14th century, and in the second half of
the 16th. Seven tilers were prosecuted for manufacturing misdemeanours in 1572, so this

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 8.5 Manor Farm and nearby historic buildings at Ruislip, as surveyed by RCHME in
1937. The main manorial building is the upper 4; the other 4 to the lower left is the
later of two surviving barns, of 1600. The Old House, 13, contains early 16th-centu-
ry panelling; building 9 may contain 15th-century elements. Buildings numbered
7–12 can be identified in the King’s College terrier of 1565, and thus their 16th-
century occupants. Most of these buildings survive today, though no. 12 has been
demolished. The dashed lines indicated a new road across the site, now St Martin’s
Approach (1934–9). An earlier scheme for roads and houses, the result of a com-
petition in 1910, would have destroyed all the motte and the medieval buildings
around; it was stopped by the outbreak of World War I.

must have been a local industry which presumably served London. Research on the clays
here and on examples of tiles and bricks in the London area could clarify this. Perhaps
the tiles and bricks were transported via Brentford.
I have described Ruislip at some length to make the point that there is much to explore
in any locality when you dig around, either in the documents or on the ground. Here is
the information for a multi-disciplinary study of an entire parish close to London, from
Domesday to 1600 and beyond. A first step would be to translate and publish the terrier of
1565 which is in Latin and plot its 135 properties accurately on the ground. All the surviv-
ing fragments of medieval and 16th-century buildings should be recorded to a common

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 London’s region
and high standard.33 Then a programme of selective archaeological investigations could
be devised.

Towns, communications and specialisation in industry

As the Ruislip example shows, the basis of all archaeology is local fieldwork, the description
and analysis of the area we know and live in. But as we think about London in its region,
another objective appears: the relations between the various elements in the landscape.
In the middle of its increasing web, London had two functions: to provide both necessar-
ies and luxuries to institutions and people who came from the country roundabout, and
to draw on that region for its own sustenance and growth. It was a two-way street.
How London was used by outsiders is demonstrated by the requirements of rural mon-
asteries. The accounts of the cellarers of Battle Abbey (Sussex) in 1275–1513 show that
they went to some expense to buy not only luxuries but everyday commodities, especially
food, in London, which was 75km distant. Hastings provided fish, and Winchelsea both
fish and wine, and provisions were purchased at Canterbury; but delicacies came from
London: salmon, spices (pepper, saffron, rice and almonds), and foreign wines. At the
same time, there are occasional purchases in London during the 14th century of poultry,
Gascon herrings and salt fish. In 1369–70 a ship was hired to bring foodstuffs by sea from
London to Rye, where land transport was arranged.34 Even quite cheap imports such as
onions and garlic were bought in London, the cost offset by buying in bulk when possible.
This pattern of a monastery or a rich rural establishment buying luxuries in London –
wax, jewellery, and spices – was widespread. By the 15th century northern religious houses
such as those at Carlisle and Durham were obtaining their spices in London.35
From the 13th century, the market towns and villages of the region and of the upper
Thames valley were also part of a system which supplied London with corn, fuel and
other basics.36 Towns were established at important road junctions, such as that founded
in the 12th century by the Knights Templar at Baldock in Hertfordshire, and flourishing
by 1185: the name indicated its purpose, for Baldock was known in the 13th century as
Baudoc, which is derived from Baghdad. Beresford and St Joseph, who report this in their
aerial study of medieval England, add dryly ‘the Templars’ commercial optimism must
have been high if they hoped to create a new Baghdad in Hertfordshire.’37
Though the road system, inherited from the Romans, was strong and was further sup-
ported by imposing stone bridges over the main tributaries of the Thames (eg Figure
8.6), the bulkier necessities were transported by water: around 1300, cartage costs by road
for grain could have been between 12 and 18 times greater than sending it by river.38 Lon-
don’s river trade influenced the growth of towns along the Thames such as Henley, the
trans-shipment point for grain for London mentioned in 1179, and Maidenhead (1202).
Through Ware on the River Lea, London drew supplies from the east midlands. Maid-
stone and Faversham also flourished around 1300, from the grain trade. Most of the
towns of Essex are on rivers. The capital’s needs were not however always beneficial: it has
been suggested that in 1315–18, a time of great dearth and famine, the superior prices
for grain on the London market both siphoned grain out of rural markets and caused

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 London 1100–1600

Figure 8.6 An anonymous view of Bow Bridge in 1834 (GL). This medieval bridge, with 12th-
century origins, carried a principal road over the River Lea, the most important of
the streams contributing to the Thames. Before, in the Roman period, there may
have been only fords here across the streams. The connection between the original
building dates of bridges and expansion of urban trade, including which came first,
is not well known.

starvation, even deaths, in Essex.39

Towns generally probably had a greater impact on the conduct of agriculture in the
period up to 1300, when they were growing, than after 1350, when most were not.40 The
prime function of small towns around London, as elsewhere in Britain, was to be centres
of rural activity. Some market places, such as that at Romford, were huge. In the 14th and
15th centuries, according to one historical model, English towns which had grown up ini-
tially to serve rural needs generated internal markets, where craftsmen sold to their fellow
townsmen. This made the towns more susceptible to the ups and downs of the commer-
cial market, and this in turn caused fluctuations in urban living standards quite different
from the pattern in the countryside.41 At the same time, there is evidence that London
overshadowed many small towns in its vicinity by attracting to itself functions which might
have been provided locally, especially markets; on average, a market in Middlesex served
a far greater area than one in Essex or Hertfordshire.42 It was easier to take one’s produce

232
 London’s region
to the capital. Trading with London affected the topography of certain towns: the market
centres of Croydon, Witham and possibly Coggeshall (both in Essex) moved to be on a
main road, pulling the settlement with them.
Until the last two decades, very little archaeological work was undertaken in the small
towns in the London area; what there was concentrated on the Roman period. But now
investigations, often individually small in extent, are building up a local picture, as for
example at Barnet or Tottenham.43 As examples of the archaeology of smaller towns in
London’s orbit, here are two contrasting experiences from the west side of London:
Uxbridge and Kingston-upon-Thames. Uxbridge has suffered particularly badly in post-
War development. Between 30% and 50% of the historic town, which has 12th-century
origins, was destroyed without record during construction of a new shopping centre,
uninspired in design and unfeeling in scale to make matters worse, and an orbital road
in the 1960s. In 1937 there were at least 39 secular buildings of the 17th century or older
surviving on the High Street or nearby, including four with 15th-century parts.44 Today
less than half a dozen remain. A small amount of excavation on one of these sites took
place in 1983–4, ahead of the construction of the present Charter Place, ‘the most distin-
guished of the town’s rash of 1980s buildings’45 towards the south end of the High Street,
opposite the fine medieval parish church. This small excavation shows what could have
been found out about historic Uxbridge, but which was permanently lost on a large scale.
The building on the site, just before the excavation, was a jettied two-storeyed 16th-cen-
tury construction. The excavation recorded its foundations, walls and cellar; but beneath
were two phases of earlier buildings on different configurations, with an oven and kitchen
possibly behind shops on the street frontage in the 14th century. Scraps of 12th-century
features would complement the history of the church across the street, now mostly of
15th-century form.46
Kingston-upon-Thames, in contrast, has been comparatively well-served by archaeologi-
cal work since the 1980s (though, as elsewhere, some of it was hurried). Though major
aspects of the Saxon royal centre in the town remain to be elucidated, its medieval and
Tudor development have been illustrated by some important excavations: of the medi-
eval stone bridge over the Thames of about 1170, of a large portion of its medieval and
later waterfront on the development site called Charter Quay, and especially of an area
of pottery kilns, as reported above in Chapter 5.47 By the 13th century Kingston sup-
plied London with livestock, fish, wood, both firewood and for construction, and pottery.
There were several Kingston merchants in the capital. In the case of pots, it may be that
an industry which seems originally to have been set up in the capital to make a product
imitating an import from overseas subsequently migrated to a cheaper site of production
outside the capital.48 The use of the Thames as a highway for goods has been touched on
in Chapter 5.
As towns grew in London’s region and under its influence, so they often specialised in a
craft or form of commerce. Croydon was a centre for the production of charcoal for the
capital, from its surrounding woodlands, by the 14th century. Another town which prof-
ited from its London connections was Thaxted in northern Essex, famous for its knives.49
Being on a major road also helped the small towns generally, as in the case of Enfield and

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 London 1100–1600
Tottenham to the north of London; they have large late medieval churches, and these
started to expand in the late 14th century. There was also considerable rebuilding of
churches in Essex towns in the 15th and 16th centuries.
London also needed the region to build itself. The role of towns and villages in supply-
ing London with building materials – stone, timber, brick and glass – might be developed.
There has been a little work on the stone quarries which served London, especially the
many mines in the Upper Greensand of east Surrey, which provided the stone known vari-
ously as Reigate or Merstham; according to one study, from the 7th or 8th centuries until
1961; and thereafter the abandoned mines presented problems for the construction of
the M23 and M25 motorways. Some mines there can still be explored.50 Surviving traces
of chalk mines in Pinner of 18th- and 19th-century date also had medieval antecedents
nearby.51 Reigate was also a market and collecting-point for timber, including for royal
buildings.
Artefacts or features recorded by archaeologists within medieval buildings, whether
houses or churches, could have originated in London itself or be a product of somewhere
in the region but distributed through the capital. For many luxuries both in life and in
death, prominent people throughout the south-east of England looked to London, as
exemplified by church monuments and brasses. People came to the capital to be
exposed to new goods, and this created new tastes in places outside London. In contrast,
some household items made in the London area, quite possibly originally for the London
market, found their way into other parts of the region, and this may have been through
London itself. The distribution of Penn floor tiles, made in Buckinghamshire but found
throughout Essex and Kent, suggests that some regional entrepreneurs were based in
London in the 1380s. On Essex sites such as Maldon Friary, small amounts of Kingston-
type ware are found, and Cheam and Coarse Border wares in Colchester.52 One conse-
quence of highlighting the access which smaller towns had to London, by road or river, is
an expectation that foreign imports would come more easily from the metropolis along
those routes, to be found in modern excavations on medieval urban sites.

The demands of London after 1450

By 1450, the demands of London were beginning to shape the countryside and the small
towns. By 1600, the nearer parts of Surrey, Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent probably shared
with Middlesex a concentration of market gardening, growing fruit and vegetables for the
capital’s tables. This area also concentrated on producing butter, eggs and milk, pork and
bacon.53 Outside the central zone, London’s demands on more distant sources of supply
for food were more selective, as we have already seen in the medieval period: now grain,
malt, and cattle came from more or less specific counties or regions. As before, towns spe-
cialised or grew as regional centres: Kingston, Reigate and Croydon (on a new site now on
a main road). The consequent intensification of agriculture in south-east England may
have pushed major industrial areas away from the capital. A contributory factor was that
London, from 1550, rapidly increased its use of sea coal from Newcastle; this freed the
land in the environs of the capital of the necessity to produce wood fuel, and thus it could

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 London’s region
now turn even more to food production.54
The widespread problems for towns throughout England in the second half of the 15th
century do not seem to be shared by many small towns in the immediate environs of
London, which profited in supplying the capital. This was especially true for those on
river routes, such as Enfield, Henley and Faversham. Other interests in the region fed
off the capital: from the early 16th century, tanners in Hertfordshire were supplied with
hides by London butchers, a byproduct of the great need for meat. Recycling has an old
history. In these circumstances a town which declined markedly would be unusual: and
Bletchingley (Surrey), prosperous in the 13th century, seems to be an example of a small
town which thereafter shrank to its present village size.55 There may be other examples of
towns which became smaller, or which changed their active centres, as they responded to
new economic factors.
It was not good news for all towns. Some markets were in decline in the 16th century,
such as Bletchingley, Haslemere and Leatherhead in Surrey; at Staines, it seems that by
1593 the church stood in an area of dereliction, about a quarter of a mile from the rest
of the town.56 Other towns in contrast prospered or improved, for instance Godalming,
Chertsey and Dorking; the small amount of excavated evidence might be placed in this
context. Chertsey profited from being on the river (should we think of it as a small port?),
and Dorking was a regional market for poultry. The fortunes of towns in the south-east at
this period were linked in large measure to their relations with London. This is certainly
the case in Buckinghamshire, a little outside London’s immediate periphery, where towns
large and small boomed after 1550, partly fuelled by their trade with London.57 Being a
staging post on the road to London was good for small towns, as noted above, and this
was the case in a widening radius within England, for instance Towcester, Market Harbor-
ough, Stamford and Grantham to the north, or Thetford in Norfolk.
Nationally the roadside inn for travellers was essentially a new form of building in the
17th century, though there were medieval precedents. Bocking (Essex) retains some of
its many medieval inns, from its function as a stopping-place on the pilgrim’s route to
Bury St Edmunds.58 One sign of the capital’s influence would be groups of inns at stop-
ping places along the main routes to London, often in places which were a typical day’s
journey apart. A broadside of about 1600 bears a chart of such mileages from London
in all directions: the main routes across Surrey were from London to Southampton via
Wandsworth, Kingston, Coveham (Cobham), Ripley, Guildford and Farnham; and to Ex-
eter, via Staines, Bagshot, Hartleyrow (? Hartley Wintney) and Basingstoke.59 Guildford
was already known as full of inns by the time of William Camden in 1607, though I am
not aware of architectural or archaeological records of any. More work has been done on
the inns of towns in Hertfordshire. In the forefront of this trade was St Albans, with its
medieval abbey, which even in 1577, after the Dissolution, had over 20 per cent of the inns
in the county. The earliest surviving Hertfordshire inn is the former Crown and Anchor
in Holywell Hill, St Albans, of the second quarter of the 16th century. A covered gallery
at first-floor level led to eight or nine chambers. Other, more fragmentary inns survive at
Hitchin, Hertford and Berkhamsted (where The Swan seems to have grown into an inn
from being a 15th-century house, no doubt a common occurrence).60

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 London 1100–1600
Some villages, or collections of buildings at stopping-places along a major route, tried
to be towns. Their archaeology, even that remaining below ground, may still demonstrate
this in the arrangement of properties and the history and character of their secular and
religious buildings. Early maps are often a starting-point for investigation; as in the pos-
sible case of Edgware. Here, on the extreme northern edge of London, All Souls College
Oxford acquired the manor in 1442, and in 1597 they commissioned Thomas Langdon
to survey it. A small extract of the survey drawing (Plate 5) serves to show how archaeol-
ogy could explore a landscape to compare with a map. The main road running through
Edgware was the Roman Watling Street, on its way to St Albans, and no doubt this was
the reason a small urban stopping place arose here, half-way between the two places.
The great majority of the manor in 1597 was fields, but next to St Margaret’s church, the
properties were packed together in aspiring urban form, long and narrow. There was
no manor house to speak of. The agriculture was a mixture of arable, pasture, meadow
and woodland. By this time, if not before, Edgware was serving London; cattle on the last
stages of their long trek to Smithfield were grazed here, and the parish supplied hay to
the London market. In the first two decades of the 17th century, several men with urban
occupations are mentioned here: a tailor, brewer, butchers, surgeon and a draper. One of
the buildings on the west, Stanmore side of the main street may have been a market hall;
there were probably also inns, but their known buildings are later. Some 16th- and early
17th-century timber buildings were still standing in 1969.61 Here, in these observations, is
the making of a set of archaeological questions for those who study Edgware, for instance
the local archaeological society who are very active.62
Industries serving the capital were also established further out. The countryside on the
Surrey-Hampshire border, around Farnborough and Hawley, was the site of a flourishing
pottery industry in the 16th and 17th centuries, producing what is now called Border
Ware. Border Wares are found in Surrey towns, throughout the London area and south-
east England; and much further afield, such as in the American colonies until the 1620s.
At Jamestown in Virginia, they are one of the most common kinds of everyday household
wares. Perhaps the London-based Virginia Company had something to do with this, sup-
plying the early colonists with pots until their own pottery production could begin. This
Surrey-Hampshire industry must have been working through London networks. Simi-
larly, the links through the small towns with the two rural Wealden industries, iron and
glass-making, could be further elucidated. Both must have looked to London for their
markets.63
The themes which might be explored for the period 1450 to 1600, therefore, are the
specialisations of small towns, the fortunes of towns on roads and rivers which led to Lon-
don, towns and rural industries like Border Ware pottery, and the use of towns by the gen-
try class. In 1600, there was still some rural life continuing at its own primeval pace; but
within about 20 miles of London, that is a circle defined by St Albans, Dartford, Reigate,
Uxbridge and Watford, towns were essentially part of the capital, as far as goods, prices
and trade were concerned.64

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 London’s region
Towards an archaeology of the landscape near London: a test area
To finish, consider a large area: London north of the Thames and east of the River Lea.
Though most of the area being considered is now covered with bricks and mortar, not
to mention roads and railways, the sites of medieval centres of activity can be suggested,
plotted and often found to be surviving below ground; a few churches and other build-
ings remain above ground. The area can be divided into inner and outer zones. The
inner zone, illustrated by a map drawn for the topographer Lysons in 1790, shows the
rural landscape of Barking, Leyton, Ilford and Hainault Forest (Figure 8.7). Today it
comprises the two London boroughs of Barking and Dagenham, and Redbridge. In the
18th century the spread of London had not yet obscured the medieval landscape, though
it would shortly. I suggest this map abounds with the knots of a medieval net of settlement
which requires explanation. There were important monasteries at Stratford and Barking;
roadside villages, perhaps small towns, at Ilford, Leytonstone, Walthamstow and Wood-
ford. Many manor houses are marked on the map, including Low Hall, Walthamstow,
which has already figured in our account. In the ancient centre of Walthamstow village
stands a church with remains of 13th-century aisles, and a 15th-century timber frame
building south of it (Figure 8.8). To the north-east, the great Hainault Forest belonged
to Barking Abbey, and at the Dissolution the Crown acquired 2800 acres of woodland.
These were cleared and greatly reduced in the 19th century. Now part is modern man-
aged forest, and is concerned with conservation of a different kind: it is a Site of Special
Scientific Interest of 135 hectares. To the west, the larger Epping Forest has had a better
conservation history, being now in the care of the City of London. In the Middle Ages,
both forests were larger, and occupied a large part of this landscape within riding distance
of London itself.
But there is more to east London: the borough of Havering stretches to the east, as large
as the two boroughs already mentioned. According to the gazetteer in the Museum’s
assessment of 2000, Havering holds the sites of at least 94 notable medieval places. These
include six parish churches, four chapels, 34 manor houses or mansions, 15 settlements,
three inns (there would have been more), four deer parks, two hunting lodges, six wind-
mills, and so on.65 Today, Havering is largely covered by the 20th-century satellite subur-
bia of Romford; but embedded within it are visible remains of several medieval churches:
St Laurence Upminster with its 13th-century shingled spire; a complete Norman church
with aisles at St Helen and St Giles Rainham; other fragments inside later rebuildings.
A 15th-century monastic barn is now an agricultural museum (Hall Barn, Upminster),
and there are surviving fragments of 16th-century timber houses and a galleried inn
(Upminster Hall; the Golden Lion Romford). Sadly remains of substantial manor houses
have almost all disappeared, some quite recently: the house at Dagnams (now Dagnam
Park), Harold Hill, was demolished in 1950; the 16th-century mansion of William Roche,
Lord Mayor of London in 1540, called Great Nelmes, now under Emerson Park, Horn-
church, was demolished in 1967.66
Despite these losses, this large area of three contiguous boroughs can be studied: it
would have been part of rural Essex in character, but within the orbit of London from

237
 London 1100–1600

Figure 8.7 London east of the River Lea, drawn for Lysons in the 1790s; the rural landscape was
being overlaid by 18th-century estates such as Wanstead, but retained its medieval
(and even Anglo-Saxon) structure. Some of the sites mentioned in this and previous
chapters have been accentuated, such as Low Hall, Eastbury and Marks manor house;
and churches with surviving medieval fabric. The southern part of Epping Forest (in
the top left) stretched at this time from Chingford in the north down to Stratford.

earliest times, and this contrast or tension could be explored. Such a study would show
what it was like to live next to an overpowering and demanding neighbour, London.
Results from individual sites might be small, but they would gain in meaning when an
aerial, almost satellite view is used. At the level of the village, though not of the indi-

238
 London’s region

Figure 8.8 The Ancient House, Walthamstow, retaining many of its 15th-century features,
though restored at least twice since 1934, an early success of conservationists (au-
thor). It is still recognisable as a hall with cross-wings at both ends.
vidual farm, the medieval landscape beneath and around the present conurbation could
be reconstructed by working from 18th-century maps, especially that of London and its
environs by John Rocque of 1754.

Conclusions and questions

This short chapter has outlined some of the archaeological questions for east London,
and for all other parts of the region: the interlocking economic system of farms, man-
239
 London 1100–1600
or houses and villages; the conduct of agriculture and its response to London’s needs;
industries which supplied London, some by imitating foreign imports; and the seeping
metropolitan tastes which gradually spread along the roads and small rivers to make the
rural areas even more reflections of the capital.
Small towns in London’s orbit have had a better, but very patchy, archaeological cover-
age than villages, and large parts of several have been lost. Again we can look to examples
beyond London, and in this case we can certainly use them as models for work. One
example is the summary of work of the 1960s and 1970s at Saffron Walden in north
Essex.67 This medieval town comprises a castle, market place, defences and streets; outside
the town is the Tudor mansion of Audley End, based on a Benedictine abbey. A substan-
tial review of 1982 provides an archaeological and historical framework, from research
up to that time, which is now supplemented with recording work on the rich legacy of
medieval and Tudor buildings in the town. This type of study is eminently possible in our
region. Across in west Surrey, archaeological and documentary work has been combined
to outline the foundation and early history of Farnham in the 12th and 13th centuries.68
It may be that such towns outside the present conurbation of London, but arguably with-
in its network of contacts, contain larger reservoirs of archaeological information, and
that they should be targeted for concerted work; not only on the now generally miniscule
development sites as they arise, but on their documents and especially their standing
buildings.
Study of distinctive pottery styles will help; but apparently not much can be expected
from non-ceramic artefacts. A brief review to tease out whether there might be observ-
able differences between urban and rural places looked at England as a whole, and found
that ‘not one everyday object has emerged that can be claimed exclusively for towns or
for the countryside.’ Towns, even London, produce pieces of ploughs and other agricul-
tural implements; increasing use of metal-detectors around villages produces coins and
cloth seals, for instance from German cities. Across England, material culture was rather
homogeneous.69
Finally some aspects hardly changed over the centuries. In 1433 Venetian galleys came
to London; a few miles away to the west in Harmondsworth, the servants of the manor
were paid not with money, but with bags of wheat which had been grown on the farm.70
The Home Counties, and pockets of outer London, remained rural, even quaint, until
the late 19th century. The spread of suburbia, the railway and the motor car put an end
to that.

