The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (9 page)

Many streets rose again from the ashes of the Blitz, but Silver Street did not. It was dealt a final death-blow by redevelopment and traffic-planning - we are at the outer edge of the giant Barbican estate, opened in the early 1960s. All that survives visibly of the previous lay-out of the area are the old churchyards, which have been left as public open spaces. You can find the churchyard of St Olave’s, watched over by gleaming high-rise offices. No foundations of the church are visible, as they are in some others in the vicinity, but on a low brick wall among the municipal shrubs is a small faded inscription on a block of whitish stone (see Plate 9) - it looks like part of an old gravestone, and indeed it has a skull and crossbones incised on it. It reads: ‘THIS WAS THE PARISH CHURCH / OF ST OLAVE SILVER STREET / DESTROYED BY THE DREADFVLL / FIRE IN THE YEAR 1666’. Opposite is another inscribed stone, most of it now illegible. The bottom lines read, ‘BY THE / COMMISSIONERS OF SEWERS / AT THE REQUEST OF THE VESTRY’. Below is a date, 18-something, perhaps 1865. The vestry would have been that of St Alban’s, Wood Street, with which the parish was twinned. It is likely both tablets date from the nineteenth century, though the skull was probably on the stone before the commemorative words were added. If so it would be a fragmentary pre-Fire relic of the original churchyard.

The churchyard of St Olave’s stood almost directly opposite the Mountjoys’ house on Silver Street. The site of it now lies on the edge of the busy traffic-road called London Wall (part of the A1211). The name London Wall is misleading at this point, where the road runs south of, and at an angle to, the true line of the old walls, whose fragmentary bastions can be seen to the north. The line of Silver Street lies partly under and partly alongside this road. Pacing it out I would say that the closest one can now get to the Mountjoys’ house is underneath the road, in London Wall car-park. We are physically near, for the pre-Fire stratum is indeed some feet below the current surface, but this is on the whole a depressing proximity. An underground car-park is unmistakably an underground car-park whether or not Shakespeare once lived on the site of it.

Climbing back up to present-day levels I take some comfort in the thought that the opposite scenario - the house’s survival - might have been even grimmer: the postcard rack, the polished oak panelling, the lute musak following you from room to room.

We must find other ways to specify the house and the street as they were in Shakespeare’s day. The obvious place to turn is John Stow’s
Survay of London
, published in 1598 and updated in 1603. But this corner of Cripplegate did not spark the roaming antiquary’s enthusiasm. Voluble with history and curiosities elsewhere, of Silver Street he has only this to say: ‘Down lower in Wood streete is Silver streete (I think of silversmithes dwelling there) in which bee divers fayre houses.’
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His conjecture about the name is correct, but the association is medieval: there is no particular evidence of silversmiths here in Shakespeare’s time, though there were some goldsmiths. Other than this Stow gives just one crumb of information - that the street had ‘fair’ houses. ‘Fair’ is a favourite word when he has nothing much else to say: a bland term of approval. He means that the buildings are of a good size, the street well kept, the area respectable. It continued to be so in its post-Fire manifestation. In Maitland’s
London
of 1756, Silver Street is described as a ‘handsome broad street with well-built houses’.
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Jacobean London had few broad streets, however, and to our eyes Silver Street would be narrow.

The Mountjoy establishment was probably quite a large house. It served the family as both work-place and dwelling-place. The ground floor would have contained a workshop, where the Mountjoy ‘tires’ were made, and probably also a shop in the retailing sense, where customers came for viewings and fittings. (In theory immigrant craftsmen were forbidden to retail directly to the public, but this was not strictly enforced.) Upstairs were the family’s living quarters, and doubtless the room or rooms let out to lodgers, and then the higher, smaller rooms which accommodated apprentices and servants. A ‘snapshot’ of the Mountjoy household in the late 1590s shows half a dozen workers in their tiremaking business - Christopher and Marie, their daughter Mary (whom Christopher had trained ‘to a good perfection in his sayd trade of Tyermakeinge’), and three apprentices - plus at least two other live-in servants. Then, a little later, there is the lodger, Mr Shakespeare. There had probably been a lodger there before him, and there was certainly one there after him, for in court in 1612 Christopher Weaver says Mountjoy ‘hath a sojourner in the house with him’. On this evidence the house had at least nine adult residents in it. By 1612 there were considerably fewer, and Mountjoy was letting out half the property to tenants. ‘The house wherein he dwelleth’, says Noel, is ‘divided into two tenements.’ These tenants are distinct from the lodger or sojourner, who is ‘in the house with him’.

