Fleet Author2014 Brendan Vidito Guest Editor2014 Patricia Brace Encoder2021 Kate LeBere Data Manager Tye Landels Junior Programmer Joey Takeda Programmer Martin Holmes Associate Project Director Kim McLean-Fiander 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

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 Provider: University of Victoria Database: The Map of Early Modern London Content: text/plain; charset="utf-8" TY - ELEC A1 - Vidito, Brendan ED - Jenstad, Janelle T1 - Fleet T2 - The Map of Early Modern London ET - 7.0 PY - 2022 DA - 2022/05/05 CY - Victoria PB - University of Victoria LA - English UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/FLEE1.htm UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/xml/standalone/FLEE1.xml TY - UNP ER - Vidito, Brendan. Fleet. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0, edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of Victoria, 05 May 2022, mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/FLEE1.htm. INP. Vidito, Brendan. Fleet. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Accessed May 05, 2022. mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/FLEE1.htm. INP. Vidito, B. 2022. Fleet. In J. Jenstad (Ed), The Map of Early Modern London (Edition 7.0). Victoria: University of Victoria. Retrieved from https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/editions/7.0/FLEE1.htm. INP.

The Fleet, known as Fleet River, Fleet Ditch, Fleet Dike, and the River of Wells due to the numerous wells along its banks, was London’s largest subterranean river (Stow 1598, sig. C4r). It flowed down from Hampstead and Kenwood ponds in the north, bisecting the Ward of Farringdon Without, as it wended southward into the Thames (Weinreb, Hibbert, Keay, and Keay 298).

 Molly Rothwell Molly Rothwell MR

Project Manager, 2022-present. Research Assistant, 2020-2022. Molly Rothwell was an undergraduate student at the University of Victoria, with a double major in English and History. During her time at MoEML, Molly primarily worked on encoding and transcribing the 1598 and 1633 editions of Stow’s Survey, adding toponyms to MoEML’s Gazetteer, researching England’s early-modern court system, and standardizing MoEML’s Mapography.

 Kate LeBere Kate LeBere KL

Project Manager, 2020-2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019-2020. Research Assistant, 2018-2020. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. She published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet during the Russian Cultural Revolution. During her time at MoEML, Kate made significant contributions to the 1598 and 1633 editions of Stow’s Survey of London, old-spelling anthology of mayoral shows, and old-spelling library texts. She authored the MoEML’s first Project Management Manual and quickstart guidelines for new employees and helped standardize the Personography and Bibliography. She is currently a student at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.

 Joey Takeda Joey Takeda JT

Programmer, 2018-present. Junior Programmer, 2015-2017. Research Assistant, 2014-2017. Joey Takeda was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English (Science and Technology research stream). He completed his BA honours in English (with a minor in Women’s Studies) at the University of Victoria in 2016. His primary research interests included diasporic and indigenous Canadian and American literature, critical theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities.

 Tye Landels-Gruenewald Tye Landels-Gruenewald TLG

Data Manager, 2015-2016. Research Assistant, 2013-2015. Tye completed his undergraduate honours degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2015.

 Kim McLean-Fiander Kim McLean-Fiander KMF

Director of Pedagogy and Outreach, 2015–2020. Associate Project Director, 2015. Assistant Project Director, 2013-2014. MoEML Research Fellow, 2013. Kim McLean-Fiander comes to The Map of Early Modern London from the Cultures of Knowledge digital humanities project at the University of Oxford, where she was the editor of Early Modern Letters Online, an open-access union catalogue and editorial interface for correspondence from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. She is currently Co-Director of a sister project to EMLO called Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (WEMLO). In the past, she held an internship with the curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, completed a doctorate at Oxford on paratext and early modern women writers, and worked a number of years for the Bodleian Libraries and as a freelance editor. She has a passion for rare books and manuscripts as social and material artifacts, and is interested in the development of digital resources that will improve access to these materials while ensuring their ongoing preservation and conservation. An avid traveler, Kim has always loved both London and maps, and so is particularly delighted to be able to bring her early modern scholarly expertise to bear on the MoEML project.

 Janelle Jenstad Janelle Jenstad JJ

Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and PI of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. She has taught at Queen’s University, the Summer Academy at the Stratford Festival, the University of Windsor, and the University of Victoria. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge). She has prepared a documentary edition of John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Renaissance and Reformation,Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Early Modern Literary Studies, Elizabethan Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism, and The Silver Society Journal. Her book chapters have appeared (or will appear) in Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society (Brill, 2004), Shakespeare, Language and the Stage, The Fifth Wall: Approaches to Shakespeare from Criticism, Performance and Theatre Studies (Arden/Thomson Learning, 2005), Approaches to Teaching Othello (Modern Language Association, 2005), Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007), New Directions in the Geohumanities: Art, Text, and History at the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2011), Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter, 2016), Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives (MLA, 2015), Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana, 2016), Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota, 2017), and Rethinking Shakespeare’s Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018).

