Episode 134 Tudor London: St Paul’s Show Notes

In episode 134 of the Renaissance English History Podcast we looked at one aspect of life in Tudor London, and that’s St Paul’s, particularly the bookselling businesses that sprang up around the churchyard. Listen with the player here, or read the rough transcript below.

Book Recommendation:

London’s Triumph by Stephen Alford

The World of Richard III
By Kristie Dean

Other source:
Christianson, C. Paul. “The Stationers of Paternoster Row, 1534–1557.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 87, no. 1, 1993, pp. 81–91. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24304161.

St Paul’s with the spire intact, pre 1561

Life in Tudor London: St Paul’s Rough Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity. This is Episode 134, and it’s the first in a series of episodes on Tudor London.

Also, we had Tudorcon a couple of weeks ago, and if you missed it, you missed a LOT of fun and learning. It was a blast – way more fun than even I expected it to be. But we’re doing it again next year, and for the rest of this year you can get the early bird price, saving $50 off the regular price. So it makes a great Christmas gift. Also, if you do decide to gift someone a Tudorcon ticket, since there’s nothing really to wrap up, I’ll send you a card that you can put under the tree. And stay tuned next week because I’m going to have a really good Black Friday special on the tickets. I’ll send out a note to the newsletter list about that – if you’re not on the list, you can sign up at englandcast.com, or if you just want to check out englandcast.com/tudorcon2020 you can see all the information, and get your tickets there.

So this episode is about Tudor London, specifically what 16th century London was like for our Tudor friends. This is actually the first episode in what will be a mini series, feature on life in 16th century cities, with several episodes on Tudor London. And while I will talk about landmarks, I will do so in the context of their impact on the lives of real people. Because that, of course, is what I’m most interested in here. Landmarks and buildings are interesting to me only insofar as the stories they can tell about the people who lived there, who died there, who laughed, cried, grieved, worshipped, and had fellowship with others there.

So today, I am going to give a very brief introduction to London at the start of the 16th century, and then talk specifically about an aspect of 16th century London that I find fascinating, and that’s St. Paul’s, and the publishing houses and booksellers around the cathedral.

As the sun rose on the 16th century, London was a city of between 50,000 and 60,000 people cramped mostly into the Roman walls of what we now call the Square Mile. It was still recovering from the Black Death over 100 years earlier, when its population was more like 80,000. It was the smallest of the major European capitals, and many in places like Paris, Naples, and Milan, or Venice – all of which had populations of over 100,000 – considered it a backwater, barely on the map. But in England, it was huge – more than 4 times the size of the other major centers like Norwich or York. And by the end of the century, London would be transformed into a city of almost 200,000 people. I am interested in exploring that transformation in more depth, through looking at how London came to dominate commerce, trade, and exploration during this century.

But let’s go back to the 1480’s. There are several traveler accounts I’d like to read to you about what London was like as Henry Tudor would have known it, coming to the capital as the new King, freshly crowned from Bosworth Field. We have several accounts of London from this time including from Dominic Mancini, who was visiting London for a short period right at the time that Richard III took the throne, and so he is often quoted for his eyewitness accounts of the events of 1483. But he also wrote of London itself, describing it as “the royal city and capital of the whole kingdom both in size and in wealth.” He goes on, “On the banks of the Thames are enormous warehouses for imported goods; also numerous cranes of remarkable size to unload merchandise from the ships. From the district on the east, adjacent to the Tower, three paved streets lead towards the wall on the west; there are the busiest, and almost straight… here are to be found all manner of minerals, wines, honey, pitch, wax, ropes, thread, grain, fish…”

And it was a cosmopolitan city, just like today. Andreas Franciscus, a Venitian who wrote of his travels in London, Itinerariunm Britnniae in 1497, remarked:

“The town itself stretches from East to West, and is three miles in circumference. However, its suburbs are so large that they greatly increase its circuit. … Throughout the town are to be seen many workshops of craftsmen … . This makes the town look exceedingly prosperous and well-stocked … . The working in wrought silver, tin or white lead is very expert here, and perhaps the finest I have ever seen. There are many mansions, which do not … seem very large from the outside, but inside … are quite considerable … .

All the streets are so badly paved that they get wet at the slightest quantity of water, and this happens very frequently … . A vast amount of evil-smelling mud is formed, which does not disappear … but lasts … nearly the whole year round. The citizens, therefore, in order to remove mud and filth from their boots, are accustomed to spread … rushes on the floors of all houses … .

Merchants not only from Venice but also Florence and Lucca, and many from Genoa and Pisa, from Spain, Germany, … and other countries meet here to handle business with the utmost keenness … . Londoners have such fierce tempers and wicked dispositions that they not only despise the way … Italians live, but actually pursue them with uncontrollable hatred, and whereas at Bruges foreigners are hospitably received … by everybody, here the Englishmen use them with the utmost contempt and arrogance, and make them the object of insults. They eat very frequently, at times more than is suitable … ”.

So we see the beginnings of a city on the cusp of being cosmopolitan, and a hub of trade and merchants.

If you walk straight up from the Millennium Bridge now, you will go directly to St. Paul’s Cathedral, but it’s not the St. Paul’s that our Tudor friends knew. Their St. Paul’s was gothic, perhaps the 4th Christian church on Ludgate Hill (which was also possibly the home of other celtic and pagan worship during roman and pre-roman times), the one our Tudor friends went to had been started in the 11th century. The cathedral had one of Europe’s tallest church spires, the height of which is traditionally given as 489 feet (149 m), surpassing all but Lincoln Cathedral. Christopher Wren (1632–1723), judged that an overestimate and gave 460 feet (140 m). William Benham noted that the cathedral probably “resembled in general outline that of Salisbury, but it was a hundred feet longer, and the spire was sixty or eighty feet higher. The tower was open internally as far as the base of the spire, and was probably more beautiful both inside and out than that of any other English cathedral. The spire of St. Paul’s was actually destroyed during our period, in 1561, when it was hit by lightning. Under the reign of James I the architect Inigo Jones oversaw some reconstruction work, but that work stopped during the English Civil War, and then the entire church burned during the Great Fire.