240
 —9—

Medieval and Tudor London after 1600

In the preceding chapters, I have attempted an archaeological account of London from

1100 to 1600 by starting from a metaphor which invited the reader to imagine what Lon-
don would have looked like had he or she stepped from a railway station into the capital’s
streets at any time between those dates. This final chapter begins with another image:
London in 1600, conceived as an immense and spreading layer of the signs of human
habitation, in places several metres deep, with a wide range of buildings forming its top
crust. To explain where we are today, we need to understand how this object, a three-
dimensional cake of layers, has been changed. The chapter therefore outlines some of
the attitudes displayed to medieval and Tudor London, its buildings and artefacts, by rul-
ers, administrators, developers and residents in the four centuries since 1600; and from
comparatively recently, the growing efforts of those concerned with recording the past
as it was gradually but inevitably eroded. The two matters are inversely related: archae-
ologists of all kinds have become more numerous and stronger, but the archaeological
resource has diminished.

Attitudes to the past in the 17th century: the Great Fire

During the first half of the 17th century, the population of London increased greatly,
from about 200,000 in 1600 to perhaps over 450,000 in 1650, and the authorities fought
a losing battle against the building of poor tenements within alleys and over gardens,
the extension of suburban areas into the fields, and overcrowding generally.1 Proclama-
tions by Elizabeth and the Stuart monarchs tried to contain the expansion of building
in London by banning new buildings and the subdivision of existing ones. Overcrowd-
ing was thought to be a factor in the frequent and savage urban plagues of London at
the time. Within four months of arriving in London in May 1603, James I issued such
a proclamation. A year and a half later in March 1605, another proclamation added a
second element: to improve standards of construction, particularly along major streets.
Any new building inside or within a mile of the suburbs (i.e the built-up area) was to have
brick outer walls and windows, its front of brick or stone. Further proclamations followed
in 1608 and 1611; in the latter year, jetties were banned except for canted bay windows
which projected with splayed sides. In July 1615 a proclamation included James’s famous
words, ‘that as it was said by the first Emperour of Rome, that he had found the City of

241
 London 1100–1600

Figure 9.1 The Great Fire of London, from a painting by Jan Griffier, an aquatint probably of
1790–1 (GL). Although this is usually taken to be a view of Ludgate with St Paul’s
cathedral behind, it is more likely to be Newgate, north of the cathedral (suggested in
Schofield 2011); in versions of the painting, Jones’s portico is clearly visible.

Rome of Bricke, and left if of Marble, So that We whom God hath honoured to be the
first King of Great Britaine, might be able to say in some proportion, that we had found
our Citee and Suburbs of London of stickes, and left them of Bricke’. A further procla-
mation to restrain building in London, of 1618, is the first to include stipulation about
storey heights: that each complete storey would be at least 10½ft (3.2m) high, and each
half storey at least 7½ft (2.3m) high. It also, for the first time, stipulated wall thicknesses:
buildings of two storeys or less could have walls 1½ bricks thick, but buildings over two
storeys were to have walls two bricks thick for the first storey or ground floor.2 Virtually no
brick buildings from this time have survived in central London, though a house in Cloth
Fair might be a product of these regulations.
In September 1666 the Great Fire of London struck the City (Figure 9.1).This was a cata-
clysmic event, a disaster. Observers like Evelyn called the city ‘one ruinous heap’ of rubbish.
But architectural, social and literary historians have exaggerated the effect. We read that
the Great Fire of London in 1666 swept away most of a medieval city of wood, and brought
about the birth of modern London.3 This is not a fair summary if we step back in space and
in time to take a wider and longer view. Destructive as it was, the Great Fire affected only
about a quarter of the conurbation then standing in the City and Southwark, and even less
if Westminster is included (Figure 9.2). But the story of the Fire has endured.

242
 Medieval and Tudor London after 1600
N
Built-up Area

Extent of Great Fire

Moorfields

Tower
of London

Westminster
Southwark

0 500m

Figure 9.2 The extent of the central built-up area in 1666 (light tone), with the outline of the
City wall and the extent of the Great Fire (hatched).

Some of the largest stone and brick buildings, such as St Paul’s and the Royal Exchange,
were beyond repair; but others survived and were rebuilt incorporating their pre-Fire parts.
Here are three contrasting cases: the first of replacement, the other two of retention.
St Paul’s was already in a decrepit condition when it was wrecked by the Fire in 1666.
The south transept roof had fallen in 1654, exposing that part of the church to the ele-
ments. Immediately after the Fire there was some talk of temporarily using the western
part of the nave as a church while rebuilding was discussed, but more of the ruin fell down
and put an end to that discussion. Wren’s new cathedral began building in 1675 and was
largely finished in 1711, though the statues on the roofline were not added until 1722. It
lay on top of the medieval building, but the new brick-vaulted basement under all four
arms dug out much of its predecessor, which is now only to found beneath the ground at
the east and west ends (Figure 9.3; it is preserved beneath just outside the east end and
accessed by manholes). This difference in alignment meant that Wren could do nothing
with what remained of Jones’s portico, which stood in damaged state until 1687–8, when
it had to come down; many stones from its columns were broken up to form part of the
foundation of the new cathedral’s west end, where they were found when a tunnel was
made between two crypt spaces in 1996. Nearby to the east, the octagonal 14th-century
chapter house had survived, along with part of the cloister around it (Plate 10). Wren
patched up and used the chapter house as his site office, though part of it had to be sliced
off for the south wall of the new nave, and it survived until about 1714.
Other large stone buildings were retained if possible. Guildhall had resisted the Fire,
though it had lost its roof and no doubt its windows. Here there seems to have been no

243
 London 1100–1600

Figure 9.3 Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in its present setting, showing its relationship to the full-
est extent of the medieval cathedral beneath, which perished in the Great Fire of
1666 (Schofield 2011).

thought of demolition and starting again. The post-Fire building by Wren and Robert
Hooke has been elucidated by the recent archaeological work on the Guildhall Art Gal-
lery and yard site. By the 1670s Wren and Hooke ‘had transformed the Guildhall yard
into a modern piazza, stylistically far closer to 16th-century Rome than to the medieval
precinct’. The main building was reroofed, and the 15th-century porch refurbished with
some 17th-century scrolls on top but the original six statues of civic virtues retained, at
least for the present.4
A similar spirit of practicality pertained at Greyfriars School, which was also well within
the area of the Fire and badly damaged. Wren’s Christ Church Greyfriars parish church
arose on the east half of the former Franciscan church, using the 13th-century founda-
tions on three of its sides. North of the church, the various courtyards of the friary, which
had been the Christ’s Hospital school since 1553, were rebuilt but largely on their previ-
ous lines. One contained the 15th-century library which had been funded in large part by
Richard Whittington, standing on its own cloister walk. This was patched up and survived
until 1827 (Figure 9.4).
Nor are these large buildings alone in their degree of survival. It has long been known
that the 51 churches burned in the Fire and rebuilt by Wren and his associates, includ-
ing Robert Hooke, in certain cases contained pre-Fire fabric, but the extent of this reuse

244
 Medieval and Tudor London after 1600

Figure 9.4 The library endowed by Richard Whittington at Greyfriars, by C J M Whichelo, 1812
(GL). This is probably the north side. The south side, which was refaced in brick in
1778, had then two escutcheons of Whittington’s arms, still decipherable.
of standing walls may be surprising. In some cases there were radical new plans, such as
the decahedron of St Benet Fink, or we know that new towers were built (ie. their sites
within the churches moved), as at St Alban Wood Street, St Edmund Lombard Street
and St Mary-le-Bow (Figure 9.5), where Wren’s insertion of a brick vault over part of the
11th-century crypt ensured its survival to the 20th century, to be rescued again after the
War. But in a number of cases it is demonstrable, from the standing fabric or documen-
tary references, that the pre-Fire tower was retained in the post-Fire rebuilding; and in
as many cases, the outline of the post-Fire church was also based on the foundations of
the previous building, usually its immediately pre-Fire extent. This accounts for some
odd wall alignments and projections in the post-Fire churches. Examples of the reuse of
towers, at least at their foundation level and occasionally higher above ground include
All Hallows the Great, All Hallows Lombard Street, St Andrew Holborn, SS Anne and
Agnes, St Augustine Watling Street, St Bride, St Christopher-le-Stocks, St Dunstan in the
East, St Lawrence Jewry, St Mary Aldermanbury, St Mary-at-Hill and St Michael Bassishaw.5
There would probably be other examples if a large group of Wren churches had not been
demolished in the late 19th century, as described later.
Within the Fire-damaged area, then, there were a number of cases where stone build-
ings survived as ruins and were patched up for reuse, so that their medieval parts could be

245
 London 1100–1600

Figure 9.5 Section through the Wren parish church of St Mary-le-Bow, built in 1670–80, by
John Clayton about 1848. This shows the incorporation of the late 11th-century
crypt, which with major repairs survived bombing in World War II.

seen above ground in the post-Fire City; and in the case of Guildhall, can be seen today.
Even more remarkable, since brick is less bulky than stone, was the survival of parts of
Bridewell Palace, which could be seen until the early 19th century (Figure 3.7).
What happened to houses? If we take the long view of the 17th century, from Treswell’s
surveys in 1610–12 through the Fire to the rebuilt City (or that part of it damaged) in 1700,
many questions arise. Was it really as many historians suppose, that the Fire ushered in mod-
ern London? Did London change into a brick city overnight? Let us look at the evidence.
Treswell provides a plan of a house, or rather several houses on one property, in Pudding
Lane itself (Figure 9.6). This small property housed four tenancies, the timber buildings
going up to three storeys with garrets against the Lane. No wonder the flames spread so easily.
Several sites near the epicentre of the Fire in Pudding Lane have produced graphic
evidence of collapsed buildings. At a site in Pudding Lane itself, a few metres south of
the site of the baker’s house where the Fire started, the remains of wooden barrels were
found on a badly scorched brick cellar floor in 1981. Buildings covered with Fire debris
have been excavated to the south in Thames Street at New Fresh Wharf and Billings-
gate (the latter shown in Chapter 4, Figure 4.13). The best published example of a com-
parison between buildings before and after the Fire comes from excavation of a site in
Botolph Lane, one street to the east of Pudding Lane, in 1998 (Figure 9.7). Here a large
house had been rebuilt or altered around 1500, unifying two previous properties, so it
comprised three cellared buildings. Repairs took place at intervals in the 16th and 17th
centuries; one included the introduction of a fine fireplace in Reigate stone, carved in a
style which can be dated to after 1540. Debris from the Fire was excavated in the cellars,

246
 Medieval and Tudor London after 1600

N
Thomas Myles
31/2 storeys
John Dorrell
+ cellar main house
31/2 storeys
1 4

H Y K
PUDDING
LANE

Henry Dowsing Daniell Kirby

0 5m house built 1573 2 storeys
21/2 storeys + gallery

Figure 9.6 Plan of a property on the east side of Pudding Lane, surveyed in 1611 by Ralph
Treswell (Schofield 2003). This shows how congested the timber-framed buildings
could be in the central City. A large house (Dorrell, 4) lay to one side, with a sepa-
rately let shop to the front (Myles, 1); it seems probable that the original yard of the
house to the south was exploited with extra tenancies, one to the front (Dowsing, 2;
built 1573), and a fourth tenancy at the back, of unknown date (Kirby, 3).

which were backfilled and not dug out afterwards; the post-Fire buildings were on a new
plan. This debris contained local and foreign pottery, many floor and wall tiles, roof tiles,
ribs from a Tudor plaster ceiling, the fireplace, and a large quantity of metal fittings such
as locks, keys, a window catch, and iron kitchen equipment. The colourful floor tiles
included examples made in Dieppe, the Low Countries, Seville and Antwerp; the wall tiles
were Dutch, in several designs.6 In 1666, these originally 15th- and 16th-century buildings
would have had interiors similar to those we can see in contemporary Dutch paintings,
for instance by De Hooch.
Evidence for a new approach to the design of houses might be found in the sizes of the
new houses, the total number of new houses, or a widespread turn to building exclusively
in brick. But when each of these aspects is scrutinised, the answer is not at all clear.
First, there were cases where some replanning of larger properties was possible and was
undertaken, as shown by the site in Botolph Lane (Figure 9.7) . Here the configuration
of buildings on a wide property before and after the Fire could be studied; and it is clear
that the pre-Fire ruins were disregarded as a larger working courtyard for a new house
at its rear was planned. But such clear cases are rare. There seems to have been a much
more usual spirit of rebuilding on old alignments, with the barest of observation of new
regulations.

247
 London 1100–1600

ane
fireplace

lph L
courtyard Building 7
room A

Boto
drain
room B
window

well

Building 6 Open Area 8

courtyard
S8

Road 1
Cat Lane

cemetery

Building 10

cesspit
ane
lph L

chimney
Boto

courtyard

Building 9
house
1670s

Building 8

cemetery

0 20m

Figure 9.7 Buildings before and after the Great Fire on a property in Botolph Lane (after Blair
and Sankey 2007). The acquisition of an extra piece of land to the east enabled a
larger complex to be built, with a fine new house of about 1670 (which survived
until about 1900).
248
 Medieval and Tudor London after 1600
There may be other ways in which we could establish anything new: the size in square
feet of houses and their overall number, since larger houses would mean fewer overall.
Were houses generally larger in area? Post-Fire regulations concerned height of storeys
and materials, but said nothing about the plan or size in area of the new houses, which
seem in general to have been the same range of sizes as before the Fire. The arrange-
ments for rebuilding on individual properties were regulated by judges in the Fire Court,
and they did little to sort out the many cases of interleaving, tangled tenancies which had
been a feature of many pre-Fire properties; in several cases proposals for better building
by untangling tenancies was resisted by the Court.7 The amalgamation of houses was al-
lowed in a few cases where the viability of the property had been affected by the widening
of a street or alley. Study of the social topography revealed by a tax of 1693–4 shows that
the extent of the Fire (its area of destruction) bore no relation to overall land values,
mean household rent per annum of mean number of persons per house.8 If the rebuild-
ing after the Fire had created a radically different housing stock, we would have expected
these variables to reflect the area of new housing. Ogilby and Morgan’s map of 1676
(Figure 9.8) shows the areas both within and outside the Fire zone, its extent marked by
a wavy line. But in fact it is impossible to tell from the map, without assistance, which side
the Fire devastated. In the vast majority of cases, the configuration of building outlines
on the properties and the aspirations of their occupants were the same before and after
the Fire. To Samuel Pepys and others walking along the street, however, there would have
been a stark contrast where the line ran, between timber-framed and plastered buildings
outside the zone and the new brick buildings within. The juxtaposition of the two build-
ing traditions would have been part of many streets and alleys in the outer parts of the
City until well into the 19th century (Figure 9.9).
Nor is it clear whether there were more or fewer houses in the damaged area after
the Fire. One recent study, from a sample of eight parishes, suggests there was a fall in
numbers; but Daniel Defoe, in his Tour of Britain of 1724–6, says that there were almost
4000 more houses in the fire damaged area than there were before the Fire.9 It is difficult
to suggest how this question will be answered reliably. The number of properties which
were staked out after the Fire is of no real help, since these were the outlines of the previ-
ous properties, and bore little relation to the number of individual houses then erected
within these outlines. About 8200 cases of staking out were recorded, though there were
probably many others not recorded because the fee was not paid.10
On a small scale, timber-framed buildings continued to be built; a range of 1692 survives
at Middle Temple Lane, where the lawyers presumably thought they were exempt from
the building act which concerned only the City. At least one timber-framed house stand-
ing among brick houses in the damaged zone was allowed to remain, though the landlord
wanted to pull it down.11 In 1756 William Maitland could report, with surprise, finding an
old timber house which had apparently survived the Fire well within the affected zone, in
a court off Noble Street.12 Outside the zone, several traditions in timber-framed building
flourished for some time. Some streets had long ranges of tall timber-framed houses, often
of the 1650s, which were stout enough to survive into the 19th century (Winchester Street
in the east, and Wych Street in the west). Others of a similar date survived almost until

249
 London 1100–1600

Figure 9.8 Middle and Inner Temple on Ogilby and Morgan’s map of 1676 (GL). The wavy line
shows where the Great Fire, spreading from the east (right), reached. It singed Tem-
ple Church, which survives today (Plate 6). All properties to the right of the wavy
line would have been rebuilt in brick, on pre-Fire boundaries. On the map, there is
no difference in the appearance of the buildings either side of the Great Fire line; in
the street, the difference would have been startling, like crossing a border
between countries.
1900 by being in back courtyards. Even in the central City, the street views of John Tallis
of 1840, which show both sides of certain streets in elevation as small strips, record the
pre-Fire buildings then standing along lengths of Leadenhall Street, Fenchurch Street,
Holborn Hill, the Strand and Blackman Street in Southwark.13 It is quite likely that these
street-side elevations include 16th-century and in a few cases earlier buildings, and that
many of the properties are medieval in their outline, before the large developments of
the 19th and 20th centuries. Thus, in sum, the Great Fire resulted in a new area of the
250
 Medieval and Tudor London after 1600

Figure 9.9 Houses in Little Bell Alley, on the east side of Moorgate, by R B Schnebbelie in 1818
(GL). This shows a fine timber-framed building of the time of Charles II on the
right, and post-Fire building on the left. The Great Fire was halted here about half
way down the alley; this may have been the spot.
City in brick, but three quarters of the larger conurbation, including parts of the City
itself, remained stubbornly timber-framed and traditional for generations afterwards.
This only started to decay beyond redemption or rebuilding in the 19th century.
The replanning schemes of Wren and others, frequently mentioned in the modern
literature, came to nothing because the owners and occupiers of houses wanted rebuild-
ing, fast, so they could continue their lives. They won. This is exactly what happened after
a smaller but devastating fire in central Venice in 1514.14 But this short account of the
survival of pre-Fire and timber-framed building techniques into the decades, and even
centuries, after the Fire has to acknowledge that the Fire brought about some changes
in buildings of all kinds, and probably in the way people thought about London and
their own lives within it. After the Fire no aristocrats had houses within the city walls or
in Southwark;15 but they were long gone. Whether the Great Fire ushered in modern
London, as many writers have said, is debatable. But the Fire did bring about an increase
in two features which had perhaps been waiting for encouragement during the previous
decades. First houses, their furnishings, and people’s tastes generally (in clothes, and
251
 London 1100–1600
presumably in food) became increasingly ‘polite’; that is, notions of what was polite and
therefore acceptable in surroundings and in conduct were now shared by townspeople
everywhere, and everywhere they looked to London for these standards. Second, this was
achieved because the architecture, and increasingly all aspects of material culture, were
standardised.16 So London taste, polite taste, meant standardisation.

The development of interest in monuments and archaeology

After 1700 the physical reality of medieval and Tudor London and its environs was there-
fore progressively eaten into, eroded and cut down by redevelopment and change, largely
without record. A final comparison with Paris is useful, for a new reason. Although there
were important changes in the 17th and 18th centuries, the centre of the French capital
preserved its character as a medieval city until the eve of the Revolution in the 1780s.
The widespread destruction of ancient fabric, particularly the religious buildings, as a
consequence of the Revolution prompted the study of medieval antiquities in France.
So today the medieval buildings and fragments of them require a little effort to discover
in Paris, as in London; but in both places there are medieval churches (often rebuilt,
necessarily), and pieces of medieval buildings especially monasteries, undercrofts and
town walls; the outlines of prestigious complexes are laid out on the ground in lines of
contrasting stones.17 There is more of the medieval and 16th-century city to see in Paris
than in London, though in terms of destruction of historic fabric, the Revolution and
Baron Haussmann together can be compared with the Great Fire.
From the late 17th century the publication of books illustrated by engravings shows an
interest in London’s monuments and older buildings. At first, the illustrations were only
of tombs in Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral. The City gates have a long history
in engravings, beginning in 1684. Many books printed in London mixed modern civic
buildings, such as those built after the Fire, with some of their older companions, to show
pride in both types. Foreign works extolled the virtues of London in its region by pirating
many of the local works, especially those of Hollar. Bird’s-eye views of many London pal-
aces and other prominent complexes, along with the new squares, were provided by the
work of Leonard Knyff and Johannes Kyp (born in Leiden and Amsterdam respectively)
in the 1720s. Views of St Paul’s before the Fire celebrated the lost building. A significant
publication was that on Westminster Abbey by John Dart, failed attorney turned antiquary,
in his Westmonasterium of about 1723; this recorded all the major monuments before, in
one modern opinion, ‘being subjected to the damage, defacements and depredations of
eight more generations of vandals, souvenir-hunters, barbarous organizers of state occa-
sions and restorers’.18 In the 1780s the careful work of James Basire and John Carter pro-
duced what we call sections of the White Tower and St Mary-le-Bow, in the latter case the
Wren building with the late 11th-century crypt below. Parish churches were favourite top-
ics for artists. Interest now spread to prominent houses in the City and in the area, such as
moated sites and Elizabethan or Jacobean houses. By the late 18th century the antiquar-
ian investigation of medieval buildings was firmly established, and to people like Carter
and his colleagues we owe records of a large number of generally exceptional London
buildings before destruction; most were published at the time, or have been since (Figure
252
 Medieval and Tudor London after 1600

Figure 9.10 St Nicholas Plumstead (LB Greenwich), viewed from the east in 1807, by S Wood-
burn. The church was thereafter restored or enlarged in 1818, 1867, 1907 and after
War damage in the 1950s, so this is a useful view of the old parts. Plumstead was a
small market town. By 1807 the 15th-century north aisle (right) was in ruins. The
lancet window is 13th-century, and traces of late 12th-century doorways survive. The
brick tower is of 1662–4.
2.14 shows the entrance to the 15th-century chapel at Leadenhall, drawn about 1785).
Carter firmly believed that by his work he was making a contribution to fighting Napoleon:
he knew ‘of no way that can so well aid the general cause, as to stimulate my country-
men to think well of their own national memorials.’19 A notable archaeological ‘report’
almost in the modern sense concerned Westminster Palace, by J T Smith in 1807; it used
engravings, with those illustrating wall-paintings and decorated glass fragments coloured
by hand. Others produced engravings and antiquarian notes on parish churches in the
London area, which are of use today (Figure 9.10). The drawings in the comprehensive
study of Westminster Palace after the fire of 1834 by Brayley and Britton, for instance, are
of a quality rarely equalled even today.20 Unpublished drawings, often unique records, can
still be found in record offices (Figure 9.11). But such enthusiasts were in a minority; far
stronger was the spirit of improvement, which made London a European symbol of new,
refined and noble architecture. This was the age of formal, over-designed houses by Nash
at Regent’s Park, the new University College building, and Rennie’s bridges.