These roomy tradesmen’s houses were a popular choice for writers’ lodgings. We hear of Robert Greene living, and dying, in the house of a ‘cordwainer’ (leather-worker) in Dowgate; of Ben Jonson lodged ‘at a comb-maker’s shop about the Elephant and Castle’; of Matthew Roydon ‘making his abode’ at a shoemaker’s house in the Blackfriars; of Nashe billeted with the catchpenny printer John Danter in Hosier Lane.
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Shakespeare was typical, then - except that none of those hard-up writers owned houses elsewhere. They were lodgers by necessity, not for professional convenience. Shakespeare has an apartment in town, which is a different matter.

We have a broad guideline to the value of the house. Mountjoy was not the owner of the property: he leased it. In 1612, according to Noel, he had recently renewed the lease: ‘He hath a time in his lease of the house wherein he dwelleth of some thirty years to come, which he renewed but lately.’ He also had the leasehold of another house, out in ‘Brainforde’ - Brentford in Middlesex - which he sub-let to tenants. (This second Mountjoy property will be of interest to us later: see Chapter 25.) We have a figure for the two leaseholds combined. Mountjoy ‘payeth yearly rent for those leases some seventeen pounds per annum’ (Christopher Weaver).
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We cannot know the proportioning of this figure, but might guess that the London house was worth more than the Brentford house (though, as I will show, Brentford could be an expensive area). Perhaps something between £10 and £12 per annum is a reasonable estimate for the house in Silver Street.

This suggests a good-sized house but not a grand one. Speaking of Dutch immigrants in Billingsgate John Stow says, ‘In the chief and principall houses, they give twentie pound the yeare for a house latelie letten for foure marks [£2 13s 4d].’ The discrepancy sounds exaggerated but we gather that around the beginning of the seventeenth century the lease on a large London house could be as much as £20 a year.
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Stow’s comment reminds us that immigrants were often charged extortionate rents, so our estimated £10 to £12 rent for the Silver Street house may exaggerate its market value.

The house was probably a timber-framed building. Freestone houses were a rarity in the city: in medieval times, says Stow, ‘the houses in London were builded in stone for defence of fire . . . but of later time for the winning of ground taken downe, and houses of timber set up in place’. Ground was won - in other words, space saved - because it was easier to build timber houses tall: five storeys were not uncommon. We see these houses in contemporary paintings and engravings, and we know them from many fine examples scattered around the country, in a style we generically call ‘Tudor’, though the black and white look they often have today is not authentic. The colours of a typical London street were softer - the silvery grey of untreated oak, the beiges and umbers of unpainted loam. Resting on a shallow foundation of brick and stone, the framework consisted of horizontal, load-bearing beams - the ‘sill beams’ at the base and the ‘bessamers’ above - into which upright and diagonal timbers were slotted. The bessamers had to be particularly strong to bear the weight of the overhanging jetties (or ‘jutties’) which projected out from the front of the house, giving it that stacked, teetering look. These were often a source of dispute: they cut out light from the narrow streets, they invaded others’ privacy, and they altered the ground-area on which house values were partly based. A larger upper-floor protrusion was the pentice or penthouse, a storage space with a sloping roof, as possibly seen on the house in the Agas map. Shops like Mountjoy’s often had one: in the Dekker- Webster comedy
Westward Ho!
(1607) we hear of ‘penthouses which commonly make the shop of a mercer or a linen-draper as dark as a room in Bedlam’ (1.1).

The fabric of such a house can be broadly gauged from the tenancy conventions of the time. The tenant (or lessee, like Mountjoy) was responsible for repairing ‘stone, brick and tiling where need is’; for the upkeep of timbers, floorboards, glass windows and gutters; for providing planks for stable doors and ‘quarters for pentices’; and for ‘daubing of the walls with lathe, nail, loam and quarters whereas the walls be broken’. The tenant was also responsible for ‘cleansing of the sieges and withdraughts’ (cesspits and drains).
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The days of the flushing lavatory were far in the future, though a prototype was discussed in Sir John Harington’s half-serious, half-scurrilous
Metamorphosis of Ajax
, published in 1596 (Ajax = ‘a jakes’ = a privy). He exaggerates - but not by much - the particular stench of shared urban drains:

