Writing Early Modern London

Memory, Text and Community

A. Gordon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137294913
• eBook ISBN: 9781137294920
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

WritingEarly Modern London explores how urban community in London was experienced, imagined and translated into textual form. Ranging from previously unstudied manuscripts to major works by Middleton, Stow and Whitney, it examines how memory became a key cultural battleground as rites of community were appropriated in creative ways.

1

Henry Machyn’s Book of Remembrance

Scripting community

On August 1550 the funeral took place at St Andrews in Holburn, of Thomas Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, sometime Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII and acknowledged leader of the conservative faction at the court of Edward VI. Less than a year earlier, when the religious direction of the reign seemed to hang in the balance, there had been speculation that Southampton might influence the young King to effect a restoration of Catholic practices.¹ For committed Protestants such as Sir George Blage, a gentleman of Henry’s Privy Chamber whom Southampton had condemned for heresy before the King’s intervention rescued him from burning, the news of his death was welcome.² Blage marked the occasion with a mocking epitaph devoted to this ‘Picture of pryde, of papistrye the platt’ in which he gleefully forestalled intercessory prayers for the dead nobleman with the assurance that ‘[t]his Dogge is dead, the sowle is downe to hell’.³ But for those religious conservatives who still regretted the loss of the practices that had shaped parish life up to the 1530s – not least the rites of remembrance – and who still dreamed of the restoration of the familiar liturgy, the burial of Southampton seemed to mark the interment of their hopes.

Amongst those in attendance that day was Henry Machyn, citizen, Merchant Taylor and parish clerk of Holy Trinity the Less, whose church stood a few yards from the Thames in the city’s Queenhithe ward. Machyn may even have participated in the ceremony in his role as one of the Fraternity of Parish Clerks. He also set pen to paper to provide a solemn description of the rite, making this funeral the subject of the first entry in a remarkable manuscript that records events over the thirteen years from 1550 to 1563, a period of immense upheaval in the cultural life of the city. Machyn’s text is an extraordinary document. In a little over 150 fire-damaged pages, it records events taking place in the city from the everyday to those of national and international significance. His writing bears witness to the transformations of urban community during the period, transformations which in turn modify the format and significance of his work. As the familiar patterns of Machyn’s urban existence are altered, and his sense of belonging is challenged on multiple fronts, so his sensitivity to the construction of community is heightened.

The text is principally known today from the work of the nineteenth-century scholar John Gough Nichols whose edition for the Camden Society christened it The Diary of Henry Machyn.⁴ The term diary is of course anachronistic for the 1550s: it is Nichols and not Machyn who was working at the time that ‘the truly “private” diary, with its entrusting of intimate thoughts and experience to the page’, came into its own, and having identified the author he chose to interpret the manuscript under the ultimate rubric of self-referentiality.⁵ A probable reference to the manuscript in Machyn’s will calls it ‘my Cronacle’, deploying the common contemporary term for historical writings in general.⁶ Gary Gibbs has suggested that the text was conceived as a continuation of the chronicle produced by Edward Hall, but although Machyn clearly knew Hall’s work (he mentions to ‘Mr Hall’s chronicle’ (fol. 73v) when describing the burial of Hall’s mother), the specificity of textual association is questionable.⁷ In recording political events and punishments amongst other entries, Machyn does share some generic features of the civic chronicle tradition while lacking the more definitive characteristics. The London chronicles were typically the product of multiple hands, covered periods of well over a century, and organised themselves around mayoral lists, none of which apply to Machyn.⁸ Many can be identified with specific institutions, or with members of the civic administration. Two closely contemporary examples with which Machyn’s work bears comparison are the Wriothesley and Grey Friars chronicles. Surviving in an early seventeenth-century copy, the former covers the period from the accession of Henry VII to the death of its author Charles Wriothesley in 1562. Cousin to the sometime Lord Chancellor, Wriothesley was one of several generations of his family to serve as a herald in the College of Arms where Machyn himself had a number of acquaintances, and his text was largely conceived ‘as a record of the dynasty he served’.⁹ In its extant form Wriothesley’s Chronicle is a highly polished text that displays considerable historiographical ambition in its detailed account of historical events, legal proceedings and sermons. It is also firmly situated within the chronicle tradition, drawing directly upon previous histories in its treatment of the early Tudor period as well as including what F. J. Levy terms ‘the usual quota of two-headed calves, deformed children, apparitions and spirits’.¹⁰ The text reflects its author’s social access as a herald on the fringes of royal power and although London-based, Wriothesley’s narrative is more concerned with relating the policies of Tudor rule than describing urban life. Covering almost the entire period of Machyn’s chronicle – Machyn outlived Wriothesley by about a year and recorded his lavish funeral in the text – key differences in scope, completeness, social context and extent of localisation set their works apart. The general brevity of Machyn’s entries also distinguishes his work from Wriothesley’s ambitious narrative and the idiosyncrasies of his vernacular style contrast with both Wriothesley and another key chronicle work to cover this period, the anonymous Chronicle of the Grey Friars that extends to 1556 although like many of the urban chronicles, it commences with the reign of Richard I. Written into a register book of the Franciscan monastery dissolved in 1538, the chronicle may be the work of a former monk. Certainly the text reflects the institutional affiliation in the author’s open opposition to the process of religious reform as evidenced in his condemnation of a Paul’s Cross lecture against the real presence: ‘What an ironyous oppynyone is this unto the leye pepulle’.¹¹ The Chronicle of the Grey Friars terminates in the midst of the Marian restoration of the Catholic religion and its author’s resistance to reform appears vindicated in the Catholic reversal which lends the chronicle a providential shape.