253
 London 1100–1600

Figure 9.11 A 13th-century crypt from the medieval religious house of St Martin le Grand, east
of the street of that name just north of St Paul’s, recorded during development in
1818 by Bartholomew Howlett (GL). This, along with an adjacent earlier crypt, is
the only recorded fragment of the important monastery.

The pace of redevelopment, many people noticed at the time, quickened in the first half
and middle of the 19th century; the new railways not only cut great swathes of destruc-
tion through the urban landscape of all previous periods, but brought many new varieties
of stone and other building materials, such as rooftiles and bricks from the Midlands,
which fed the insatiable need to rebuild anew. When the forecourt at the west end of
St Paul’s was opened up in 1874 and its semicircle of railings disposed of (one section has
ended up in a park in Toronto), it was laid in several contrasting stones including slabs of
Cornish granite and the former wall line marked by bollards of Shap (Lakeland) granite,
both of which types remain there. Other new stones and materials on secular buildings
included Swedish granite, a wide range of terracotta, Peterhead granite and Midlands
Red Sandstone, to cite only City examples. Some other lively choices of stone can be seen
in Southwark and Westminster.
In the decade 1860–70, according to Summerson, ‘London was more excavated, more
cut about, more rebuilt and more extended than at any time in its previous history’.21

254
 Medieval and Tudor London after 1600
At the same time, the intervals between redevelopments on the same site got smaller. The
modern London phenomenon of a commercial building only lasting one or two genera-
tions before being replaced starts in the 19th century. There was also large-scale earth
moving which affected the above- and below-ground reservoir of buildings and strata
composing medieval and Tudor London. One of the most radical was the construction
in 1825–8 of St Katharine’s Docks immediately east of the Tower, which removed all trace
of the 12th-century and later buildings of the hospital of the same name; the church was
where the entrance to the Docks from the river now is. The excavated soil from the dock
basin was used to raise the marshy land for building at Pimlico, where presumably much
of it remains to confuse the archaeologist.
It is perhaps a small consolation that churches, museums, public buildings and office
blocks were sometimes decked out in medieval dress, a product of the Gothic Revival
movement in architecture. Horace Walpole, building his mansion Strawberry Hill in
Twickenham in the 1750s, had bookcases made which were fronted by tracery derived
from the 14th-century choir screen in St Paul’s Cathedral, which he knew from his copy
of Dugdale’s history of the cathedral illustrated by Hollar (Figure 6.4); but this attrac-
tive idea was not imitated. Some buildings outside London did take inspiration from
major medieval buildings in the capital: the roof of the railway station built in 1839–40
at Temple Meads, Bristol, is of wood, and is based on the great hammerbeam roof of
Westminster Hall, which it exceeds slightly in width. But within London itself, medie-
val models for new buildings were almost all taken from continental Europe, as can be
seen from the most Gothic survival, Street’s Law Courts in the Strand, designed in 1870.
New parish churches were commonly in a 13th-century or early 14th-century Gothic of
French character. Other styles plundered, to mention only surviving buildings, included
Byzantine (Abbey Mills Pumping Station), Romanesque (in spirit at the Natural History
Museum; sometimes Italian, as Christ Church, Streatham), or Venetian (General Credit
Company, Lothbury). Rarely, and often only for details such as windows, the native styles
of Perpendicular (St Andrew Kingsbury, moved stone by stone from Marylebone in 1932)
and Tudor (Lincoln’s Inn Hall and Library, with the darker bricks in diaper patterns)
were used. Meanwhile medieval and Tudor London refused to go away, and occasionally
redevelopment revealed that buildings had been patched up over the centuries, just like
in other towns (Figure 9.12).
Interest in archaeology of London and its region was flickering into life: the Surrey
Archaeological Society was founded in 1854, and the London and Middlesex Archaeologi-
cal Society in 1855. Concerned observers began to record demolitions and destruction on
London sites. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, antiquaries were mostly concerned
about London’s Roman past, though notable medieval buildings were recorded from time
to time.22 Photography began to be used, but until 1920 the watercolour and pencil drawing
continued to be the main means. In 1875 the Society for Photographing Relics of Old Lon-
don was formed, and they issued valuable large, if murky, photographs mostly of 17th- and
18th-century buildings. Virtually every building they recorded is now gone.
Legislation slowly improved, and some buildings were saved, but many others lost.23
Under the Union of Benefices Act 1860, which rationalised parishes in the City to respond

255
 London 1100–1600

Figure 9.12 Rebuilding of Carpenters’ Hall in London Wall in the 1870s revealed at least three pe-
riods of the former hall, which was just outside the Fire-damaged zone. Mixed in with
the ornate post-Fire plasterwork of 1671 was an arch of the roof of the 15th-century
hall, and stone corbels which would have supported other arches (right); and on the
end wall, paintings of about 1560 celebrating biblical references to carpenters. Three
out of four of these painted panels have survived and are kept at the present hall.
to declining congregations, the Church itself by 1888 sold off and therefore destroyed 22
churches, 16 of which had been rebuilt by Wren and which therefore were also medieval.
Angry and frustrated, antiquaries observed some of the destruction.24 But this recording
was selective; there was very little recording of the immediately post-Dissolution timber
houses at St Bartholomew Smithfield, in Cloth Fair and its neighbouring streets, which
had lasted from the 1550s; they were pulled down as insanitary in the first two decades of
the 20th century. Most of what we know about the galleried inns of Southwark has to be
based on early photographs and watercolours of the exteriors, with no analytical studies
and no comprehensive floor plans (or at least, none yet published; perhaps they survive
somewhere).25 The new London County Council attempted to save standing buildings in
a few cases, or kept disembodied pieces in store; one notable feat was the purchase and
saving of what is now called Prince Henry’s Room in Fleet Street. This secular building
over the Inner Temple Gateway, built in timber in 1610–11, had been obscured by a later
front, and had lost its bay-windows. The whole building was moved back 5ft (1.5m) for the
widening of Fleet Street and reopened in 1906, with a restored (largely facsimile) front
and splendid original first-floor ceiling within.26
256
 Medieval and Tudor London after 1600
World Wars and after
The First World War was not particularly destructive in London; as already noted, a bomb
dropped from a Zeppelin in 1917 did reveal the timber-framing now restored at the
entrance to St Bartholomew Smithfield. But the Second World War certainly was.
Medieval monuments, particularly churches, suffered along with far more buildings of
all kinds and of more recent centuries. In the City, medieval churches were destroyed
or badly damaged, as were Guildhall and several livery company halls. At Christ Church
Greyfriars, the Wren church which was based on half the medieval friary church was de-
stroyed (Figure 9.13); along with St Dunstan in the East, near the Tower, it has been left
as a ruin in the post-War City, and both are now gardens. Recording of the north wall of
Christ Church in 2008 found, as now to be expected, that the Wren building reused much
medieval stone, including architectural fragments. Some had been burnt twice, in 1666
and again in 1940.
After the War, some damaged medieval and Tudor buildings were restored: notably
Guildhall, Staple Inn, Gray’s Inn, Merchant Taylors’ Hall, Middle Temple Hall and the
Temple church, where Godfrey’s careful restoration added another layer to many before,
so that little of the building, though beautiful, is now genuinely medieval (Plate 6).27
Of the medieval parish churches, the damaged central ones were rebuilt: All Hallows
Barking, St Olave Hart Street and St Giles Cripplegate.
In post-War development, archaeology took a back seat. Although standing buildings of
historic merit were to some degree legally protected with the introduction of the in Town
and Country Planning Act of 1944, the over-riding need was for new housing, offices and
public buildings. In the darkest and most depressing years of the War, people began to
hope for a better post-War London, with architecture to suit. This would be a new and
better society; this is what their brothers and sons, and a significant number of civilians
in London, had died for.28 Modernism was the architectural fashion, and this resulted in
large office and apartment blocks which obliterated large groups of medieval property
boundaries within their new footprints. There was no feeling that the past might contrib-
ute to the future townscape, but a deliberate rejection of the past as being pre-War, dirty
and below-standard.
During and after the Second World War there were several schemes for rebuilding the
City of London after war damage. One of the most ambitious was The Precincts of St Paul’s,
by William Holford, presented to the Corporation of London in March 1956, reaching its
final form in 1961. The main objective was to improve the setting of the cathedral, ensure
its practical future and contribute to an improved flow of traffic. The cathedral then lay
in an area of bomb damage, so large gestures were possible and embraced. Holford’s
approach was however rooted in ‘principles of design’, and for that reason he rejected the
idea of a semi-circular forecourt like Bernini’s in Rome. In terms of results, the scheme
came to fruition with the Paternoster development on the north side. Similar new build-
ings, a new alignment for Creed Lane and a south-east garden including a large jet of
water were proposed (Plate 7). Holford had more freedom in his planning than Wren
had after the Great Fire; indeed, one has to go back to the expansion of the precinct
under the bishops in the early 12th century to find a parallel in magnitude, of potential
257
 London 1100–1600

Figure 9.13 Firemen combat the blaze after Christ Church Greyfriars is hit by a bomb, 1940
(GL). Now the site is a garden, surrounded on three sides by the walls of the roof-
less church.
and actual power in changing the townscape. The Paternoster Square development of
1961 has now been demolished. Holford also suggested bringing Temple Bar back from
Hertfordshire, to which it had been transposed when removed from Fleet Street in the
1870s. He proposed it should be rebuilt at the north-west corner of the cathedral, in line
with the west facade but set back a few yards to the east. Perhaps fortunately, this never
took place, but in 2004 the Bar was brought back and erected a few metres away to form
an entrance to the new Paternoster development.

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 Medieval and Tudor London after 1600
Post-War regeneration and road schemes destroyed more in London than the war had,
as in towns all over Europe, and archaeological concern began to respond.29 For London,
urban archaeology in the modern sense began after World War II with the work of W F
Grimes30 and Peter Marsden in the City of London, which included excavation of several
medieval sites, and of Kathleen Kenyon in Southwark. Study of medieval artefacts in Lon-
don had in fact a slightly longer pedigree. Mortimer Wheeler encouraged a young col-
league, John Ward Perkins, to write a catalogue of ‘the history of familiar but neglected
antiquities of the Middle Ages’ which were held by the London Museum. This was written
in the 1930s, and produced, not quite finished because curtailed by the war, in 1940.
It contains what may be the earliest discussion of the idea of ‘medieval archaeology’. The
range of artefacts, though impressive, was what appealed to museum curators: weaponry,
horse-furniture, domestic and agricultural objects, some articles of dress and objects in
bone, ivory and glass.31 The Medieval Catalogue of the London Museum was of national im-
portance for students of artefacts for decades, and the subsequent catalogues of medieval
finds produced by the archaeologists and museum curators in the 1980s and 1990s are
extensions of that original work, not replacements.
The era of professional archaeological organisations or ‘units’ attached to museums or
established by local committees dates from the early 1970s. The first half of that decade
saw three documents which are now known to have been crucial: a national survey of the
state of archaeology in English towns, The erosion of history, in 1972; The future of London’s
past, concentrating on the City, in 1973; and Time on our side?, a survey of all the other
London boroughs, in 1976.32 Archaeology of the centuries covered in this book was how-
ever not yet totally emancipated: The future of London’s past stopped at 1500, and Time
on our side? had maps for all periods to the Anglo-Saxon, but nothing after 1066. This
may have been because both documents were primarily assessments of what had been
achieved, but the omissions delayed discussion about what should be done. There was
much destruction of standing historic buildings in the name of progress; one of the few
recorders of buildings, in a study of the changing of central Watford out of all recogni-
tion, noted ‘it is ironical that 1975, European Architectural Heritage Year, should have
been a year of wholesale destruction.’33 Gradually amateur and later professional archae-
ologists recorded the loss of town centres. The progression in all English towns and cities
from a period of archaeological impotence, developer hostility and official indifference
in the 1960s to some measure of archaeological input into the development process by
the 1990s was reflected in all other European countries.34
The 1970s and 1980s were an increasingly hectic time. East of the City, the derelict
docklands area was quickly developed from 1980, and the City responded to this per-
ceived threat with another building boom of its own.35 The most frenetic period was the
five years from 1985 when the Stock Exchange was deregulated, leading to a demand for
large buildings with large floor areas for trading. Archaeological investigations in the City
rose in number from 16 a year in 1984 to 59 in 1988.36 Few of these excavations have been
published; the current programme of publications by the Museum of London is gradually
mopping them up as adjuncts to more recent projects, but often in summary form, and
they deserve more.

259
 London 1100–1600
From 1989, the Corporation of the City of London adopted policies to encourage
archaeological investigation during development. Though developers paid for the
excavations, they were under no obligation or pressure to pay for the equally expen-
sive analysis and publication, and usually did not. In 1990, coinciding with an economic
recession, the government introduced planning guidance, known by the initials of a pol-
icy guidance paper as PPG 16, which gave local authorities controls to deal with archaeol-
ogy in the planning process, in both policy and development control. This has improved
the situation immeasurably, though it would have been much better for the conduct of
archaeology and the saving of archaeological information if PPG 16 had come ten years
earlier. This guideline has now been itself replaced by further measures. Many of the
British-based multi-national companies which developed sites in London in the 1980s
still exist. In a changed climate of opinion, they now reap considerable public relations
benefits from being seen to support and fund conservation and archaeological work,
often renewing whole areas of the capital. This is praiseworthy, but these companies
should now turn back to their unfinished obligations from 20 years ago.
On large development sites or in small trenches ahead of Thames Water renewing the
19th-century pipes in the streets, discoveries come (Plate 8, the recent uncovering of a
medieval tidal mill at Greenwich). Partly as a result of greater interest in the archaeology
of their areas shown by local planning authorities, encouraged by government guidelines
from 1990, the archaeologists working in the London area today share a fairly common
methodology of how to excavate, archive and publish their work. The Museum runs a
central store for the archive of excavations – plans, photographs and reports as well as
the multitude of artefacts and samples – in Hackney, called the London Archaeological
Archive Research Centre (LAARC) (see the appendix on websites). The present study
is a summary of published archaeological work about the five centuries in London after
about 1100, and it only skims the visible top of a mountain of material which awaits study
at LAARC, and readers are encouraged to go beyond the publications cited here to exam-
ine and study the physical evidence for themselves.

The future of medieval and Tudor London

Now archaeological excavation of a standard not seen before takes place during devel-
opment as a matter of course; but there is not much left of the medieval and Tudor city
(Plate 9) or, increasingly, its environs. Study of this remaining fragment should be allied
with interrogation of the very large amount of information gained from excavations, par-
ticularly since about 1970, and the rich documentary sources. We are only at the begin-
ning of constructing an archaeological account and explanation of London during these
centuries.
How are medieval buildings, both standing and buried, now dealt with and regard-
ed? The City of London, and its contiguous boroughs, are now one of the most vibrant
centres of new exciting architecture in the world. Innovative, artistic buildings are still
destructive, if not more so than before, of archaeological strata. How do they accom-
modate the past? The west side of the Tower of London, the assembly point for its large
numbers of tourists, has been well laid out, in a sober way which enables the medieval
260
 Medieval and Tudor London after 1600
buildings to be prominent. When St Ethelburga Bishopsgate was badly mauled by a ter-
rorist bomb, there was brief discussion of totally new designs, but in the end a facsimile
of the medieval west end was restored to Bishopsgate. Nearby, however, the other medi-
eval churches of St Andrew Undershaft and especially St Helen Bishopsgate are totally
overwhelmed by the Gherkin and its soon-to-appear larger colleague, a high building in
Leadenhall Street nicknamed the Cheesegrater from its sloping profile. This will cast a
permanent shadow on St Helen’s church. There is a danger, it seems to me, that medieval
and Tudor buildings are preserved and honoured, but not integrated into the future
townscape. They become isolated, their significance unappreciated by the public and
therefore diminished. We should have more debate about how modern building develop-
ments could incorporate and use the old.
One method of remembering is to lay out the plan of a demolished building in new
stone, to show its relationship, often at variance, with the new or existing buildings above
ground. This has been done successfully at St Paul’s, where the remains of the 14th-cen-
tury south cloister and the feet of several of the radiating buttresses originally beneath
the contemporary chapter house had survived the Wren construction, but only as scat-
tered clumps of stonework a couple of feet high. These were found in 1879 and partially
displayed until 1937, but the stonework had decayed badly in that time. In 2004–7 a
new stone surface was laid above the remains, with flat or gradually sloping surfaces for
disabled access, and on this the cloister and buttress plans reproduced, incorporating
detailed mouldings accurately cut by computers (Plate 10). This open space, like the rest
of the cathedral churchyard, is much frequented by City workers, tourists and school par-
ties at lunchtimes; the present City has many open spaces, but not many with grass. In the
St Paul’s case, the previous and now buried medieval walls and tiled cloister walkways are
replicated in facsimile structures which stand a few feet high. The easier and more wide-
spread technique, in other British and European cities, of simply laying out the outline of
a former important building on the new ground surface should be employed in London
much more than it is, which is hardly at all.
A common form of commemoration in London, strange to American visitors, are stat-
ues. In general, modern central London is full of statues, but with an almost total absence
of historical personages from the Middle Ages or Tudor period in public spaces. It seems
that, with the exception of kings and two representations of Thomas More and a couple
of Shakespeare, we honour our great and good from after 1600, not before. There are no
statues of Richard Whittington or Geoffrey Chaucer. There is a 1973 fibreglass effigy of
London-born Thomas Becket, now on the grass south-east of St Paul’s Cathedral, but he
is shown falling to the ground from the blow which killed him – in Canterbury. Outside
the City, methods of recalling the past have been attempted, though on a small scale and
very rarely. At East Finchley Underground Station, a stylised metal statue of 1957 kneels
on a parapet: an archer bending his bow. This is not an allusion to the speed at which
commuters will reach their destination, but to the former hunting forest of North Middle-
sex, now beneath suburbia. Just as the Church of England makes a point, when it can, of
sponsoring new art in its churches, so perhaps local authorities should commission works
from present-day artists, to remind people about the long history of their locality.

261
 London 1100–1600
Conclusion – to be avoided
So we come to the present. Despite the title of this work and London’s greatness, from
largest town in England by 1000 to the edge of empire in 1600, this has not been a narra-
tive of sweeping, or even logical, progression. Archaeology tends to complement history
by illuminating generalities, but they are usually specific to a place or a group of people.
Archaeology is a mosaic, and all mosaics have parts where the pieces are missing. Large
parts of medieval and Tudor London, and its region, are gone for ever, and archaeology
cannot illuminate them. Fortunately archaeologists are now sufficiently equipped, with
legislation, public support and sympathetic developers, to investigate the small portion
which remains.
To have a conclusion at all is premature, and might be arrogant. By the time this work
appears, a few months after its completion, at least some of it will probably be out of date
or in need of revision. I certainly hope so. All I can promise is that the archaeologists in
London will ensure that when you step out of that railway station for medieval and Tudor
London next time, there will be more to see.

262
 Notes

1 Introduction
1. Cherry and Pevsner 1983, 23.
2. Thompson et al 1998, 122–58.
3. The main authors used here are: for the London area, Airs 1983 and Bond 1998; for Essex,
Walker 1998 and other authors as noted below; for Hertfordshire, Smith 1992 and Gibson
1998; for Kent, Pearson 1994 and Clarke et al 2010.
4. Castle 1977.
5. Hughes 2004.
6. Third edition, Schofield 1999a.
7. The medieval chapter by Barney Sloane and Charlotte Harding, with the present author
and Julian Hill, and parts of the post-medieval chapter by the present author: MoLAS 2000,
207–54 and 255–81 respectively.
8. See review by this author, with details of the map produced by Old House Books in 2008, in
Trans London Middlesex Archaeol Soc 59 (2008), 242–3.
9. For the similarities in the 10th century, Verhulst 1999.
10. Bartlett 1993, 291–313. This cultural consensus over much of medieval Europe is one of the
main aspects being explored by the series of books of which the present study forms part.
11. Cowie 1988; Cowie and Whytehead 1989; Vince 1990, 1991; Malcolm and Bowsher 2003.
12. Burch et al 2011, 25–7.
13. Malcolm et al 2003, 128–34; Keene 1995a, 11.
14. Schofield et al 2008/9.
15. Steedman et al 1992, 135; Watson et al 2001, 56–7.
16. Dyer 2002, 66.
17. Clarke and Ambrosiani 1995; Verhulst 1999; Schofield 2007.
18. Demolon et al 1994; Verhulst 1999, 59–118.
19. Vince 1991.
20. Gover et al 1942.
21. Astill 1988, 36–9.
22. Vince 1991, 421.
23. Campbell et al 1993, 24.
24. Barron 2004, 239.
25. Clay 1984, 2, 213.

