The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (10 page)

To the south of Windsor House was a large walled garden. At the top of Noble Street, says Stow, ‘ye come to the stone wall which incloseth a garden plot before the wall of the city’. He gives its length as ‘95 elles’ - an ell (an old English word for the arm, still discernible in ‘elbow’) was about 45 inches, so Lord Windsor’s garden was over a hundred yards long. This stone wall is shown in the Agas map. Looking west down Silver Street from the Mountjoys’ front door it would seem you were in a cul-de-sac. You were not, because you could turn south down Noble Street, but that is how it would seem, as your eye met His Lordship’s garden wall built across the line of the street.

We touch here an older part of the street’s story, for this wall was only the latest of the obstructions blocking the western end of the street. Excavations have shown that in Saxon and early medieval times Silver Street led out through the city walls: a minor gateway between the proper city gates of Cripplegate and Aldersgate. Around the twelfth century this exit was progressively blocked off. It was first made impassable to wagons, then later to pedestrians.
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The street became quieter, no longer a thoroughfare. It was after this closure, probably, that it became known as Silver Street - the earliest record of the name, ‘Selvernstrate’, dates from 1279. Before that it was merely the western continuation of Addle Street, the derivation of which is from Anglo-Saxon
adel
, ‘cow dung’. It was a drover’s road, a short-cut leading west to the great cattle-market of Smithfield. With the blocking of the exit through the walls this usage desisted, making the street more desirable to residents and craftsmen, among them the metal-workers who give the street its new name, and whose presence in the medieval period is evident from archaeological remains. This is the first rise in the respectability of the street that was once just a stretch of Dung Street.

Across the street from the Mountjoys’ house stood the small churchyard of St Olave’s.
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Its area was about 330 square yards, considerably less than Lord Windsor’s garden across the way. The combination of the two makes the immediate prospect from the Mountjoys’ front door a pleasantly leafy one. The church itself stood at the western end of the churchyard, abutting on to Noble Street. The dedication, sometimes miswritten ‘Olive’s’, is to the Norwegian king Olaf II, or Olaf Haraldsson, who fought in England against the Danes in the early eleventh century, and was canonized for converting Norway to Christianity. This suggests a Viking origin for the church, though the earliest record of it is twelfth century. There were other St Olaves in the city (on Hart Street and Bread Street, and in the Jewry) and another across the river in Southwark.

Stow passes the church with scarcely a glance - ‘the parish church of St Olave in Silver Streete, a small thing and without any noteworthy monuments’. This insignificance tends to be confirmed by the Agas map, which does not specify the church at all (most of the city churches are represented with a tower, and some are identified by a keyed numeral). The church was perhaps in poor repair when Shakespeare knew it, for in 1609 it was demolished and rebuilt.
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But though it was small and scruffy, St Olave’s possessed a peal of bells: there are records of payments for ringing the bells on Queen Elizabeth’s birthday.

Shakespeare would have worshipped there - a statement which says nothing about his religious feelings or lack of them: regular attendance at church was compulsory, and shirkers were fined. The minister was John Flint, a Cambridge graduate a few years younger than Shakespeare. His college, Christ’s, had a strong tinge of Puritanism, and his reputation there as a ‘great preacher’ suggests he was of that tendency. It was Flint who officiated at the wedding of Mary Mountjoy, and at the burial of her mother, and it is his fluent hand which records these events in the parish register, on the cover of which he wrote shortly after his arrival:

St Olave in Sillver streete
The Register of this Parishe, truely
transcripte, or copied out by me John
fflinte minister and Parson thereof
in the yeare of our L. God 1593
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Opposite the churchyard the narrower Monkwell Street ran northwards towards Cripplegate. You might turn this way if you were in search of fresh air and leisure activities beyond the walls, or indeed if you were headed for the playhouses and pleasure-dens of Shoreditch, north-east across Moorfields (though Shakespeare’s own connection with the northern playhouses was now past).

