Merchants and Heroes:

London's history in the time of John Snow

 

Dr Matthew Davies

 

A stained glass in the Vintners' Hall in the City of London depicts the Feast of the Five Kings, which is a central event in the history and folklore of the Vintners' Company.  The Feast was held, so the story goes, by Henry Pritchard, vintner and former Mayor of London, at his mansion in Cold Harbour Lane in about 1363.  The guests supposedly included not only Edward III, but John, King of France, David of Scotland, Waldemar of Denmark, and Peter of Cyprus.  The stained glass window itself was modelled on the mural which the Vintners contributed to the rebuilt Royal Exchange at the end of the 19^th Century, as part of a series of murals paid for by the twelve great livery companies.

This story of the Five Kings has been much studied by historians, mainly to try and pin down exactly what might have happened and when, and in particular, which Kings might or might not have actually been present.  The consensus, if such there is one, is that if a feast occurred, the most likely date is the autumn of 1363, when Edward III was not on campaign, which was a rare occasion, and when David of Scotland and the French King were prisoners in England awaiting ransom.  Peter, King of Cyprus, is known to have been in London during the winter of 1363-4.  In other words, if this event took place, and the evidence is reasonably positive, then there were, at most, four Kings present. 

I am starting with this particular story as it is a good illustration of one of the themes that I want to concentrate on tonight.  This is the way in which London's history was written and interpreted in different periods.  This was particularly the case in the century or so after the Reformation, when London's trading horizons and fortunes were expanding rapidly.  We know, for example, that the story of Henry Pritchard entertaining royal guests at his house in London was in circulation in the late 14^th Century, but it is not until the late-16^th Century that it really took off. 

John Stow, you will not be surprised to hear, was the first to revive the legend in his Survey of London.  He was, in fact, the first to suggest that there were four Kings present, although he did not say who they were.  As a matter of fact, and the Vintners may not wish to hear this, the first reference to five Kings is actually much later, in the histories of the reigns of Edward III written by Samuel Clark and Joshua Barnes in 1673 and 1688 respectively.

This kind of embellishment is typical of this period, and it is another of the themes I want to look at tonight: the way in which historical figures and stories were revived, exaggerated or even invented in order to present a particular version of London's past and to serve contemporary needs.  For London merchants, the idea that the crowned heads of several European countries had converged on the house of one of their own for dinner would have spoken to their own ambitions as international traders and the importance of the city and its port. 

What I want to draw attention to tonight is the importance given by writers to the achievements of individuals.  This was particularly a feature of London's civic culture in the hundred years or so after the Reformation.  The consensus among historians is that, while there was much continuity between the pre and post-Reformation periods, there was undeniably a greater promotion of the successes and achievements of individual merchants from the mid-16^th Century onwards.  The most striking examples of this come from the City's livery companies, where what one historian has called 'the arts and acts of memorialisation' focused on the lives and works of wealthy merchants.  These were evoked in recitations of the wills of benefactors, heraldic glass windows, portraits, company plates, and even statues.  Commemorative sermons and dinners celebrated the generosity of donors and the importance of charity in binding together the elite inhabitants of the godly City.  As a result, livery company halls became what has been described as 'theatres of memory', in which the elite constantly recall the charitable acts of previous members.  In some notable cases, the image and reputation of particular merchants was spread far and wide.

Sir Thomas White was, at one point in his career, reputed to have been the wealthiest man in London.  A merchant taylor, he died in 1567, after having founded St John's College Oxford at great personal expense, and establishing an enduring connection between his company and the College.  What was even more remarkable though was the complex array of charities he established in more than twenty towns throughout England, setting up loan funds that enabled taylors and cloth-workers to establish their own businesses.  To remember White and his charity, at least sixteen portraits were commissioned, each of which were to hang in the guildhalls of the towns that benefited from his scheme. 

In the public arena, the celebrations accompanying the Lord Mayor's procession took off in this period, as expressions of civic and corporate identity, often channelled through pageants which extolled the virtues and achievements of the new Mayor, as well as innumerable historic figures such as Richard Whittington or William Walworth, as well as those of the new Mayor.  We have some remarkable surviving records of these performances from the mid-16^th Century onwards, and they include detailed descriptions of processions and verses written by leading poets and writers, such as Anthony Munday and John Webster.