 Martin D. Holmes Martin D. Holmes MDH

Programmer at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC). Martin ported the MOL project from its original PHP incarnation to a pure eXist database implementation in the fall of 2011. Since then, he has been lead programmer on the project and has also been responsible for maintaining the project schemas. He was a co-applicant on MoEML’s 2012 SSHRC Insight Grant.

 Patricia Brace Patricia Brace

Patricia Brace is a MoEML Pedagogical Partner. She is Associate Professor at Laurentian University.

 Brendan Vidito Brendan Vidito BV

Student contributor enrolled in ENGL 4687: Honours Seminar II at Laurentian University in Spring 2014, working under the supervision of Patricia Brace.

 Ben Jonson Ben Jonson 1572/73 1637/38

Poet and playwright.

ODNB Wikipedia Henry de Lacy Henry de Lacy 1249/50 1311/12

Fifth Earl of Lincoln. Benefactor of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Buried at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

ODNB Wikipedia John Stow John Stow 1524/25-1525/26 1605/06

Historian and author of A Survey of London. Husband of Elizabeth Stow.

MoEML ODNB Wikipedia Heyden Heyden

Dramatic character in Ben Jonson’s On the Famous Voyage.

 Shelton Shelton

Dramatic character in Ben Jonson’s On the Famous Voyage.

 Born digital. Ashton, John. The Fleet: Its River, Prison, and Marriages. T.F. Unwin, 1889. Remediated by Google Books. Fleeting. The New Lexicon Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language. 1988. Print. Thornbury, Walter. The Fleet River and Fleet Ditch. Old and New London. Vol. 2. London, 1878. 416-426. Remediated by British History Online. Weinreb, Ben, Christopher Hibbert, Julia Keay, and John Keay. The London Encyclopaedia. 3rd ed. London: Macmillan, 2008. Print. London

The city of London, not to be confused with the allegorical character (London).

(LOND5.xml) Hampstead Heath

(HAMP3.xml) PLACEHOLDER LOCATION

PLACEHOLDER LOCATION ITEM. The purpose of this item is to allow encoders to link to a location item when they cannot add a new location file for some reason. MoEML may still be seeking information regarding this entry. If you have information to contribute, please contact the MoEML team.

(LLLL1.xml) Farringdon Without Ward

Farringdon Without Ward is west of Farringdon Within Ward and Aldersgate Ward and is located outside the Wall. This ward is called Without or Extra because the ward is located without Newgate and Ludgate and to differentiate it from Farringdon Within Ward. Farringdon Without Ward and its counterpart within the Wall are both named after William Faringdon, principle owner of Farringdon Ward, the greater ward that was separated into Farringdon Within Ward and Farringdon Without Ward in the 17 of Richard II.

(FARR2.xml) The Thames Information is not yet available. (THAM2.xml) Holborn Bridge

Holborn Bridge or Oldboorne bridge (Stow) spanned the Fleet Ditch at Holborn Street. Located in the ward of Farringdon Without, the bridge was part of a major westward thoroughfare.

(HOLB3.xml) Fleet Bridge Information is not yet available. (FLEE7.xml) Fleet Street

Fleet Street runs east-west from Temple Bar to Fleet Hill or Ludgate Hill, and is named for the Fleet River. The road has existed since at least the twelfth century (Sugden 195) and known since the fourteenth century as Fleet Street (Beresford 26). It was the location of numerous taverns including the Mitre and the Star and the Ram.

(FLEE6.xml) St. Paul’s Cathedral

St. Paul’s Cathedral was—and remains—an important church in London. In 962, while London was occupied by the Danes, St. Paul’s monastery was burnt and raised anew. The church survived the Norman conquest of 1066, but in 1087 it was burnt again. An ambitious Bishop named Maurice took the opportunity to build a new St. Paul’s, even petitioning the king to offer a piece of land belonging to one of his castles (Times 115). The building Maurice initiated would become the cathedral of St. Paul’s which survived until the Great Fire of London.

(STPA2.xml) Whitefriars Church

According to Stow, Whitefriars Church was located on Fleetstreet (Stow 1:310). The church was occupied by the Whitefriars, a Carmelite order, until the closure of the monestaries in 1538.

(WHIT52.xml)

