ABSTRACT
We will domineer over the vulgar like so many St Georges over the poor dragons.1
In his calendar of the many customs, ceremonies and functions to be observed by the Lord Mayor of London during his year of governance, the city’s Remembrancer Thomas Norton explains that although his list is as complete as he could make it, ‘Yowe must not looke to finde a large discription howe and in whate forme every thinge ys to be donne that ys heare mentioned; for so showlde the booke have bene to large for yowr use’. Besides, ‘the moste thinges for the manner are from time to time, [...] which yt were not possible for me to sett downe aforehande’.2 The first ‘thing’ every mayor was to remember - and he was not likely to forget this - was the sumptuous procession that accompanied him home from his ceremonious oathswearing trip to Whitehall. During the second half of the sixteenth century this show at a new mayor’s inauguration became ever more elaborate, primarily because the traditional midsummer marches had been abolished and its pageantry was now displayed on Lord Mayor’s Day.3 With elaboration came novelty and variety, so it would indeed have been impossible ‘to sett downe aforehande’ in any detail what was to happen. What was possible, even desirable, was to set it down afterwards: in most years of King James’s reign, unless the inaugural show had to be cancelled due to an outbreak of plague, the new mayor’s company had the show’s script printed and published, usually in an edition of some two or three hundred copies. Although this did not exactly make these scripts popular reading
1 Woodstock, ed. Arthur P. Rossiter (London, 1946), 3.1.168-9. 2 Thomas Norton, Instructions to the Lord Mayor of London, 1574-5: Whereby He is to Govern Himself and the City, in Illustrations of Old English Literature, ed. John Payne Collier (London, 1866), 1-17, 15. 3 On this transfer see Anne K. Lancashire, ‘Continuing Civic Ceremonies of 1530s London’, Civic Ritual and Drama, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Hiisken (Amsterdam, 1997), 81-105.