On the left-hand side, Monkwell Street was dominated by the hall and gardens of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company. In medieval times the barber and the surgeon (or ‘chirurgeon’) were one and the same - a man skilled with a razor and other cutting accessories. Gradually the occupations separated, as surgery became more ambitious in the wake of Renaissance anatomical study, but barbers continued to perform minor surgical and dental operations, particularly ‘blood-letting’ or phlebotomy. The red and white barber’s pole, still seen outside old-fashioned hairdressers, refers to the blood and tourniquet of phlebotomy. Actual surgery, with little in the way of antiseptic or anaesthetic, was alarmingly hit-or-miss. Here is the procedure for removing a bladder-stone, as described by the diarist John Manningham in 1601:

There is a seame in the passage of the yard [penis] neere the fundament, which the surgeons searche with a crooked instrument concaved at one end (called a catheter), whereinto they make incision and then grope for the stone with another toole which they call a duckes bill. Yf the stone be greater than may be drawne forth at the hole made by the seame, the partie dyes for it.
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In Shakespeare’s day the Barbers’ Hall, as it was generally called, lay further east than its later manifestations (post-Fire and post-Blitz), and more or less fronted on to Monkwell Street. It consisted of a large single room, or hall, with a kitchen and other domestic offices for the serving of dinners. In 1605 the company bought up land behind the Hall, formerly let to Lord Windsor, and added a courtroom. The famous circular anatomy theatre next to the city walls, designed by Inigo Jones on the model of the
teatro
at Padua, was not built until the 1630s, but dissections were performed at the Hall long before that.
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A painting of about 1580 (see Plate 10) shows the Elizabethan surgeon John Banister delivering the ‘Visceral Lecture’ - one of four lectures held at the Hall every year, open to freemen of the Company and their guests. He points to a skeleton, beside which there is an open medical text; in front of him there is a body undergoing dissection. Banister himself lived on Silver Street, as he tells us in the preface of his
Antidotarie Chyrurgicall
(1589), but as he died in 1599 he was not co-resident with Shakespeare.
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The burials of bodies used for dissection - traditionally the cadavers of executed criminals - are recorded in the St Olave’s register: Henry Stanley, ‘anatomized by the chirurgeons’; Katherine Whackter, ‘anatomised by Dr Pallmer’, and so on. One thinks of
King Lear
:

Let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart ... (3.6.34-5)

Let me have surgeons!
I am cut to th’ brains . . . (4.5.188-9)

The Dr Pallmer who dissected the body of Katherine Whackter on 17 June 1600 is Richard Palmer, a leading physician of the day. A former Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, he was licensed by the Royal College of Physicians in 1593, elected a Fellow in 1597, and Censor in 1599 (and several times thereafter). ln a Treswell survey of 1612 he is shown as the owner of a property on Monkwell Street adjoining the Barber-Surgeons’ lands; it was perhaps here that these anatomies were performed. In that year Dr Palmer was one of the physicians attending the dying Prince Henry, along with his neighbour Dr John Giffard, of whom more below. He died in 1625, his will describing him as a resident of St Olave’s parish.
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There was another fine garden at Barbers’ Hall. It is first mentioned in the Company annals in 1555, when the clerk was given an allowance for maintaining it. A later entry refers to purchases of a hundred sweet briars for a hedge, together with strawberries, rosemary, violets and vines. The latter were probably for producing verjuice (juice from unripe grapes for pickling and cooking) rather than wine.

The Barber-Surgeons’ garden is of special interest because of its connection with the great horticulturalist John Gerard. He was a surgeon by training, and held a number of official positions in the Company, culminating in the Mastership in 1607, but he was better known for his green fingers than for his dexterity with catheter and duck-bill. He had designed gardens for the great Lord Burghley, and his own garden in Holborn, off Chancery Lane, was a lush acreage of ‘trees, fruits and plants both indigenous and exotic’. In 1597 he published his famous
Herball
, which remains a landmark in botanical description and classification. It is illustrated with over 1,800 woodcuts, though many of them were plagiarized from an earlier continental work.
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Gerard was also curator of the ‘physic garden’ of medicinal plants at the Royal College of Physicians (similar to the Apothecaries’ Garden still extant in Chelsea), and in the late 1590s he was urging the Barber-Surgeons to plant a similar garden at the Hall. On 2 November 1602 a ‘committee for Mr Gerrard’s garden’ had a meeting. It is not clear what was planted, or where, but it is likely that when Shakespeare lived here there was a physic garden designed by Gerard round the corner from him. Again it is
Lear
that springs to mind.