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 London 1100–1600
2 Public buildings and concerns
1. A more detailed summary is Schofield 2003, 8–12. The following paragraphs make use of an inter-
nal MoLAS assessment of sites on the defences drawn up in 1999 by A Westman and the author.
2. Reconstructed section of the London wall in RCHM(E) 1928, 70, fig 9; for Paris, Favier 1997b, 76.
3. Maitland 1756, i, 31.
4. He was a principal author of the RCHM(E) volume on Roman London (1928).
5. Milne with Cohen 2002.
6. Shown in an engraving of 1792, in Schofield 2003, fig 5, and excavated in 1988–9.
7. The most recent discussion is of several excavations of the ditches around Cripplegate by W
F Grimes, by Milne with Cohen (2002, 11–24).
8. Stow i, 29.
9. Redrawn in Schofield 2003, fig 4. Leybourn’s plan is in LMA.
10. Thomson 1983, 206.
11. The site of Bastion 11A is shown from the north in an engraving of 1793 by J T Smith, which
shows the Jocelyn work in a complete state on the wall, and no sign of the tower: Schofield
2003, fig 3.
12. Ward-Jackson 2003, 127–9.
13. Building accounts for the rebuilding of 1586 are in Masters 1984. For the recording in 1969,
Trans London Middlesex Archaeol Soc 22 part 3 (1970), 8–9 (work by P Marsden). Leybourn’s plan
of the gate in 1676, which includes an outline of the prison, is in Schofield 2003, 10, fig 4.
14. Wheatley and Cunningham 1891, i, 27.
15. Schofield with Maloney 1998, 32.
16. A parallel of a few years before, possibly a model, is provided by the equestrian statue of
Henri IV placed above the main entrance to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, to signify the city’s
allegiance to the king, in 1609 (Ballon 1991, 11).
17. Schofield with Maloney 1998, 31.
18. Creighton 2007 for further discussion.
19. Martin and Martin 2009, 41–60.
20. Watson et al 2001, 76–113. For the Botolph Wharf tradition, Maitland 1756, 45.
21. Milne 2003, 83.
22. Keene 2000a, 144.
23. Harding and Wright 1995; Watson et al 2001, 92–4, 119–22.
24. Harding and Wright 1995, xxi–xxii, nos. 310, 330; Watson et al 2001, 105–6.
25. The best study of these later buildings is Home 1931.
26. Work by I Tyers in Watson et al 2001, 180–90.
27. Bowsher et al 2007.
28. Archer et al 1988 is a study of an illustrated manuscript survey of the markets and market
streets in the City in 1598 by Hugh Alley.
29. Samuel 1989.
30. For les Halles in Paris, Favier 1997, 34–7 with plan. A brief discussion of the bastides is in
Schofield and Vince 2003, 42–4.
31. Padfield 2009.
32. VCH Essex v, 214–19. [1966]
33. Saunders 1997.
34. Bowsher et al 2007, 241–5.
35. The first mention of ‘acqueducts’ at Siena is in 1226 (Balestracci and Piccinni 1977, 146–7).
Nicholas 1997b, 75 lists the next known cases as Breslau in 1272, Lübeck in 1294, and Nu-
remberg in 1331.

264
 Notes
36. Schofield 1987.
37. Burch et al 2011, 108–11.
38. Schofield 1987, 34–5; Waley and Dean 2010, 114–15.
39. Cal Early Mayor’s Court Rolls 1298–1307, 124.
40. Haslam 1972; 1973; Burch et al 2011, 96.
41. Cf Keene 1985, 51.
42. Schofield and Lea 2005.
43. Schofield 2003, 6–7.
44. For examples, Dijon in the 1240s, where the mayor had to look out for the alignment of
buildings on the street (Le Goff 1980, 390–1); detailed instructions of use of water by citizens
for cleaning their alleys, Bologna 1288 (Dean 2000, 5–56, esp 53). Three studies of cleaning,
cesspits and butchery practices are Sabine 1933; 1934; 1937.
45. For introductions to a large subject, see Steedman et al 1992; Milne 1981, 2003; Milne and
Milne 1978, 1982; Dyson 1989.
46. Dyson 1981.
47. Eg Milne and Hobley 1981; Herteig 1985; Good et al 1991; Bill and Clausen 1999.
48. Gläser 1999b; Hammel-Kiesow 1999.
49. Knight and Phillpotts 2008.
50. Barron 2004, 36.
51. Carlin 1996, esp 250Â�Â�–1.
52. Carlin 1996, 36.
53. Schofield 2001b.
54. Swain et al 1991; Bowsher and Miller 2009. For a summary which includes the circumstances
of the discovery of the Rose in May 1989, Blatherwick 2000.
55. Hill 1969, 121.
56. Jehel and Racinet 1996, 89; Goff 1980, 216.
57. York is studied in several volumes by RCHM(E). On Exeter, I note an exemplary study of the
defences in 1485–1660, Stoyle 2003. We have nothing like this in London.
58. Rosser 1989; Carlin 1996.
59. Bowsher et al 2007, 412–14.
60. To match historical study of deviance and power in London, e.g. Rexroth 2007.

3 Castles, palaces and royal houses

1. Principally RCHM(E) 1930, 74–95; History of the King’s Works, ii, 709–26.
2. Impey 2008.
3. Kemp and Graves 1996, 319–21.
4. Impey 2008, 102.
5. Works noted in footnote 1 above; Parnell 1993; Hutchinson 1996.
6. Bradley and Pevsner 1997, 354–71 is the best current succinct guide.
7. Hiller and Keevill 1994.
8. Keevill 2004.
9. Hewett 1980, 217.
10. Keay 2001.
11. Crowfoot et al 1992.
12. A suggestion of John Blair to Barbara Harvey (1993, 3).
13. King’s Works i, 44–8, 491–552; Colvin 1966; Thomas et al 2006.
14. Thomas et al 2006, 57, fig 34.
15. L Keen in Rodwell and Mortimer 2010, 233.

265
 London 1100–1600
16. This has fascinated civil engineers and architectural historians and has been drawn and ana-
lysed by many, including Viollet-le-Duc: Courtenay and Mark 1987, reprinted in Yeomans
(ed) 1999, 127–50.
17. Suggested by Keene 2003, 49.
18. Poulton 2005.
19. Brindle and Kerr 1997.
20. ↜King’s Works ii, 949–50; RCHM(E) 1930, 25–6; Dixon 1972.
21. Woods 1982.
22. Gadd and Dyson 1981.
23. Thurley 1993, 48, 133.
24. Green and Thurley 1987; Thurley 1993, 187–91; 1999.
25. Cloake 1995; Cowie 2004. I am grateful to Bob Cowie for these and other references.
26. Thurley 1988; 1990; 1993; 2003.
27. Thurley 1993, 19–21; Dawson 1976.
28. Thurley 1997, esp fig 7.3.
29. Hewett 1980, 219; Cherry et al 2005, 719–20 (both with drawings).
30. Blatherwick and Bluer 2009.
31. King’s Works i, 130.
32. King’s Works i, 163.
33. This sentence I owe to Tony Dyson.
34. King’s Works ii, 999.
35. Thurley 1993, 104–6.
36. Wilson 2003, 143.

4 Houses, daily life and neighbourhoods

1. Parts of this chapter are based on Schofield 2001a and Schofield 2003.
2. Horsman et al 1988; Brigham 1992.
3. Milne and Milne 1982; Milne 1992; Goodburn 1993; 1997.
4. Grimes 1968, 155–9, with revision and comment by Milne with Cohen 2002, 38–40; recent
examples come from a site immediately east of St Paul’s Churchyard at 25 Cannon Street
(Elsden 2002).
5. Horsman et al 1988; Pritchard 1991.
6. Bowsher et al 2007, 38–42.
7. Schofield et al 1990; Steedman et al 1992; Bowsher et al 2007, esp fig 148.
8. Burch et al 2011, 97–8
9. Gadd 1983.
10. Seeley et al 2006.
11. Seeley et al 2006; Carlin 1996, 25–6; Schofield 2003, 229–32.
12. Tatton-Brown 2002.
13. For wider surveys of urban housing, Büttner and Meissner 1983 (a useful account with an
interesting Marxist approach as was to be expected from East Germany at the time) and more
briefly, Roesdahl and Scholkmann 2007 for the period to 1200.
14. Büttner and Meissner 1983, 26–9; Strobel 1976.
15. Esquieu and Pesez 1998; Garrigou Grandchamp 1992; on Cluny, Garrigou Grandchamp et al 1997.
16. Rutledge 2002. Norwich is also notable for its later medieval brick undercrofts: Smith and
Carter 1983.
17. Flüeler and Flüeler 1992, 82, 225; Laleman and Ravescott 1994; Garrigou Grandchamp 2006.
In Bruges about 195 houses of the 12th to the 14th century in stone and brick have been

266
 Notes
identified: Van Eenhooge 2001.
18. Fehring 1994, 196–7; Garrigou Grandchamp 2006; for a European survey, Gläser 2001.
19. For a probable 12th-century London example, see the Watling Court site (Schofield et al
1990), Building 6. For examples of stone towers in towns from Zürich to Riga, Fehring 1991,
204; in Ghent, Hammel-Kiesow 1996, 44–5; stone cellars, Verhaeghe 1994, 154–6.
20. Eenhooge 2001.
21. Keene 1985, 420.
22. Schofield 2003, 34–5; Emery 2006, 240–3.
23. Keene 1999b.
24. Barron 1995.
25. Procter 2000, 56–61.
26. Thompson et al 1998, photograph on p36.
27. Hewett 1980, 123–4.
28. Blatherwick and Bluer 2009.
29. Le Goff 1980, 321; Favier 1997, 98, 109; Van Ossel 1998, 114–19.
30. Schofield 2003, 147. Jetties are known abroad at Bergen (Norway) after a fire of 1248 and
one at Esslingen (S Germany) has been dated by dendrochronology to 1266/7 (Reimers
2001, 790; Flüeller and Flüeller 1992, 256). Jetties are known in many European cities, for
instance in Venice, in the 13th century (Howard 2002, 153).
31. Keene 1996, 106–7. Study of the increasing height of timber-framed houses in towns in the
13th and 14th centuries would be fruitful: high houses survive in several German towns, with
an example of 1289 in Limburg an der Lahn having three storeys and two more in the roof-
space (Fehring 1996, 60, fig 51).
32. For example sites: Schofield et al 1990; Lyon 2004; Telfer 2004; Bowsher et al 2007; Burch et
al 2011, 97–8, 224–5.
33. Brown 1990.
34. Inq PM ref, passim.
35. Cal Pat R Edward VI 1550–5, 27–8.
36. Schofield 2003, 71–88; Pfaud 1985.
37. For the Witham example, Shackle 2009.
38. The surveys are catalogued in Schofield 1987 with an introduction; and many redrawn and
studied further in Schofield 2003.
39. For one example see Bowsher et al 2007, 120–1, 247.
40. Martin and Martin 2009, 200.
41. Steele et al in prep.
42. Not in every case; quite a few boundaries of modern buildings are on medieval foundations.
One length of medieval wall observed in Ducksfoot Lane, Upper Thames Street, in 1966 sup-
ported a standing party wall 70ft (21.3m) high, and because of this, according to museum
notes, ‘the City Engineer did not disturb the medieval work, even to discover its thickness’
(Schofield and Maloney 1998, 48).
43. Armitage 1981; Bowsher et al 2007, 310.
44. Chew and Kellaway 1973.
45. Chew and Kellaway 1973, nos 362–7.
46. Winter 2005.
47. Loengaard 1989.
48. Harward 2003.
49. Clarke 1999.
50. Blair 2002.
51. Poulton 1998.

267
 London 1100–1600
52. Westman and Holder 2004.
53. Pearson 1994, 4.
54. Smith 1992, 12–45, 66.
55. Bascombe et al 1982.
56. Brown 1986; Schofield 1994b.
57. Bond 1998, 17; Walker 1999. Much of this paragraph is based on Airs 1983 and Bond 1998.
58. Pearson 1994, 9; 2005, 57.
59. For a brief survey of the ‘archaeology of the law’ in general in western Europe, highlight-
ing the London legal inns, see Steane 2001, 167–92, which concludes the subject ‘has been
less systematically studied and therefore recorded than the corresponding evidence for the
church’ in the period 800–1600 (p192).
60. Salzman 1967, 418–19, 483–5; Schofield 2003, 153.
61. Eg Schofield 1999, figs 119, 127, 136.
62. Hewett 1980 for St Etheldreda’s undercroft, Barnard’s Inn, Charterhouse (gates), Fulham
Palace, Lambeth Palace, Lincoln’s Inn and Middle Temple hall.
63. Brigham 1992.
64. Milne 1992b.
65. Martin and Martin 2009; Clarke et al 2010.
66. This is the suggestion of Bond 1998, 17. A cluster of medieval monastic barns survives in the
countryside west of St Albans, on abbey lands. These are also claimed to be style-leaders of
their day (Gibson 1998, 24), but I wonder if this is in fact an accident of survival; they look
good because we have lost their contemporaries, most of the buildings in towns.
67. Bond 1998, 19; Gibson 1998, 23 (an example from Offley, in the north of Hertfordshire).
68. Harris 1989.
69. Lloyd 1925.
70. Van Eenhooge 2001, 132; Baart 2001, 159.
71. Sloane and Malcolm 2004, 173–5 (building B22).
72. Kingsford 1921, 39–42. Often an inventory of a palatial house at this level contains a wealth
of information about noble lifestyle and the furnishing of rooms and spaces, both grand
and functional. The inventory of North House, the post-Dissolution adaptation of the Char-
terhouse, in 1565 runs to 54 published pages. There were over 80 rooms and yards, a few of
which can be traced in the present buildings; apart from all kinds of furniture, pewter items,
linen and clothing, and a stable containing thirteen horses, there are useful descriptions of
fittings and equipment in a laundry, brewhouse, plumbery, pastry, spicery, dry and wet lar-
ders, pantry and servants’ rooms (Temple 2010, 198–251).
73. Schofield 2003, 128–33 for other examples of London inventories. For archaeological mate-
rial illustrating the household, Egan 1998 and 2005.
74. Littlehales 1904–5, 36–50.
75. Schofield and Pearce 2009.
76. Grenville 1997, 157–93 and Schofield and Vince 2003, 79–120 for English towns; for two syntheses
(among many) of work in continental Europe, Gläser 2001 and Garrigou Grandchamp 2002.
77. This is a feature of houses in Norwich (D Evans pers comm), but has not yet been studied in
London.
78. Bowsher et al 2007, 46–9, 95.
79. Schofield 1994.
80. Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 44 and passim.
81. For house fittings of the period, parts of Hall 2005. I have omitted here discussion of arrange-
ments for heating (open hearths, chimneys, stoves), and the probable effect on standards of
hygiene of the gradual introduction of planked floors (pointed out by D Evans).

268
 Notes
82. Pearson 2005 begins to address this.
83. Quenedy 1926.
84. Martin and Martin 2004; 2009.
85. Schofield et al 1990, 218.
86. Schofield et al 1990, 128, 218; for the bowls, L Keys in Egan 1998, 196–206.
87. Jenner and Vince 1983; Pearce et al 1985; Vince 1985; Pearce and Vince 1988; Blackmore
1994; for Rhenish stoneware, Gaimster 1987.
88. Grew and de Neergaard 1988, Egan and Pritchard 1992, Crowfoot et al 1992, Clark 1995,
Egan 1998, Spencer 1998. A table of 24 key waterfront reclamation dumps, with their cur-
rently proposed dates from 1039–40 to 1440, is in Blackmore and Pearce 2010, 14, table 2.
89. Eg Lindsay and Webber 1993, Drinkall and Stevenson 1996, Freshwater 1996.
90. Schofield et al in prep. The development of relations with metal detector users in London in
the 1980s was primarily the work of Geoff Egan.
91. Veale 2003, 146–7.
92. Crowfoot et al 1992, 3, 9, 100.
93. Egan 2005; the comparison with documents on p 12–13.
94. Gaimster 1999b.
95. Dyer 1989, 55.
96. Albarello 2005; Kowaleski 2006, 244–5.
97. Davies and Saunders 2004, 32.
98. Work by Kevin Rielly reported in Bowsher at al 2007, 113, 116–17, 134, 150.
99. Bowsher at al 2007, CD table 26.
100. Analysis of animal bone by Kevin Rielly and plant remains by John Giorgi in Malcolm 1997, 49–55.
101. Poulton 1998, 139–71 (analysis by J Bourdillon and A Bullock).
102. Work by Alan Pipe and Lisa Gray reported in Miller and Saxby 2007.
103. Harvey 1993, 34, 66–7.
104. Sloane and Malcolm 2005, 208–10.
105. Barber and Thomas 2002, 49–51.
106. Dyer 1989a, 60–1.
107. O’Connor 2000, 169; Miller and Saxby 2007, table 45; Bowsher et al 2007, CD table 22.
108. Veale 2003, 209–14.
109. Dyer 1989a, 67.
110. Howe 2002, 35.
111. The paragraphs which follow on Jews and foreigners are largely from my contributions to
Ross and Clark 2008, 62–3.
112. For a succinct survey of Jews in medieval England before 1290, Rigby 1995, 284–302. This
covers anti-Semitism at all levels.
113. Mundy 2000, 86, fig 6.5.
114. Bowsher et al 2007, 336–9, which cites earlier work on the Jewish area.
115. Grimes 1968, 180–1.
116. Dempsey 1993.
117. Bolton 1998.
118. Blatherwick and Bluer 2009.
119. Jehel and Racinet 1996, 99.
120. Maitland 1756, i, 279.
121. Eg several projects reported in Mayne and Murray 2001.
122. Geremek 1987, 2, 81, 92.
123. Barley 1986, 78.
124. Kowaleski 2006.

269
 London 1100–1600
125. In his 1982 study of the Ulster village of Ballymenone, quoted by Beaudry et al 1991, 164.

5 Selling and making

1. For what can be deduced about a variety of trades from archaeological and documentary
work on a large central site, Burch et al 2011, 201–44.
2. Barrow 2004, 218–23.
3. D Keene in Schofield et al 1990, 106–9.
4. Salzman 1952, 441–4; Schofield 2003, 185–6.
5. Clarkson 1971, 138.
6. Burch et al 2011, 231–41.
7. Martin and Martin 2004.
8. Goldthwaite 2009, 347–8; Howard 2002, 110–15, 159.
9. Barron 2004, 298–300. For a summary of almshouse foundation up to 1600 by Londoners,
see also Jordan 1960, 135–46. From 1541 to 1600, at least 37 almshouses were created or
substantially endowed by London donors; not only in the City and surrounding villages, but
often in the place of the donor’s birth, in counties as far as Somerset and Suffolk. It would be
interesting to know if these rural almshouses showed their London origins.
10. Schofield 1987, 129–30, 108–9 respectively.
11. For a recent historical survey of London’s overseas trade, Barron 2004, 84–117.
12. Schofield 1987, 126–7, 140–3.
13. Harding 2000, 287.
14. Munby 1992, who appends a list of 23 inns in Oxford around 1400.
15. Pantin 1961.
16. Bowsher et al 2007, 220–1 (work by Jacqui Pearce). Schofield 1987, 39–41; 2003, 55. For the
George, Hewett 1980, 244.
17. Clark 1995.
18. D Goodburn in Blatherwick and Bluer 2009, 220–1.
19. Dave Evans reminds me that some types of enamelled glass vessels, and certain types of objects
made of stone, brick and tile (such as stove tiles) are distinctive. My point is still generally true.
20. For the latest study which sets a standard, Blackmore and Pearce 2010 on shelly wares of 1140
to 1220 and greywares of 1170 to 1350.
21. I owe the caveats in this and the following note to Dave Evans. An example would be stone-
ware cups, which might have replaced wooden, leather or horn cups in lower-status house-
holds, and possibly supplemented glass and metal cups (silver, latten or pewter) in higher-
status households.
22. Verhaeghe 1999 is a wide-ranging study of the difficulties in pottery studies.
23. Reynolds 1977, 47.
24. Britnell 1996, 79, 102; Vince 1985; Blackmore 1999a, 50–1; 1999b, 48–52. Copies were made of im-
ported French jugs from the 1170s; the earliest securely-dated sherds were incorporated into the
construction levels of London Bridge from 1176 (work by J Pearce in Watson et al 2001, 197).
25. Britnell 2004, 324; Spufford 2002, 74–7; Veale 2003, 56; Barron 2004, 68–9.
26. Vince 2002, 135. The most striking evidence for pottery from the London region going
abroad is found in a new study of London-type ware and other pottery wares in the 12th and
13th centuries; pots reached several port towns in Denmark and Scandinavia (Blackmore and
Pearce 2010, 8, 74–6).
27. Vince 1985, 2002; Blackmore 1999b.
28. Williams 1970, 109–11; Dempsey 1993; Fryde 1983, XIV, 298.
29. Salzman 1923, 3.