Sometimes, the verses employed puns or illusions based on the Mayor's name.  Just to give you an example, the election of William Harper in 1561 was celebrated by orations from actors playing, as you might have guessed, legendary harpists, starting, as you would, with King David, who pronounced: 'For why your gentle harper may with mildness bring about as much touching good government as they that be right stout; Where for rejoice ye Londoners and hope well of your Mayor, for never did a milder man sit in your chiefest chair.'

As well as the character and achievements of the Lord Mayor himself, the pageants increasingly came to present to a fascinated public episodes from the lives of historical figures, whether real or imagined, couched within a broader narrative of the history of London as a whole.  Sometimes, the writers' research let them down the wrong path.  Anthony Munday apologised in print in 1614 for having, in a previous publication, linked Henry Fitz-Ailwin, London's first recorded Mayor, to the Goldsmiths, whereas he should have been allocated to the Drapers.  Rather mischievously, he blamed John Stow for his mistake: 'What more frequent confession can any man make,' he wrote 'than of his blind misleading by a blinder guide.'  It is a bit harsh, I think!  Yet, much else of what appears in these works was familiar or, at least, it reflected a long tradition of historical writing in London.

An example was the story of William Walworth, the fishmonger who was Mayor of the City during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.  When it came to the turn of the fishmongers to celebrate to elect their Mayors, they made the most of their connection to this historic event, placing Walworth at the centre of the action in 1831.  The pageant devised by Anthony Munday in 1616 for the mayoral procession of John Leman had as its centrepiece a celebration of William Walworth, who 'manfully defended and preferred the life, crown and dignity of Richard II'.  Richard himself was to appear in the tableau, his crown held on very fast by the triumphing angel, 'who that they smote the enemy by Walworth's hand'.  But now, the purpose here was to make explicit connections between London, the fishmongers, and the story of the nation as a whole.  Richard II may have been a rather controversial King, but writers and chroniclers were able to focus on his position rather than his character.  Walworth was the saviour of English kingship against rebellion, thereby emphasising London's crucial importance for the Crown, particularly in terms of international trade and prestige. 

This is a long-running theme, particularly in the history of the City livery companies which supplied the Lord Mayors and commissioned these pageants.  The companies and their members owed a great deal to their connections with royal authority, because through the charters the crown granted the companies privileges and status. 

A story like the Vintners' Five Kings therefore had a great deal of currency in late-16^th and early-17^th Century London.  It evoked these historic connections between Crown, City and company, as well as the broader international context.

The Merchant Taylors were another company with impressive royal credentials.  In their pageant of 1605 for Sir Leonard Holliday, the procession was led by a chariot containing actors playing the parts of the seven Kings who had been honorary members of the Company.  The opening speech was given by Edward III, who had given them their first Charter.  This was linked to the overall theme of the pageant: the triumphs of reunited Britannia.  Two years after the accession of James I, the pageant placed the themes, characters and stories familiar to the audience in a slightly wider context, emphasising the coming together of the British peoples. 

One of these stories, which very popular in pageants and chronicles of this period, was the idea of London as the new Troy, founded by the mythical Brutus, a descendent of Aeneas, a legend that first appeared in the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12^th Century.  The 1605 pageant presented Brutus as the father of Britain; the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Wales were given to his three sons to rule, and to their descendents ever after.  The reuniting of these kingdoms thus provided a very contemporary backdrop to this mayoral election, and placed London and its merchants at the heart of this alliance of nations.

A related theme in the pageants of this period was exploration and international trade, and here, there are lots of potential heroes to choose from.  The merchant hero was not only associated with the charitable acts at home, but also with deeds and achievements abroad.  We can see this in many contexts.

Sir Andrew Judd, the skinner who founded Tonbridge School, died in 1558 and was buried in St Helen's Bishopsgate.  The epitaph on his tomb made the claim that: 'To Russia and Muscovy, to Spain, Guinea, without fail, travelled he by land and sea'.  In actual fact, the view now is that this claim goes ratehr too far.  Although Judd was closely involved in the financing of expeditions to these places through his role in the Merchant Adventurers and the Muscovy Company, it is not at all clear that he actually travelled to these places at all.  In fact, he travelled far less than someone like Thomas Gresham, whose mercantile and diplomatic ventures are well known.  But what is important is the heroic status attached to mercantile activity in general.  By playing such a leading role in the financing and organisation of these ventures, Judd was helping to open up new markets and contribute to the expansion of the country's trading interests.

