By: Albert Vogt III
Prepare for death, if here at night you roam,
And sign your will before you sup from home.
Some fiery fop, with new commission vain,
Who sleeps on brambles till he kills his man;
Some frolic drunkard, reeling from a feast,
Provokes a broil, and stabs you for a jest.
Yet even these heroes, mischievously gay,
Lords of the street, and terrors of the way;
Flushed as they are with folly, youth, and wine,
Their prudent insults to the poor confine;
Afar they mark the flambeau’s bright approach,
And shun the shining train, and golden coach;
In vain, these dangers past, your doors you close,
And hope the balmy blessings of repose: Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair,
The midnight murderer burst the faithless bar;
Invades the sacred hour of silent rest,
And leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast.[i]
- Samuel Johnson, from London: A Poem
Fleet Street begins where it connects with Ludgate Hill outside the city walls at a malodorous ditch generously called Fleet River. Along with the Strand, Fleet Street outlines the main thoroughfare linking London proper inside the city walls with the seat of government at Westminster.[ii] From Roman times up through the Medieval Ages to 1550, both London and later Westminster grew in significance for the whole of England, the former as a source of money and the latter as the nexus of political power. Concurrently the two became increasingly important to one another, especially for English kings at Westminster who relied on the favor and wealth that London generated as a seedbed for political power. The more prudent monarchs used London to their advantage by giving the city the freedom to reap profits from trade, and in turn London flourished. With London’s growth came the stench and a general trend, in stages over the centuries, of movement westward through Ludgate. To escape the smells concomitant with demographic overcrowding inside the city walls, Londoners progressed down Fleet Street and the Strand and towards Westminster, the site of the Royal Courts.[iii] Fleet Street and the Strand developed as neutral ground between Westminster and London, first settled by clergymen and later, after the Reformation, by the press and legal London who found themselves situated between the two poles of London life. Fleet Street was in the middle of London life.[iv]
Because of Fleet Street’s strategic location near the pillars of the City, the Church (symbolized by nearby St. Paul’s Cathedral), and the State in Westminster, it evolved as a logical place for people to congregate in order to disseminate information. Whether before the Reformation when the Catholic Church controlled the area or after, Fleet Street remained a logical place to converge between these centers of London life. As a result, when secular presses emerged, people came to recognize Fleet Street as a place to obtain the news of the day.[v] One of the main reasons Fleet Street earned its reputation as a place to go to obtain the news was its proximity to St. Paul’s Cathedral. The cathedral edifice formed the eastern terminus of Fleet Street and served as an early center for book sellers in the sixteenth century. Publishers came to St. Paul’s because of the Stationers’ Company, established by Royal Ordinance of Queen Elizabeth I in 1559, operated out of St. Paul’s churchyard inside the walls of London. The company sold many of its books in the churchyard. The Stationers’ Company functioned as a guild and earned the license to publish all books in London through the ordinance which organized the company. But because of the Stationers’ Company’s guild status, their authority extended only as far as the walls of London. Fleet Street began just outside the walls, after Ludgate Hill crossed over the Fleet Bridge and River. As such, and due to its quasi-unattached status as neutral ground between the two official towns of London and Westminster, information flowed through here along with the traffic. Precisely because of its rising status as a nexus of information, in 1500 Wynkyn de Worde opened the first press independent of Guild control here. Most printing businesses, though, did not earn official sanction for over a century.[vi] Fleet Street also acquired a reputation as a place for those seeking to escape the reach of the law not only for printers, but also for more hardened criminals.[vii]
Scattered amongst wayward printers there dwelled an unruly set of denizens in the buildings lining and surrounding Fleet Street, centered on the Whitefriars area. Ironically, one of the institutions established to train people to prosecute unruly behavior was situated next to Whitefriars. It was located on ground originally claimed by the Knights Templar in the thirteenth century and became known as the Temple and the Inns of Court. Younger sons of the gentry and nobility came here to learn how to practice law and it formed the western boundary of Fleet Street where it met up with the Strand.[viii] At the other end of Fleet Street, around the corner to the north where Fleet Street joined Ludgate Hill at Fleet Bridge and just inside the city walls on Newgate, lay the Old Bailey. There the lawyers trained at the Temple and Inns of Court practiced their trade during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.[ix] Across the walls from the Old Bailey to the west and southwest, two destinations for the criminals judged in the courtroom stood on either side of Fleet Street and the Fleet River. These included Fleet Prison on the north side of the street and east of the river, and Bridewell to the south of the street and west of the river.[x] In between these structures and the Temple resided Whitefriars, known by the characters who haunted it as Alsatia.[xi] The Temple and Inns of Court, the Old Bailey, Fleet Prison and Bridewell, the independent printers, and Alsatia taken together constituted a liminal space that encompassed the entire life of many criminals at the time. When scholars study Fleet Street in the early modern period, the history of the press occupies much of their attention rather than its less respectable aspects. But between 1550 and 1750 anyone dwelling in the environs of Fleet Street, even printers at times, could find themselves in disrepute, either as an accused on the docket or prosecuting at the bar.