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

Author A person or organization chiefly responsible for the intellectual or artistic content of a work, usually printed text. This term may also be used when more than one person or body bears such responsibility. MoEML uses the term author to designate a contributor who is wholly or partly responsible for the original content of either a born-digital document, such as an encyclopedia entry, or a primary source document, such as a MoEML Library text. Data manager A person or organization responsible for managing databases or other data sources. MoEML uses the term data manager to designate contributors who maintain and manage our databases. They add and update the data sent to us by external contributors or found by MoEML team members. They also monitor journals and sources regularly to ensure that our databases are current. Markup editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. MoEML uses the code mrk both for the primary encoder(s) and for the person who edits the encoding. MoEML’s normal workflow includes a step whereby encoders check each other’s work. We use the term encoder to designate the principal encoder, and markup editor to designate the person who checks the encoding. Project director A person or organization with primary responsibility for all essential aspects of a project, or that manages a very large project that demands senior level responsibility, or that has overall responsibility for managing projects, or provides overall direction to a project manager. MoEML’s Project Director directs the intellectual and scholarly aspects of the project, consults with the Advisory and Editorial Boards, and ensures the ongoing funding of the project. Programmer A person or organization responsible for the creation and/or maintenance of computer program design documents, source code, and machine-executable digital files and supporting documentation. MoEML uses the term programmer to designate a person or organization responsible for the creation and/or maintenance of computer program design documents, source code, and machine-executable digital files and supporting documentation. Research team head A person who directed or managed a research project. MoEML uses the terms research term head and assistant project manager interchangeably. Guest editor MoEML uses the term Guest Editor in two ways: (1) an instructor who participates in our Pedagogical Partnership and edits content generated by their students; and (2) a contributor who solicits, coordinates, and edits a number of entries written by other contributors. Proofed and changed status to stub. Encoded document. Removed old geo coordinates now superceded by GeoJSON. Added sourceDesc information for born-digital documents. Standardized respStmts for JENS1, MCFI1, and HOLM3 and added TAKE1 as Junior Programmer. We did not solicit or officialy assign this article. Patti Brace (pbrace@laurentian.ca) of Laurentian University sent 2 completed student articles to us in late Sept. 2014 for our consideration. One of them was on Fleet Ditch by her student Brendan Vidito. KMF reviewed it and sent it back in late Nov. 2014 with suggestions for changes. Brace expects Vidito to re-sbumit in early 2015. Added XInclude for listPrefixDef in the header. Fixed erroneous status attribute on revisionDesc, changing it from stub to empty. Added global publicationStmt through XInclude. Eliminated superfluous catRef elements from the header. Added catRef elements based on the place/type values in the document. Put change elements inside revisionDesc into the correct (latest first) order. Added profileDesc containing document type information expressed in catRef elements. Converted @rend to @style, through XSLT transformation. Added front element with docTitle as part of a normalization process. This will be used as the definitive page title on rendering. Various updates and fixes made through XSLT, to standardize and normalize encoding practices. Fleet
Fleet Ditch

Location:

The Fleet, known as Fleet River, Fleet Ditch, Fleet Dike, and the River of Wells, due to the numerous wells along its banks, was London’s largest subterranean river (Stow 1598, sig. C4r). It flowed down from Hampstead and Kenwood ponds in the north, bisecting the Ward of Farringdon Without, as it wended southward into the Thames (Weinreb, Hibbert, Keay, and Keay 298). The river is spanned by Holborn Bridge and Fleet Bridge, and gives its name to Fleet Street.

It derives its own name from the adjective fleeting, as well as the Anglo Saxon fleotan, which means to flow (Fleeting 359) or tidal inlet (Weinreb, Hibbert, Keay, and Keay 298). In John Ashton’s The Fleet: Its River, Prison, and Marriages, the author provides yet another etymology: My own opinion, backed by many antiquaries, is that a Fleet means a brook, or tributary to a large river, which is so wide and deep, at its junction with the greater stream as to be navigable for the small craft then in use, for some little distance (Ashton 2).

It is often speculated that the River Fleet served as a route of transportation during the time of the Romans, as evidenced in 1676, following the Great Fire, when the ditch was widened in one of many attempts to cleanse the waters. Workers discovered the stray rubbish, bones, and refuse of Roman London (Thornbury 416). The earliest recorded documentation of the river’s use was in the early twelfth century when stones for old St. Paul’s were brought upstream (Weinreb, Hibbert, Keay, and Keay 298). In the interval between the Roman occupation and Stow’s composition of the Survey of London, the river doubled as a means of transportation and a source of sustenance. In his Survey, Stow explained how Henry Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, commented that the river had beene of such bredth and depth, that 10. or 12. Shippes, Nauies, at once with Marchandizes could pass through without difficulty (Stow 1598, sig. B6r). Since then, however, the river narrowed and grew foul by pollution, and in 1290 the monks of Whitefriars complained to the King that the smell of the river was so bad that even their incense could not mask it (Weinreb, Hibbert, Keay, and Keay 298). Later, in 1502, the river was scowred into the Thames and cleansed for the first time (Stow 1598, sig. B6v). A second attempt was performed in 1589 by drawing from various unpolluted sources and channeling them into the Fleet. The attempt was ultimately a failure and, as Stow remarks, the effect fayled, so that the brookes by meanes of continuall incrochments vpon the banks gyttying ouer the water, and casting of soilage into the streame, is now become worse cloyed and choken then euer it was before (Stow 1598, sig. B6v).

The Fleet River features prominently in Ben Jonson’s satirical poem On the Famous Voyage, which recounts a mock Homeric journey of two scoundrels, Shelton and Heyden, through the squalid, putrescence-ridden ditch, as they seek out prostitutes.

Today, the Fleet River is largely hidden underground, but can be heard rushing beneath the grates lining the streets, as it continues to serve as a sewer system.