By the early 17^th-Century, overseas exploration, propelled by the activities of London's merchants, was in full swing.  The pageant commissioned from John Webster for the merchant taylor John Gore in 1624 is a masterpiece of celebratory verse and prose, centred on Gore himself, who was an international trader with worldwide interests.  Travelling and exploration were a theme throughout, starting with the mercenary Sir John Hawkwood, of whom much more later, and reaching a peak with a pageant that included famous seafarers such as Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher.  The performances celebrated the international reach and the honour of mercantile endeavour, represented in its ultimate form by the deeds of men such as Gore.

So, as the examples of William Walworth, Andrew Judd, and John Gore show, pageants and other devices provided audiences with a roll-call of important merchants who were seen as having played a critical role in the history of the livery company concerned and in the City of London as a whole.  This was, in many ways, a formative period for the fashioning of heroes for the City of London. 

It was in the late-16^th and early-17^th Centuries that the story of Richard Whittington really took hold, developing an unstoppable momentum that gave him a unique place, with his cat of course, in the imagination of Londoners, but this kind of celebrity was hard to attain.

The Drapers' pageant of 1615, written by Anthony Munday again, for Sir John Jolles, lists quite a few eminent drapers, starting with Sir John Poultney, and including William Cromer, Simon Eyre, William Capel, and many others.  He even, for some reason, throws in a rather random speech at the end from Robin Hood - I am not quite sure why that was.  Some of these drapers are remembered in place names in the City or through their building projects, but none had the same impact as someone like Whittington. 

One who nearly did so was Simon Eyre, a 15^th Century draper who founded the Leadenhall as the City's granary.  In 1597, Thomas Deloney published 'The Gentle Craft,' which provides a very Whittington-like story of how Simon Eyre, being at first a shoemaker, with the aid of his wife and apprentices, made a successful career in the City, ending up as Mayor and builder of Leadenhall.  Thomas Dekker then recycled this story, with all its fanciful elements, to form his more famous play 'The Shoemakers' Holiday' of 1600.  Yet, despite this, it failed to capture the popular imagination for very long, and so Simon Eyre's fifteen minutes of fame were up.

Now, for the second part of this lecture, I want to look, first of all, at a particular text that was produced in the late-16^th Century, and which encapsulates some of the themes I have touched on so far.  I will then turn to one of the heroic figures it documents, and try and to explain how and why he rose to prominence many centuries after his death.

The work of literature I want to consider is Richard Johnson's 'Nine Worthies of London', published in 1592.  The title, as many of you will know, deliberately evokes the tradition of writing about 'worthies', particularly in the context of medieval chivalry and the history of religion.

Indeed, the first mentions of 'nine worthies' can be found in chivalric works of the early 14^th Century, which brought together heroic figures from the classical era, the Bible, and the relatively recent medieval past.  A typical line-up of worthies therefore included Hector, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus, King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey de Bouillon.

There was also, it may interest you to know, an emerging tradition of depicting nine female worthies, although perhaps they are less well-know to us today.  Most of them were Queens of the Amazons and other marshal women who appear in classical myths and legends.

Richard Johnson was clearly well aware of this tradition, and indeed, it influenced his choice of London worthies and the way in which their deeds and achievements were characterised.  In Johnson's mind, London needed heroes, and the purpose of the pamphlet was to identify middle-ranking Londoners, mainly of humble birth, who had distinguished themselves in acts of heroism and chivalry.  Johnson introduces monologues by the Nine Worthies in the allegorical guise of Fame, who brings the muse of history, Clio, to record their stories.  Fame explains to Clio that the monologues are not of Kings and mighty potentates but such whose virtues made them great and whose renown sprang not from the nobleness of their birth but of the notable towardness of their well-qualified minds, advanced not with lofty titles but praise for the trial of their heroical truths.

So, why did London need such heroes?  Johnson's work was, in many ways, a response to the turbulent times in which he lived, and the way in which the London of that time was depicted in other works.  As historian Lawrence Manley has shown in his book on literature and culture in early modern London, corruption, greed and the undermining of civic values were themes that were becoming increasingly common in satirical works of this period, whether in the form of urban reportage, by writers such as Thomas Dekker, or in other plays and pamphlets. 

