9—
Civic Life

Middling people had interests and duties which stretched well beyond their business life and the narrow vertical world of the household. They were, as has been seen, part of a network of 'friends' to whom they could look for help and advice in matters of importance, such as apprenticeship or marriage, and who might well turn to them as they grew older and more experienced in the world. They were also very much part of the neighbourhood in which they lived and it is to this aspect of their lives that attention is now turned.

i—
Neighbourhood and Parish

Augustan London shared the anonymity of all great cities and it could be a lonely place to live in. Nevertheless, despite this and perhaps because of it, there was also a village atmosphere about the parishes within the city. This neighbourhood ambience meant that in the heart of the metropolis one could find some of both the best and worst aspects of the villages and small towns from which so many Londoners had originally sprung, a combination of the mutuality which saw it as a duty to look after 'our poor' with the moral determinism which saw it as another duty to tell one's neighbours how to live.

Once they had married and acquired a house, most middling people seem to have stayed in the same house and so had most of the same neighbours for a fairly long time. This cannot be proved conclusively, since there are no records of actual addresses, but some idea of continuity of residence within the same parish can be obtained from evidence provided by witnesses in the Consistory Court and figures relating to this are presented in Table 9. opposite. It can be seen that at all ages there must have been a considerable turnover of people living

for less than five years in the same parish. However, the length of continuous residence of the older householders is quite striking, with over 40 per cent of those in their forties and nearly half of those over fifty having spent at least fifteen years in the same parish.

Such continuity of residence meant that most middling people must have been very well known by their neighbours, whom they would meet regularly in their homes and shops, on the street or in such institutions of good neighbourhood as the local tavern or coffee-house. Such relationships could take on a certain formality, as is indicated in a Spectator of 1711: 'There are at present in several parts of this city what they call Street-Clubs, in which the chief inhabitants of the street converse together every night.' Clubs were indeed very common in early eighteenth-century London, there being some 2000 in all according to one recent study, such purely neighbourhood clubs as the street-clubs being well outnumbered by those catering

for people with something other than propinquity in common, from bird-fancying to politics and from gardening to being Irish.^[1]

The implications of neighbourhood were wide-ranging. A neighbour was, for instance, the person most likely to be asked for information on one's character and business competence, either formally in a court of law or informally in the course of casual conversation. His loose tongue and assumed knowledge of your affairs could dry up your credit and set you on the road to the debtors' prison. On the other hand, a well cultivated neighbour could be expected to show solidarity in times of trouble, by giving evidence of one's probity, business ability, generosity or virtue as the case might be. Neighbours were also often chosen as peacemakers or arbitrators, an important function in a society which usually preferred to avoid the publicity and expense of the law. It was William Hillyard, for instance, 'a near neighbour of the master', who agreed to act as arbitrator between a Holborn tallow-chandler and his apprentice, who had run away after being accused of theft.^[2]

Neighbours took a great interest in each other's sexual and marital as well as business affairs. In England, it was said in 1602, 'every citizen is bound by oath to keep a sharp eye at his neighbour's house as to whether the married people live in harmony.' Such busybody interference in other people's lives had once been one of the main tasks of the ward inquest, a lowly component of the complex City government whose questmen eagerly presented their neighbours for moral and personal failings. By our period, however, the inquest normally confined itself to presenting people for such mundane failings as not maintaining their pavements or keeping shop without attaining the freedom of the City. However, this change in emphasis did not mean that the citizens had lost their previous interest in the sexual lives of those who lived around them. Case after case in the Consistory Court depended on the evidence of neighbours, who claimed to have seen a surprising amount of intimate behaviour through windows or doorways or by peeping through 'a hole or crevize' in a coffee-house.^[3]

Moral vigilance often went much further than mere peeping. The outrageous behaviour of Lavinia, wife of the parish clerk of St Peter's Cornhill, 'caused a mobb to come about his house to

his great disgrace and the disturbance of the neighbourhood.' Such a mob might simply abuse the offending person or they might play out the crude rural theatre of the 'skimmington ride', a ludicrous procession designed to ridicule the offender and provide a moral lesson to the bystanders. Matters often got out of hand and such sanctimonious mobs were a common focus for riots and brawls.^[4]

Augustan London was a fairly lawless place, teeming with thieves and pickpockets whose main victims were likely to be the prosperous members of the middle station. The official protection provided by the small numbers of constables, beadles and watchmen in each ward or parish was strictly limited and the citizen needed to watch out for himself and his neighbours. With no police and no public prosecutor, it was the victim of crime himself who was expected to detect, catch and prosecute the criminal who had robbed or attacked him, and often did so. The opportunist nature of much crime helped in this respect, many thieves being former servants or close neighbours of their victims who could be recognized as they jumped out of windows or climbed over walls. Apprehension was also not quite the problem one might expect, for, in the circumstances of the period, honest neighbours and bystanders were not so ready to turn a blind eye to roguery as they are today and were quite prepared to join in a hue and cry, as indeed it was their duty to do. Self-reliance also meant that many citizens kept arms and some kept small armouries, such as Edward Kingsley, carpenter of Crutched Friars, who had two pikes, two swords, a halberd and three muskets in his kitchen when he died in 1679. Some of this weaponry was no doubt left over from the Civil War or was used in the periodic musters of the trained bands, London's militia, but much was also kept for the protection of the citizen and his neighbours.^[5]

A neighbourhood might be a street, a few streets or, in the City, it might be contiguous with the precinct and the parish. In medieval times, these small areas of a few hundred houses had been the setting for a vibrant community culture. Much of this vanished with the Reformation and, although such institutions as the Ascension Day procession round the parish and the Ward Inquest dinner survived, the local life of Augustan London had little of the colour and pageantry of other European

cities.^[6] Nevertheless, the parish church continued to provide a focus for neighbourhood life and pride and many local dramas were played out within its walls. The church, or rather the vestry, was also where the meetings of local government were held, meetings which one finds with little surprise were dominated by members of the middle station. Local office and attendance at meetings were time-consuming but they were a necessary condition of earning the respect of one's neighbours and moving up in the world. Many men paid a fine or hired a substitute to avoid some bothersome local duties, but few of the middle station, even those who were nonconformists, opted out of parish government altogether.

