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I was re-reading the London Root and Branch petition last week for a class and noticed for the first time, amongst the list of religious and constitutional grievances, a very specific issue:
8. The swarming of lascivious, idle, and unprofitable books and pamphlets, play-books and ballads; as namely, Ovid’s Fits of Love, The Parliament Of Women, which came out at the dissolving of the last Parliament; Barns’s Poems, Parker’s Ballads, in disgrace of religion, to the increase of all vice, and withdrawing of people from reading, studying, and hearing the word of God, and other good books.
The London petition was presented to the Commons on 11 December 1640, shortly after the opening of the Long Parliament by Alderman Isaac Pennington, a City MP, along with about 1,500 of his signatories. Around 15,000 people signed the petition itself. The petition had been brewing since the opening of Parliament: on 18 November 1640 the Scots commissioner Robert Baillie noted that:
The Toun of London, and a world of men, minds to prefent a petition, which I have feen, for the abolition of Biihops, Deanes, and all their aperteanances. It is thought good to delay it till the Parliament have pulled doun Can terburie and fome prime Biftiops, which they minde to doe fo foon as the King hes a little digefted the bitternefs of his Lieutenant’s cenfure. Hudge things are here in working: The mighty hand of God be about this great work!
Exactly how the petition was organised is something we will probably never know. It’s possible that organisation centred on the parish of St Stephen’s, Coleman Street, led by John Goodwin. Goodwin had close links to Pennington, who was a parishioner. But the actual process through which signatures were gathered remains unknown.
Most of the petition criticised the religious constitutional policies of the 1630s. What was it about these particular books that merited their inclusion?
A pirated translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria by Thomas Heywood – which dated back to earlier in the century – was re-published in 1640. It’s almost certainly this that is the first objectionable book on the petitioners’ list. For a particular type of puritan, the Ovidian hero, using theatres and the arena as his hunting ground for one night stands, would have been unacceptable.
The Parliament of Women is an anonymous satirical pamphlet that is almost certainly by the poet John Taylor. It was entered into the Stationers’ Register on 18 June 1640 which suggests it was still fresh in the minds of those putting the petition together. It features characters like Bridgit Boldface, Mistress Tattlewell and Hannah Hit-Him-Home. Although these are recycled from earlier poems like A Juniper Lectures and The Womens Sharpe Revenge, the timing of this pamphlet just a month after the dissolution of the Short Parliament is interesting too.
Barns is a bit more of a mystery. It’s possible that it means Barnabe Barnes, a poet and playwright from the late Elizabethan period whose play The Divils Charter was about the life and death of Pope Alexander VI. However, I haven’t been able to find any of Barnes’s works that were reprinted during 1640.
Martin Parker was a prolific ballad writer whose career stretched from the 1620s into the 1640s. The content of his ballads was summed up by his fellow pamphleteer Henry Peacham:
‘For a peny you may have all the Newes in England, of Murders, Flouds, Witches, Fires, Tempests, and what not, in one of Martin Parkers Ballads’.
Whether it was his collected back catalogue that offended London puritans, or a particular ballad, is unclear. But it’s interesting that 1640 saw Parker produce a particularly proto-royalist ballad, An exact description of the manner how his majestie went to the parliament, the thirteenth day of April, to mark the opening of the Short Parliament.
I was supposed to be searching for early modern satirical prints on the British Museum “flat art” database, but looking at the freezing Cornish landscape outside my window I got distracted and ended up searching for winter scenes. I found some wonderful images of the frost fair that took place from December 1683 to February 1684 when the Thames froze solid near London Bridge.
For more on images of the fair see Joseph Monteyne, The Printed Image in Early Modern London (Ashgate, 2007).
Wonders on the Deep; Or, The most Exact Description of the Frozen River of Thames (1683-4), AN288334001, © The Trustees of the British Museum.
God’s Works is the Worlds Wonder (1684), AN250639001, © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Great Britains Wonder: or, Londons Admiration (1684), AN501914001, © The Trustees of the British Museum.
An Exact and Lively Mapp or Representation of Booths and all the varieties of showes and humours upon the Ice on the River of Thames by London … Anno Dm. MDCLXXXIII (1684), AN163816001, © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Seventeenth-century Londoners were used to exotic animals. As a port London had its fair share of sailors and traders bringing in animals from abroad, like parrots, monkeys and lions. Even so, you can imagine the wonder it must have caused when in 1675 Lord George Berkeley imported an elephant to London.