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 Notes
30. Ekwall 1954, 153, 154, 192.
31. Miller and Hatcher 1995, 208.
32. Porter 1996, 16.
33. Keene 1989; Schofield 2003, 23 and fig 22; Schofield with Maloney 1998, 259–60.
34. Carlin 1996, 161.
35. Shown for instance in Clarke 1984, 181, fig 87.
36. Reimers 2001, 784.
37. Barron and Saul 1995.
38. Gaimster 1987; 1997.
39. Davis 1973, 26–36; Nicholas 1992, 390–1; Zins 1972, 10–13.
40. Childs 1978.
41. Kowaleski 2000, 477, table 19.1.
42. Cobb 1990.
43. Egan 1998, 4, 90, 159–61, 236–7.
44. Rhodes 1982; also illustrated in Schofield and Vince 2003, 132.
45. Cobb 1990, xxxvii.
46. Dietz 1972.
47. Spence 2000, 32, fig 2.4.
48. A notable example is Egan 2005.
49. Egan 1995, Giorgi 1997.
50. Clarkson 1971, 155–6.
51. Milne et al 1997.
52. What follows here is based on Peberdy 1996.
53. Peberdy 1996, 317.
54. Harding 1995, 160–1; Marsden 1996, 55–106; Davis 1973, 2–3.
55. Bill 2002, 97–8. For other types of ship, including the hulk and carrack, Friel 1995, 35–8, 158–67.
56. De Witte 1999.
57. Friel 1995, 57. Excavation at Deptford has included examination of the separate East India
Company dockyard of 1614, and the nearby Trinity Almshouses of 1514: Divers and Jarrett
1999. The subject of loading and unloading cargoes, with discussion of slipways, cranes and
other machinery on the banks of the Thames will not be dealt with here, as there has been
very little specific archaeological investigation of it in London to date.
58. Crumlin-Pedersen 1999, 11.
59. Friel 1995, 39–67.
60. On boats, Marsden 1981a, 1996; Goodburn 1991; Goodburn and Thomas 1997; Milne 1999.
Westminster Abbey purchased an old boat for reuse in a revetment at Vauxhall in 1475/6:
Woodward-Smith and Schofield 1977.
61. D M Goodburn in Blatherwick and Bluer 2009, 200–17; for review of post-medieval ship and
boat fragments from excavations from the City to the Isle of Dogs, Goodburn 1999.
62. On medieval weights and balances from London, see for instance Egan 1998, 301–29; for
coinage in Europe generally, Spufford 1988.
63. Dyer 1989a; Britnell 1996, 164; Kowaleski 2006. Half-pence and farthings were first minted in
1279: Miller and Hatcher 1995, 397.
64. Margeson 1993; Ayers 2006, 31.
65. For a national review of these and other medieval crafts, Blair and Ramsay 1991.
66. Miller and Hatcher 1995, 2, 95–6.
67. Keene 1985, 760–1.
68. Miller and Hatcher 1995, 112, 121; Ayre and Wroe-Brown 2002, 34–5, 48.
69. For a review of the techniques used in textile production, Crowfoot et al 1992, 15–25. This

271
 London 1100–1600
has yet to be grounded in London evidence.
70. A concise summary is given in Swanson 1989, 53–4.
71. Thompson et al 1998, 183.
72. Drummond-Murray and Liddle 1984.
73. Egan 2005a, 181–3.
74. As at Winchester: Keene 1985, 254.
75. McDonnell 1978, 72–85; Barber et al 2004, 12, 70–6. These paragraphs on mills in London
are based on my chapter in Blatherwick and Bluer 2009, 156–7.
76. Milne and Milne 1982, 61–2.
77. Sisitka 1997; Watson et al 2001, 115–16.
78. Blatherwick and Bluer 2009, 85.
79. Substantial remains of a tidal water mill were excavated at Greenwich Wharf, Greenwich, in
2008–9; the structure used timbers which were felled in 1194 (Galloway 2010).
80. Sygrave 2004.
81. Bowsher et al 2007, 79–80; Schofield 1987, 85–7. For fast food in London and other medieval
towns, Carlin 1998.
82. Unger 2002.
83. Schofield et al in prep; documentary research by Tony Dyson.
84. Burch et al 2011; Howe 2002, Sygrave 2005.
85. Bowsher et al 2007; Schofield with Maloney 1998, 30; Ekwall 1954, 137.
86. Howe 2002.
87. Homer 1985.
88. Egan 2005. 8.
89. Burch et al 2011, 223–7.
90. VCH Middlesex iv, 139; Salzman 1967, 244–6.
91. Goodburn 1997; 2007.
92. Work by D Goodburn in Blatherwick and Bluer 2009, 108–13 (Structure 24).
93. Tatton-Brown 2001b, 190; Samuel 1992.
94. Stow i, 325.
95. Stow i, 325; Salzman 1967, 104, 110, 135–7; Harding and Wright 1995, no. 312; Schofield 2011.
96. Bromehead 1957, 35.
97. Worssam 2006, 239–40.
98. Sloane and Malcolm 2004, 38–9; Miller and Saxby 2007, 177.
99. Salzman 1967, 120–1, 126, 131, 412; Marks and Williamson 2003, 148; Brown et al 1963, 999.
100. Colvin 1971; Tatton-Brown 2001, 190; Bowsher et al 2007, 29.
101. As ashlar, at the round nave of St John Clerkenwell of 1146–c 1155: Sloane and Malcolm 2004, 29.
102. Milne 1997, 35, figs 37–8.
103. Schofield and Lea 2005, fig 75.
104. Potter 2004.
105. Seeley et al 226, 41; Schofield 2011. Purbeck was also used for making mortars (bowls to
grind things in).
106. Salzman 1967, 443–4.
107. Lloyd 1925; Salzman 1967, 142–3; Schofield 2003, 163.
108. Cherry et al 2005, 129.
109. Phillpotts 2003. The brick towers of the 16th century are a separate thing from the stone
towers of many European towns in the 12th to 14th centuries. In Toulouse a brick tower on
a house was a specific sign of the residence of one of the town’s most important political fig-
ures. It was a sign of status and prestige.
110. Cherry and Pevsner 1998, 163–4.

272
 Notes
111. Betts 2002; and contributions of I M Betts to many MoLAS excavation reports.
112. At the Teardrop site: reported in English Heritage, London region archaeology (Greater London
Archaeology Advisory Service Annual Review, April 2007–March 2008), 5.
113. This paragraph is based on Blackmore 1999a, which contains references to the detailed stud-
ies. For the Eden Street kiln, Miller and Stephenson 1999. For Coarse Border Ware, Pearce
1992 and 1999.
114. Gaimster 1999a, 1999b.
115. Schofield and Lea 2005, esp chapter 8.5 by Lyn Blackmore.
116. Divers et al 2009.
117. Dyson 1996; Barron 2004, 74.
118. Pritchard 1991.
119. Beier 1986, 141–67.
120. Egan 2005a.
121. Salzman 1923, 135.
122. Marks and Williamson 2003, 152–3.
123. Clark 1983.
124. Blair 1987; Keene 2003; Badham 2005.
125. Salzman 1923, 144.
126. Egan and Pritchard 1991, vii–viii.
127. Egan and Forsyth 1997.
128. Cowgill et al 1987, 15, 62–74.
129. For Beverley, Armstrong et al 1991, Evans and Tomlinson 1992, Evans 2006; for Hartlepool,
Daniels 1990 and 2010.
130. Ayers 2006 (Norwich); Evans 2006 (Beverley); Hall 2006 (York); Daniels 2010 (Hartlepool).
131. Gläser 2006; see the summary of this wide north European survey (43 medieval towns in 14
countries) by A Falk on p 674–8.

6 Religion and religious ways of life

1. Schofield 2011. Keene et al 2004 is a comprehensive history of the successive cathedrals on
the site, especially the Wren building, up to the present.
2. Burgess 1999.
3. Keene 1985, 106–28; Brooke and Keir 1975, 122–31. For churches in York, which display
many similarities in their development to churches in London, Wilson and Mee 1998.
4. Bettley and Pevsner 2007, 436.
5. Redknap 1985.
6. For churches in Middlesex, see RCHM(E) 1937.
7. This section on City parish churches is based on Schofield 1994.
8. Milne 1997; Milne with Cohen 2002.
9. ↜Cal Wills ii, 424.
10. Draper 2006, 184.
11. Harvey 1987, 130.
12. Harvey 1987,114; Schofield 1993, fig 92.
13. This description is based on reports by MoLAS, notably Goodburn and Smith 1998.
14. Barron and Roscoe 1980, 42–3.
15. Schofield 1994 contains a section on these matters for City churches.
16. ↜Cal Wills i, 468; Littlehales 1904, 19.
17. Schofield 1994; Milne with Cohen 2002.
18. Reports by M Samuel and A Wilson in Milne 1997, 69–82.

273
 London 1100–1600
19. Milne 1997, 108–10.
20. ↜Cal Wills i, 158; VCH i, 192, 205–6.
21. Bowsher et al 2007, 55–6.
22. Harris 2005, 246–8.
23. Blake et al 2003.
24. Spencer 1998.
25. Spencer 1998, 179; Gaimster 2003, 129. The object is in LMC, 293 and pl xci, 2.
26. Gaimster et al 2001; Gaimster 2003.
27. The accounts of 55 monastic houses of all types and ten religious colleges originally pub-
lished in the Victoria County History volumes for London and Middlesex have recently been
brought together and re-assessed, in a useful compilation of the documentary evidence: Bar-
ron and Davies 2007.
28. Draper 2006, 115.
29. Webb 1913; 1921; Gormley 1996.
30. Sloane and Malcolm 2004; for St Mary Clerkenwell, Sloane in prep.
31. Description and plan as it now stands in Bradley and Pevsner 1997, 221–6.
32. RCHM(E) 1924, 1.
33. Recent works on the art and architecture of the abbey include Wilson et al 1986, Binski 1995.
For the restorations, Cocke 1995. A succinct summary of the abbey buildings today is Bradley
and Pevsner 2003, 105–207.
34. Wilson 2008, 59.
35. Rodwell and Mortimer 2010.
36. Mills 1995.
37. Tatton-Brown 1995.
38. Tatton-Brown and Mortimer 2003; Rodwell and Mortimer 2010.
39. Thomas et al 2006, 67–8.
40. A K G Jones, ‘Fish bones’, in Black 1976.
41. Harvey 1993; who does point out (p.46) that in its heyday Westminster Abbey would have
consumed over 10 tons of fish every year.
42. Miller and Saxby 2007.
43. Miller and Saxby 2007, 80, 190–1 (work by Mark Samuel).
44. Barber et al 2004.
45. Thomas et al 1997.
46. RCHM(E) 1929, 107. It would have been relaid, probably several times.
47. Herbert 1979.
48. Hinnebusch 1951, 20–33.
49. Hinnebusch 1951, 33–55; Clapham 1912; ; Thomas et al 2010.
50. Poulton and Woods 1984.
51. Butler 1987; for French towns, Jehel and Racinet 1996, 411–17.
52. Grainger et al in prep.
53. Knowles and Grimes 1954, 6. For the Paris Charterhouse, Lorentz and Sandron 2006, 151–2.
54. Knowles and Grimes 1954; Barber and Thomas 2002; Temple 2010.
55. Sloane 2003.
56. Eeles 1904.
57. ↜Cal Wills ii, 29.
58. Barber et al 2004, 61, fig 46.
59. Harding 2002, 94.
60. Geremek 1987, 176–7.
61. Morris 2003.

274
 Notes
62. Stow i, 263.
63. Doggett 2001.
64. Hutchinson 2003.
65. Hill 1969, 25; Wells-Cole 1997, 12–14. Kirsty Rodwell, studying Acton Court, however remarks
‘it is not clear why an Italianate style should have prevailed amongst such enthusiastic Prot-
estants’ (2003, 170–1).
66. Schofield 1994, 69–70 (analysis by Nigel Ramsay).
67. Kitto 1901, 127–40.
68. Braudel 1984, 145.
69. Morris 1989; Rodwell 1996.
70. Schofield and Vince 2003, 175–211.
71. Keene 1985, 106, on Winchester.
72. Dobson 1977, repr in Holt and Rosser 1990, 275.
73. These statements are from Collinson 2004.
74. Lorentz and Sandron 2006, 132–60. The large number of religious houses in London should
be compared with the much larger presence in Venice, which in 1581 had 59 monasteries,
31 friaries and 28 nunneries. Here a notable survival of churches enables studies to be made
of acoustics in the 16th century, and how architects may have been influenced by musical
requirements (Howard and Moretti 2009).
75. Cherry et al 2005, 14; Clapham and Godfrey 1913, 199–214.
76. Burton 1994, 112.
77. Greene 1992, 50.
78. Sloane and Malcolm 2004, 278–9.
79. Eg Bond 2001a and 2001b; understandably these national surveys do not take account of the
London reports, which have come out since.
80. Lewis 2010.

7 Human health and the environment

1. Roberts and Cox 2003, 3–10.
2. White 1988.
3. J Conheeney in Thomas et al 2007, 218–31.
4. J Conheeney in Miller and Saxby 2007, 255–77.
5. Grainger et al 2009.
6. Roberts and Cox 2003, 195, 248, 308. It would be tempting to compare statistics such as life
expectancy, level of nutrition, diseases and general health between the medieval period and
today, but such an exercise is subject to many unknown factors. For an attempt by the experts,
Roberts and Cox 2003, 383–97.
7. Sexing of sub-adults was attempted at Merton Priory, but in accordance with modern think-
ing not at the other medieval sites.
8. Griffiths et al 2000, 208–9.
9. Thrupp 1948, 194.
10. In this case, following the review in Roberts and Cox 2003, 256–65, several other London sites
are included, for instance at the Blackfriars and Holy Trinity Priory Aldgate.
11. de Rouffignac 1985. An interesting side-feature of this research is that eggs of a liver fluke in one
medieval pit from Hibernia Wharf in Southwark, on the site of St Mary Overie priory, indicate
the presence of sheep droppings. This may seem arcane, and in this case probably represents
sweepings from a yard thrown into a pit, but the investigation of how and where animals were
kept in London, for instance in the butchery trade, might be illuminated by such research.

275
 London 1100–1600
12. Conheeney 2007, 269.
13. White 1988, Appendix 3. Another example of death in childbirth was found at St John Clerkenwell.
14. Thomas et al 1997, 114–15.
15. Barron and Davies 2007, 315–17.
16. Dyson 1974, 184.
17. Roberts and Cox 2003, 266–7. A graph in Dyer 1989a, 4, based on the work of E A Wrigley
and R S Schofield, suggests that in 1349–50 England’s population fell from about 4.5 million
to 2.5 million.
18. Grainger at al 2009.
19. Transcribed in Maitland 1756, i, 128.
20. D Keene, review of Grainger et al 2009 in Trans London and Middlesex Archaeol Soc, 59 (2008),
243–5.
21. Maitland 1756, i, 130.
22. Jehel and Racinet 1996, 200–1; for Venice, Howard 2002, 55–6.
23. These concluding remarks are by Bill White. The cases of syphilis at St Mary Spital, a step
forward in the study of the disease in medieval Europe, are to be published in Walker et al
in prep.
24. Kenward and Hall 1995, 726, 735 and passim.
25. These references are from Ollivander and Thomas 2008, a selection of texts from Gerard’s
Herbal as augmented by Thomas Johnson in 1633.
26. Burch et al 2011, 183–4.
27. Bowsher et al 1997, 84–91.
28. Jones et al 1991; the sites are reported in Schofield et al 1990.
29. Anne Davis has provided the following note on specialist reports for readers wishing to delve
further, which includes studies mentioned in the main text, but gives others: A Davis in Tho-
mas et al 1997 (flax retting waste in early medieval ditch); Davis in Miller et al 1999 (charred
heather used as fuel in pottery kiln); Davis in Telfer 2003 (stable waste and resulting polluted
environment in a ditch); Davis in Sloane et al 2004 (stable and ?garden waste, diet); Davis
in Burch at al in prep (narrow range of medieval foodstuffs); Giorgi in Bowsher et al 2009
(several unusual species at end of period including tobacco).
30. Sloane and Malcolm 2005, 61–4.
31. Miller and Saxby 2007, especially 235–54.
32. Work by J Giorgi in Miller and Saxby 2007, 237, table 41.
33. Work by L Gray, A Pipe and D Smith in Miller and Saxby 2007, 250–5.
34. Work by R Scaife in Miller and Saxby 2007, 243–5.
35. Eg Potter 1993; work at Hampton Court (Thurley 1995); for a review of garden archaeology
in England after 1500, with many references, Dix 1999.
36. Details in Schofield 1999b.
37. Jacques 1999, 41–4.
38. Schofield 2003, fig 218.
39. Henderson 2005, 10, fig 9.
40. Strong 1998.
41. Giorgi 1997.
42. Sloane and Malcolm 2005, 186–7, 262–3.
43. Sloane and Malcolm 2005, 267–70.
44. Schofield 1999, 83–4.
45. Thomas et al 2006, 145–51.
46. Tatton-Brown 2002, 205.
47. Dyer 1988; Bond 2001, 73–4.

276
 Notes
48. Maitland 1756, i, 57.
49. Aston 1988, 2.
50. Milne 2003, 145–6.
51. Favier 1997b, 11.
52. ↜Survey of London 43–44, 375–80.
53. VCH Surrey iii, 487–8.
54. Brandon and Short 1990, 106–8.
55. Schama 1991, 34–8; Nicholas 1992, 118–19. A recent review of the medieval archaeology of
all France, written by one who specialises in environmental archaeology, starts with the rivers
and soils first, and only later gets to towns (Burnouf 2008).
56. For the 1589 tremor, Brayley and Britton 1836, 366, quoting Stow’s Annals.
57. Dyer 1989a, 258–73.
58. Carlin 1996, 38.
59. Riley 1868, 347–8.
60. Pers comm D Walker, MOLA: to be published in Connell et al in prep.
61. Bond and O’Connor 1999, 414–22.
62. Greig 1982, 63–4.

8 London’s region
1. Parts of this chapter are based on Schofield 2004.
2. Keene 1989.
3. Hammerson 2004.
4. See the several papers in Astill and Grant 1988.
5. Greig 1988.
6. Campbell et al 1993.
7. Keene 1998; Campbell et al 1993.
8. Campbell 2006, 202, table 7.1.
9. Hale 1958, xlviii-xlix, 130, 136; Hewett 1980, 32–3, 49.
10. Huggins 1972, 56–61, Building X.
11. Medlycott 1996, 173.
12. Davison 1990.
13. Currie 1987, a study in Harrow.
14. Pearson 1994.
15. Williams 1970, 56, 59, 231–7.
16. Munby 1977, 35–41.
17. Hurst 1961; VCH Middlesex iv, 109–21.
18. Walker 1994, 5.
19. VCH Essex v, 267–81; Cherry et al 2005, 147–8.
20. Rowe 2009.
21. Thrupp 1948, 123–30.
22. Lorentz and Sandron 2006, 60–1.
23. Goldthwaite 1980, 22, 88.
24. Belcher et al 2004.
25. Cherry et al 2005, 129–31.
26. Rowley 1978, 119.
27. Ward 1983, ii.
28. Klingelhöfer 1974.
29. Beresford 2009.

277
 London 1100–1600
30. Beresford and St Joseph 1979, 122–4.
31. Museum of London 2000, map 11.
32. This summary is based on RCHM(E) 1937, 104–10, VCH Middlesex iv, 127–48 and Bowlt 1986.
33. Franklin 2009 on the main range at Manor Farm.
34. Searle and Ross 1967.
35. Dyer 1989b.
36. Keene 1989; Galloway and Murphy 1991; Galloway et al 1996.
37. Beresford and St Joseph 1979, 231.
38. Campbell et al 1993, 60.
39. Campbell 2006, 182.
40. Britnell 1996, 233.
41. Dyer 1989, 7.
42. Keene 1989, 103.
43. Edwards 2007; Melikian 2007.
44. RCHM(E) 1937, 129–31 with map.
45. Cherry and Pevsner 1991, 365.
46. Mills 1984; Knight and Jeffries 2004; Blackmore and Pearce 2010, 114–15.
47. Potter 1991; Andrews 2006; Miller and Stephenson 1999.
48. Keene 1995, 233; Walker 2000, 117–18.
49. Harris 2005; Andrews 1989.
50. Sowan 1975; Tatton-Brown 2001.
51. Kirkman 1992.
52. Schofield 2003, 112; Walker 1999, 94; 2000, 118.
53. Fisher 1935, repr 1990, 70–1.
54. Keene 2000c, 68.
55. O’Connell 1977, 7.
56. VCH Middlesex iii, 16.
57. Clark 1995, 107.
58. Bettley and Pevsner 2007, 150–1.
59. Orlin 2000, frontispiece.
60. Smith 1992, 170–4.
61. ↜VCH Middlesex iv, 151–60.
62. For the area, see Taylor 1989, esp 49–76.
63. Pearce 1992, 1999; Fryer and Selley 1997; reports by P Jones in Poulton et al 1998.
64. Chalklin 2000, 56.
65. MoL 2000, 244–5.
66. Details in Cherry et al 2005.
67. Bassett 1982.
68. Various authors in Poulton et al 1998, 102–61.
69. Egan 2005b.
70. VCH Middlesex iv, 11.

9 Medieval and Tudor London after 1600

1. The best account of the physical expansion of London in the first half of the 17th century is still
Brett-James 1935. The population estimates are from Harding 2002, 14–15 (also Harding 1990).
2. Larkin and Hughes 1973, 47–8, 111–13, 193–4, 267–71, 346, 399.
3. Wall 1998, 39; McKellar 1999, 12; Spence 2000, 5.
4. Bowsher et al 2007, 253–74.