This can be illustrated by looking at Allhallows Bread Street, a prosperous central City parish which contained about eighty houses and five hundred people in the late seventeenth century. The business of the parish and its two precincts was supervised by a vestry open to all householders which met about ten or twelve times a year in the 1690s and normally attracted between fifteen and twenty men or nearly a quarter of the householders. The main business was to make appointments to local offices; to make recommendations relating to the parish poor, such as who should be on the pension list, how much they should be paid and whether they should suffer the indignity of wearing a pauper's badge; and to supervise the fabric and decoration of the church. Allhallows was burned down in the Great Fire and for many years the parishioners shared temporary accommodation with their neighbours from St John the Evangelist. However, in 1680, the vestry finally decided to rebuild and by 1684 a fine new church had been erected, which was improved and embellished in the 1690s.^[7]

The vestry also appointed various sub-committees, some on an ad hoc basis, such as the eight men chosen in April 1698 'to wait on his Grace of Canterbury to desire him to recommend a new curate'; some set up every year, such as those which audited the churchwardens' accounts and assessed the poor rates. For the social historian, the most interesting is the committee of'seators', who were appointed every three or four years to seat the parishioners in the various rows in the church, this important social duty even being carried out in the long interval between the burning of the old church and the building

of the new one. As in many churches of the day, Allhallows seated men and women separately, 'to avoid thereby all appearance of evil', according to Sir George Wheler, though in fact this arrangement facilitated the ogling of such itinerant church attenders as Samuel Pepys.^[8]

The seating arrangements provide a series of snap-shots of social hierarchy and social mobility within the parish. In 1701, for instance, the first name in 'No. 1 South Side' was Sir Owen Buckingham, a prominent presbyterian alderman but nevertheless a stalwart of his Anglican parish church. Next to him were the two common councillors, while the row as a whole paid an average of 22s. to the poor rate, compared with 13s. in rows two and three, while, at the back, those who paid averaged only 9s. and most were exempt.^[9] Wealth was not the only determinant of one's place in church and so, very visibly, Sunday after Sunday, in the parish. Many merchants, wholesalers and rich shopkeepers are of course found near the front and such lowly creatures as Stephen Champion, hemp-porter, at the back. However, other poor men can be found well up the church, such as the glazier Richard Joynor, who paid only 1s. in the Poll Tax of 1692 but was a regular attender of vestry meetings and clearly deserved his place in the second row, while no less than seven men paying surtax in 1695 were seated as far back as Row Five. At least five of these men were young bachelors and this helps the analysis of the seating arrangements to be refined a little further. The fact is that these reflected seniority in the parish and the holding of office, as well as wealth and occupation, so that a poor glazier could get up to the second row if he lived long enough, but would be unlikely to attain the dignity of the front row, while a rich young man had to start near the back and work his way up the church over the years.^[10]

Such social progress is illustrated in the bottom half of Table 9.2 overleaf, which shows the seats given in successive years to the twelve top men in 1701. As far back as 1673, the front row was already occupied by Richard Bristow, who was born in 1630 and was to be elected common councillor eighteen times between 1672 and 1701. For the others, progress up the church was slow but steady and usually required lengthy residence in the parish to get to the top. In fact, all twelve men except Buckingham and Keeling were already resident in the parish at

the time of the 1678 Poll Tax, twenty-three years earlier; Gough as a child living with his father, Hulbert and Leppington as apprentices, and the rest as householders paying the surtax rate of 10s. Owen Buckingham lived in St Mildred, the other Bread Street parish, during the 1670s and 1680s, and Ralph Keeling came into the parish in the early 1680s, a senior man who had already served as common councillor for Langborn Ward.^[11]

In the top half of the table, the office-holding of the same men is shown and it can be seen that it would be difficult to get to the top without serving all or nearly all the major offices and putting in time on committees such as that which audited the churchwardens' accounts. The vestry nearly always allowed men to be excused from office on payment of a fine, Keeling and Oley for instance paying £15 and £12 respectively after being appointed churchwardens. However, the others all served this important office, though some paid fines of £4 to avoid being questman and nearly everyone paid £1 or £2 to avoid the second year as constable. Indeed, hardly anyone served even the first year of this tiresome chore, paying a substitute instead of fining, and for much of the period the two constables were in fact Job Makepeace and Samuel Landon, paid substitutes of no social significance in the parish.

It would be foolish to pretend that Allhallows Bread Street was a typical London parish. It was small and wealthy and it was the only parish in which the arrangements for seating discussed above have been found.^[12] Nevertheless, Allhallows probably illustrates in a formal way what was generally true of other parishes. It is probable that most middling people went to church at least once on Sunday and many went twice. Even many of London's middle-class dissenters went to church as well as meeting, because they wanted to see and be seen by their neighbours or hear the sermon or because occasional attendance at church and the holding of posts such as churchwarden was a necessary condition both of being elected to higher offices and of being allowed by the law to hold such offices. It is unlikely that once in church people sat where they liked, a freedom which would have been contrary to the minutely observed social hierarchy of the age. Other parishes may not have had a committee which pondered these nice problems every few years, but there seems little doubt that

subtle nods and hints would have ensured that the seating reflected those factors such as age, wealth, occupation and the holding of parish office which determined one's position in Alhallows Bread Street. The parish church would thus reflect the social hierarchy of its neighbourhood, however formal or informal the particular arrangements.

