Cheapside Street
Cheapside, one of the most important streets in
early modern London, ran east-west between the Great
Conduit at the foot of Old Jewry to the
Little Conduit by St.
Paul’s churchyard. The terminus of all the northbound streets from the
river, the broad expanse of Cheapside separated
the northern wards from the southern wards. It was lined with buildings three,
four, and even five stories tall (Weinreb
148), whose shopfronts were open to the light and set out with
attractive displays of luxury commodities. Cheapside was the centre of London’s wealth, with many mercers’ and
goldsmiths’ shops located there. It was also the most sacred stretch of the
processional route, being traced both by the linear east-west route of a royal
entry and by the circular route of the annual mayoral procession.
Both the street and Cheap Ward through which it ran
were named for the market located there. Cheapside
or West Cheap was the site of a great medieval
food market. West Cheap and East Cheap were the
two principal market areas of London, both created during King Alfred’s program of urban renewal in the ninth
century (Sheppard 71). Over time, Cheapside became the more prestigious market
location. The name originated from the word "chepe," which has also been spelled
"cepe" and "cheop," and means a market, or bargaining place (OED, "cheap, n.").
The importance of Cheapside Street increased
greatly after 1087. It was in this
year that Mauritius, then the bishop
of London, began rebuilding St. Paul’s cathedral
(Stow 1:324). The new church’s
footprint was much larger than that of the previous structure, and it blocked
traffic running from Aldgate to Ludgate. To alleviate the congestion and danger
caused by frequently turning horses and wagons, Newgate was built, allowing traffic to flow through the city on Cheapside. Thus the street grew very busy and
became a good location for tradespeople to sell their wares (Stow 1:35–36). The names of the streets
leading out of Cheapside are a good indication of
some of the goods sold there: bread, wood, honey, milk,
and poultry (Bebbington 82). More evidence of the high traffic in Cheapside is found in a royal proclamation by Edward I, designed to ease
congestion:
All manner of victuals that are sold by persons in Chepe upon Cornhulle and elsewhere in the City, such as bread, cheese, poultry, fruit, hides and skins, onions and garlic, and all other small victuals, for sale as well by denizens as by strangers, shall stand midway between the kennels [gutters] of the streets, so as to be a nuisance to no one under pain of forfeiture of the article.
(qtd. in Bebbington 82)
By Stow’s time, Cheapside had many important
landmarks as well. On the east end of the street was the Great Conduit, where people could get fresh water, conveyed by
underground pipes from Paddington. At the west end were a little conduit near
Paul’s gate, St. Paul’s itself, and the Standard in Cheapside. Executions of criminals
were once performed at the Standard (Stow 1:265). The Saddlers’ Hall, and three churches, St.
Mary-le-Bow, St Peter West Cheap, and St. Michael at Corn, were also
located in Cheapside. In the street itself jousts
and various other entertainments were often held (Bebbington 82).
Also on Cheapside was a Great Cross, three stories
tall, erected by decree of Edward I
after the death of his wife Eleanor (Weinreb
148). She died in the countryside, near Lincoln, and at every place
her body rested on the way to Westminster, Edward ordered a great stone cross to
be built with her image upon it. The cross at Cheapside fell into ruin over many years and was recommissioned and
repaired several times, often with funds from local mercers. It was newly gilt
for the coronation procession of each new monarch, and for the entry processions of visiting monarchs
until 1581, when it was defaced by
vandals (Stow 1:266–67).
The most sacred segment of the coronation processional route was along Cheapside. It was here that the most expensive and
elaborate pageants took place, as can be seen in Thomas Dekker’s The Magnificent
Entertainment (1604) and Richard
Mulcaster’s The Quenes Maiesties
Passage. The most extravagant portions of the Lord Mayor’s pageant also took place
here, such as those in Thomas
Middleton’s The Triumphs of Truth.
The part of Cheapside known as Goldsmiths’ Row ran
between Bread Street and Friday Street (Weinreb
148). Goldsmiths’ Row and the shops and homes of other wealthy merchants
made the street an elite and attractive one. Stow claims that there were ten
houses and fourteen shops in Goldsmith’s Row, and that they were easily the most
beautiful in London (Stow 1:296,
1:345–46). The Mercers’ Hall was also
located on the North side of Cheapside Street. The
result was a high concentration of wealth and power in Cheapside.
Eventually, goldsmiths began to leave Goldsmiths’ Row, and other businesses moved
in. James I wanted to keep all the
goldsmiths in one place because it made for a more beautiful street, with fine
houses kept by rich men, and because it was easier for him to monitor trade in
gold. The king passed laws requiring non-goldsmiths to leave and goldsmiths
elsewhere in the city to relocate to Cheapside. By
1628 the Privy Council was
imprisoning non-goldsmiths who refused to vacate.
Cheapside Street was destroyed in the Great Fire
of 1666, as was the rest of Cheap Ward. St.
Mary-le-Bow and the Mercers’ and Saddlers’ Halls were rebuilt (Weinreb 148).
Cheapside is once again "becoming one of the City of London’s most prestigious
shopping destinations," according to the Cheapside Initiative project (About the
Initiative).
See also: Chalfant 53.
References
- Bebbington, Gillian. London Street Names. London: B.T. Batsford, 1972. Print.
- Chalfant, Fran C. Ben Jonson’s London: A Jacobean Placename Dictionary. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1978. Print.
-
Griffiths, Paul.
Politics Made Visible: Order, Residence, and Uniformity in Cheapside, 1600–45.
Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S.R. Jenner. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 176–96. Print. -
Harding, Vanessa.
Cheapside: Commerce and Commemoration.
The Huntington Library Quarterly 71.1 (2008): 77–98. Print. -
Jenstad, Janelle.
’The City Cannot Hold You’: Social Conversion in the Goldsmith’s Shop.
Early Modern Literary Studies 8.2 (2002): 2:1–25. Web. - Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Web. Subscr. OED.
-
Reddaway, T.F.
Elizabethan London - Goldsmiths’ Row in Cheapside, 1558–1645.
Guildhall Miscellany 2 (1963): 181–206. Print. - Sheppard, Francis. London: A History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.
- Stow, John. A Survey of London. Reprinted from the Text of 1603. Ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1908. Print. [Also available as a reprint from Elibron Classics (2001). Articles written before 2011 cite from the print edition by volume and page number.]
- Weinreb, Ben, and Christopher Hibbert, eds. The London Encyclopaedia. New York: St. Martin’s, 1983. Print. [You may also wish to consult the 3rd edition of The London Encyclopedia (2008). Print.]
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