Episode 4 - The Story of John Stow
John Stow (1525/6 – 1605) was an English antiquary, historian, and cartographer who is best known for his comprehensive survey of London, entitled "A Survey of London," first published in 1598. Stow's work is considered one of the most important historical sources on the city and provides a fascinating insight into London's development, topography, and social history.
Stow was born into a family of modest means in the City of London and worked as a tailor before devoting himself to the study of history and antiquities. He became a member of the Society of Antiquaries and was a keen collector of manuscripts, books, and other historical artefacts.
In this episode we will dive deep into his life, and explore the survey in full.
Read the full script here:
Welcome to episode 4 of SideStreets, a podcast about the history and geography of London. I’m Alan Hertz, Professor of Humanities at Hult International Business School. Despite my accent, I have been prowling London and teaching courses on its past for over 40 years. SideStreets is a Black Lab Media production, and my producer and editor is Wilhelm Schenk.
I think of our first three episodes as a mini-series, treating a bit of Whitechapel as a case study in “edginess”, the peculiarity of urban margins. We saw how an industrial site was developed first as a sugar refinery then as a brewery because, since it was on the edge of the city, it was convenient for the import of raw materials and close to markets for finished products. We saw industries banished from the City to Whitechapel because they were dangerous or disgusting . . . and we saw those industries explosively living up to their reputations. We saw immigrants finding homes near the docks where they disembarked, and also near factories and workshop which could employ them. We saw dissenting chapels and theatres and whorehouses valued and used by Londoners, but unwelcome in the more highly regulated, more heavily policed centre.
Those three episodes are a case study in something else too: the complex connections between the global and the local. We saw how a neighbourhood once defined by its proximity to the city centre became part of trade networks that stretched thousands of miles and included millions of people. We also saw how those networks enriched some involved in them, but also reduced many others to misery. In Whitechapel, as in many London locations, the evidence of enslavement, empire, and exploitation is everywhere.
It's time a for a change. I want to turn away from Whitechapel and from local history in general. In the next three episodes, I want to consider some observers and chroniclers of London life. The figures I have chosen were well known in their own time; now they are largely forgotten. But they still have a lot to tell us—rediscovering what was important or interesting or troubling to them can help us understand some significant features of the city. They can also provide us with an index of how London– and most intriguingly the mentality of its inhabitants -- have changed over the past 400 years or so.
Let’s begin with Citizen John Stow, as he called himself, the first historian and geographer of London. Stow was born in 1525 [he would have said the 16th of Henry VIII] in the parish of St Michael Cornhill at the heart of the City. His father Thomas was a reasonably prosperous tallow-chandler, with a substantial, though rented, property and a steady income providing candles to the church. John was the eldest child of seven, but he was not destined to take over the family business—we don’t know why not. He does not seem to have had any formal schooling; when he writes about London grammar schools, it is as an envious outsider. But he was apprenticed to a Merchant Taylor, becoming a Freeman of the company in 1547. He set up his home and household a short distance from his parents, in a house by Aldgate Pump. He was married and had three daughters.
Stow was never particularly successful as a tailor or in other business ventures, and beginning in the 1560s, he turned his attention to antiquarian scholarship, sometimes [but not alas often enough] sponsored by wealthy patrons. His first book was an edition of Chaucer, and he followed up with collections of documentary material about the history of England. He seems to have been involved–we are not sure how--in the preparation of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, the chief source for Shakespeare’s history plays.
Stow repeatedly complained of poverty. One anecdote has him ironically approaching a group of beggars to apply for membership in their guild. Another has him unironically approaching King James for an official license to seek sponsorship, which was granted. In a third, another writer was invited to continue Stow’s work after his death. The writer refused, thanking God that he was not yet mad enough “to waste his time, spend 200l. a year, trouble himself and all his friends only to gain assurance of endless reproach.” Stow’s situation, however, was not quite as bleak as he liked to claim. His scholarly interests were undoubtedly baffling to many of his contemporaries, but he had influential and wealthy patrons, who not only gave him financial support but also got him access to important archival sources. He was solvent enough at his death in 1605 for his widow to commission a grand monument to him in his parish church of St Andrew Undershaft. It is still an impressive sight, and in one of those quaint customs that grace our city [customs that Stow himself lovingly chronicled], every three years on the anniversary of his death, the goose quill in his writing hand is ceremonially replaced.