The illustrations above are taken from two pamphlets describing the elephant. They are part of a long tradition of cheap books describing wondrous beasts: 77 years earlier, for example, Londoners had been able to read about A Most Strange and Wonderfull Herring (1598), with pictures on its sides of men fighting and of strange runic letters. The difference with Berkeley’s elephant and the Dutch herring is the the latter was written about in a heavily didactic way. Readers were meant to see the herring as a portent to be linked to contemporary events. By 1675 the elephant could be presented as a curiosity of the natural world rather than something linked to the supernatural.
Both authors are at pains to describe the elephant’s physical details, its age, and the likely size it will grow to. The woodcuts would also have given a (not too inaccurate) sense of what the animal looked like. In other respects, though, readers still would have taken away a perception of the elephant filtered through very old-fashioned lenses.
Like many early modern descriptions of elephants, A Full and True Relation is taken almost entirely from Pliny the Elder’s account of elephants:
- The closest of all the animals to man in intelligence.
- They understand the language of the country they were bred in.
- They excel in goodness and honesty.
- They fight to the death with dragons/snakes.
- They carry castles full of men on their back.
- They have 2 year pregnancies and live for 200 to 300 years.
The author also adds a detail from Isidore of Seville that they are afraid of mice, and another from Bartholomaeus Anglicus that they go down to the river at new moon to wash themselves.
A True and Perfect Description sneers at Pliny and other classical and medieval authors, saying that it will not repeat lies that the reader can look up in those texts. The author corrects Pliny’s assertion that the elephant does not have joints. Certainly it seems that there are more first and second-hand accounts of elephants within the text. This anecdote was particularly nice:
They are said to be very amourous of handsome women, (whence it appears that he is worse than a Beast that hates them), and to be very Kind and Grateful to their Keepers, insomuch as one upon a time (as the story has it) one of them seeing in his Masters absence a Man lying with his Mistris, as soon as he came from her, fell upon him and Killed him, I wish every Citizen had one of them for that trick.
But other details are still taken from standard bestiaries: the story that elephants bury their teeth to hide them from men, and that they are chaste animals.
Apart from the pamphlets, and a mock-speech by the elephant to celebrate it being shown at Bartholomew Fair, the only contemporary reactions to the elephant that I can find are one by Robert Hooke, and one in a newspaper. In Hooke’s diary he recorded the following:
12 August. Elephant sold for £1600.
2 September. Walkd to see elephant.
1 October. Saw elephant 3sh.
Meanwhile the City Mercury’s edition of November 2 described how Berkeley had been sold the elephant for £2,000, and that the elephant:
was now to be seen at the White Horse Inn over against Salisbury Court in Fleet Street, at which place there is provided accommodation for the Nobility, Gentry and Commonalty for that purpose.
It’s also possible that it inspired Francis Barlow’s picture of a fight between an elephant and a rhinoceros (1684). Barlow’s print-shop, as Aubrey Noakes has pointed out, was just round the corner from Salisbury Court. On 25 August 1684 a rhinoceros was imported into London, and it seems possible that Barlow matched the pair in the death-match to end all death-matches…
1. Anonymous, A full and true relation of the elephant that is brought over into England from the Indies, and landed at London, August 3d. 1675. Giving likewise a true account of the wonderful nature, understanding, breeding, taking and taming of elephants (London, 1675).
2. Anonymous, A True and perfect description of the strange and wonderful elephant sent from the East-Indies and brought to London on Tuesday the third of August, 1675 : with a discourse of the nature and qualitites of elephants in general (London, 1675).
3. Anonymous, A description of the rhinoceros, lately brought from the East-Indies, and sold the 25th. of this instant August, to Mr. L. for 2320£ (London, 1684).
Spotted the poster above pasted onto a wall on the north side of the Millennium Bridge, on the approach to Tate Modern. The URL in the corner is www.neoexternalism.co.uk – but it takes you to a defunct website. A Whois check on the URL doesn’t reveal much, either.
Still, seeing it reminded me that pasting satirical messages onto London’s walls is nothing new, so I thought it would be a good excuse for a post. For comparison, here is one of the Voyeur Card’s famous early modern counterparts: a satirical broadsheet ballad that would probably also have been glued onto walls.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
The World Is Ruled & Governed By Opinion was published in 1641 by Thomas Banks (although subsequent editions did not feature his name). The text is by Henry Peacham, a writer and illustrator who in the late 1630s and 1640s published a number of written works. There is some suggestion that he was down on his luck and attempting to make money by doing so. At this period Peacham collaborated with Wenceslaus Hollar, who is the artist behind the ballad’s illustration. This is one of a number of works they collaborated on at this period. The dedication is to Sir Francis Prujean, a noted physician.
