Monday, November 13, 2017

Visions of London in the Sixteenth Century



Archival sources have provided the locations of major landmarks in the London that
Thomas Cromwell knew, including his grand house at Austin Friars, however many maps of the time are impractical, being so compressed that individual streets and buildings are difficult to pinpoint, however the published work of John Stow, The Survey of London is regarded as the classic guide to the City (Putney is nowehere to be found in Stow's world), being a comprehensive description of the central London's wards.

Stow's Survey was published in the reign of Elizabeth, in 1598, some fifty years after the demise of Cromwell, and it is noteworthy that Stow took the time to depict Austin Friars from a different political perspective than in the prevailing environment of Henry VIII's reign. Stow writes of the
great house and garden near Brode (Broad) Street, being the property of the Lord Treasurer
named Sir William Powlet. Cromwell's Austin Friars home had been replaced by a rebuilt mansion because Thomas was no longer deemed a person at all, and all of his properties and assets had been seized by the King after the execution in 1540. Stow makes a disparaging reference to Cromwell as the architect of the Reformation who had stolen some twenty feet of Stow's father's garden in Throgmorton Street and who, rather than provide compensation had instead levied his neighbours a weekly rent! Cromwell had extended his boundary wall on three sides, heedless of his neighbour's rights; as a shrewd lawyer and member of the Henrician court Thomas was impervious to recrimination. Stow continues to write glowingly of the rebuilt Austin Friars in another section where Cromwell's name is omitted.  In the Elizabethan era it may have had a modern parallel with the dismantled, much-hated Berlin Wall and those who built it as being a creation best forgotten.

London in the mid-fifteenth century saw an astonishing population growth from some 40, 000 to over 160,000 a century later. By 1700 it had become the largest city in Europe as well as the wealthiest
city of the kingdom.

Hofnagel's London map of 1572, above, is typically cluttered and has little to offer with its disproportionate street dimensions.  



In 2013 six students of the DeMontfort University, Leicestershire developed an award-winning 3D
recreation of Pudding Lane as it existed in around 1666, again, long-after Cromwell's lifetime however it gives us the smoky, densely-populated atmosphere of central London that would 

have been not too far-removed from the houses, streets and Thames bridge that Thomas knew.
The animatiion begins at 0.29.  Two matters of interest are the interior of the blacksmith's shop at
3.05, and that the 'flight' keeps returning to a church-yard, which in the era represents the
centrality of the local place of worship in the collective and individual lives of the English people.
Thomas, after all, had played the pivotal role in giving everyone the Bible in the English text that
at least a substantial number of people could understand. He had learned about a rebel priest and the doors of a church in Wittenberg. 
But we haven't been with him in northern Germany and Switzerland - yet. 




- Crytek 3D, Pudding Lane, Recreating Seventeenth-Century London.  Journal of Digital Humanities.
Vol. 3, No. 1 Spring 2014

http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3-1/pudding-lane-recreating-seventeenth-century-london/
- Stow, John. The Survey of London. First published 1598. Reprinted and revised edition, ed.
   H.B. Wheatley. London: Everyman's Library (1987). 'Broad Street Ward', pp. 157 -159.





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