The Society of Antiquaries, of which Stow was a member, seems to have engaged in discreet political lobbying, frequently challenging new business practices on the grounds that no precedents for them existed. He was also investigated several times for Roman Catholic tendencies and even Spanish sympathies. No significant evidence was found, and the authorities seem to have recognized that he collected suspect materials for eccentric but innocent purposes. But it seems reasonable to conclude -- certainly his work bears this out -- that he was culturally and politically very conservative, even reactionary. Implicit in all his historical research and writing is a yearning for a vanished, less chaotic, more civil urban community, and a conviction that his city was in decline.
A Survay of London Contayning the Originall, Antiquity, Increase, Moderne Estate, and Description of that Citie was the last of his major works, published when he was in his seventies. It was the product of decades of digging in ecclesiastical and legal archives, reviewing parish and livery company records, diligently copying inscriptions on funeral monuments, and interviewing his elders before they died. It appeared in 1598, with Stow producing a revised edition 5 years later. From the start it was his most celebrated and widely read work, and it remained the standard reference book about London for over a century, though the contents changed substantially in editions published after his death. My Patreon subscribers can find out more about those editions, and Stow’s extraordinary editor John Strype, in the first of our “alleyway” supplementary episodes. The link is on the SideStreets website.
Stow had good reason to yearn for a gentler past. As he recognized himself, London was fast becoming too big, too complicated, too confusing to be surveyed. Though the city did not grow much in size in Stow’s lifetime, and the death rate was significantly higher than the birth rate, the population quadrupled to over 200,000. That apparent paradox is explained by immigration: London’s wealth and dynamism pulled people from all over Britain, but as a result the City became increasingly congested and dangerous, sinking into its own waste, blighted by crime and riot. Child mortality was appalling, and epidemics recurrently shattered urban life and decimated the population. One of Stow’s favourite words – he used it again and again – is “encroached”, and the pressure of uncontrolled growth can be felt everywhere in his prose.
Moreover, the institutions which once had provided a social safety net for Londoners vanished at the Reformation: monasteries had served as hospitals, asylums, old age homes, schools . . . and monasteries had been dissolved. The Catholic tradition of charitable bequests depended on the doctrine of purgatory [the wealthy endowed good works largely to shorten their term], and that doctrine was now deemed heretical. In addition, the Reformation had physically wrecked the city: art had been destroyed, buildings demolished, monuments defaced. The city Stow was born into – the city he treasured, explored, and documented, was disappearing before his eyes. No wonder he was nostalgic!
Stow’s approach was very different from mine – he was systematic, comprehensive, and exhaustive. He worked by categories. So an early run of the Survey’s chapters deals with significant places and buildings by function: bridges, gates, walls, towers, castles, and so on. It is striking that he put “Ancient and Modern Rivers, Brooks, Bourns, Pools, Wells, and Conduits of Fresh Water serving the City” first in this series – Stow, like most students of London since his time, recognized the existential importance of clean water. Another set of chapters describes the activities of citizens: orders and customs, sports and pastimes, the giving of alms. Yet another gives a historical list of London’s officeholders.
Most of the survey is a kind of verbal cartography. Stow took London ward by ward, using the same format for each: a summary geographical description, followed by an account of the significant buildings on each street. It is easy to imagine him walking every road in every ward. On arrival at a parish church, he described the significant monuments, paying particular attention to those which had been recently damaged or defaced, and gave an account of the achievements, especially the charitable gifts and bequests, of important [but often forgotten] Londoners memorialized there. When he came to a guildhall, he gave an account of the history, current activities, responsibilities, and ceremonies of the livery company. Each of these chapters closes with the amount assessed in property taxes in that ward.
Much of this material can be unreadably dry, but the interpolated anecdotes sometimes jolt the reader into a charmed alertness. Here, for example, is a passage from his chapter on London’s castles: In the year 1512, the chapel in the high White Tower was burnt. In the year 1536 Queen Anne Bullein was beheaded in the Tower. 1541, Lady Katherine Howard, wife to King Henry VIII., was also beheaded there. In the year 1546, the 27th of April, being Tuesday in Easter week, William Foxley, potmaker for the Mint in the Tower of London, fell asleep, and so continued sleeping, and could not be wakened with pricking, cramping, or otherwise, burning whatsoever, until the first day of the term, which was full fourteen days and fifteen nights, or more, for that Easter term beginneth not before seventeen days after Easter. The cause of his thus sleeping could not be known, though the same was diligently searched after by the king’s physicians, and other learned men; yea, the king himself examining the said William Foxley, who was in all points found at his awakening to be as if he had slept but one night. And he lived more than forty years after in the said Tower, to wit, until the year of Christ 1587, and then deceased on Wednesday in Easter week.