It would be laborious to prove, but it certainly seems very probable that nearly every middle-class householder would have had either to fine or serve at least some of the various parish offices, such chores or expenses being virtually a precondition of social progress, a rite of passage by which you were elected constable in your early or mid-thirties and sidesman or churchwarden a few years later. Naturally, the details and the willingness to undertake chores would vary from person to person and parish to parish. The Webbs pointed out many years ago that people were most keen to avoid office in the crowded parishes where there was most to do, and this seems very likely, jobs such as churchwarden or constable being a very different matter in a parish such as St Giles in the Fields, with nearly 1000 poor people supported by the rates, than in Allhallows Bread Street, which had just a handful of poor old people and orphan children.^[13] On the other hand, social progress for middling people might well be faster in a poor parish where there was less competition, an acceleration of dignity which might enable them to get to the front row of the church in rather less time than the fifteen, twenty or twenty-five years that it took in Allhallows Bread Street.

The highest office chosen at parish or precinct level was common councillor and it can be seen from Table 9.2 that this was a dignity quite often achieved by the cocks of the parish, eight of our twelve men being elected to that office at least once and many of them several times. This may seem surprising since there is a tendency to see this 'lower house' of the City government as composed mainly of lowly people from the very bottom of the middle station or even below it. The Webbs, for instance, wrote that 'the common councillor would find his couple of hundred colleagues made up, almost entirely, of the retail shopkeepers of the narrow streets and lanes converging on the Guildhall; or of the old-fashioned master-craftsmen whose workrooms and sales counters still lingered within the

City boundaries; together with a dozen or two of the apothecaries, surgeons and petty attorneys who dwelt among them'.^[14]

This comment sounds as though it is based on West End prejudice and it was certainly not true in our period or, at least, it was not true of our sample. Altogether, forty-six men were common councillors and another three were aldermen but not common councillors, a total of forty-nine men chosen for high City office. In Table 9.3 above, the wealth of those who did and did not get chosen is compared. The figures completely deny the Webbs' assertion that common councillors were selected from retail shopkeepers, artisans and other lowly groups, people who would be extremely unlikely to accumulate the £2000 or more which was left by forty-five out of the forty-nine common councilmen and aldermen in the sample. There were, of course, exceptions to the general rule, the four 'poor' men being a carman, a grocer, a 'dealer in turnery ware' and an insolvent linen-draper who, if he had run his business properly, would certainly have been in the £5000-plus group.^[15]

It can be concluded, then, that neighbourhood and parish played an important part in the lives of those of the middle station. Not all achieved or aspired to the dignity of common councillor; several tried to avoid many lesser dignities as well. Nevertheless, it seems probable that most were happy enough to accept the fact that, as one got older and richer, one acquired added responsibilities and duties as well as the respect of one's neighbours and a seat at the front of the church. This was as it

should be in a hierarchical society, but it did mean that one had to concentrate very hard on the serious and difficult business of maintaining one's reputation. Life was played out before an audience made up not just of one's equals and superiors but also of the poor and unsuccessful who waited avidly for the fall of the great.

ii—
Livery Companies

All members of the middle station belonged by necessity to a parish or a precinct, but most also belonged to parallel organizations which could offer similar social and political opportunities. These were the livery companies, some ancient, some of comparatively recent vintage, which in theory combined many of the functions of both a trade association and a trade union, as well as providing a clubbish ambience of fraternity in which the members of a craft or trade could express their appreciation of each other. Our period, however, sees the virtual demise of the livery companies as effective controllers of the City economy. They had once controlled entry to the various trades, the numbers of apprentices, the conditions and quality of work and a host of other matters relating to the social and moral as well as the economic behaviour of their members. Many were still doing some of these things in 1700 but all of them were moving, some slowly, some fairly rapidly, towards becoming the wealthy dining clubs with important charitable functions which most of them are today.^[16]

The conservative and corporate nature of the livery companies was contrary to the individualist spirit of the age, a spirit which was reflected in the law courts, where those who challenged the companies found that they could often gain a favourable decision. As a result, many of the powers granted or taken for granted in Elizabethan times were to be lost in the next century. The most important power was the right of search, essential if companies were to control their trades and maintain their monopolies. The growth of the metropolis had long made such a right difficult to enforce in Westminster and the suburbs. By the end of the seventeenth century, doubts about the legality of searches meant that, even in the City, companies were increasingly reluctant to act for fear of prosecution for trespass.^[17]

The loss of ancient rights was compounded for most companies by serious financial problems. They had been weakened by demands made on them by both King and Parliament ever since the 1620s, but it was the Great Fire of 1666 which dealt the hammer blow. This not only destroyed their ancient halls, which had to be rebuilt at great cost, but also much of the property on which they relied for their income and the support of their charitable obligations. The property was rebuilt, but at the cost of lowering annual rents and extending leases, with the result that for most of our period the companies had diminished incomes, which made prosecution of offenders even less attractive in the face of doubts of success in the courts. It also had a serious effect on the morale of members, who looked to their companies for extravagant pageantry and bountiful dinners. The Fire also made it necessary to relax or abandon restrictions on unfreemen, in the building trades to encourage provincial workmen to come to London to rebuild the city, in the shopkeeping and craft trades to encourage people to take up the new-built property as fast as possible. Such decisions were not easily reversed and the Fire was very much a turning point in the fortunes of the companies.