LEAR: Give the word.
EDGAR: Sweet marjoram.
LEAR: Pass. (4.5.92-4)

Our foster-nurse of nature is repose
The which he lacks. That to provoke in him
Are many simples [herbs] operative, whose power
Will close the eye of anguish. (4.3.12-15)

Shakespeare’s own knowledge of herbs is acute: a countryman’s knowledge. It has been shown that Iago’s herbicultural metaphor in
Othello
- ‘our bodies are our gardens’, in which we may ‘plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many’ (1.3.320-26) - makes perfectly good sense in terms of contemporary gardening practice.
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Many other livery companies had their headquarters round here - this is one of the features of the neighbourhood which contributes to an idea of its respectability. Just off Monkwell Street by the walls was Bowyers’ Hall. Nearby were Curriers’ Hall (they ‘curried’ or drubbed leather), and Plasterers’ Hall (formerly the site of Pinners’ Hall), and Brewers’ Hall on Addle Street. Further south, towards Cheapside, stood Haberdashers’ Hall, Embroiderers’ Hall and the most opulent of all, Goldsmiths’ Hall.

Goldsmiths - the epitome of flashy Jacobean success - were plentiful in the area. There was at least one, William Pierson, living on Silver Street itself. He leased his house from Thomas Savage of Addle Street, also a goldsmith - and a man known to Shakespeare, as he was one of the sureties of the land-lease for the Globe theatre.
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Another goldsmith on or near Silver Street was Henry Bannister, probably a relative of John Banister the surgeon. This Bannister was also a ‘broker’ or moneylender, as was John Wolfall, a skinner by trade, whose extortionate dealings resulted in a Star Chamber suit in 1593, in which he is described as ‘of Silver Street’. Both of them employed a shady character called Nicholas Skeres as a tout to wind in ‘young gents’ in need of cash. Conman, spy and sometime employee of the Earl of Essex, Skeres has a dubious place in literary history - he was one of the companions of Christopher Marlowe on the night he was killed.
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Continuing up Monkwell Street, you passed on your right a neat row of alms-houses. Thus Stow: ‘On the said east side of Monkeswell street be proper Almeshouses, 12 in number, founded by Sir Ambrose Nicholas.’ Accommodated there, rent-free, were a dozen ‘poore and aged’ people, ‘having each of them seven pence the week, and once the year each of them five sackes of charcoales, and one quarter of a hundreth of faggots, of his gift forever’. Occupants are designated ‘almsman’, ‘almswidow’, etc, in the St Olave’s registers. The charitable founder, Sir Ambrose Nicholas, a salter by trade, served as Lord Mayor in 1575-6. He died a couple of years later, so Shakespeare would not have known him, but he certainly knew his son, Daniel Nicholas (born about 1560).
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This was the friend of Stephen Belott, who testified in 1612 that he had visited Shakespeare ‘to understand the truth’ about the disputed dowry.

At the top of the street, close to the city gate, was a former chapel or ‘hermitage’, St James-by-the-Wall. It was now converted into tenements, one of which housed a private school run by one Thomas Speght. Near by was an old well, formerly belonging to the hermitage. Stow suggests this as the origin of the name Monkwell or Monkswell Street but it seems he is wrong. The earliest records of the street, from the twelfth century, call it ‘Mukewelle’ or ‘Mogwelle’ Street. The first syllable is probably a family or clan name. Thus the rougher-sounding Muggle Street - as used by the apprentice William Eaton in his deposition, and also found on the Agas map - is more correct.

Immediately outside the gate was the extramural parish of St Giles, Cripplegate - the tall-towered church still stands, despite the efforts of fire and bombs, and can be seen clearly from the site of Silver Street. In this parish there were writers living at one time or another - Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and Shakespeare’s future collaborator George Wilkins. Here too lived an actor who appears in the St Giles registers as ‘Edward Shakespeere, player’, but who is more probably the dramatist’s younger brother, Edmund. This was in 1607, the occasion the burial of an illegitimate child. Sixteen years younger than Shakespeare, it seems he had followed his big brother into the glamorous but uncertain world of the London theatres.
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Also near by, in the parish of St Mary Aldermanbury east of Wood Street, lived two of Shakespeare’s closest colleagues in the King’s Men - John Heminges and Henry Condell, the future editors of the First Folio. A monument in the former churchyard notes that Heminges lived in the parish ‘for upward of 42 years’, and Condell for over thirty; between them they had twenty-one children baptized and ten buried at the church, where both served as churchwardens.
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