But the area I want to talk about today is the open area around the Church. There was a small parish church, St. Gregory by St. Paul’s, in the shadow of the spire, but there was also a large open area called the Churchyard of St. Paul’s Cross, known as St Paul’s Churchyard. This had been a popular place to meet and gossip for generations. During the medieval period, this is where the citizens had gathered for the folkmoot, the loose legislative group that would handle the administrative affairs, almost like a city council. By the Tudor period, that had ended, but what was left was the the churchyard as an open area where people could walk and chat, listen to sermons, and buy books.

Paul’s Church Yard was known for Paul’s Cross, an open air pulpit from where preachers could give sermons to everyone who gathered to listen, almost like a precursor to the common Speaker’s Corner. These sermons could be on any subject from religion to politics to world affairs, and they would often be printed, and offered for sale. Stationary shops and bookshops sprang up all around the pulpit, and sold copies of these sermons.

An example of this was on 8 June 1561 when a Bishop Pilkington preached a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross on the causes of the destruction of St. Paul’s spire from the aforementioned lightning strike. He received an angry reply from John Morwen, a chaplain to a Bishop Bonner. Pilkington then issued a ‘confutation’ in which he vigorously followed up his original exposure of the Roman catholic church. All of these sermons would have been available for sale from a print shop owned by William Sears, at the west end of the cathedral. His particular branding was that he hung up a sign of a hedgehog outside his shop.

Paul’s Cross Churchyard became the bookselling hub of London – and in fact, for all of England – with hundreds of titles available by the 1520’s, on topics ranging from religion to travel to science and politics. By the 1550’s there were dozens of printers and stationers running shops adjacent to the churchyard. They organized into the Stationers Company, with a headquartered building to the south of the cathedral.

Being a printer demanded not just skill and hard work, but also patience. They would set by hand each individual letter of the books that they printed, some in different languages including Latin and Greek as well as English and French. Many printers employed highly skilled workmen, including some brought over from Antwerp.

The bookshops at Paul’s were owned and worked in largely by foreign booksellers until the end of the sixteenth century. England did not have its own printing press until the 1490s, and in 1484 Richard III had passed an Act of exemption to foreign printers, encouraging them to bring their trade to London. The central settling point for these booksellers was Paul’s. But by the mid 16th century, Londoners were becoming worried about the foreign competition, and so another act was passed in 1534 outlawing much of the foreign workers.

The print shops hung signs outside their shops to identify them – in addition to Sears’ hedgehog, there was a sun, a Bible, and others. The printers would obtain a license to print a specific work, an early form of copyright, where they would pay a fee to the Stationers Company, and in return be given the exclusive rights to print that title. The Bishop of London and the Privy Council reserved the right to censor any book that was deemed too controversial.

By 1550 it was possible to buy books for only a few pennies, a massive change from just 50 years earlier when printing was in its infancy in England – I did an episode a few years ago on printing and William Caxton, so you will want to check that out – I’ll add a link in the show notes at englandcast.com/stpauls. There are so many parallels to our own period here, where information is suddenly so much more available, so much more easily, and inexpensive enough so that most people can consume it. There were Bibles, histories, dramas, sermons, and law books. There were also cheaper printed sheets of sermons, and tales of murders and tragedies.

By 1620 you could walk through St Paul’s Churchyard and buy books on mulberry trees and silkworms in Virginia, Francis Bacon’s newest studies, and an English translation of boccaccio’s decameron.

While many of the printers would have had stalls in St. Paul’s churchyard, the main hub of the printing was done in Paternoster Row, the lane just north of the Churchyard. Book binders had been there since the mid 15th century at least, and there are cases of long standing family owned printing businesses going on through the generations, like that of John Taverner. He was set up on Paternoster Row by 1500 when he witnessed the will of another London stationer, William Kendall. Taverner was set up with his own shop by 1501, and when he died in 1534 his wife took it over, then followed by his son. He had an especially good reputation as a binder, and in 1521 was paid 4 pounds to bind, cover, and clasp 41 volumes for the King’s Chapel at Windsor.

So we can imagine this hub of book sellers, stationers, printers, and book binders all along the lanes just north of the Cathedral, with many of them then renting stalls in the churchyard itself. There was also a school on the grounds of St Paul’s, for boys, founded by the leading humanist scholar John Coulet.

And as much as most of this activity was sanctioned by the Stationers Company, there were also cases where illegal pamphlets were printed in the very same shops. Imagine how difficult it must have been to set up a printing press to print illegal materials, now that we know just how much work went into printing a title.

So you start to get this picture of St Paul’s – a massive church with one of the tallest spires in Europe – though it had been destroyed in 1561 – with large open spaces around it for walking, talking, browsing at the stands, and listening to sermons. And buying books. Always browsing, and buying books. St Paul’s became synonymous with the book trade.

So that’s it for this week. Next time I’m going to take you on a journey to London Bridge, where we will check out the public privies – the height of city convenience! – and avoid looking at the heads on pikes. The book recommendation is London’s Triumph by Stephen Alford. I’ll put a link in the show notes at Englandcast.com/stpauls.

And you can get in touch with me through the listener support line at 801 6TEYSKO or through twitter @teysko or facebook.com/englandcast. And I’ll be back soon with another episode on life in Tudor London, specifically on London Bridge.

Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.

She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).

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