There was one last problem facing the companies. Much of their logic depended on their members having in common some particular trade or occupation; the Mercers were supposed to be mercers and the Fishmongers fishmongers. However, from quite an early date, this uniformity of occupation began to be undermined as people changed their trades or as sons acquired the freedom through patrimony but did not practise their father's trade. Attempts to regularize this situation were not very successful and were seriously undermined by a legal decision of 1614 which in essence said that anyone free of any London company could practise any trade that they wished. The result, by our period, was that a livery company label was by no means a good indication of a man's occupation, especially for members of the older, larger and more prestigious companies. Some idea of the confusion can be seen in Table 9.4 overleaf, which lists the occupations of members of the sample belonging to companies with at least ten representatives. A few companies, such as the Apothecaries, Distillers and Vintners, could still be said to represent a trade but most were so

heterogeneous in their membership that little loyalty to craft or occupation can have remained.^[18]

Given all these problems, it seems amazing that the livery companies survived at all, but survive they did and most of the

London business community belonged to one, though some people opted out. Many merchants and wholesalers who required no shop premises in the City never bothered to acquire the freedom or join a livery company. Neither did an increasing number of shopkeepers in Westminster and the suburbs. Nevertheless, the number of freemen bore up quite well, declining only slowly from a peak figure of over 2000 new freemen every year in the late 1670s, when entry restrictions were temporarily relaxed, to 1250 a year in the 1740s. Relative decline was more serious, as population grew, but the decline was probably greater amongst those destined to be journeymen than in the business community itself. Prospective masters, even those in Westminster and the suburbs, continued to be apprenticed to a freeman and to become free of their companies as a matter of course, because it was the normal thing to do or because it saved trouble or the possibility of trouble.^[19]

For many people, the acquisition of the freedom was the last active interest that they took in their companies. They were indifferent to company business and felt, quite rightly in most cases, that the activities of the Court of Assistants who ruled their company had no significance for them as individuals. However, indifferent or not, many of the apathetic had no choice but to move up to the next stratum of their companies by joining the 'clothing' or livery. This was because most companies had found that the easiest way to raise much-needed cash was to increase the numbers of the livery and to charge high fines, from £10 to £30, for the privilege of joining it, threatening to prosecute those who refused to comply. Many men begged to be excused, as can be seen from the Committee Book of the Grocers' Company, the most prominent committee being that which raised the livery fines and listened to the petitions of those who tried to wriggle out of them. Some got away with it on such grounds as 'inability', 'age', 'small trade and must repair his house which will cost £100'. Most did not; not even Joseph Stone whose plea that 'he has but half a trade being concerned with his mother who has losses and troubles' had no effect on the hard-hearted committee.^[20]

Liverymen had no actual duties, though they had the right to vote in parliamentary elections and could attend certain dinners and processions, as well as being entitled to wear a

handsome livery gown. They were, however, liable to be appointed to such posts as Steward or Gentleman Usher, which could be a heavy strain on their holder's purse, since they often involved the obligation to pay for a dinner for the liverymen and it was a nice point whether the dinner or the fine exacted for refusing the office would be cheaper. As time went on a minority of liverymen would find themselves called to the ruling body of their company, the Court of Assistants. Most companies had some twenty to thirty assistants and, although they included a few keen or politically active men in their thirties and forties, the great majority were elderly men, the 'antientest' of their company.^[21]

What did these elderly members of the middle station talk about at their meetings, and what indeed was the business of the livery companies in our period? A partial answer to this question may be provided by examining the accounts and court minutes of a few companies in which our sample were well represented, concentrating on the 1690s and I 700s. A start can be made with the Society of Apothecaries, whose membership consisted almost entirely of apothecaries and whose society was the best run and most actively interested in the promotion of the trade of those whose records have been examined.^[22] The apothecaries were very much on the crest of a wave in the late seventeenth century, just about to win their long running battle with the physicians and attracting new freemen at the rate of twenty-five a year. The society had only been founded in 1617 and had none of the accumulation of property which was a feature of the older livery companies, so that most of its income came from fees for apprenticeship and freedom, fines and from the two shillings a year that its members paid as quarterage. Outgoings included interest on loans and legal expenses but were concentrated on basic housekeeping—the maintenance of the hall, salaries for beadle, clerk and bargemaster, and on 'feasts and other entertainments and refreshments', such as the Midsummer's Day and Election Day dinners. A few widows and elderly members of the society were supported by pensions but there was none of the heavy involvement in charity which is to be found in other companies.

As a new company, the Apothecaries were very conscious of their dignity, very upset when not accorded what they thought

was their proper order of precedence on great public occasions, keen to acquire all the paraphernalia of the older companies, such as a handsome hall, a barge and plenty of silverware. Such matters attracted considerable attention at Court meetings, as did the business of admitting members, electing officers and fining those who refused office, business which was done by all companies. However, what is striking about the records of the Apothecaries, when compared with other companies, is the impression that this was a real professional association, interested in promoting the business of its members and the education of its apprentices. In the early 1690s, the society was actively engaged in defending its members' interests against both the surgeons and the physicians, and was still using the powers given by its charter to enter premises and search for defective drugs and medicines. The search of 1695, for instance, resulted in five apothecaries being summoned before the Court for having bad medicines on their premises. However, these men were discharged without fine, which suggests that, even in this active society, the search was not the important part of its activities which it had been in the past.