What with the fish-water coming from the kitchens, blood & garbage of fowl, washing of dishes, and the excrements of the other houses, and all these in moist weather stirred a little with some small stream of water . . . these thus meeting together make such a quintessence of a stink that if Paracelsus were alive, his art could not devise to extract a stronger.
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An account survives of the emptying of a cesspit in Elizabethan London. The owner of the house paid 32 shillings for two ‘night-men’ and their crew; sixteen barrels of night-soil were carted away. Other costs were bread, cheese and beer for the workers; bricks and mortar to make good the ‘funnels’ or downpipes from the privy; and threepence for ‘juniper to refresh the pit’.
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By good fortune we have a more detailed insight into the structure and measurements of one of those ‘fair’ houses on Silver Street. It was called Dudley Court. It stood on the north side of the street a couple of doors down from the Mountjoys’ place. It had once belonged to the priory of Holy Trinity in Aldgate, but in the mid-sixteenth century it was owned by John Dudley of Hackney, who held the tasty-sounding post of Sergeant of the Pastry to Queen Elizabeth. In 1599 Dudley Court was purchased by Christ’s Hospital - considerable landowners in London - and a few years later it was surveyed for them by Ralph Treswell. His precise and elegant plan of it survives, along with many others he did, in the Hospital’s ‘Evidence Books’.
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The house was by then split into three tenements - one large and two small - but is still recognizably a single house. It is set back from the street, with entry via a courtyard. The house is on three floors, with an irregular frontage of about 60 feet; part of the frontage is ‘jettied’, with projections of 2 feet on the first floor and a few inches on the second. In the main part of the house there are four rooms on the ground floor, including a kitchen and a ‘parlour’. The two largest rooms, at the back of the house, are about 15 feet by 15; they have windows looking on to a narrow garden, 44 by 30 feet. There is a well in a corner of the yard.

The dimensions may be similar to those of the Mountjoys’ house along the street, though the lay-out would be different, as Dudley Court was purely residential. Many of the houses surveyed by Treswell have a front room or rooms designated ‘shoppe’, opening straight on to the street, and this would probably be the case at the Mountjoys’.

This being a ground-plan there is no view of the upper floors, but they are described in an accompanying note. Across the whole property there are eight upstairs rooms. Two are designated as ‘garrets’ - low-ceilinged rooms up under the eaves of the house. Garrets are often associated with poverty-stricken poets, but we are unlikely to find Mr Shakespeare accommodated in one at the Mountjoys’. He could afford better. The biggest upstairs room in Dudley Court, ‘a chamber over the parlour with a chimney’, measures about 20 by 17 feet. This is not a bad-sized room but in general the Treswell surveys confirm what one knows from surviving Jacobean houses - that rooms were on the whole small, and ceilings low, and window-light not overly generous due to the expense of glass, not to mention the extra heating incurred.

Upstairs also, not far from the main bedroom, is the privy or ‘house of office’. They are often found upstairs in the houses surveyed by Treswell: the fall was better. They were narrow closets, seldom more than 5 by 7 feet. If the literary jokes are to be believed, old pamphlets and manuscripts met an ignominious end here.
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It was unusual for a household to have more than one privy, so it is likely Shakespeare shared this facility with the family.

6

The neighbourhood

W
hat would you have seen, and who might you have met, if you were walking in and around Silver Street on a day in 1604?

Standing at the front door of the Mountjoys’ house there were three directions in which you might go (that is one of the desirable things about corner-houses). To your right, across the other side of Muggle or Monkwell Street, was the last western stretch of Silver Street, before it veered off southwards into Noble Street. Here stood the grandest house in the immediate neighbourhood, Windsor House, formerly known as Neville’s Inn. Stow calls it a ‘great house builded of stone and timber’. The Neville family, Earls of Westmorland, had owned it in medieval times, before it passed to the Windsor family by marriage. Henry, 5th Lord Windsor was the incumbent in Shakespeare’s day - he features as Lord ‘Windser’ or ‘Windzer’ in the parish register. His wife Ann was a Wiltshire squire’s daughter. Baptisms of some of their children are recorded, but it is noted they were ‘baptized in his house’, rather than at the church: there was probably a small chapel there. In June 1600 an infant daughter, Grizzel - the contemporary form of Griselda - was buried at the church. Lord Windsor does not seem to have done anything very memorable. In 1600 an amorous clergyman’s wife, Alice Blague, had hopes of becoming his mistress. In 1601 he was one of the peers who sat at the arraignment of the Earl of Essex. On his death in 1605, aged about forty-three, Parliament ordered the sale of some of his lands to pay his debts. Windsor House was probably sold, for it seems it was later owned by Sir David Fowles.
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