This was fuelled in part by a sense of a city that was expanding rapidly; indeed, the population increased during the 16^th Century from around 80,000 inhabitants to as many as 200,000 by 1600.  Social and economic tensions rose to a peak at the end of the Century, with criticism of the traditional scapegoats, foreigners, replaced by often very direct criticism of those in authority in the City.  Even though London never erupted in the way that some other cities in Europe did, there was enough concern about the situation to provoke men such as Richard Johnson into trying to explain what was wrong and how it should be fixed. 

Indeed, Johnson himself, in a work published some years later, called 'Look on Me, London', used the device of a gentleman warning his son about the dangers of the big city, urging him to study law or become a merchant, thereby enriching the country through trade but not falling into wicked ways and spending his whole substance to the utter undoing of his posterity and great shame of his kindred. 

In 'The Nine Worthies', Johnson was seeking to transform and redeem this corrupt and evil London, using the natural chivalric values of citizens turned knights.  This would strengthen London's merchants as they went about their important business of making money through international trade in particular, bolstering London's financial as well as its moral fortunes.

So why did Johnson choose chivalry as the means to save London from itself?  As we all know, the great period of chivalric literature was the 14^th and 15^th Centuries, where the Hundred Years War in particular encouraged a revival of tales of men such as King Arthur and his Knights as well as the creation of contemporary heroes - the Premiership footballers of their day - men such as Sir John Hawkwood and Sir Robert Knowles, who fought first for Edward III and then for anyone else who would pay them.  For Londoners though, there was little to suggest that these kinds of tales influenced civic culture in that period, but all that was to change from the end of the 15^th Century, helped in part by closer links between England and Burgundy that depended themselves on trading activity. 

A tournament held in Smithfield in 1467 was the first of quite a number of years.  From the reign of Edward IV onwards, London merchants were regularly knighted by the King.  Before the 1460s, this was a very rare event.  By 1500, the new Mayor would automatically be knighted by the monarch.  Knights, and even merchant knights, needed models, and these were provided in the plethora of chivalric texts which appeared in print from the 1480s onwards.

For example, William Caxton, whose contacts with Burgundian merchants are well-known, wrote a preface to a book called 'The Order of Chivalry' which he printed in 1488.  In it, he bemoaned the poor state of English chivalry and spoke out against recreation such as gambling because they distracted men from marshal pursuits.  He urged his readers to 'look in the latter days at the noble acts since the Conquest, as in the days of Richard, Coeur de Lion, of Edward I and III, and of his noble sons, of Sir Robert Knowles, Sir John Hawkwood, and Sir John Chandos.'  Caxton was one of several writers who dealt in a specifically chivalric nostalgia, looking to a golden age of warfare, defined in relation to methods and practices as well as values.  With modern warfare so far removed from its earlier incarnations, merchant knights could safely aspire to some of the virtues and trappings of chivalry, now that these were associated with an age gone by rather than present day realities.

In London, we can see a more sustained engagement between chivalry and civic culture.  The idea of London as the new Troy was reinvigorated under the Tudors.  London's role was framed in propaganda by the language of feudal loyalty and chivalric honour, encapsulated by the visit of Charles V to London in 1522, where he was treated to an Arthurian pageant. 

This revival of interest in chivalry was taken much further later in the 16^th Century, and became linked with the interests of London and its merchants.  As I mentioned earlier, civic and livery company ceremonial became much more lavish, particularly after the Reformation, when, it has been argued, secular rituals, such as the Lord Mayor's processions, acted as an outlet for display and performance which was no longer possible through religious ceremonies and rituals. 

As we have already seen, these processions and pageants came to extol the virtues and achievements of historic figures, such as Whittington and Walworth, as well as those of the new Mayor.  Pageants on a chivalric theme are recorded from the 1580s onwards, bringing together the civic and the chivalric in ways that were not quite managed at earlier times.  A document of 1588 speaks of the revival of an Arthurian archery tournament, not held since the reign of Henry VIII.  Arthurian Societies are recorded.  One was led by Hugh Offley, a leading member of the Leathersellers' Company, which stages a 'costly show of Prince Arthur' for Queen Elizabeth.  Lawrence Manley suggests that the adaptation of chivalry to the urban scene enabled citizens to reflect with pride on the origins of their city, and the idea of London as the new Troy becomes even more prominent in this period.  It also, he argues, provided a language of loyalty, parity and reciprocity in which to negotiate the City's relationship to the aristocracy and the Crown, because of course these relationships were critical to the ability of London and its merchants to secure important grants, influence government policy, and improve its position in relation to other major trading centres.