Much more important in the minds of the Court were the six annual 'herbarizing' or botanical excursions, which were laid on in the summer months for the education of apprentices. These expeditions combined the attractions of a fraternal picnic with a genuine zeal in botanical matters. The party often set off to a riverside destination in the society barge, wandered through the fields identifying herbs for the benefit of the apprentices and then ended up with a dinner. Two other activities specific to the Apothecaries also engaged much of the time of the Court and its sub-committees. In 1672, the society had established an 'elaboratory' for making chemical medicines, a successful experiment run on a joint-stock basis for its subscribers, who received a dividend and were also able to buy stock for their shops at low prices. In the following year, the energetic society inaugurated the Physic Garden on its land at Chelsea, which by the 1690s had become an important botanical collection, 'very necessary for the honour and dignity of its members and the education of its apprentices', though its management was giving the Court so many headaches that some members were

in favour of giving it up and letting the land to a professional gardener.

The Distillers' Company was also very active in the early 1690s in promoting the trading interests of its members, for example, by lobbying parliament for or against any legislation which might affect the trade. This company was even newer than the Apothecaries, first chartered in 1638 but not enrolled by the City government until 1658. They had no hall and, although like all companies they had plenty of dinners, one feels that business rather than ceremonial was what really interested the Court. Here, the search was still an active business, the metropolis being covered by seven search parties. Defaulters were regularly summoned before the Court, where many were fined, and the company were quite prepared to take matters further if necessary. Mr Walsingham Heathfield, for instance, was summoned 'for abusing the Master and Warden Henning upon a search and giveing them very bad language'. He was fined £3 for contempt and, when he refused to pay, was sued in the Court of Common Pleas, an action which led Heathfield to submit and declare 'himself to be very sorry for his offence', as well he might be since now he had to pay £13. 10s. to cover the company's costs.^[23]

The company was also prepared to prosecute those who refused to pay livery fines or fines for avoiding such offices as steward, but it was most active in defence of its monopoly of distilling. In the early 1690s, person after person was summoned 'to show his right to the trade'. Charles Loving, summoned in April 1694, was just one of many who 'confesses he does distill fruit and molasses but hath noe right'. He was ordered to desist by midsummer or be indicted and, when he called the company's bluff, he was in fact sued in the following year. However, just a few years later, the company was beginning to have doubts about its legal position and, in 1704, a committee was set up 'to advise with Councell touching prosecuting interlopers'. Meanwhile, a profitable trade was being conducted in selling the freedom of the company to interlopers rather than sueing them, the normal price being £25.

By the reign of George I, one fears that the company was fighting a losing battle as the Gin Age encouraged the multiplication of back-street distilleries and the smuggling of French

brandy became a major English industry. In 1715, the company still showed an interest in defending the monopoly, but there are few further signs of activity in succeeding years. The Court was now showing more interest in its investments in South Sea stock, the list of pensioners supported by the company was growing and it was beginning to look more and more like any other livery company, with few interests outside its property, its dinners and its charities. Early in 1723, there was a debate in the Court on 'whether the searches be continued for the future' and, although this was not resolved immediately, there do not seem to have been any more searches after that date. In the following year, the changing nature of the company is nicely symbolized by the Court's decision to invest £4000, the accumulated balance of many years of livery fines and selling the freedom, 'in the purchase of freehold lands or houses in the City of London'. The company still acted as a lobby for the spirits trade, but had abandoned most of the other activities and powers for which it had fought when it first acquired its charter in the 1630s.

A rather similar story can be told of the Vintners' Company, which as can be seen from Table 9.4 (p. 252) was largely composed of tavern-keepers. The company was of medieval foundation and its members had many important privileges, including that of selling wine without licence in the City and liberties.^[24] Past members had left property which the company administered as trustee, and rents comprised 56 per cent of the company's income in the early 1690s. However, nearly all this rental income was specifically tied to charitable purposes and the Vintners shared the problems of all the ancient property-owning companies of honouring their charitable commitments in the difficult half-century following the Fire. Livery fines, very high at £31 each, were the backbone of the company's non-property income, while the tavern-keepers seem to have been better payers of quarterage than the members of most companies.

The company still carried out searches in the early years of the reign of Queen Anne. In May 1704, for instance, some wine found in the cellar of William Lewellin of Pudding Lane was 'tasted and tryed by severall members and found to be defective and not fit for the body of man to be drunk'. However, the

Vintners, like the Distillers, were doubtful about the legality of their searches and sought legal opinion in 1704 and again in the winter of 1706 on the subject. It is not known what advice was given by 'eminent Councell', but matters seem to have come to a head in 1708 when the Master was faced with a mutiny, the majority of those summoned for the search failing to turn up. Eventually, most of the mutineers appeared before the Court to purge their contempt at a cost of 3s.4d. a head in the poor box (or 5s. for late-comers) but, from this date onwards, searches were few and far between and seem to have been give up altogether by the reign of George 1. The company continued to lobby on behalf of its members but its main business was property management, charity and more than usually good dinners.

The last two companies which will be considered had reached this position much earlier. These were the Grocers and the Fishmongers, second and fourth in the order of precedence of the 'Twelve Great Livery Companies', both companies having a heterogeneous membership, as was seen in Table 9.4. In the early 1690s, one can still find a faint flicker of the control of the London fish trade which the Fishmongers had acquired in the middle ages.^[25] The first Monday in Lent was traditionally the 'view day for this Company's land and the search for corrupt fish' and this was still being carried out, some traders being fined for 'exposing to sale unseasonable salmon', but cases were rare and the main attraction of the search day was the 'moderate dinner' laid on by the renter warden. The Court is also found occasionally establishing a committee of 'all the Assistants being traders in fish and others as they shall thinke fitt' to hear the grievances of 'severall traders in fish of this company', but this was a very pale reflection of the famous fishmongers' hallmoot which sat once a week to settle disputes in the fourteenth century.