278
 Notes
5. Church plans in RCHM(E), 1929; Schofield 1994; Jeffrey 1996. For St Bride’s, Milne 1997.
6. Milne and Milne 1985; Schofield 1977; Blair and Sankey 2007.
7. Examples in Jones 1966, 18, 67–8, 8, 87, 88, 116.
8. Spence 2000.
9. Porter 1996, 128; Defoe quoted in Wall 1998, 103.
10. Reddaway 1951, 279–80.
11. Jones 1966, 118.
12. Maitland 1756, ii, 762.
13. Jackson 2002.
14. Howard 2002, 152–3.
15. Spence 2000, 81.
16. McKellar 1999; Borsay 1989.
17. For London: Schofield 1999, Bradley and Pevsner 1997. For Paris, Lorentz and Sandron
2006, Beaumont-Maillet 1997.
18. Adams 1983 catalogues the known engravings; his comment on Dart is on p 59.
19. Quoted in Brooks 1999, 134. For Carter’s life and thinking, Mordaunt Crook 1995. Cart-
er’s work on the site of Holy Trinity Priory in the 1790s is briefly analysed in Schofield and
Lea 2005; unpublished drawings by Carter of important details in the former choir of St
Katharine’s Hospital by the Tower are in Guildhall Library (now LMA), accessible via the
Collage website (http://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk).
20. Brayley and Britton 1836. Several draughtsmen were involved, notably R W Billings.
21. Summerson 1973, 7.
22. For development of archaeology, see the introductions to Schofield with Maloney 1998 for
the City and Thompson et al 1998 for Greater London.
23. Davies 2009, 26–30.
24. Norman 1902; Cobb 1977; Schofield 1994; Cohen 1995.
25. The surviving fragment of The George is briefly studied, in different ways, in Survey of London
22: Bankside and Hewett 1980.
26. Another interesting detail is the balcony with balustrade at attic level; from this the residents
could sit and watch the hubbub on Fleet Street, or, as did Samuel Pepys across town by the
Tower, converse with his neighbours on similar balconies.
27. Gardam 1990.
28. For reviews of the decades 1940 to 1980: Esher 1981, Bullock 2002.
29. Biddle et al 1973; Grimes 1976. For summaries of sites dug in the City in 1920–90 and Greater
London in 1965–90, see Schofield with Maloney 1998 and Thompson et al 1998 respective-
ly.
30. For Grimes’s work on medieval sites: Grimes 1968, with reinterpretation in more recent stud-
ies by Milne 1997, Milne with Cohen 1992.
31. London Museum 1940; reprinted in a larger format in 1967.
32. Heighway 1972; Biddle et al 1973; Time on our side? (1976) is listed in the bibliography as be-
ing edited by J Bird and S Kington, but most of the text was drafted by Brian Davison.
33. Castle 1977, 3.
34. These years in European archaeology, even only of medieval towns, have a vast literature. For
one bibliographical note, Schofield and Vince 2003, 283–7; for many north European coun-
tries, the series organised by archaeologists in Lübeck, eg Gläser 1997, 1999, 2001, 2006. Out
of many books on individual countries I mention only those on the Netherlands, Sarfartij
1990; France, Burnouf 2008 and Italy, Gelichi 1997.
35. For the planning history of these years in London, Hall 2002, 389–401.
36. Schofield with Maloney 1998.

279
 Appendix

Sources of further information

This is a brief and selected list of organisations and their websites which the reader is encouraged
to explore further. The best way of supporting archaeological work in London is to join your
county archaeological society.
The Museum of London is the premier custodian of London’s archaeology and material culture
(www.museumoflondon.org.uk). It contains Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA; formerly
Museum of London Archaeology Service), one of the main archaeological units working on all
aspects of archaeology in the capital, from excavation on development sites to reports of research
(www.museumoflondonarchaeology.org.uk, or via the main Museum website). The Museum also
operates the world-leading London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC) which
is part of the museum’s Department of Archaeological Collections and Archive (at time of writing,
reached through either of the mentioned websites). LAARC holds the finds and records from sev-
eral thousand excavations in London since the late 19th century, administers an online catalogue
of this archive, and conducts programmes of public involvement and education.
Other websites to explore
• English Heritage: www.english-heritage.org.uk
Archaeological societies in the London area have journals, newsletters and programmes of lec-
tures and conferences on the archaeology and local history of London. They also occasionally run
training excavations. The four main societies are:
• London and Middlesex Archaeological Society: www.lamas.org.uk. The website has links to more
than 40 affiliated societies, that is specialist interest groups and local archaeological and histori-
cal societies throughout Greater London, all of which have their own meeting schedules.
• Surrey Archaeological Society: www.surreyarchaeolog.org.uk. Includes a range of special inter-
est groups from prehistory to industrial history, and has a fine lending library. Has an interest
in boroughs in south London, including Southwark.
• Essex Society for Archaeology and History: www.essex.ac.uk/history/esah. For work north of
the Thames and east of the River Lea.
• Kent Archaeological Society: www.kentarchaeology.org.uk. Treats the ancient county of Kent as in-
cluding the south-eastern boroughs of Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich and Lewisham.

280
 Appendix
These societies, to varying extents, also administer funds which support archaeological work in the
London area, especially research, publication and education. Another fund is the City of London
Archaeological Trust, www.colat.org.uk; this trust has funded work on many of the projects which
are reported in this book.

281
 Bibliography and abbreviations

This bibliography is of all the works cited in the footnotes, together with other studies which I have found useful.
The place of publication is London unless specified otherwise.

Adams, B. (1983) London illustrated 1604–1851: a survey and index of topographical books and their plates,
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Airs, M. (1983) ‘Timber framed buildings’, in Cherry and Pevsner, 104–11
Albarella, U. (2005) ‘Meat production and consumption in town and country’, in Giles and Dyer
(eds), 131–48
Alexander, J. S. (1996) ‘Masons’ marks and stone bonding’, in Tatton-Brown and Munby (eds), 219–36
Alexander, J. and Binski, P. (eds) (1987) Age of chivalry: art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400, Royal
Acad Arts exhibition catalogue
Alexander, M. (1997) ‘Medieval Guildford’, in De Boe and Verhaeghe (eds), 61–73
Andrews, D. (1989) ‘A late medieval cutlery manufacturing site at Weaverhead Lane, Thaxted’, Essex
Archaeology and History 20, 110–19
Andrews, D. and Stenning, D. F. (1996) ‘More Maldon Wealdens: the origins and development of the
King’s Head, Maldon High Street’, Essex Archaeology and History 27, 214–25
Andrews, P. (2004) ‘Kingston – Saxon royal estate centre to post-medieval market town: the contribu-
tion of archaeology to understanding towns in Surrey’, in Cotton et al (eds), 169–86
Archer, I., Barron, C. and Harding, V. (1988) Hugh Alley’s Caveat: the markets of London in 1598, Lon-
don Topographical Society Publication 137
Armitage, K. and Vince, A. (1981) ‘A late medieval “bronze” mould from Copthall Avenue, London’,
Antiquaries Journal 61, 362–9
Armitage, K., Pearce, J. and Vince, A. (1981) ‘Early medieval roof tiles from London’, Antiquaries
Journal 61, 359–62
Armitage, P. and West, B. (1985) ‘Faunal evidence from a late medieval garden well of the Greyfriars,
London’, Transactions of London and Middlesex Archaeological Society 36, 107–36
Armstrong, P., Tomlinson, D. and Evans, D. H. (1991) Excavations at Lurk Lane Beverley 1979–82, Shef-
field Excavation Reps 1, Sheffield
Astill, G. G. (1985) ‘Archaeology and the smaller medieval town’, Urban History Yearbook 1985, 46–53
Astill, G. G. (1988) ‘Rural settlement: the toft and the croft’, in Astill and Grant (eds), 36–61
Astill, G. G. (2000) ‘General survey 600–1300’, in Palliser (ed), 27–49
Astill, G. G. and Grant, A. (eds) (1988) The countryside of medieval England, Oxford
Aston, M. (ed) (1988) Medieval fish, fisheries and fishponds in England, British Archaeological Reports
182, Oxford
Atkinson, D. R. and Oswald, A. H. (1969) ‘London clay tobacco pipes’, Journal of British Archaeological
Association 32, 171–227
Atkinson, M. and Malcolm, G. (1990) ‘Recent excavations at St John’s Priory, in Cowcross Street,
EC1’, London Archaeologist 6, 171–8

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don, EC4, 1989–97
Baart, J. M. (1997) ‘Amsterdam’, in Gläser (ed), (1997), 87–94
Baart, J. M. (2001) ‘Medieval houses in Amsterdam’, in Gläser (ed), (2001), 159–74
Badham, S. (2005) ‘Evidence for the minor funerary monument industry 1100–1500’, in Giles and
Dyer (eds), 165–96
Bailey, J. (1998) ‘The development of carpentry in Bedfordshire, 1200–1550’, in Stenning and An-
drews (eds), 55–67
Balestracci, D. and Piccinni, G. (1977) Siena nel trecento, Florence
Ballon, H. (1991) The Paris of Henri IV: architecture and urbanism
Barber, B., Chew, S., Dyson, T. and White, B. (2004) The Cistercian abbey of St Mary Stratford Langthorne,
Essex: archaeological excavations for the London Underground Limited Jubilee Line Extension Project, Mo-
LAS Monograph 18
Barclay, A., Boyle, A., Bradley, P. and Roberts, M. R. (1995) ‘Excavations at the former Jewsons Yard,
Harefield Road, Uxbridge, Middlesex’, Transactions of London and Middlesex Archaeological Society
46, 1–26
Barley, M. W. (ed) (1977) European towns: their archaeology and early history
Barley, M. W. (1986) Houses and history
Barratt, M. and Thomas, C. (1991) ‘The London Charterhouse’, London Archaeologist 6, 283–91
Barron, C. M. (1974) The medieval Guildhall of London
Barron, C. M. (1995a) ‘Centres of conspicuous consumption: the aristocratic town house in London
1200–1550’, London Journal 20 (1), 1–16
Barron, C. M. (1995b) ‘London in the later Middle Ages 1300–1550’, London Journal 20 (2), 22–33
Barron, C. M. (2000) ‘London 1300–1540’, in Palliser (ed), 395–440
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307
 Index

A artefacts, urban and rural 240

Arundel House 213
Abbey Mills Pumping Station 255
Ashford (Mddx) 7
Aberdeen 127
Assize of Nuisance 34, 75, 77
Afghanistan 172
Audley, Thomas 74
Agas map 174
Audley End 240
agriculture 220–3, 236
Augsburg (Germany) 70
Air Pilots and Air Navigators’ Company 114
Austin Friars, see London, City of
Alcocke, Thomas 72–3
Australia 111
Aldwych 5
Avignon (France), bridge 40
alehouses 121
Alfred, king 5, 6 B
All Hallows Tottenham 149, 195 Baghdad (Iraq) 231
All Saints Fulham 169 Bagshot (Surrey) 235
All Saints Laleham 195 44 High Street 81
All Souls College Oxford 236 bakers 141–2
almshouses 119–20 Baldock (Herts) 225, 231
America 1, 111, 133, 236 Baltic coast and towns 7, 36, 90, 129–31, 139, 145–6,
amphitheatre, Roman 23 158
Amsterdam 132, 252 banqueting houses 74–5
Anchor Terrace 39 Barbary (N Africa) 132
anchorites 18 Barcelona (Spain) 10
animal bones 103–4, 106 Bari (Italy) 175
Anne of Denmark 212 Barking 237–8
Antarctic 218 Abbey 177, 196, 216, 237
Antwerp (Belgium) 7, 127, 130–2, 177, 187, 247 market house 29
arcades, in public buldings 28–9 Town Hall 29
archery course (The Butts) 38, 40, 124 Barnet 233
architectural fragments (moulded stones) 159–62, battle of 162
182–3 barns 221–2
Ardleigh (Herts) 221 Basingstoke (Hants) 235
Arles (France) 25 Bath Inn (later Arundel House) 65–6
Armouries Museum (Leeds) 42 Battle Abbey (Sussex) 231
arms abbot, house 64
of the City 22 Baybroke, William 203
of Elizabeth I 29 Baynard’s Castle (first and second sites), see
arms and armour 88 London, City of
Arnemuiden (Netherlands) 132 bear-baiting 37
Arras (Belgium) 7, 88, 128 Bec (Normandy), abbey of 229

308
 Index
Becket, Thomas 175, 261 on City wall 15–16
Bede 5 in European towns 86–7, 90
Bedfordshire 81 Midlands 254
beech, dendrochronology 23 tower house 79
beetles 107 undercrofts 68
Belchamp St Paul (Essex) 222 buildings, Hanse 129
St Paul’s Hall 81 brick and tile, Roman 33
Turners 81 Bridge House, see London Bridge
Belgium, coins 7 bridges 34, 40, 231–3
bells, curfew 33, 168 Britton, J. 253
Bennett, John 139 Broadfield (Herts) 228
Bergen (Norway) 36, 129, 131 Bromley Hall, Bromley-by-Bow 79, 81
Berkamsted (Herts) 235 Bromley (Kent) 229
Berkeley House 213 Bruce Castle, Tottenham 150
Berlin 34 Bruges (Belgium) 7, 86, 127, 130, 132, 134, 195
Bermondsey 216 Halles 28
Bermondsey Abbey 177–9, 189 Buckingham Palace 43
dissolution 74 Builders’ Merchants Company 114
Bethnal Green 220 building contracts 82, 116
Beverley (E Yorks) 157–8 building materials 145–52
minster 155 see also wood, stone, brick
Bilbao (Spain) 132 buildings
Bilney, Thomas 168 jettied 68, 85, 112
birds, 103–7 Roman 74
Bishop’s Stortford (Herts), Thorley Hall 81 secular surviving 54, 80–2, 230, 239
Black Death 8, 112, 198, 203–4 see also dendrochronology
Black Madonna 168 bull-baiting 37
Black Prince 54, 176, 229 Burbage, Thomas 38
house of, see Kennington Palace Burghal Hidage 6
Blackfriars, see London, City of burials 186–9
Blackfriars barge 135–6 Burston (Bucks) 229
Blackman Street Southwark 250 Bury St Edmunds (Suff) 159, 235
Bletchingley (Surrey) 105, 234 butchery and joints of meat 103–5
Little Pickle 78–9 Butts, archery course 38, 40, 124
Blitz, World War II 15, 257–8 C
Bocking (Essex) 235
Bond Street Underground Station 30 Cadiz (Spain) 132
Book of Rates 132 Caen (France) 127, 146
books 88, 163 St Etienne 161
Bordeaux (France) 34, 132 stone 172
Borough High Street 123, 139 Cahors (France) 109, 128
Bow 232 Caister (Norfolk) 68
brasses, monumental 155–6 castle 86
Brayley, E.W. 253 Calais (France) 149
Brazil 132 Caldecote (Herts) 229
Brembre, Nicholas 224 Cambridge (Cambs) 4
Bremen (Germany) 134 Camden 229
Brentford 7, 230 Camden,William 235
breweries and brewhouses 72, 142–3 Canterbury (Kent) 1, 15, 81, 108, 217, 231, 261
Brice, Sir Hugh 189 cathedral 64, 161, 175–6
brick 58, 86–7, 148–50 defences 19
brickmaking 50, 58, 104–5, 150–1, 229–30 High Street 33
buildings 50, 53–4, 58 St Augustine’s Abbey 64

309
 London 1100–1600
Canterbury, archbishop of 11, 84 cloth-finishing 210
palace (Lambeth Palace) 64, 150 see also dyeing
Carlisle (Cumbria) 231 clothing and textiles 99, 210
Carpenters’ Company 103–4, 210 Clothworkers’ Company 72, 114–15, 117, 119, 130
carpentry 66, 84–6, 145–6 Cluny (France), stone houses 64
Carter, John 28, 196, 252 coal 76, 129
carts 123 Coggeshall (Essex) 222, 233
castles 42–6, 77, 86–7, 230 coins 96, 98, 108
cattle, markets 26 Roman, used as models 17
Cecil, William 212 Colchester (Essex) 234
ceilings, decorated 84 defences 19
cesspits, stone 76 Cologne (Germany) 34, 39, 129, 155
Chadwell Heath Dagenham 225 granary 27
Champagne (France), fair 118 stone houses 64
Chancery Lane 65–6 conduits, civic 31–3
chapels, in houses 66–7 Cooke, E. W. 20–1
royal, see Westminster, royal palace, St Stephen’s copperplate map 164–5, 174
Chapel Cordova (Spain) 115
see also parish churches Corfe (Dorset) 147
charcoal 233 Cornwall, granite 254
Charing Cross 151 Corporation of London 237, 260
Charing Cross Road 212 counting house 89–90
Charity, figure 17 Court of Augmentations 70
Charles I 212 Coveham (Cobham) (Surrey) 235
Charter Place Uxbridge 233 Covent Garden market 34
Charter Quay Kingston-upon-Thames 233 Coventry (Warks) 82
Charterhouse 70, 74, 106, 178–9, 186, 196, 203–4 Cowley (Mddx) 7
Chaucer, Geoffrey 18, 123, 261 The Old Cottage 82
Cheesegrater 261 craft halls 114, 118, 210–11
Chelmsford (Essex) 1 see also livery companies
Chertsey 1, 234 cranes 143
Abbey 177 Crayford (Kent) 223
house of abbot 139 Cressing Temple (Essex)
Chester 5, 69, 118 Barley Barn 81
Child, Alwin 177 Wheat Barn 81
Chilton, Thomas 72–3 Cricklewood 220
chimneys 76 crime and punishment 41
China, silk 99 Crofton 229
Chingford (Essex) 56 Crome’s Hill Greenwich 175
Chipping Ongar (Essex) 164 Cromwell
High Street 77–8 Oliver 39
Christ Church Streatham 255 Thomas 227
Church Farm House Hendon 150 Crosby, Sir John 187–9
Churchill, Sir Winston, statue 48 Crown and Anchor, Holywell Hill, St Albans 235
Churchman, John 119 Croxton, John 24, 28
City of London, see London, City of Croydon 139, 145, 174, 229, 233–4
City Viewers 75, 77 91–93 Church Street 81
Civil War and defences, 37, 227 Crutched Friars, see London, City of
Cleves (Netherlands), duchy 110 Curtain 38–9
Clitheroe, Henry 70 D
clocks 32–3, 165 Dagenham 225–6, 237
cloisters, Ely Place 66–7 Cross Keys 82
closets 70 Dagnams (Dagnam Park) 237

310
 Index
Damascus (Syria) 127 Edward IV 50–1
Damme (Belgium) 134 Edward VI 54, 191
Danzig, see Gdansk eggshells 106
Dart, John 252 El Chicón, Mexico 218
Dartford (Kent) 1, 236 Eleanor, queen of Henry III 66
Davenant, Ralph 70 Eleanor Cross 174
De Hooch, Pieter 247 Elizabeth I 29, 74, 119
Defoe, Daniel 249 arms 29
dendrochronology 6, 22, 23, 68, 79–81, 96, 164, statue 17
223, 227 elm, dendrochronology 23
Denmark Street 212 Eltham Palace 50–1, 54
Deptford (Kent) 134 Ely (Cambs), cathedral 160–1
Dieppe (France) 132, 247 Ely Place Holborn 25, 65–7
diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH) 201 Embankment 46
Dissolution of the Monasteries 9, 119, 153, 189–91, embassy building 54
237 Emerson Park Hornchurch 237
DNA analysis 204–5 Emmanuel College Cambridge 192
docks, Tudor 134 Enfield 168, 233, 235
documentary records see regulations; building English Heritage 227
contracts; Assize of Nuisance; Petty Custom environment
Account archaeological evidence 48–9
Doget, Thomas 173 buildings and sites 205–15
Domesday Book 77, 137, 146, 230 from plant remains 209–10
Dordrecht (Netherlands) 132 Roman and medieval towns 219
Dorking (Surrey) 234 see also insects
Dorrell, John 247 Epping Forest 56, 237–8
Douai (France) 7 Epping Forest District Museum 80
Dover (Kent), defences 19 Erith (Kent) 223
Dowsing, Henry 247 Ernulf, bishop of Rochester 215
Drayton 7 Essendon (Herts) 226
dress accessories 100, 157 Essex 82, 223–4, 228, 232, 234
Dudley, Edmund 88 Essex House 213
Dugdale, William 254 Ethelred’s Law Code 6–7
duke of Norfolk, house of 189 Eton (Berks) College 147, 149, 175
Durham 231 Evelyn, John 242
Dutton, John 192 Exeter (Devon) 235
dyeing 137–9, 143 F
E faeces and human refuse 202, 207
Eakines, George 72–3 fairs 118
Ealing 224, 229 famine 27
earth, walls of 75 farms and farm houses 78–9, 221–3
earthquakes 217 Farnborough (Hants) 236
East Finchley Underground Station 261 Farnham (Surrey) 235, 240
East Ham 165 Fastolf, Sir John 68, 86, 110, 142–3, 149
East Smithfield 176, 203, 227 Fastolf Place Southwark 142
Eastbury Manor House, Barking 150, 227–8 Faversham (Kent) 231, 235
Eastcote 3 feasting 103
Edgware 220, 236 Felsted (Essex) 223
Edward the Confessor 7, 46–7, 146, 175, 180 Feltham (Mddx) 7
Edward the Elder 6 fences, wicker 15
Edward I 11, 54, 108, 174 Fennings Wharf 6, 19
Edward II 57 Fez (Morocco) 127
Edward III 54, 56, 58, 114–15, 204 field-walking 223

