ABSTRACT
On the high road from Cambridge to London in 1588, the traveller's pulse began to race somewhere around Shoreditch. It was there, still ·a mile north of the city gates, that he hit the outer rind of London's notorious 'noysom and disorderly' suburbs. He passed St Leonard's church-hearing perhaps how the vicar, one Hanmer, was melting down the brasses to coin base silver1 - and then the smithy at the crossroads. Away to his right, above a huddle of houses, he could see the pennants and thatched roofs of the Theatre and Curtain play-houses, and beyond them the three windmills on Finsbury Fields. The road became a teeming street. Where old men could remember fields and spacious priories - Holywell and St Mary Spital - there was now 'continual! building of small and base tenements', a tangle of 'poor cottages' and 'alleys backeward', of 'stables, ins, alehowses, tavernes, garden houses converted into dwellings, ordinaries, dicyng howses, bowling alleyes and brothel houses'. 2 Amidst this ragged development could be glimpsed leafy, secretive gardens where the well-to-do had their 'summer houses for pleasure', and then the green marshy stretch of Moorfields, haunt of washerwomen, prostitutes, beggars ('Zoons, methinks I see myself in Moorfields, upon a wooden leg, begging threepence'3), animals grazing, archers at practice, fullers bringing cloth to the tenteryards, and anyone whom business or pleasure brought to these 'liberties' beyond the civic pale. Crossing the bars into Bishopsgate Street Without, hearing the sound of gunfire from the Artillery Yard, the traveller passed on by the gates of St Mary Bethlehem, the 'hospitall for distracted people' better known as Bedlam, and at last found himself before Bishopsgate, there to alight for lodging at the Dolphin, 'a common lone for receipt of travellers', or at the classier White Hart opposite, or to press on into the great city itself.