References to fish are in fact hard to find in the indexes of the court minutes and are totally overwhelmed by the company's main business, which was managing its extensive property and administering several important charities and trusts, such as the free grammar school at Holt in Norfolk and St Peter's Hospital at Newington in Surrey, which housed forty-two poor men and women free of the company, petitions for places

forming a recurrent theme in the minutes. Every year, just before Christmas, a party of assistants went down to St Peter's to distribute doles to the almsfolk, first admonishing them 'to live in the feare of God and to avoid drunkennesse and to be helpefull one to another'.

Managing property and carrying out the testamentary wishes of former Fishmongers meant that the wardens, clerk and beadles were busy men, collecting rents (often in arrears), repairing property and paying out over a hundred separate legacies and doles to the poor of this or that parish, to hospitals and to particular individuals, many of these doles requiring a selection process to decide which particular worthy, poor and ancient man or woman should be the lucky recipient. Some idea of the problem can be seen from a typical entry in the renter warden's accounts: 'paid for coles and faggotts distributed to poore and needy fishmongers in St Michael Crooked Lane and elsewhere according to Mr Pendlebury's last will, 20s.' Collectively, the charities administered by the older livery companies must have handed out amounts of money, coal and bread which compared in total with the parallel system of poor relief provided by parishes, but it was all scattered around in bits and pieces and must have been a tiresome burden to administer.

There was still a faint odour of fish in the deliberations of the Fishmongers, but one would never know that the Grocers had any connection with sugar and spice if the company had not borne that name, despite the insistence of the historian of the company that 'the excellence and purity of foodstuffs' was still one of its primary concerns in the 1690s.^[26] This statement is based on the revised bye-laws of 1690, which still provided for an inspection of grocers' shops 'once or oftner in every year . . . to search view and essay all raisins, currants, prunes, figs, almonds, sugar, pepper etc.' and included a scale of fines for 'rotten, false or counterfeit wares'. However, it is clear from the court minutes and accounts that these searches were not carried out and there is virtually no reference to business relating to the grocery trade in the excellent index to the minutes.

What interested the Grocers was their appalling financial position, they probably being the worst hit of the big companies by accumulated indebtedness before the Fire and the effects of

the Fire itself. This did not stop them splashing out on two pageants for the Grocer Sir John Fleete's 'Triumph' as Lord Mayor in 1692, the money on this occasion as on others being raised by appointing a large number of new liverymen. A couple of years later, the company's financial problems were solved by Sir John Houblon, the first governor of the Bank of England and himself a Grocer, who rented Grocers' Hall for the use of the Bank in return for a fine of £5000 and a loan of the same amount. Otherwise, the Grocers' records show that their activities were very similar to those of the Fishmongers: dinners and ceremony, property management and the administration of charities and gifts, including Oundle and other schools, almshouses, scholarships and exhibitions at Oxford and Cambridge and the normal profusion of doles in kind and money.

The Grocers were already in the 1690s what all the other companies would be by the end of our period, 'a Nursery of Charity and Seminary of good Citizens', as their clerk put it in 1689.^[27] Most of their income was spent on charity, though some was used 'for defraying the charge of sober anniversary festivals in moderate entertainment of the members, to maintain and increase mutual friendship and Christian conversation in the fraternity as well in ease as for encouragement of the members'. George Ravenhill's words nicely sum up the meaning of the livery companies to those of their members who actively supported and enjoyed what they did. One suspects that by our period this would only have been a minority of those of the middle station, though occasional attendance at such fraternal festivities remained an important part of civic life.

iii—
Tory and Whig

What one reads in court or vestry minutes was no doubt only the bare bones of what had been discussed by the worthies of parish or livery company, who would hardly have come together so many times a year for such dry business alone. One subject which would almost certainly have been aired was politics, for this was an intensely political age and nowhere more so than in what had once been described as 'the proud, unthankful, schismatical, rebellious, bloody City of London'.^[28]

Political activity took many forms, but the one most likely to

pay dividends was lobbying. The practice of addressing grievances in person or in writing to parliament, the privy council or the City government was an ancient one but it reached new levels of intensity in our period, especially from the 1690s onwards. Annual sessions of parliament, and sessions long enough to ensure that bills had a fair chance of being enacted, meant that much more legislation relating to economic affairs could now get into the statute book. The process of initiating and supporting such legislation, or of opposing it, was one that might engage any Londoner, rich or poor, at some time in his life. This might involve nothing more than waiting, cap in hand, on one of the members of parliament for the City or it might involve a fully orchestrated campaign with signatures collected for petitions, a printed statement of grievances and perhaps a well-organized procession of petitioners. Such campaigns were normally conducted in a polite enough way, with emphasis on the respectability and good standing of the petitioners. Sometimes, they were far from polite, frustration leading to violence, as in the weavers' riots of 1675 or the calico riots of 1719–21 in which women wearing cotton had the clothes ripped off their backs by embittered silk-weavers.^[29]

The weavers of Spitalfields and the East End had a notorious reputation for crowd violence and they were to make a threatening appearance on a number of occasions in our period, either in pursuit of an industrial grievance or as a force manipulated by politicians for their own ends, such as the crowd of weavers with whom the Whigs flooded Guildhall during the General Election of 1710, who 'caused much fighting and quarrelling in the street'.^[30] However, weavers had no monopoly of political or industrial violence and the threat of the crowd was a major factor in London political life.