But, to return to Johnson and his 'Nine Worthies', there is a second aspect of Johnson's pamphlet that is worth emphasising as well.  The full, lengthy title of the pamphlet is as follows: 'The Nine Worthies of London, Explaining the Honourable Exercise of Arms, the Virtues of the Valiant, and the Memorable Attempts of Magnanimous Minds, Pleasant for Gentlemen, Not Unseemly for Magistrates, and Most Profitable for Prentices.'  This last phrase I think is very significant.  What I would like to suggest is that one of the things that Johnson is doing is to respond to a specific concern about the moral condition of the City's apprentices, part of wider debates I have just described. 

Disorder and violence among apprentices and servants in London was nothing new of course, the most famous example being Evil May Day of 1517, when apprentices and journeymen were prominent in rioting that took place against foreign merchants and craftsmen in the City.  With London's population growing so rapidly in the later 16^th and early 17^th Centuries, worries about disorder and collective action increased, fed by reports of conspiracies, immorality and violence. Indeed, in 1592-3, London's Aldermen had to confront the very real possibility of a repeat of the rioting of Evil May Day.  So sensitive did the authorities become that a group of apprentices putting on a pageant was enough to arouse suspicion because of its potentially subversive content.

Sermons were one popular way of trying to control apprentices and improve their moral condition, and we have hundreds of examples of sermons preached in the City churches, many of them commissioned by the livery companies.  The author of the 1613 pamphlet 'The Prentices Practising Godliness' was aimed at 'those religiously disposed and virtuous young men, the apprentices of the City of London'.  Several historians have studied the way in which radical Protestantism intersected with the youth of early modern London.

However, another strand in this apprentice literature relates to the ideas of chivalry I described.  Several writers have looked at the idea of apprentice culture in early modern London - the importance of tales of chivalry and heroism, foreign adventure, social mobility, and so on, which created a kind of sub-culture with a strong sense of fraternity.  In other words, the improvement of the moral condition of apprentices could also be achieved by harnessing some of the same chivalric values that were popular at the time, represented in the lives of historic figures.

It is this that skews Richard Johnson's choice of his 'Nine Worthies', listed here.  All were said to have begun as apprentices and been involved in trade in London. 

The nine worthies were: the aforementioned William Walworth, Henry Pritchard, William Sevenoke, Thomas White, John Bonham, Christopher Croker, John Hawkwood, Hugh Calverley, and finally, Henry Maleverer.  It is interesting to point out that Richard Whittington does not get a look-in; this was despite the fact that this period saw an increasing number of plays and pamphlets which developed the more fanciful and romantic aspects of his story, as well as celebrating his charitable achievements.  Johnson's 'Nine Worthies', on the other hand, are notable for their supposed marshal exploits.  Almost all made their mark in the 14^th or early 15^th Centuries, the period of the Hundred Years War, thus creating a sense of a Golden Age in London's chivalric heritage.

The 'Worthies' bring out particular themes that Johnson wanted to emphasise.  William Walworth, for instance, is again celebrated for his deeds during the Peasants' Revolt, in particular for killing Wat Tyler, bringing an end to the rebellion, and saving the kingdom.  Thomas White, the only Londoner from our 16^th Century period, is given particular plaudits for saving London, and hence the Crown, from Wyatt's Rebellion during the reign of Mary. 

The 'Worthies' were not averse also to saving foreign monarchs and princes too.  Christopher Croker, said to have begun his career as a vintner, served alongside the Black Prince, and assisted Pedro of Castile in pressing his claim to the Castilian throne.

Their activities as merchants were emphasised very strongly.  John Bonham allegedly started out as a mercer, and was entrusted with a valuable cargo bound for Denmark.  Once there, he found favour at the Danish Court and, rather rapidly, was made commander of the army raised to stop the progress of the 'Great Solyman' of Turkey.  He eventually made peace with the Turkish leader and returned to England a very wealthy man.

Johnson makes it clear that a London apprenticeship was not just for the low-born.  Sir John Bonham tells his own story thus: 'A gentleman I am, of gentle blood, a knight my father was, yet thought no scorn to place his son within apprenticehood.'

