ABSTRACT
By the second half of the sixteenth century, London comes out of the shadows. Which is not to say that we know nothing about medieval London. Plenty of buildings survive - Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and Eltham Palace, for example; the City has retained its medieval street plan almost undisturbed until our own generation;1 and we catch old, odd, disarming glimpses of it in drawings like the spire of Old St Paul's in a Matthew Paris manuscript,2 or in a grand illumination to Charles d'Orleans' poems,3 which show him both as a prisoner in the Tower and as a free man riding away from it, or even in graffiti like the scratched outline of - once again - St Paul's on the tower wall inside the parish church at Ashwell in Hertfordshire. And of course, as far as archives and civic manuscripts are concerned, we have a collection as rich as, if not richer than anywhere in Europe. Work such as that undertaken by Derek Keene and Vanessa Harding on the Hustings rolls has made it possible to trace out the frontages all along Cheapside from the thirteenth century onwards. But in the 1540s it is as if the sun comes out, the mist rolls back, and we can actually see Dunbar's 'flower of cities'. For this we have to thank three pieces of evidence - a panorama, a group of maps, and a descriptive survey of the City of London. Let us deal with them in chronological order.