No one could forget the pressure that had been imposed by a well-articulated London crowd on the eve of the Civil War, pressure which took the form of 'monster' petitions or the physical presence of hundreds or thousands shouting slogans or waiting menacingly outside parliament to ensure that the members voted correctly. The London crowd was never again to play quite such an important political role but the fear that it might was always a factor in the political calculus, as the respectable were to be reminded on several other occasions

during the Civil War and its aftermath—in the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–81, during the Revolution of 1688, in the Sacheverell riots of 1710 and again in the anti-Hanoverian riots of 1715 and 1716. Historians love riots and the social make-up of those arrested or indicted on these occasions has been carefully analysed. In nearly all cases, one finds that the crowd was not composed of the totally dispossessed, but was drawn mainly from artisans and from the lowest section of the middle station, who used these occasions not as an opportunity for looting and mayhem but as a means of demonstrating on some specific political or religious issue. Sometimes the crowd would generate its own leaders, but often it was orchestrated by people of higher status, most obviously in the Exclusion Crisis and in the Sacheverell riots of 1710.^[31]

Political activity by large numbers did not necessarily involve riot. London had a long tradition of pageantry and processions, a form of street theatre which might be used for patriotic purposes or to reinforce the social hierarchy but which was often used as political propaganda, in much the same way as the marching days of modern Ulster. Processions were meticulously organized and could be stirring spectacles, but they were often full of menace and none more so than the savage popeburning processions of 1673–80. Normally held on Guy Fawkes night and on the anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth on 17 November, these processions became more and more elaborate and often involved several hundreds of people, a host of whistlers, bellmen and torch-bearers escorting their fellows dressed as Catholic priests, Jesuits, cardinals and, of course, 'a most costly Pope, carried by four persons in divers habits, and the effigies of two devils whispering in his ears, his belly filled full of live cats who squawled most hideously as soon as they felt the fire'. The size and importance of such processions ebbed and flowed with the intensity of political activity, but they were to reach a new crescendo in the last years of the reign of Queen Anne and the period of the Hanoverian succession, when popeburnings, fireworks, ox-roastings and free beer laid on by the Whigs were matched by the rival displays of the Tory Jacobites, who celebrated such occasions as the anniversary of the martyrdom of Charles I or the Pretender's birthday with equal panache.^[32]

Riots and processions were the noisy and sometimes exciting manifestations of street politics but, for most people most of the time, politics was a quieter business, an intermittent process of complaining about this and that, and particularly about the government. Seditious words spoken by drunks in taverns form a recurring theme in the revelations of the numerous spies employed by the secretaries of state, but the democracy and sobriety of the coffee-house was often seen as a greater danger. 'These sober clubs produce nothing but scandalous and censorious discourses and at these nobody is spared,' wrote the City Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Player.^[33]

The grumbling of political discussion reached its peak, then as now, at the times of elections, democratic processes which involved virtually all the middle station and a surprising number of lesser people in this period over a hundred years before the first Reform Act. Democracy at the local level varied from parish to parish, depending on such matters as whether the vestry was open or closed, but in many parts of London all rate-paying householders had the right to vote in local government elections. Most of these were not very exciting or well attended, but a particularly fraught political situation could induce a strongly contested election for such offices as common councilman, while for many people a local election was a matter of bread and butter on whose result depended local power, office and its perquisites and lucrative contracts which could be distributed to the friends of the elected man.

Local elections happened every year, but most middling people were also able to vote from time to time in parliamentary by-elections and in general elections, the latter occurring on an unprecedented number of occasions during the middle years of our period. There were three general elections during the exciting years of the Exclusion Crisis and then a lull during the period of absolutist backlash, which was ended by the Revolution of 1688. Then came a period of electoral excitement such as the English public had never experienced before, the Triennial Act of 1694 being followed by ten general elections in twenty years, a record never since beaten. Not only were there more elections, but more seats were contested during this period than at any other time before the nineteenth century, and each

contest was magnified and made more exciting by the increasingly partisan coverage provided by the newspapers. If many people had been able to ignore politics in the past, few were able to forget that they lived in an intensely partisan and divided city by the end of the reign of Queen Anne, when the two general elections of 1710 and 1713 produced the highest polls of the period, some 92 per cent of the liverymen of London voting in the 1713 election.^[34]

Londoners voted for only ten members of parliament, four for the City and two each for Westminster, Southwark and the county of Middlesex. This was a minute proportion of the House of Commons relative to the population of the metropolis but the London members, especially those for the City, played a much more important role than is suggested by their numbers, for example, as key committee members on legislation relating to economic affairs. The results of London elections were eagerly awaited because the electorate was large enough to reflect public opinion rather than just the largesse handed out by the candidates. Londoners were notorious for their independence and the large floating vote reflected and indeed led the national trend in all but one of the seven general elections between 1701 and 1715. 'The countrys always take the rule from hence', observed Lord Halifax of London in 1705, 'and the true pulse of a nation is always felt at the heart.'^[35]

What sort of politics was this heart interested in? This is not the place to attempt to write a political history of London, but it is possible to observe a continuity in the political structure of the metropolis which reflected the social structure and survived right through from the hectic days of the early 1640s to the comparatively quiet years of 'stability' at the end of our period and indeed much later in the eighteenth century.^[36] In this scheme, one can identify five levels of political activity. The first, and usually the most active, comprised the gentry and aristocracy, who played out on a London stage the struggles of national politics, a continuing and often intense political debate which took place in their West End houses, in taverns, coffee-houses and clubs, in the street and in the theatre and, of course, in the forum of parliament itself. The nature of this debate naturally varied with time, but it was usually as much about

jobs and power as about ideology, and it often reflected longstanding divisions between the great families of the counties far more than any metropolitan or even national political issues.