311
 London 1100–1600
figurines 176 St Peter’s abbey 50
finds research 96–7 stone houses 64
Fire Court 249 towers 65
fireplaces 44, 54, 84, 246–7 Gherkin 144, 261
fires 74, 88, 94, 253 Gibbs, James 192
Houses of Parliament Westminster 46, 253 glass 76
Windsor Castle 50 drinking glasses 131–2, 155
see also Great Fire; Blitz Glassie, Henry 113
fish, and fishponds 103–4, 215–17, 226–7, 231 Globe Theatre 38
bones 106–7 Godalming (Surrey) 234
Fisher Godfrey, Walter 257
Bishop John 162 Gold Lane 210
Jasper 149 Golden Lion Romford 237
Fitzstephen, William 221 Goldsmith, Francis 70
flash locks 133–4 Goldsmiths’ Company 103–4, 114–15
Flemings 109, 128 Goswell Road 37
floods and sea surges 57, 216–17 government buildings, royal 49
Florence (Italy) 39–40, 118, 204, 227 grain, markets 231–2
Flushing (Vlissingen, Netherlands) 132 Grange Barn Coggeshall 222
food and drink 102–8, 112, 140–4 Grantham (Lincs) 234
Fortune, figure 17 Gravesend (Kent) 223
France 4–5 royal house 54
merchants 109 graveyards 198–204
pottery 7, 61, 125–8 Gray’s Inn 65, 82, 257
towns 7, 204 Gray’s Inn Lane 124
Fraunceys, Simon 78 Great Fire 3, 15, 17, 66, 70, 88–9, 91, 94, 118, 162–3,
frost and ice 217 170, 242–52
Fryth/Frithe, Abraham 72 aftermath 17, 247–52
Fulham 77, 169 Great Nelmes Hornchurch 237
furnishings and inventories 87–90 Great Open Tennis Play (Whitehall Palace) 54–5
Furnival’s Inn Holborn 65–6 Great Tomkyns Upminster 82
furs 99 Greenford 7
Future of London’s past 259 Greenwich 50, 260
Fyfield Hall, Fyfield (Essex) 81 duke of Norfolk, house 149
G Greenwich Palace 50–1
galleries 70, 74–5, 212, 235 Royal Hospital (Royal Naval College) 50–1
Garald, Richard 169 Gresham, Sir Thomas 187
gardens 74, 210–15, 221 Greyfriars, see London, City of
garden houses 70 Griffier, Jan 242
Gascony (France) 109, 127 Grimes, W. F. 12, 164, 259
Gaunt, John of 66, 160 Guildford (Surrey) 1, 3, 107
Gdansk (formerly Danzig, Poland) 130, 132 Blackfriars 184
General Credit Company Lothbury 255 castle 49–50
Genoa (Italy) 127 inns 235
galleys of 128 gunloops 14–15
George Inn Southwark 123 gutters and drains 75–7
Gerard, John 205 H
Germany and Germans 4, 110, 128 Hackbridge 229
merchants 109 Hackney 168, 227
pottery 130 Hainault Forest 237–8
towns 87, 204, 240 Haliwell (Holywell) nunnery 197
see also Steelyard Hall Barn Upminster 237
Ghent (Belgium) 7, 10, 39, 130, 195 halls 89–90, 211, 225

312
 Index
aisled 81 Hollar, Wenceslaus 23, 139–40, 156, 160–3, 212–14,
in elite residences 66–7 252, 254
first–floor 82–3 Holy Roman Empire 6
functions and developments 80–4 Holy Trinity Priory Aldgate, see London, City of
Hamburg (Germany) 128, 132, 204 Holy Trinity Rouen (France) 222
Hampstead 7 Hong Kong 129
Hampton Court 50–1, 53–4, 59, 212 Hooke, Robert 244
Hanse merchants, see Steelyard Hornchurch (Essex) 237
Hariot, William 172 Horndon-on-the-Hill (Essex), market house 29
Harlem (Netherlands) 132 horses, market 26
Harlow (Essex), Harlowbury Hall 81 horses and horse equipment 45, 123
Harmondsworth 240 Horsham Priory (Norfolk) 70
barn 222 hospitals 118, 175, 184
Harold Hill 237 see also leprosy
Harrow 81, 84, 167 houses 60–94
Hartlepool (Cleveland) 157 11th to 15th centuries 60–9
Hartleyrow (? Hartley Witney) (Surrey) 235 in the 16th and early 17th centuries 69–74
Haslemere (Surrey) 234 access patterns and privacy 92–3
Hastings (Sussex) 231 decoration and building materials 84–7
Hatfield (Herts), bishop of Ely’s palace (Old Palace) developments in form and decoration 92
87, 150 of Europe compared 64–5
Haussmann, Baron 252 as indicators of fashion 112–13, 251–2
Havering 237 first–floor living 64
Hawksmoor, Nicholas 181 functions of parts 92–3
Hawley (Hants) 236 furnishings and inventories 87–90
Hayes (Mddx) 165 lobby-entrance plan 70
Headstone Manor Harrow 81, 84 of the majority 68–77
health 198–205 post-Fire 248–51
Heathrow Airport 222 regulations 74–7
hedgerows, dating 223 religious and secular leaders 61, 63–4
Hengham, Ralph de 156 rural 77–80
Henley-on-Thames (Oxon) 133, 231, 235 stone 61, 72, 110–11
Henrietta Maria 212 timber 60, 85–6
Henry III 13, 42, 49, 58, 147, 162, 180 types 1 to 4, 71–2
Henry V 149, 162 Wealden plan 82, 91–2
Henry VI 149, 175 see also gardens; halls; parlours; kitchens;
Henry VII 44, 162 undercrofts
Henry VIII 50, 53–4, 56, 212 Howlett, Bartholomew 254
Henry VIII 39 human remains, see skeletons
Hertford (Herts) 235 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester 50–1
defences 19 hunting 226
Hertfordshire 80, 223, 228, 232, 234–5 falconry 56–7
surviving buildings 190–1 hunting lodges 54, 56–7
Hesdin, Ernulf de 229 Huy (Belgium) 6
High Street Fulham 77 Hyde Park 56
High Street Uxbridge 233 I
Highgate 175 ICPS (inductively coupled–plasma spectroscopy) 131
Hildersheim (Germany) 109 Ilford (Essex) 164, 237–8
Historic towns atlas for London 4 immigrants 194, 220
Hitchin (Herts) 191, 235 industries 153–4
Hobson, Thomas 189 taste 177
Holbein the younger 54 industry 136–58
Holford, William 257–8 region 236

313
 London 1100–1600
Information Technologists’ Company 114 house of Bishop Bonner 3
inns 121–3, 235–6 house of duke of Norfolk 3
insects 205–7, 209 manor of bishop of Rochester 215
Ireland 127 Palace 64, 149–50
Isle of Dogs 216 Lancaster, dukes of 66
Isleworth 7, 175, 190 landscape archaeology 237–8
Islington 175 Langley (Herts) 223
Italy 4 Lavenham (Suff) 93
merchants 109, 127 Law Courts Strand 255
pottery 127–8 Lawrence, John 151
towers 65 Layer Marney (Essex), castle 87
towns 32 Lea, river 231–2, 237
J lead, water pipes 30, 32
James I 17, 18, 212, 241 leather industry 139–40
Jamestown (Virginia, USA) 153 Leatherhead (Surrey) 1, 234
jetties Legal Quays 132
on buildings 68, 85, 112 Leicester (Leics) 220
into river 35 Leiden (Netherlands) 252
Jewel Tower Westminster 181 leprosy and leper hospitals 202–3, 205
jewels 88 Lewes (Sussex), priory 64
Jews and Jewry 24, 41, 108–9 Lewisham 145
Jocelyn, Ralph 13, 15 Leybourn, William 15, 16
Jones, Inigo 162, 243 Leyton 237–8
Leytonstone 237
K Lillyngston, Thomas and Cristina his wife 187
Keble, Henry 188 Lincoln 163
Kennington Palace 56, 229 cathedral 161
Kent 80, 82, 223, 234 Lincoln’s Inn (Bishop of Chichester) Chancery
church towers 169 Lane 65–6, 82, 149, 255
Countess of 119 Lincoln’s Inn Fields 37
Kenyon, Kathleen 259 Lisbon 127
kilns, pottery 152–4 Little Berkhamsted (Herts) 226
King Street Westminster 48, 121 Little Pickle, Hextalls manor house, Bletchingley
King’s College Cambridge 229–30 78–9, 105
King’s Langley (Herts) 191, 226 Little Wymondley Priory (Herts) 81
King’s Lynn (Norf) 129, 175 Littleton (Mddx) 165
Kingston-upon-Thames 98, 133, 233–5 livery companies 114–15
39–41 High Street 81 halls 139, 211
bridge 2, 216 almshouses, 118–19
Eden Street 152–3 see also Apothecaries’ Hall; Brewers’ Hall;
pottery 135–6, 152–3 Carpenters’ Hall; Clothworkers’ Hall;
Kirby, Daniel 247 Drapers’ Hall; Dyers’ Hall; Fishmongers’ Hall;
Kirkby, John de 66 Girdlers’ Hall; Leathersellers’ Hall; Mercers’
kitchens 89, 117, 121–2, 211 Hall; Merchant Taylors’ Hall; Skinners’ Hall;
Knights Templar 231 Vintners’ Hall; Weavers’ Hall
Knyff, Leonard 252 Liège (Belgium) 6–7
Kyp, Johannes 252 Lombards 109
L London Bridge 3, 6, 19–23, 33, 121, 129, 135, 137,
La Rochelle (France) 132 145, 149, 216
LAARC (London Archaeological Archive Research Roman 19
Centre) Hackney 260 11th or early 12th century 19
Laleham (Mddx, now Surrey) 137 Bridge House 21
Lambeth 2, 169 chapel 20–1

314
 Index
drawbridge 21 St Dunstan in the West 17
Nonsuch House 21, 23 St Edmund the King 165, 169, 245
Stonegate 21–2 St Ethelburga Bishopsgate 165, 167, 169–71, 261
compared with others 39–40 St Etheldreda Ely Place 25
London, City of St Gabriel Fenchurch 165
Roman, 4–5, 215 St George Botolph Lane 165
amphitheatre 23–4 St Giles Cripplegate 31, 70, 167–8, 257
basilica and forum 27 St Helen Bishopsgate 118, 120, 165, 177–81,
buildings quarried 74 187–9, 261
fort 23–4 St James Duke’s Place 191
Anglo-Saxon, 4–8 St James Garlickhithe 165
civic seal 12 St John the Baptist Cloak Lane (Walbrook) 165
defences 11–19 St Katherine Cree 165, 169
before 1100 6, 44 St Lawrence Jewry 24–5, 62, 103, 108–9, 147,
city wall 11–12, 243 165, 174, 187, 204, 245
compared 19, 39 St Lawrence Pountney 165, 170, 173
ditch 15, 37, 94 St Leonard Eastcheap 173
excavations 17–19 St Magnus the Martyr 21, 33, 165, 167
gates 15–18, 252 St Margaret Fish Street Hill 165
interval towers 12–14 St Margaret Lothbury 8, 144, 165
posterns 15–16 St Margaret Pattens 165
in 1643 17 St Martin Ludgate 17
parish churches and parishes 191–4, 255–6 St Martin Orgar 165
All Hallows Barking 33, 167, 173, 257 St Martin Outwich 188
All Hallows the Great 245 St Martin Vintry 109
All Hallows Honey Lane 173 St Mary Aldermanbury 245
All Hallows the Less 173 St Mary Aldermary 188
All Hallows Lombard Street 167, 245 St Mary at Hill 171, 173, 187, 245
All Hallows London Wall 172 St Mary Colechurch 173
All Hallows Staining 168 St Mary-le-Bow 245–6
All Hallows Watling Street 169 St Mary Woolnoth 189
Christ Church Greyfriars 244, 257–8 St Michael Bassishaw 165, 167, 172, 245
St Alban Wood Street 155, 164, 166, 245 St Michael Cornhill 172
St Andrew by the Wardrobe 45 St Michael Paternoster Royal 169
St Andrew Holborn 164, 169–70, 184, 245 St Michael Wood Street 169
St Andrew Hubbard 163 St Michael-le-Querne 31–2, 174
St Andrew Undershaft 168, 172, 261 St Nicholas Cole Abbey 173
St Andrew’s Hill 45 St Nicholas Shambles 198–204
St Anne and St Agnes 168, 245 St Olave Hart Street 168, 173, 257
St Antholin 170, 173 St Olave Jewry 167
St Augustine Papey 170 St Pancras 165
St Augustine Watling Street 245 St Sepulchre Newgate 167–9
St Bartholomew Exchange 170 St Swithin 167–9
St Benet Sherehog 170, 204 streets, areas and buildings (medieval to modern)
St Botolph Aldersgate 167, 187 Abchurch Lane 117
St Botolph Aldgate 170 Aldermanbury 144–5
St Botolph Billingsgate 173, 193–4 Aldersgate 6, 17, 26, 32
St Botolph Bishopsgate 170 ditch 17
St Bride Fleet Street 33, 147, 164, 166–7, 172–3, street 121
185, 245 Aldgate 6, 15, 17, 177, 179, 218
St Christopher-le-Stocks 245 street 121
St Dionis Backchurch 170 well or pump 31
St Dunstan in the East 165, 167, 169–70, 172, 245, 257 Apothecaries’ Hall 118

315
 London 1100–1600
Austin Friars 70, 109, 178, 185, 189 Crutched Friars 70, 153, 178, 184
Bank of England 8 Custom House 132
Barbican 12, 109 Dowgate 30, 34–5, 65, 109, 128–9, 139, 154
Bartholomew Fair 30 Drapers’ Hall 114
Basing Lane 69 Duke’s Place 33, 189
Basinghall Street 24, 103, 109 Dyers’ Hall 139
Baynard’s Castle (first site) 44–5, 184 Eastcheap 26, 163, 217
Baynard’s Castle (second site) 45, 97, 99, 140 Elsing Spital 70, 178–9
Bevis Marks 12 Erber 210
Billingsgate 6, 20, 26, 29–31, 35, 65, 129, 131 Farringdon Road 139, 151–2
The George 88 Fenchurch Street 132, 153, 212, 250
Billingsgate Fishmarket 34 Finsbury 104–5
Billingsgate Lorry Park excavation 7, 35, 84, 88, Finsbury Fields 38
91, 173, 176, 246 Fisher’s Folly Bishopsgate 149
Bishopsgate 6, 15–16, 38, 149, 197, 218 Fishmongers’ Hall 114, 119
street 38, 121 Fleet Ditch 112
Blackfriars (Dominicans) 11, 13, 39, 45, 70, 118, Fleet Lane 112
134, 178, 184–5, 191 Fleet river 11, 33, 52, 129, 139, 151
Blackfriars bridge 39 Fleet Street 52, 66, 68, 119, 121, 256, 258
Blackwell Hall 24, 30, 41, 139 Foster Lane 155
Botolph Lane 246–8 Founders’ Court 144
Bow Lane 76, 115, 140 Furnival’s Inn 65, 83
Bowyers’ Row (Ludgate Hill) 116 Giltspur Street 143
Brewers’ Hall 114 Girdlers’ Hall 144
Bridewell Palace 52–4, 56 Gisor’s (Gerard’s) Hall 69
Broadgate 139 Goldsmiths’ Row 155
Bucklersbury 33, 61, 116 Gracechurch Street 65
Cannon Street 88, 138, 217 Great Wardrobe 45
Cannon Street railway station 129, 210 Gresham Street 41, 103, 109
Carpenters’ Hall 210, 256 Greyfriars (Franciscans) 178, 184–5, 189, 244–5
Cat (Catteaton) Street 62 Grub Street 86
Catteaton Street 41 Guildhall and Guildhall Yard excavation 3, 8,
Cheapside (including excavation at 1 Poultry) 23–8, 40–41, 61–3, 68, 91–2, 103, 105, 107, 109,
6, 23, 26, 61, 65, 109, 111, 115–16, 121, 144, 118, 142, 144, 152, 174, 206, 209, 218, 243–4,
155–6, 174, 207 246, 257
Broken Cross 174 chapel 25
Eleanor Cross 174 gatehouse 25
Great Conduit 31 library 30
Little Conduit 31, 174 roof 74
market buildings 26 Halliwell nunnery 70
Standard 31 Haywharf 129
Christ’s Hospital 70, 72, 119 Holborn 65–6, 203, 205, 210, 250
Cloth Fair 242, 256 Holy Trinity Priory Aldgate 16, 33, 70, 99, 147–8,
Clothworkers’ Hall 114, 149, 210–12 154, 177–9, 185, 189–191, 203
Cock Lane (Pie Corner) 143 dissolution 74–5
conduits 31–3, 174 Houndsditch 15
Coopers Row (Tower Hill) 11 Ironmonger Lane 116
Corderie (Thames Street) 154 Ironmongers’ Row (Poultry) 116
Cordwainer Street 115 Jewry, see Jews and Jewry
Corvesers’ Row (Bow Lane) 115 Knightrider Street 72–4
Cripplegate 6, 12–13 Leadenhall 26–8, 30, 253
Crosby Place Bishopsgate 78, 149 Leadenhall Street 27, 250, 261
Crowne Aldgate 121–2 Leathersellers’ Hall 118, 120

316
 Index
Little Bell Alley Moorgate 250 St Thomas of Acon 118, 178
Liverpool Street railway station 139 Seacoal Lane 128
Lombard Street 111 Skinners’ Hall 34, 139
London Bridge (1832) 99 Southwark Bridge 132
London Wall [street] 144, 210 Spitalfields 37
Lothbury 255 Staple Inn 82, 84, 149, 257
Ludgate 11, 14–15, 17 Steelyard 109, 129–30
prison 15, 17, 76 Stockfishmongers’ Row (Thames Street) 116
Ludgate Hill 17, 116 Swan Lane 97–101, 131, 137–140, 143
Mansion House Underground Station 74 Tanner’s Seld 115
Mercers’ Hall 118 Temple, Church and Middle Temple Hall 82,
Merchant Taylors’ Hall 69, 118–19, 257 147,149, 178–9, 185, 249–50, 256–7
Milk Street 94–6, 105, 109, 146, 207–9 Temple Bar 258
Mincing Lane 211–12 Thames Street (Upper and Lower) 21, 33–4,
Minoresses 178, 185 109, 116–17, 137–8, 143, 154, 246
Moorfields 12, 94, 151 Threadneedle Street 69
Moorgate 104, 140, 144, 250 Three Cranes Wharf 132
Mountfichet’s Tower 44–5, 184 Tower Bridge 99
New Fresh Wharf 7, 129, 246 Tower Hill 11
Newgate 15, 192 Tower postern 15
ditch 17 Tower Street 44, 131
prison 15, 76 Trig Lane 85, 131, 139, 143
street 26, 184 Vintners’ Hall 118
Noble Street 11, 249 Vintry 65, 111
Old Bailey 15, 175 Walbrook 34, 139, 206
Old Jewry 77, 109 Watling Court (Bow Lane) 76, 140
Old Swan Lane 137 Weavers’ Hall 139
Oystergate 129 (West) Smithfield 26, 203, 236
Pancras Lane 33 Whitefriars (Carmelites) 119, 178, 184–5
Paternoster Row 155 Winchester Street 249
Paternoster Square 31, 33, 257–8 wards
Paul’s Wharf 31 Bishopsgate 111
Poultry 6, 26, 31, 61, 116, 137, 140, 144, 206 Broad Street 110
Prince Henry’s Room 256 Cripplegate 110–11
Pudding Lane 246–7 Farringdon Without 110–11
Queen Victoria Street 74, 119 Langbourn 100
Queenhithe 20, 26, 29, 35, 72, 129, 131 Portsoken 76, 110
Roperie (Thames Street) 154 Tower 100
Royal Exchange 30, 242 Walbrook 32
St Alphage Garden 11, 13, 15 London Bridge City 143
St Anthony’s Hospital 178 London County Council 256
St Bartholomew Smithfield 87, 178–9, 189–92, 257 London and Middlesex Archaeological Society 255
St Botolph’s Wharf 7 London Museum 259
St Helen Bishopsgate, see under parishes London Underground 46, 48
St Martin le Grand 253 Jubilee Line 215
St Mary at Hill [street] 61 Long Crendon (Bucks), Sycamore Farm 81
St Mary Axe [street] 144 Louis IX 180
St Mary de Coneyhope Lane (chapel) 189 Louvre Museum Paris 155
St Mary Graces 70 Low Countries 129, 134, 247
St Mary Spital 184, 187, 196, 198–204, 218 pottery 7, 61, 127
St Paul’s Churchyard 155 towns 87
St Peter’s Hill 119 Low Hall Walthamstow 177, 237–8
St Thomas, chapel, see London Bridge Lucca (Italy) 25, 116