Now, as you can tell already, there is a certain amount of exaggeration involved in these tales, both in terms of the London connections of the 'Worthies', which, in several cases, are very tenuous, and in terms of their chivalric and heroic achievements.  For instance, Sir John Calverley's main claim to fame seems to have been to rid the kingdom of Poland of a large bear!

More plausible, though still romanticised, was the story of William Sevenoke, whose London credentials are of course unimpeachable.  He was said to have been a foundling who was brought to London and served an apprenticeship, and Johnson took the opportunity to emphasise the virtues of a good apprentice:  'To please the honest care my master took, I did refuse no toil nor drudging pain, my hands no labour ever yet forsook whereby I might increase my master's gain.'  Now, at this point, the story becomes a bit more fanciful.  Sevenoke then saw service in the wars in France in the army of Henry V, and at one point, amazingly, even fought the Dauphin in single combat!  He returned to London, resumed his career as a grocer, became Mayor, and founded an almshouse and a school, Sevenoke's School, in the parish of his birth, although these achievements are described in just a few verses.

As we can see, one of the key themes of the 'Nine Worthies' is travelling and adventure.  This, again, would have resonated with his late-16^th Century audience.  They would have seen the parallels and connections between trade, diplomacy and warfare.  Thomas Gresham, we know, was as much a diplomat as he was a merchant for some of his career, while London merchants were used to dealing with the vagaries of international politics, providing money for campaigns and so on.  The 'Worthies', like merchants in our period, travelled far and wide, making their fortunes and also their reputations.

Now, for the last part of this talk, I want to concentrate on the career and reputation of one of these 'Worthies' in particular: Sir John Hawkwood, the famous soldier and mercenary.

He is depicted in the famous fresco completed in 1436 by Paolo Uccello for the Cathedral of Florence.  It was commissioned by the city of Florence in recognition of Hawkwood's service to the city, and shows him on a charger, wearing a short doublet over his armour, and carrying the baton of a captain of war in his right hand.

I do not propose to go over his career in any detail here, but mainly to look at him as a Londoner, an aspect of Hawkwood that is not usually examined.  First of all, despite the doubts about some of the 'Worthies' I have been talking about, there is actually a reasonable amount of evidence that he was a London apprentice.  We know he was born in Essex, but we do not know much more about him until he entered Edward III's service.  However, there are at least two chronicles written shortly after his death in 1394, which state that he rose to prominence after starting off as an apprentice in London.  One writer says that he was a hosier; another that he was a taylor.  We also know that he had property interests in London, which were the subject of letters to and from the City government after his death.  Thereafter, there is silence in the records, until our old friend John Stow wrote his 'Annuls of England' in 1580: 'I find by good record that this John Hawkwood was born in Essex, the son of Gilbert Hawkwood, tanner, in his youth was bound as an apprentice with a taylor in the City of London, and from thence was pressed into the service of King Edward III.' 

All this stacks up with the known historical facts, and it is clear that Richard Johnson used this or a similar account as a starting point for 'The Nine Worthies'.  He added the odd bit of detail to the story of his origins.  His apprenticeship, for instance, was said to have been in Lombard Street, of course a reference to his later military exploits in Lombardy.  According to Johnson, he was pressed into service with Edward III before becoming a soldier of fortune, leading a company of 1,500 Englishmen to the walls of Milan: 'There did the Italians term me John Acute because I had their foes in such pursuit.'  - It is a terrible rhyme really! 

The emphasis on apprenticeship which we see in Johnson continues in later versions of the life of Hawkwood.  William Valens in 1615 published 'The honourable prentice or this taylor is a man', showed in the life and death of Sir John Hawkwood, sometime prentice of London.  This short work does not add a great deal in terms of embellishment, although, in this case, much is made of his decision to become a solder when 'his spirit and genius leading him rather to follow arms after the sound of trumpet and drum, then be at the hand of the call of his master or mistress, to France he went, as also many other prentices of his acquaintance and familiars'.  The rest of the pamphlet deals in much detail with his career in France and Italy, drawn on versions of the chronicles written by Villani, but also citing references in work by Machiavelli, Thomas Walsingham and others.  He notes the variations in the spelling of Hawkwood's Italianised surname, explaining that Acuto has sometimes led writers to refer to him as John Sharp.