The closest analogue for the institutional connections with the Grey Friars or Wriothesley’s dynastic affiliations with the College of Arms is to be found in Machyn’s association with the parish. As parish clerk of Holy Trinity the Less Machyn likely had responsibility for the upkeep of various records and these duties influenced the form and process of his text. Recent studies have highlighted the way in which compilers of parish account books might use their documentary duties to shape conceptions of community life. Clive Burgess has argued that a commemorative design drove the production of some urban churchwarden’s accounts in which ‘the whole was intended to be a book of memory compiled to celebrate the names and deeds of benefactors’.¹² Eamon Duffy found that the accounts of the West Country parish of Morebath overseen by Sir Christopher Trychay were ‘saturated with a rhetoric of collective identity and shared responsibility’ through which the priest who read them out each week to his parishioners ‘presented a particular model of the parish community to itself’.¹³ Ian Mortimer has further uncovered Machyn’s involvement in keeping the parish register, another principal document of parish life. Some notably expansive parish registers survive from the period such as the highly detailed ‘daybook for the parish’ maintained by the clerks of St Botolph without Aldgate from the Elizabethan period.¹⁴ The re-copied registers of Holy Trinity the Less illustrate the ‘habits of recording’ developed in his work as parish clerk.¹⁵ While

Machyn’s chronicle is not formally representative of the parish, his practice in textually recording the material and ritual fabric of parish life gave Machyn a methodological platform for engaging with urban community. Machyn’s text ranges beyond the parish: his combined employment as parish clerk and funeral fixer extended his activities city-wide, and this is reflected in a text which offers an insight into a range of overlapping constructions of community.

Machyn’s text thus falls between the established generic model of the chronicle and the recordkeeping practices of the parish. The fact that he bequeathed the text to a man with learned antiquarian interests, the herald William Harvey, who also appears repeatedly in the text, suggests that he saw the manuscript as a serious textual project worthy of preservation and one that suited the commemorative responsibilities of the parish recordkeeper. The manuscript has been viewed by some as a form of account book, directly reflecting the author’s professional involvement in the organisation of burial rites and it is as a contemporary source on funerary practice that the text has most frequently attracted attention from historians.¹⁶ Certainly his manuscript records funerary furnishings in great detail, and two thirds of the entries concern funerals. These were important occasions for the articulation of community relations, involving a series of social groups from family and neighbourhood to livery company and church. His descriptions capture the importance of these rites within urban society and we can discern a likeness here with those churchwardens’ accounts which detail investments in the fabric of devotion as an index to parish piety. Nevertheless the scope of Machyn’s book of remembrance encompasses a wide range of occasions and practices affording an insight into the various ways in which a sixteenth-century Londoner conceptualised his experience of urban life. Like Wriothesley, Machyn records major historical events unfolding in London such as the fall of the Protector Somerset, but alongside them he includes key occasions within the civic calendar from the lord mayor’s pageants to the Easter Spital sermons. The livery companies feature regularly in Machyn in both elaborate rituals such as the Fishmongers’ Procession and in the company feasts of the Waxchandlers, Skinners, Barber-Surgeons, Clothworkers, Ironmongers and Goldsmiths. Like the Chronicle of the Grey Friars he covers city-wide celebrations of religious festivals including the general procession to the cathedral church on St Paul’s Day in 1555 and the St Nicholas’s Eve festivities, but Machyn’s manuscript is also rich in information on his own immediate neighbourhood; he records the ritual business of his parish such as the dedication of three new altars in 1556 (fol. 54v) and the parish procession on St Giles’s Day (fol. 59r) as well as more informal communal occasions such as the parish archery contest at Finsbury Field, or the playing at Barley Break (fol. 69v). In a handful of instances Machyn explicitly identifies his own presence, as when ‘Monsieur Machyn de Henry’ is one of a group of neighbours that ‘did eat half a bushel of oysters in Anchor Lane at Mr. Smith and Mr. Gitton’s cellar, upon hogheads and candlelight and onions and red ale and claret ale and muscatel and malmsey, all free cup, at eight in the morning’ (fol. 75v). As a whole, Machyn’s manuscript reveals a complex network of overlapping identities and allegiances negotiated by an inhabitant of mid sixteenth-century London. It records the rites that configured membership of urban community in multiple forms from neighbourhood, to parish, to livery company and City government. At the same time it provides an insight into some of the more abstract ways in which a Londoner might identify himself with the city. Writing at a time when the meanings of these communal rites and their imaginative associations were being re-examined Machyn’s text, with its record of changing practices, becomes by turns an instrument and an obstacle in the negotiation of urban identity.