317
 London 1100–1600
Lud, king, statue 17 church towers 169
Ludlow (Shropshire) 68 surviving buildings 3
Lundenwic 5–8 Midlands, stone, brick and tile 254
luxuries 155–6, 231, 234 Milan (Italy) 10
Lysons, D. 237–8 Mildmay, Sir Walter 192
Lübeck (Germany) 10, 36, 64, 69 Mill Green (Essex), pottery 98, 125–6, 152
M mills 133, 141–2, 145, 226–7, 229, 260
M23 motorway 234 Milne, Gustav 12, 20
M25 motorway 78, 223, 229, 234 mines, chalk 234
Maghreb (N Africa) 98 moats 142, 155, 224–5
Maidenhead (Berks) 133, 231 monasteries 117–86
Maidstone (Kent) 1, 169, 231 objectives 196–7
Mainz (Germany) 8 see also Dissolution of Monasteries; Figure 6.11
Maitland, William 216, 249 and Table 6.1
Maldon (Essex), friary 234 Mondoñedo (Spain) 192–3
Malling (Kent), nunnery 64 Monpazier (France) 28
Manny, Sir Walter 186 Montpellier (France), stone houses 64
manor houses 78–9, 224–7, 229–31, 237–8 Moorgate, gate 38
manufacturing 136–58, 156–7 More, Thomas 261
building materials 145–52 Morocco 132
food and drink 140–4 mortar analysis 43
luxuries 155–6 Morton, John, archbishop of Canterbury 64,
metalworking 144 149–50
pottery 152–3 Museum of London
textiles, clothing and leather 137–40 medieval gallery 14, 35, 170, 182–3
maps 4, 123, 220, 236, 239, 249 pottery studies 124
see also Agas; copperplate map; Ogilby and Muswell Hill 175
Morgan; Rocque Myles, Thomas 247
di Marco, Francesco 127 N
Margaret, queen of Henry VI 15, 50–1 Nantes (France) 132
market buildings and places 26–30, 232 Nash, John 253
market gardening 214, 234 Navestock (Essex) 145
Market Harborough (Northants) 234 Nedeham, James 44
Marks, Dagenham 225–6 neighbourhoods 94, 108–11
Marlow (Bucks) 133 Neutron Activation Analysis 176–7
Marsden, Peter 259 New Inn, Oxford 121
Mary Rose 134 New Palace Yard 49
Maud, queen 203 New Winchelsea (Sussex), see Winchelsea
Maurice, bishop of London 146 Newcastle upon Tyne 129, 234
Mealmarket, Southwark 121 Niedermendig lava, querns 7
meat, cuts of 108 Nivelles (Belgium) 6–7
medical care 202 Nonsuch House, see London Bridge
Mercers’ Company 139 Nonsuch Palace (Surrey) 182–3, 189
Merchant Taylors’ Company 102 Norden, view of London Bridge 21
Mercia 5 Norfolk 223, 226, 228
Merk, Robert de 225 duke of, houses 44, 74–5, 149
Merstham (Surrey) 234 Normandy, coins 7
Merton Priory, later Abbey 105–6, 179, 181–3, 186, North Sea 7, 121, 221
189, 198–9, 201–2, 209–10 Northburgh, Michael, bishop of London 186
metalworking 144 Northolt (Mddx) 224
Mexico 218 Norway 132
Middlesex 82, 232, 234 coins 7
Anglo-Saxon villages 7 Norwich (Norf) 1, 137, 158, 163, 168, 220

318
 Index
cathedral 161 Philippe Auguste 68
stone houses 64 Picardy (N France) 109
Nottingham (Notts) 220 Pickering, Sir William 187
Nuremberg (Germany) 10, 27, 118 pilgrim souvenirs 174–7
O Pimlico 254
oak, dendrochronology 23 Pinner 168, 220, 234
Ogilby and Morgan, map 123, 249–50 East End Farm Cottage 82
Old Palace Hatfield 87, 150 Sweetman’s Hall 70
Old Palace Yard 46 Pisa (Italy) 10
Old Treasury Building Whitehall 54–5 pits 207–9, 220
orchards 212, 221 plague, see Black Death
Orgar 61 pollution, air and water 215–18
Ostend (Belgium) 132 Pompeii (Italy) 89
Osterley House Hounslow 81 Ponthieu (Normandy) 6
Oxford (Oxon) 121, 133 poor 54, 111–12
Oxford Street 220 population 8–10, 241
Porth, John 88, 90
P Portsmouth (Hants) 134
palaces, royal 50–9 Portsoken 76
pantry and buttery 89–90, 211 Portugal 4, 134
Paris 10, 34, 111, 116, 127–8, 180, 185–6, 195–6, pottery
227, 252 Anglo–Saxon 224
city wall 11 chronology 96, 125–6
clock 32 city ditches 15
elite residences 68 kilns 233
Hôtel Dieu 187 imported
Louvre Museum 155 France 61
market buildings 28 German 127
Notre Dame 160 Italian 127
river Seine 68, 216 Low Countries 61, 130
royal palace (Louvre) 44, 46 Maghrebi ware 98
parish churches 163–74, 233 Rhineland 130
chapels 172–3, 189 Saintonge 98
crypts 173 Spain 130, 174
development 166–70, 172 regional
interiors 171–2 Coarse Border ware 152–3, 234, 236
objectives 195–6 Harlow 78
on sites of Roman amphitheatres 25–6 Hedingham 78
survival of fabric after Great Fire 244–5 Kingston ware 98, 234
towers and spires 169–70 ‘London–type’ ware 78, 98, 152
parks 225–6 Mill Green 78, 98
Parliament Square 48 Woolwich 98
parlours 90, 121–2, 211 see also Table 5.2 and Figure 5.6
Peace, figure 17 PPG16 (Planning and Policy Guidance Note 16) 260
Peasants’ Revolt 66, 109 Prague 34
Penn (Bucks) 152, 234 stone houses 64
Penshurst Place (Kent) 223, 227 Prato (Italy) 127
Pepys, Samuel 121, 249 prisons 15
Perth (Perth and Kinross) 127 Provins (France) 118
Peterborough (Cambs), cathedral 160–1 Pultney, Sir John 223, 227
Peterhead (Aberdeenshire) 254 Purbeck (Devon) 155
Petty Customs Account 131 stone 25, 184
Pevensey Levels (Sussex) 217

319
 London 1100–1600
Q Castle; Bridewell; Guildford Castle; Hampton
Quarendon (Bucks) 229 Court; Rotherhithe; Kennington Palace;
quays 132 Sheen; Tower of London
Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge Chingford 56 Royal Mint 198–19, 201, 203
querns 7 rubbish dumping 94–7, 104–5
Rugmere 229
R
Ruislip 3, 145, 167, 229–31
rabbits 107
Manor Farm 81
Radcliffe (Ratcliffe) 132, 214
Russia 132, 139
Rainham 237
Rye (Sussex) 72, 84, 93, 231
reclamation into Thames 35–7, 94–7, 138–40
2–3 East Street 72
Red Bull Mealmarket Southwark 121
defences 19
Redbridge 237
Rede, Henry 167 S
Reformation 69, 119, 177, 191–6 Sadleir, Ralph 227
Regensburg (Germany), stone houses 64 Saffron Walden (Essex) 240
Regent’s Park 56, 229, 253 St Albans (Herts) 1, 236
regulations, for buildings 74–7 Abbey 70, 190
Reigate (Surrey) 1, 147–8, 234, 236 battle of 15
Reigate Priory School 81 inns 235
religious buildings and artefacts 159–97 Kingsbury Manor 81
Rennie, Charles 253 St Andrew Enfield 195
Rheims (France) 204 St Andrew Greensted 164
Rhineland 5, 127 St Andrew Kingsbury 255
pottery 7 St Christopher, statue 192
stoves 176 St Clare, abbey of, see Minoresses under London,
Rich, Sir Richard 30 City of
Richard II 46, 155, 161 St Dunstan Stepney 168
Richmond 54 St Erkenwald 160
Rickmansworth (Herts), Croxley Hall Farm 81 St Etheldreda Ely Place 66–7
Riga (Latvia) 145 St George Windsor 229
Ripley (Surrey) 235 St Giles in the Fields 203, 212, 214
Rivers and major streams, see Fleet; Lea; Thames; St Helen and St Giles Rainham 237
Tyburn; Walbrook; Wandle St James’s Park 56
roads 19, 231–2, 235 St John of Beverley 155
Roche, William 237 St John Clerkenwell 87, 111, 147, 178–9, 185, 197,
Rochester (Kent) 209, 213
cathedral 160 St John Haliwell (Haliwell nunnery) 178–9
defences 19 St John Pinner 168
monks 215 St John’s Street 213
Rocque, John, map 220 St Katharine’s Docks 255
Romford (Essex) 1, 232, 237 St Katharine’s Hospital 255
roofs 83–4 St Lawrence Upminster 237
thatch 76 St Leonard Shoreditch 220
tiled 74 St Malo (France) 132
Rose Theatre 39 St Margaret Edgware 236
Rotherhithe 154 St Martin Ruislip 229–30
royal house 56–7 St Martin West Drayton 168
Rouen (France) 6, 93, 108, 111, 127, 129 St Martins in the Fields 37, 192
bridge 40 St Mary Bedfont 195
Rowse, Robert 72–3 St Mary Clerkenwell 178–80
royal buildings, as leaders of style 57–9 St Mary Graces 176, 178–9, 186, 189, 196, 203–4
royal castles, houses and palaces, see Baynard’s St Mary Hayes 165
St Mary Hornsey 149

320
 Index
St Mary Ilford 164 Shepperton (Mddx) 7
St Mary Lambeth 169 ships and boats 133–7, 154, 231
St Mary Magdalene East Ham 165 shipwrecks 132, 135–6
St Mary Magdalene Littleton 165 shoes 45, 97
St Mary Merton, see Merton Abbey shops 20, 116–17, 155, 170
St Mary Northolt 224–5 Shoreditch 38–9
St Mary Overie 61, 178–9 Siena (Italy) 10, 39
see also Southwark Cathedral silk, Chinese 99
St Mary Stoke Newington 149 skeletons 198–205
St Mary Stratford Langthorne, see Stratford basic data 199–201
Langthorne Abbey disease, fractures and cause of death 201–5
St Mary Willesden 168 DNA analysis 204–5
St Michael (Herts), Westwick Cottage 81 slag, bell–founding 33
St Nicholas Plumstead 253 Slany, Stephen 111
St Olave Tooley Street 110 Sluis (Belgium) 134
St Paul’s Cathedral 5, 8, 12, 45, 156, 159–63, 178, Smith
192, 196, 221, 243, 254 David 119
bishop’s palace 212 J.T. 253
building contracts 116 smoke 217–18
clock 32–3 Society for Photographing Relics of Old London
close 160–1 and see St Paul’s Churchyard 255
geology of stones 146 Somerset House 192, 212–13
Pardon Cloister 160 Sondergyltes, Henry 149
Paul’s Cross 162 South Ockenden (Essex) 169
portico 242–3 Southampton (Hants) 130
property 143 Southwark 1, 6, 7, 37–8, 40, 57, 68, 74, 99, 110–11,
Wren building 159–60, 162, 243–4, 252, 254 121, 123, 139, 144, 147, 155, 216–17, 220, 242,
St Peter, statue 15 251, 259
St Thomas’s Hospital 37 Cathedral 61, 154
Saint-Omer (France) 217 elite residences 63–6, 68, 86
Saintonge (France), pottery 98, 128 Spain 4, 109, 130–2, 137
Saleman 94 pottery 127–8
Salerno (Italy) 4 spectacles 131
Salisbury (Wilts) 68 Spencer, Brian 175
Salvin, Anthony 42–3 spices 131–2, 231
Samuel, Mark 27 sport and sports facilities 37–8
Sandwich (Kent) 84 stables 122, 209
defences 19 Staines (Mddx, now Surrey) 1, 133, 235
Savoy, Earl of 66 stairs 54, 56, 70
Savoy Palace (later Hospital) 65–6, 151 Standard (Cheapside) 31
Sawbridgeworth (Herts) 223 Stanmore (Mddx) 236
Scandinavia 4 Stanwell (Mddx) 167
Scotland 228 statues and images 21
coins 7 in churches 171, 192–3
Security Professionals’ Company 114 on City gates 15, 17
seeds 95, 105–6, 205–13 Stebbingford Farm, Felsted 223
selds 115 Stepney 168, 227
Seville (Spain) 4, 109, 175, 247 Stirling, James 116
Shakespeare, William 45, 261 Stock Exchange 259
Shap, granite 254 Stocks, The 26
Sheen/Shene (royal palace) Richmond 54, 56, 58, 149 stone
sheep, markets 26 buildings 61–5, 72
shells 106 see also undercrofts

321
 London 1100–1600
quarries 234 Thames Water 260
Caen 146–7, 172 Thaxted (Essex) 233
chalk 148, 234 market house 29
flint 12 The archaeology of Greater London review 4
granite The Biggin Hitchin 191
Cornwall 254 The erosion of history 259
Peterhead 254 The Fighting Temeraire 135
Shap 254 Theatre, the 38–9
Swedish 254 theatres 38–40
Purbeck 25, 147, 155, 184 Thetford (Norf) 234
ragstone, Kentish 148 Thorney Island (Westminster) 7, 33, 46, 48, 134, 215
Red Sandstone 254 tides 133–4, 216
Reigate (Merstham) 147, 234, 246 tiles
Taynton (Tainton) 146–7 Flanders or Flemish 66, 149
stone houses 64–5, 110–11 floor 44, 151–2
stoves 176 Penn 234
Stow, John 15, 42, 172, 189 roof 229–30
Strand 65–6, 68, 192, 212–13, 250, 255 Midlands 254
Stratford 204 tilemaking 129
Stratford Langthorne Abbey 179, 183, 187, 201, 237 wall 247
Strawberry Hill, Twickenham 254 timber-framing 44, 84–5, 91–2
Street, G.E. 255 Time on our side? 259
streets, as market places 26 Toky, Richard 88–9
and lanes 33 Tooley Street 64, 110
studies (small rooms) 70 tools 154
Summerson, Sir John 254–5 Tooting 169
Sun, King Street, Westminster 121 Toronto (Canada) 254
Sunbury 7 Tothill Fields 49
Surrey 223, 234–5 Tothill Street 212
church towers 169 Tottenham 220, 233
surviving buildings 3 Toulouse (France) 34, 156, 204
Surrey Archaeological Society 50, 255 Carmelites 175
Survey of London 79 Towcester (Northants) 234
Sutton 229 Tower Hamlets 79
Sutton House Hackney 150, 227 Tower of London 3, 11, 42–4, 57, 260
Swan Berkamsted 235 Bowyer Tower 44
Sweden 254 moat 11, 15, 44
symbolism in civic structures 16, 17, 19, 22 St John’s chapel 42–3, 146
Symonds, John 75 The Queen’s House 44
Syon Abbey and House Isleworth 175, 190, 197 Traitor’s or St Thomas’s Gate 44
T White Tower 42–4
Tabard Inn Southwark 123 work of Henry III 58
Tallis, John 250 use of brick 148
tapestry, Arras 88 Tower Place Woolwich 150
Tarragona (Spain) 25 towers 64–6, 70
taverns 121–3 Town and Country Planning Act 257
Taynton (Oxon) stone 146–7 towns in region 231–40
Teddington 7, 134 trade
Temple Meads Bristol 254 evidence 120–35
textiles and cloth manufacture 45–6, 137–40 as illustrated by pottery 123–8
Thames, River 33–3, 78, 123, 129, 133–4, 175, and transport 234
215–17, 233 traffic jams 37
tides 48, 145, 215 transport 121–3, 231–4

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 Index
trees 48 Ward Perkins, John 259
Treswell, Ralph 31, 33, 70–3, 88, 111–12, 116–17, Ware (Herts) 231
119, 121–2, 142, 149–50, 246–7 warehouses 70, 92–3, 117, 211
Turner, J. M. W. 135 Warsaw (Poland) 34
Twickenham 7, 254 Warwickshire 152
Tyburn stream 7, 30, 33, 46, 48 waste disposal 34–6, 40
U water, civic provision 30–3
undercrofts 69, 89, 91, 118, 121 Waterford (Ireland) 127
Union of Benefices Act 255 waterfront archaeology 3–4, 7, 34–6
University College London 253 Watford (Herts) 3, 236
Upminster 82, 237 Watling Street 236
Upminster Hall Upminster 237 wattle and daub, walls of 75
Upper Greensand 234 Weald 236
urban regulations 34, 249 weather 217–18
Urswick, Thomas 225 Webling, Wessell 110
Uxbridge (Mddx) 1, 3, 233, 236 Weld, Humfrey 17
Welshaw, John 73
V Welwyn Garden City (Herts) 225
V1 rocket 78 Wembley 220
Vadstena (Sweden) 175 West Drayton (Mddx) 168
Valencia (Spain) 174 West Ham 238
Van Dyck, Anthony 19 Western Avenue 224
Venice (Italy) 109, 118–19, 127, 132, 195–6, 204, Westminster, City of 1, 17, 37, 40, 54–6, 64, 121, 134,
251 212, 220, 242
ambassador 217 environment 48–9, 215–16
galleys 131–2, 240 religious and secular residences 63–6
Versailles (France) 58 Abbey 3, 7, 33, 46–8, 55, 58, 146–7, 151, 155, 177,
Victualling Yard 189 180–2, 196, 217, 221, 224, 252
Vienna (Austria) 34 manors 137
Vikings 7, 8 royal palace 3, 33, 46–9, 55, 127, 145, 253
villages 227–40 Jewel Tower 46–47, 55, 181
Vince, Alan 8 St Stephen’s Chapel 25, 46–7, 66
vineyards 217 Westminster Hall 21, 46–7, 49, 59, 255
Vintners’ Company 114–15 fire of 1834 253
Virginia, Jamestown 236 Westminster Bridge 133
Virginia Company 236 Whalebone Lane Dagenham 225
volcanoes 217–18 Wheeler, Mortimer 12, 259
W Whitechapel 144
wall paintings 44, 50, 256 Whitehall 48, 54
Walpole, Horace 254 royal palace 54–5
Walsingham (Norf) 175 Whitefriars, see London, City of
Waltham Abbey (Essex) 1, 222 Whittington, Richard 245
abbot, house 61 wicker, fences 15
Waltham (Essex), Sun Street 80 wildlife 226
Walthamstow 223, 237 Willesden 168
Ancient House 81, 239 shrine of Our Lady 175
Low Hall 78, 177, 237–8 William the Conqueror 108, 127
Walton on the Naze (Essex) 222 William II 46
Wanamaker, Sam 39 William III 54
Wandle, river 105, 182, 209 Willoughby, Sir Hugh 132
Wandsworth 235 Winchelsea (Old and New) (Sussex) 93, 118, 231
Wanstead 238 Winchester (Hants) 1, 15, 65, 68, 109, 139, 163, 177
Wapping 154 cathedral 159

323
 London 1100–1600
Tanner Street (Lower Brook Street) 138 Writtle (Essex) 223
bishop of 37, 217 Wych Street Westminster 249
house 37, 61, 63–4, 147, 217 Wylliams, Thomas 187
marquis of 132 Wyngaerde, Anthonis, view of London Bridge 21–2
windmills 37–8 Y
windows 76, 83 Yarford, Sir James 172
Windrush valley (Oxon) 146 Yarmouth (Norf) 86
Windsor (Berks) 133, 175 Yevele, Henry 21, 167, 169
Castle 50, 59, 145 York 1, 43, 82, 108–9, 158, 163, 218–20
Witham (Essex) 70, 233 Coppergate 205
Wolsey, Thomas 54 Gilbertine priory 218
wood, sources and uses 145–6 minster 161
Woodburn, S. 253 St Andrew Fishergate 43
Woodford 237 York Place Whitehall 54
Woodroffe, Edward 21 Ypres (Belgium) 217
Woolwich 98
World Wars I and II 257–8 Z
Wren, Sir Christopher 21, 45, 50, 171 Zeppelin 190, 257
see also St Paul’s Cathedral Zurich (Switzerland), stone houses 64

324
Plate 1 St John’s Chapel in the White Tower, in a watercolour by John Crowther of about 1883
(GL). The fragments of wall painting had by then been removed by Salvin.
Plate 2 Italian glass beaker, with decoration typical of the Ren- Plate 3 Jugs, cooking pots, crucibles and a pottery money box
aissance, found south of Tower Street, 1990 (MoL). The (with the slit for coins) produced at Kingston (MoL).
beaker was probably made in Venice around 1500, is
about 10cm high, and bears white enamel dots and gold
leaf which has been etched with lettering and designs of
oak and laurel leaves.
Plate 4 Reconstruction of the priory of Holy Trinity Aldgate, around 1500 (Richard Lea, in
Schofield and Lea 2005). Here reconstruction on computer takes plans of about 1585
as its material, and provides the setting for several small excavations.
Plate 5 Extract of an estate map of 1597 for All Souls College Oxford, surveyed by Thomas
Langdon (The Warden and Fellows of All Souls College Oxford, Hovenden Maps II:2).
This shows the present church of St Margaret Edgware (before rebuilding of every-
thing except the tower in 1763–4) and its surroundings in 1597.
Plate 6 The vault of the 13th-century nave at Temple Church today, largely a feat of many restora-
tions, culminating in that of the post-War years; but still graceful and worth visiting (author).

Plate 7 One of the schemes by William Holford, 1956. Wren’s cathedral is complemented by
Corbusian blocks. The feature south-east of the cathedral is a fountain or jet of water.
Only the tower of St Augustine Watling Street (right) and the precinct boundary marked
by Carter Lane survived to remind people of the City before 1666. Compare Figure 9.3.
Plate 8 Excavation of a medieval water mill at Greenwich Wharf in 2008, by Museum of Lon-
don Archaeology. The timbers were removed for conservation at York. Initial study of
the structure suggests it would have held a wheel about 5.6m (over 18ft) in diameter,
which would have been fitted with up to 60 paddles or ‘floats’.
Plate 9 View of St Paul’s Cathedral from the east in 2007, made available by the removal of a post-War office building in New
Change, in the foreground (John Chase). There was very limited archaeological work on this large site when the previous
building was constructed in 1955; some small areas of archaeology at the margins were recorded in 2006–7. The medieval
cathedral and some of its precinct remain in an island of stratigraphy, under and around the Wren building (see Plate 10).
Plate 10 The south churchyard at St Paul’s: the outlines of the 14th-century cloister and but-
tress bases for the chapter house were laid out in facsimile stone above the fragmen-
tary remains beneath (Andy Chopping, MOLA). This shows how Wren’s building, on
a slightly different alignment, clipped the medieval buildings; the chapter house and
south cloister were also adapted to be Wren’s site office during the construction of the
present cathedral. In the foreground, a plan made of stone inlays shows the relation-
ship between the Wren and medieval cathedrals.