Stow’s portrayal of Thomas Cromwell, one of the great men of his childhood, is fascinating. Cromwell doubtless embodied much about modern London that Stow abhorred – restlessness, ambition, wanton neglect of traditional practices and values, iconoclasm. Moreover, the Stow family had a personal grievance – Cromwell’s London property bordered on the Stows’ garden, and he had grabbed a strip of land without permission: no warning was given [my father], nor other answer, when he spake to the surveyors of that work, but that their master Sir Thomas commanded them so to do; no man durst go to argue the matter . . . . Thus much of mine own knowledge have I thought good to note, that the sudden rising of some men causeth them to forget themselves.
As he bestrode the tumult of Tudor London, Cromwell might forget himself – but Stow would not. Half a century after Cromwell’s death, Stow was sharp in his criticism but generous and candid in his tribute to Cromwell’s own generosity: I myself, in that declining time of charity, have oft seen at the Lord Cromwell’s gate in London more than two hundred persons served twice every day with bread, meat, and drink sufficient; for he observed that ancient and charitable custom, as all prelates, noblemen, or men of honour and worship, his predecessors, had done before him.
One of the oddest features of the Survey is an absence. Stow had nothing to say about Shakespeare or his company or any of London’s theatres. Bear-baiting is mentioned briefly as one of London’s traditional pastimes, but its playhouse neighbours on Bankside are not. The omission is even stranger because after Stow’s death, Anthony Munday published a revised edition of the Survey, apparently using notes Stow gave him. Munday was a playwright, and Shakespeare’s collaborator on Sir Thomas More. One can only imagine how different our understanding of Shakespeare might be if Stow had given the Globe the same detailed, scrupulous attention that he gave Old St Paul’s or the Royal Exchange or the Guildhall. The silence is shocking, and to me inexplicable.
My favourite chapter of the Survey comes near the end – it celebrates cities and urban culture in general. This shows Stow at his most eloquent and passionate. I hope you will excuse some extended and affectionate quotation:
whereas commonwealths and kingdoms cannot have, next after God, any surer foundation than the love and goodwill of one man towards another, that . . . is closely bred and maintained in cities, where men by mutual society and companying together, do grow to alliances, commonalties, and corporations.
The liberal sciences and learnings of all sorts . . .do flourish only in peopled towns; without the which a realm is in no better case than a man that lacketh both his eyes.
Manual arts, or handicrafts, as they have for the most part been invented in towns and cities, so they cannot anywhere else be either maintained or amended. The like is to be said of merchandise, under which name I comprehend all manner of buying, selling, bartering, exchanging, communicating of things that men need to and fro. Wealth and riches . . . are increased chiefly in towns and cities both to the prince and people. . . . The necessity of the poor and needy is in such places both sooner to be espied, and hath means to be more charitably relieved. . . .
His conclusion is magnificent!
At once the propagation of religion, the execution of good policy, the exercise of charity, and the defence of the country, is best performed by towns and cities; and this civil life approacheth nearest to the shape of that mystical body whereof Christ is the head, and men be the members; . . . to change it were nothing else but to metamorphose the world, and to make wild beasts of reasonable men.
In this passage Stow created a kind of London of the mind, which could inspire its citizens to faith and generosity and patriotism, rather than to venality and selfishness and cynicism. He identified this gloriously civilized place with the London of his childhood, and the Survey can be seen as an extended eulogy for its passing.
We could spend much longer with this garrulous, learned, melancholy, loveable man, but that’s enough for now. If you want to know more about the history of the Survey after Stow’s death, become a Patreon subscriber and follow me down our first alleyway. Next time, we will look at a very different guide to London: John Gay’s Trivia I hope you will join us then. This episode was researched, written, and presented by me, Alan Hertz. My producer and editor is Wilhelm Schenk.