It is scarcely surprising that the stories of men such as Hawkwood should at some stage have been deployed by the livery companies as a way of celebrating the virtues and ideals of merchants and the City.  As I mentioned right at the beginning, in 1624, the Merchant Taylors used the occasion of the election of John Gore, a leading member of the company, as Lord Mayor to commission the poet John Webster to write the pageant for the celebration on the River Thames.  Entitled 'Monuments of Honour', Webster based the pageant on a maritime theme, with actors representing the rivers Thames and Medway, and others playing the famous navigators, as I mentioned, Francis Drake and Martin Frobisher.

A lot of the pageants came down the river and landed at Three Cranes Wharf on the Thames, not far from St Paul's, before going up into the City.  After landing here, the new Mayor was greeted by a tableau called the Temple of Honour, and was treated by a speech from an actor representing the City as new Troy, celebrating the origins of the Merchant Taylors' Company.  Webster then planned a succession of speeches and historical characters, all connected with the Company's history.  Hawkwood received top billing, with a speech that drew attention to his supposedly lowly birth and his rise from the status of a lowly soldier to captain and then a knight.  He was to be followed by a chariot depicting the arms of the Company and figures of the Kings of England who had been honorary members of the Company, starting with Hawkwood's first military master, Edward III, and ending with Henry VII. 

Webster constructed the pageant around two centres of gravity, if you like: the first being the origins of the Company, the career of Hawkwood, and links with the English Kings; the other theme was a celebration of charity and learning, which was presented in relation, once again, to the career of Sir Thomas White.  Both of these men, one a 16^th Century merchant, the other a 14^th Century soldier, represented virtues and achievements that resonated with the mercantile audience.

By the late-17^th Century, the lives of men such as Whittington and Hawkwood had made their way into a wide range of publications, and the stories about them became evermore fanciful and entertaining.  However, this did not mean that they were somehow disowned by the livery companies.  There was an enduring sense that heroic and legendary figures could be included as part of an evolving sense of history.

In 1665, William Winstanley, a poet and biographer, published a book entitled 'The Honour of Merchant Taylors', wherein is set forth the noble acts, valiant deeds, and heroic performances of merchant taylors in former ages, their honourable loves and knightly adventures.  This title neatly encapsulates the idea that merchants could be, and were, heroic figures.  Winstanley's book is essentially a very heavily fictionalised account of Sir John Hawkwood's career, recounting his life as an apprentice, his love for his master's daughter, and his adventures as a soldier.  It is interspersed with a complicated romantic rivalry of two fellow apprentices, and several other loosely related sub-plots involving characters such as a lecherous lawyer and a Moroccan Prince.  After very lengthy accounts of his battles in Italy, the main part of the book concludes with the description of the honours bestowed on Hawkwood by the city of Florence and his glorious return after yet another victory.  Winstanley then, for good measure has Hawkwood hunt down a dragon that was said to be terrorising the rural inhabitants of the city estate.  He eventually found the dragon, harmlessly sunning itself by a mossy riverbank, and killed it after a long and bloody duel. 

Throughout the pamphlet, Winstanley ensures that Hawkwood and his deeds are linked with the Merchant Taylors' Company, and at the end, he turns his attention from the fictional and dramatic to a more sober account of the origins and history of the Merchant Taylors.  He does this having '...shown you the noble achievements of some few of the renowned society of Merchant Taylors.  To enumerate them all would require more than one man's life to set them down, their number exceeding the bounds of arithmetic.'  He then recounts some of the key events in the Company's history, as well as the charitable activities of four 16^th Century members of the Company, including, once more, Thomas White, for them the paragon of mercantile success and charitable endeavour.

I began this talk with the 'Five Kings' and have ended with the 'Nine Worthies' of London.  What is clear, when one looks at this period, is that Londoners seem to have wanted heroes, whether within the confines of their own livery halls, in the books they read, or out on the streets in pageants and processions.  Whittington and White were particular kinds of heroes, men who were the richest Londoners of their day, and, after careers as international traders, devoted a substantial part of their wealth, like Thomas Gresham, to charitable works.  Others, as we have seen, were drawn from the pages of London's more remote history, men whose careers were depicted in order to draw attention to certain ideals which contemporary merchants ought to display.  These were virtues that, if they were adopted, would only add to London's prestige as an international trading centre and to the reputation of its citizens as explorers, financiers, and merchants.  In this way of course, London's merchants could, perhaps, aspire themselves to be heroes to future generations.

 

 

                                                            © Dr Matthew Davies, 29 April 2009