Primary sources abound describing the people and institutions that inhabited the confines of Fleet Street, both criminal and legal. Some, such as two royal ordinances from 1643 and 1649 which sought to curtail the activities of printers on Fleet Street, demonstrated the various ways in which the press ran afoul of the law. Additionally, the proceedings of the Old Bailey contain several court cases where printers came before the judge’s bench on charges such as seditious libel. The documents left behind by the Old Bailey describe a multitude of crimes perpetrated by the occupants of Fleet Street or crimes committed in the area, including murder, theft, highway robbery, bigamy, freedom or Fleet marriages (marriages performed without a license), “assault with sodomitical intent,” and other forms of cozenage too great to enumerate at once. As to the economic motivations for such crime, sources like the Middlesex Session Rolls¾particularly of 1646 and 1656¾and the lists from the Four Shillings in the Pound Aid from 1693/1694 offer a glimpse into the limited finances of many of those who lived in the area. These documents, along with firsthand accounts like those gleaned from the diaries of Samuel Pepys and James Boswell provide contemporaneous views of the events and buildings that shaped Fleet Street. Finally, A New History of London: Including Westminster and Southwark from 1773 contains a large section on Fleet Street’s ward¾Farrington Ward Without¾and renders a possible history of many of the buildings under discussion here and the people who frequented them.
In addition, collections of secondary sources exist for both the press of Fleet Street and the legal and criminal worlds that co-mingled along this important thoroughfare. Despite the fact that interconnectedness of the press and crime between 1550 and 1750, early historiographical works began the trend of separating the histories of the press and crime. Volumes like W. G. Bell’s Fleet Street in Seven Centuries; Being a History of the Growth of London Beyond the Walls in the Western Liberty, and of Fleet Street to Our Time from 1912¾which pointedly opens with the quote, “Fleet Street is all newspapers!”¾and E. Beresford Chancellor’s The Annals Fleet Street: Its Traditions & Associations also from 1912, showcase the less sordid, more respectable sides of Fleet Street like the press and the Temple. On the other hand, Luke Owen Pike’s 1876 A History of Crime in England delved into that seedier side with only passing references to those other parts of Fleet Street. In modern times, in regards to the press, the best narratives include Ray Boston’s The Essential Fleet Street: Its History and Influence and editors Michael Harris and Alan Lee’s The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries which both establish the central role Fleet Street boasted in the rise of a free press in London.[xii] London law and crime historiography also comprises many significant works such as Gamini Salgado’s The Elizabethan Underworld, John L. McMullan’s The Canting Crew: London’s Criminal Underworld, 1500-1700, Douglas Hay, et. al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England, Lincoln B. Faller’s Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England, and Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century.[xiii] All these texts, whether dealing with the press or crime, acknowledge the centrality of Fleet Street as a physical setting for printers, lawyers, and criminals, but seldom do they connect these varied characters to one another.
[i] S. Johnson, “London: A Poem,” in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: The Reformation and Eighteenth Century (New York: ? 1973), reprinted in “London Life and Culture Readings,” (Course Packet, 2006, available at Beck’s Bookstore), 474.
[ii] B. Weinreb and C. Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler Publishers, Inc., 1986), 282-286.
[iii] J. Richardson, London & Its People: A Social History from Medieval Times to the Present Day (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1995), 17, 31, 33, 43.
[iv] R. Boston, The Essential Fleet Street: Its History and Influence (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 1990), 14-33.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] F. C. Avis, Printers of Fleet Street and St. Paul’s Church Yard in the Sixteenth Century (London: Glenview Press, 1964), 10-21; See also M. Harris and A. Lee, The Press in English Society From the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1986).
[viii] R. Hudson, The London Guides: Fleet Street, Holborn & the Inns of Court (London: Haggerston Press, 1995), 113-123.
[ix] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, 20 March 2008).
[x] For a information on Fleet Prison, see P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 180; For a description of Bridewell, see R. C. Latham, and W. Mathews, A Pepys Anthology: Passages from the Diary of Samuel Pepys, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 1/167, 2/116, 7/187, 7/190-191, 8/6; For a general history of London prisons, H. Mayhew and J. Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1968).
[xi] Information on Whitefriars, a.k.a. Alsatia, can be found in G. Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 20.
[xii] See also Avis, Printers of Fleet Street and St. Paul’s Church Yard in the Sixteenth Century.
[xiii] See also J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550-1750 (New York: Longman, 1999); C. Elmsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900 (New York: Longman, 1987); P. King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740-1820 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); S. Joyce, Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); F. McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century England (New York: Routledge, 1989); J. Landers, Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London, 1670-1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
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