The fact that the seat of government and parliament was in the metropolis meant that such people, the real political nation, were always aware that what they said or did was observed and discussed, welcomed or execrated by their neighbours, the citizens and people of London. This audience at the doors of Westminster and the West End necessarily had its effect on national politics as politicians of all hues courted the electorate and placated or enflamed the London crowd, while governments kept close contacts with their natural allies in the City élite. It was the latter, the very rich, who formed the second stratum in metropolitan politics. This élite, which came to be known as the monied interest, was made up of wealthy merchants, directors of the trading companies, bankers and other financiers. Such people were usually able to control the Court of Aldermen, the effective rulers of the City, and they benefited handsomely from their close links with successive governments. These provided them with potentially lucrative positions as customs farmers or in the revenue service, with beneficial access to the subscription lists for public loans and with commercial contracts which, especially in wartime, could quickly enhance a man's fortune as supplier of victuals, naval stores or clothing or as the organizer of remittances for the support of troops abroad. Such men were natural supporters of any government in power, mainly for practical reasons, and were often quick to trim their ideology to suit the times.

Below this élite came the majority of the people considered in this book, the wealthy and fairly wealthy traders, shopkeepers and manufacturers. Such people were usually conservative supporters of the status quo, active to lobby government but not normally hostile to government, whom they expected to protect them and forward their interests. However, they were not blind supporters of the establishment and it was the antagonism of this group which ensured that London would be a parliamentary city in the Civil War, though it was also the same people who as the 'Presbyterians' eventually ensured that the revolution of the 1640s would not go too far, closing ranks

to resist the radicals and welcoming the return of monarchical government in 1660.

These radicals, the 'Independents' of the 1640s, were drawn from the largest stratum of the London political world, small shopkeepers, petty industrialists, artisans and journeymen, who form a continuum in the political life of the metropolis. We are told that the 'agitation of small London master craftsmen against their growing subjection to capitalist middlemen is one of the most prominent themes of London history under the early Stuarts', but this theme is a continuous one which runs right through our period and beyond.^[37] Hostile to or critical of the wealthy and almost always against the government, members of this section of the population crop up time after time under various names in the political history of London. Whenever there is a riot, one can be sure that it will be people from this group who will be prominent. However, their activities went beyond mere rioting and their politics ranged from the radical and populist to the frankly revolutionary and republican.

They were the Independents and Levellers who tried to convert an argument between gentlemen into a truly radical revolution in the 1640s and 1650s. They were the populist Whigs of the 1670s and 1680s who revelled in the great popeburning processions. By the reign of Queen Anne, after a remarkable political sea-change,^[38] they have turned into populist and radical Tories but they are still the same people, still hostile to the rich, still against the government. They are still there in the 1720s and 1730s, still mouthing the same levelling and radical maxims which they had first learned in the 1640s, and they are still there in the 1760s and the 1790s. They never enjoyed power except for a few years in the middle of the seventeenth century, but their numbers were sufficient in the outer wards of the City to ensure that the Court of Common Council, the lower house of the City government, was normally opposed politically to the Court of Aldermen and that the history of City politics would be an intermittent battle between those wanting to enlarge the populist element in local government and those who wanted to restrain it, the latter group normally but not always winning the day.

There was finally a much larger group of the dispossessed—

women, children, servants and the poor—who were considered beneath political consideration even by the Levellers. If one wanted to insult one's opponents, one described them as members of this despised breed, as the Whig newspapers did in 1715 when they depicted the Tory rioters as 'Black Guard Boys, Clean Your Shoes Your Honour, Parish Boys, Wheelbarrowmen, Butchers, Porters, Basket-women, Ballad singers, Bawds, Whores and Thieves'. But, as has been said, most rioters were not in fact drawn from such lowly people but from the next group up in London's political hierarchy, the 'petty tradesmen and craftsmen of the industrial suburbs'.^[39]

London's politics can thus be depicted as class politics, with rich, middling and comparatively poor people distinguished from each other and each striving to protect or promote their interests. Needless to say, politics has never really been as simple as that; nor was it in our period, when political opportunism, ideology and particularly religion combined to confuse the politics of wealth and so create the 'fractured society' which has been analysed in a recent book.^[40] In particular, a man who was a dissenter or was sympathetic to dissenters would nearly always be a Whig, the party which favoured toleration and which after the Toleration Act of 1689 was normally prepared to defend it, while a man who was an ardent Anglican would nearly always be a Tory. Dissenters could be found in all levels of London society, from very rich Presbyterian aldermen to poor Baptist craftsmen, and so religious lines cut right across the politics of wealth and status.^[41]

How much politics actually affected the lives of middling people is difficult to say. They certainly voted Whig or Tory, depending on their wealth, their religion or their inclination, and it seems certain that political debate and the reading of the mass of ephemeral political literature must have absorbed quite a lot of their time. Indeed, according to Defoe, all this politics could have serious effects on the efficient running of a business. 'Never was the gazette so full of the advertisements of commissions of bankruptcy as since our shop-keepers are so much engaged in parties, form'd into clubs to hear news and read journals and politicks.' However, one does not necessarily have to believe Defoe. There is no doubt that the men, and indeed

the women, of the middle station thought that politics was interesting and important and that it could sometimes be profitable, but it seems unlikely that even the excitement of the 1710 general election would have so turned their heads that they forgot that 'the main affair of life' was getting money.^[42]

It can be seen that an active civic life was open to and indeed to a certain extent mandatory for the middle station. They needed to be good neighbours, both for friendship and for the sake of business, reputation and the safety of their property. They had an important role to play in local government and might be expected to play some part in the running of their livery company. They were likely to be involved in a considerable amount of political activity and discussion in their lives and, if they lived through hectic periods such as the 1640s, the late 1670s or the first half of the 1710s, they might find that the contemporary obsession with politics threatened to interfere with business. There were also many other civic or corporate activities in which they might get involved, such as active membership of a society for the reformation of manners, the management of a charity school or a directorship of a trading company. All this required time and attention, but it was unlikely to have played such a regular part in their lives as the subject of the next chapter, the spending of their money.