Machyn’s writing is anchored within a perceptual framework that seeks actively to articulate urban community. We find this in the representation of space within the text and what we might call its ocular communality; Machyn’s text rehearses a communal view in the kinds of visual access encoded within the description of venues and events. The forms of community deciphered in Machyn’s text are hierarchically organised with carefully structured access, from the formally constituted bodies of parish and livery, to the social grouping described by funerary hospitality. The vast majority of entries concern incidents either witnessed outdoors, in the open spaces of the city, or taking place in churches, in company halls or the Guildhall where the societies of parish, trade and civic governance convened. Individual houses are mentioned only rarely. The numerous examples of post-funeral hospitality, ‘and after to the place to drink’, may refer to tavern, home or company hall and on the handful of occasions when a particular home is mentioned it is in the social context of communal good cheer as when Machyn attends a twelfth night feast at Henley-on-Thames in honour of Mr John Venor in the company of ‘divers other neighbors’ (fol. 51v). On the rare occasions where no explicit occasion is given, the social nature of the event is always emphasised and the extent of participation noted, as with the Anchor Lane oyster feast a stone’s throw from the parish church at which nine named persons were present in company of ‘many more’ (fol. 75v).

The ocular communality of the text is complemented by its aural compass. In parallel to the well-established notion of the speech community, Bruce Smith has argued that inhabitants of a geographical area can be constituted as ‘an acoustic community’ where ‘identity is maintained not only by what they say in common but what they hear in common’.¹⁷ Machyn registers the acoustic co-ordinates of urban community as when in January 1554 he records the ‘proclamation in Cheapside, Leadenhall, and at St. Magnus the Martyr’s corner – with a herald of arms and one of the Queen’s trumpeters blowing’, which addressed an aural constituency with the message: ‘that Sir Thomas Wyatt was proclaimed traitor’ (fol. 27r). Machyn goes beyond recording individual experience in the description of a single auditory event, to note the multiple sites of proclamation, framing his account in terms of the sites of aural access to Londoners as an acoustic community: the symbolic ears of the city. The paradigmatic markers of acoustic community were the bells of the parish church used in an urban context to proclaim neighbourhood identity against bordering parishes in an ongoing battle of the belfries.¹⁸ We find bell-ringing mentioned in particular on occasions of celebration. At the accession of Elizabeth, in an observation clearly beyond individual perception Machyn notes that ‘all the churches in London did ring’ (fol. 94v). The description harmonises a dense layering of aural effects to represent a unified soundscape of the city, distinct from the available acoustic sensation, demonstrating how ‘the individual and society as a whole understand the acoustic environment’.¹⁹ Nor is Machyn merely transcribing administrative measures here since we find parallel examples amongst the accounts of news and rumours which demonstrate an ingrained conceptual allegiance to the city. Machyn habitually constru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Writing Early Modern London
• 1 Henry Machyn’s Book of Remembrance
• 2 Contesting Inheritance: William Smith and Isabella Whitney
• 3 John Stow and the Textuality of Custom
• 4 Credit History to Civic History: Thomas Middleton and the Politics of Urban Memory
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index