A view of London by Ferdinand van Kessel (1648–1696), one panel in a series of views of European cities; the painting was itself just one of four depicting the Continents. All the cities are a hazy cityscape seen from the countryside through a crowd of various kinds of fowl, and to Macaulay’s seventeenth-century country squire, yearning for his partridges, London must indeed have felt as remote and as alien as van Kessel’s stylised views of Brussels, Stockholm or Venice.
Part 1 of 2
WHEN the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar.* His dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he gazed at the shops, stumbled into the gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the waterspouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the operations of swindlers and barterers. Bullies jostled him into the kennel.* Hackney coachmen splashed him from head to foot. Thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his horseman’s coat, while he stood entranced by the splendour of the Lord Mayor’s show. Moneydroppers,* sore from the cart’s tail,* introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him the most honest friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen. Painted women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane* and Whetstone Park,* passed themselves on him for countesses and maids of honour.
A Lascar was a name for a sailor from India or South East Asia. The word is Urdu in origin, via Portuguese.
Kennel in this sense is an alteration of ‘cannel,’ a broad gutter or open sewer.
A Moneydropper would pretend to find a coin just in front of his mark, so that he could scrape his acquaintance and then lead him into some scam or a mugging.
That is, smarting from a whipping. Miscreants would be tied to the rear of a cart and whipped as the cart trundled forward.
Lewkner Lane (now Macklin Street) near Drury Lane was famous as a place of brothels and drinking dens, and a convenient place to fence stolen goods. The notorious burglar and jail-breaker Jack Sheppard (1702-1724), whose autobiography was apparently ghost-written by Daniel Defoe and whose exploits inspired Macheath in John Gay’s ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ (1728), had his hideout there.
Whetstone Park is a small street in Holborn. Samuel Pepys wrote of it that his wife’s former maid-companion Deborah Willets (1650-1678) had moved there, “which do trouble me mightily that the poor girle should be in a desperate condition forced to go thereabouts.” See Diary, November 16th 1668.
Précis
Baron Macaulay described in colourful terms the visit of a rural gentleman to London in the days of Charles II. It was a catalogue of mishaps, as our squire, betrayed by dress, accent and gait, stumbled about the crowded and dirty streets, falling victim to pick-pockets, bullies, confidence tricksters and working girls, all taking advantage of his provincial naïvety. (60 / 60 words)
Part Two
The interior of a London Coffee House (1668). Ned Ward described visiting one establishment in 1703: “In we went, where a parcel of Muddling Muck-Worms [i.e. low life] were as busie as so many Rats in an old Cheese-Loft; some Going, some Coming, some Scribbling, some Talking, some Drinking, some Smoaking, others Jangling; and the whole Room stinking of Tobacco, like a Dutch-Scoot [i.e. a schuyt, a flat-bottomed sailboat], or a Boatswains-Cabbin.” See ‘The London Spy Compleat’ (1703). It was brave indeed of our country squire to risk the ribaldry of such a place.
IF he asked his way to Saint James’s, his informants sent him to Mile End.* If he went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be a fit purchaser of everything that nobody else would buy, of second-hand embroidery, copper rings, and watches that would not go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee house, he became a mark for the insolent derision of fops* and the grave waggery of Templars.*
Enraged and mortified, he soon returned to his mansion, and there, in the homage of his tenants and the conversation of his boon companions,* found consolation for the vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. There he was once more a great man, and saw nothing above himself except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near the Judge,* or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the Lord Lieutenant.*
Thus sending him out of his way by a little over four miles, from St James’s near the Houses of Parliament to Mile End in the west, where Queen Mary University of London now stands.
A fop is a now dated term for a rather silly man with affectedly fine manners and dress. Sir Percy Blakeney, in Baroness Orczy’s ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’, took foppery as his cover. “In repose one might have admired so fine a specimen of English manhood, until the foppish ways, the affected movements, the perpetual inane laugh, brought one’s admiration of Sir Percy Blakeney to an abrupt close.”
‘Templars’ here means elite barristers occupying chambers in The Temple, an area of London named after an old church that once belonged to the Knights Templar.
One’s boon companions are one’s especial friends. ‘Boon’ as an adjective means favourable or convivial, and comes from French ‘bon’ (good). (The noun ‘a boon’, a timely benefit, comes from Old Norse ‘bon’, a prayer or request.)
The Courts of Assize, or Assizes, were assembled periodically in major towns to hear serious cases referred to them by the Quarter Sessions. Senior judges would travel from town to town to try the cases. The system was abolished in 1972, and replaced by a single permanent Crown Court.
The muster of the militia was a gathering of local defence forces in the days prior to the formation of a standing army and the establishment of police forces. The Lord-Lieutenant remains the British monarch’s personal representative in each county of the United Kingdom, though since 1921 he has no longer held the right to call on able-bodied men to form a militia.
Précis
Our squire’s discomfort grew wherever he went. Ordinary Londoners deliberately misdirected him; and having taken refuge in fashionable watering-holes, he had to endure the city’s elite mocking his rustic ways. He was altogether relieved to return home, where he was respected as a man of standing and fashion, eclipsed only occasionally by visiting judges or the Lord Lieutenant. (58 / 60 words)
