ABSTRACT
The people who are the subject of our book grew up in the busy cosmopolitan district that lies on the eastern borders of the City of London, in the square mile or so that stretches from Spitalfields Market in the north, down to the Tower of London in the south. Part of the area falls within Portsoken Ward, one of the ancient City wards that came into existence in the tenth century when King Edgar (959-975) granted thirteen knights a rough patch of land between Aldgate and the river that had been left ‘desolate and forsaken by its inhabitants’. The land continued to be held by their descendants until 1115 when ‘all the lands and the soke1 called the English Knighten Guild’ were handed over to the Priory of Holy Trinity, Aldgate. The Prior acted as alderman for the ward until 1531, when the Priory was surrendered to Henry VIII, who donated it to Sir Thomas Audley who demolished it. Thereafter the people of Portsoken Ward were represented by a ‘temporal man elected by the citizens’. On the northern edge of Portsoken Ward lies Spitalfields, where, in medieval times, the Hospital of St Mary’s Spital provided ‘one hundred and eighty beds, well furnished for the receipt of the poor’,2 until it too was surrendered to Henry VIII and demolished. Adjoining the hospital lay the tiny ‘liberty’ of Norton Folgate (now remembered in Folgate Street). ‘Liberties’ were autonomous areas held by both lay and religious orders, caring for their own poor and dealing with crime. Since they were outside the jurisdiction of the Guildhall they acquired a reputation for lawlessness, especially after the Dissolution when they fell into various hands, and were feared as breeding grounds for blackguards and the plague.3
