Lord Mayor’s Shows Author Dalyce Joslin Encoder Kate LeBere Proofreader Amogha Lakshmi Halepuram Sridhar Programmer Martin Holmes Project Director Janelle Jenstad The Map of Early Modern Londonhttp://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/includes.xmlVictoria, BC, Canada
Department of English P.O.Box 3070 STNC CSC University of Victoria Victoria, BC Canada V8W 3W1
2016University of Victoria978-1-55058-519-3 Janelle Jenstad london@uvic.ca

Copyright held by The Map of Early Modern London on behalf of the contributors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Further details of licences are available from our Licences page. For more information, contact the project director, Janelle Jenstad, for specific information on the availability and licensing of content found in files on this site.

Born digital.

The Lord Mayor’s Show came into being in 1215 when King John granted a charter allowing the citizens to elect their own mayor on the condition that the mayor journeyed to Westminster to be presented or shown to the King and to swear allegiance to the Crown (Reid 1). As Lawrence Manley observes, throughout the eight-hundred-year history of the London mayoralty, some form of ceremony has accompanied the annual inauguration (Manley 212). This ceremony, however, did not become a show in the form of a civic pageant until the mid-sixteenth century (Bergeron 123). These new pageants gradually replaced the Midsummer Shows originally presented by the trade guilds. In turn, the guilds began to compete with one another to see which company could produce the most elaborate pageant (Bergeron 123).

Most MoEML documents, or significant fragments with xml:id attributes, can be addressed using the mol: prefix and accessed through the web application with their id + .xml.

The molagas prefix points to the shape representation of a location on MoEML’s OpenLayers3-based rendering of the Agas Map.

Links to page-images in the Chadwyck-Healey Early English Books Online (EEBO) repository. Note that this is a subscription service, and may not be accessible to those accessing it from locations outside member institutions.

Links to page-images in the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA).

The mdt (MoEML Document Type) prefix used on catRef/target points to a central taxonomy in the includes file.

The mdtlist (MoEML Document Type listing) prefix used in linking attributes points to a listings page constructed from a category in the central MDT taxonomy in the includes file. There are two variants, one with the plain xml:id of the category, meaning all documents in the specified category, and one with the suffix _subcategories, meaning all subcategories of the category.

The molgls (MoEML gloss) prefix used on term/corresp points to a a glossary entry in the GLOSS1.xml file.

This molvariant prefix is used on ref/target attributes during automated generation of gazetteer index files. It points to an element in the generated variant spellings listing file which lists all documents which contain a particular spelling variant for a location.

This molajax prefix is used on ref/target attributes during the static build process, to specify links which point to MoEML resources which should not be loaded into the source page during standalone processing; instead, these should be turned into links to the XML source documents, and at HTML page load time, these should be turned into AJAX calls. This is to handle the scenario in which a page such as an A-Z index of the whole site would end up containing virtually the whole site inside itself.

The molstow prefix is used on facs attributes to link to the HCMC verison of the Stow facsimiles. Usually the first group is the year (1633) and then last is the image number (0001).

The molshows prefix is used on facs attributes to link to the copies of page-images from mayoral shows stored in the london account on the HCMC server. The first group is the year (1633), the second is the source repository, and then last is the image file name.

The sb prefix is used on ref/target attributes to link to Stow’s Books URLs at UToronto.

Our editorial and encoding practices are documented in detail in the Praxis section of our website.

 Proofread and published file. Created file. Lord Mayor’s Shows

The Lord Mayor’s Show came into being in 1215 when King John granted a charter allowing the citizens to elect their own mayor on the condition that the mayor journeyed to Westminster to be presented or shown to the King and to swear allegiance to the Crown (Reid 1). As Lawrence Manley observes in Literature and Culture in Early Modern England, throughout the eight-hundred-year history of the London mayoralty, some form of ceremony has accompanied the annual inauguration (Manley 212). This ceremony, however, did not become a show in the form of a civic pageant until the mid-sixteenth century (Bergeron 123). These new pageants gradually replaced the Midsummer Shows originally presented by the trade guilds. In turn, the guilds began to compete with one another to see which company could produce the most elaborate pageant (Bergeron 123). Although earlier pageants were largely religious in content (Hutton 188), subsequent pageants incorporated mythology, history, and moral allegory. As Bergeron emphasizes, these pageants frequently suggest the basic morality tension: the conflict between virtue and vice (Bergeron 138).

Comparable to the royal entry, the Lord Mayor’s show was a procession through London. In contrast to the royal entry, however, which moved east to west from one destination to another, the Lord Mayor’s show was circular, beginning at the Guildhall and returning there to conclude the festivities. The guilds would commission playwrights to create various tableaux that were presented to the mayoral party along the route. The show in the simplest form would [contain] only one device but elaboration set in, and thus the number of devices increased, and entertainment on the Thames was added (Bergeron 123). In 1613, The Triumphs of Truth complicated the traditional actor/audience division by having a character speak directly to the Mayor thus drawing him into the remaining tableaux (Middleton 970).

With these developments, the most common route became a course from Guildhall along Soper Lane to the Thames. The Mayor proceeded by boat to Westminster, returned to the city along the river, landed at Paul’s Wharf and advanced to St. Paul’s Churchyard. Then, the entourage moved along Cheapside to the Little Conduit, passed the Standard, and returned to Guildhall via Laurence Lane. Before retiring to his home, the Mayor revisited St. Paul’s Cathedral to bring the evening to a close (Marshall and Campbell; Manley 226-227).