In the illustration you can see Opinion (the blindfolded woman), crowned with the Tower of Babel. She has a globe on her lap, a chameleon on her left arm and a staff in her right hand. In the tree are various pamphlets and broadside ballads. On the left is a jester-like man watering the tree. On the right is the aristocratic cavalier labelled “Viator” or traveller, who is the person Opinion is debating with in the ballad’s text.
The ballad and its illustration are a good example of of views held in the 1640s about the dangers of print, news and opinion – Opinion is an inversion of Justice, watered by a fool, producing nothing but confusion and a world turned upside down. This is ironic, given that the pamphlet’s publisher, Thomas Banks, was a key producer of cheap ballads, pamphlets and newsbooks during the 1640s. Paradoxically, the ballad’s very medium cuts across its message.
Where it gets really interesting are the titles it’s possible to make out of the books hanging from the tree. These are:
- “[John] Taylor’s Reply”
- “The Ironmonger’s Answer”
- “Mercuries Message”
- “News from Elyzium”
- “Hellish Parliament”
- “A Swarme of Sectaries”
- “Canterburies Tooles” (not Troubles as the British Museum website has it)
- “Brownists Conventicle”
- “Taylors Physicke”
- “Lambeth Faire”
Of these, Taylor’s Reply, A Swarme of Sectaries, Taylors Physicke, and The Ironmonger’s Answer all relate to the pamphlet war between John Taylor and Henry Walker.
Mercuries Message was a ballad critical of Laud. Newes from Elizium was a satirical piece using the same woodcut of Laud as Mercuries Message. The Hellish Parliament was another satirical pamphlet by Taylor. Canterburies Tooles is a pamphlet purporting to be by Prynne which reused the same woodcut. Brownists Conventicle was yet another Taylor satire. Lambeth Faire was another satirical ballad hostile to Laud.
I have a hunch – and it is no more than that at this stage – that the listed works may all have been published by Thomas Banks. Certainly Taylor had close professional connections with Banks, who printed a number of his satires. And much of Banks’s output at this time consisted of cheap satirical pamphlets and ballads. To add another layer of paradox, it may be that as well as a critical commentary on the burgeoning public sphere in 1641, The World Is Ruled & Governed By Opinion is also an advert for the very cheap print the ballad criticises.
What is also potentially fascinating for me is that works from both sides of the pamphlet war between John Taylor and Henry Walker are mentioned – not just Taylor’s but also Walker’s. Having blogged about this previously, and hypothesised that the two may have been closer than is supposed, and linked by their mutual associations with Banks and other printers, it is intriguing to wonder whether Banks actually printed all the pamphlets in the dispute. At any rate it’s something I’ll be following up.
Incidentally the ballad also inspired the title of Dagmar Freist’s excellent study of politics and communication in mid-seventeenth century London, which is now available in limited preview on Google Books, and which I would recommend if you want to find out more about print and other forms of communication in 1630s and 1640s London.
A couple of years ago I went to the Museum of London and bought a couple of prints in the giftshop there, which between them show the panorama above of early modern London. The prints then promptly sat in a cupboard for two years until I recently got round to framing them. Below is a detail of London Bridge from the engraving – you’ll see that it is teeming with life and detail.
Since putting them up on my wall I’ve done some digging about the picture’s background, and actually it is not everything it seems. It is by the Dutch publisher Claes Jansz Visscher, the first in a printing dynasty that spanned three generations and which specialised in maps and other similar prints. The Guildhall Library has a copy dated 1616, and the Folger has a later variant from 1625.
Visscher’s panorama was long seen as an excellent source for reconstructing early seventeenth-century London, particularly the theatres on the Bankside. In the 1920s, E.K. Chambers used its depiction of the Globe to argue that it would have been octagonal. He was followed by John Cranford Adams in his book on the Globe of the early 1940s.
But later in the same decade, I.A. Shapiro demonstrated that Visscher’s engraving of the north bank was derived from Norden’s Civitas Londoni – one label gives "St Dunston in the cast", which has been copied from Norden’s print where the c’s are hard to distinguish from the e’s. The south bank is full of inaccuracies, and in fact there is no evidence that Visscher even worked in London. As a result, the picture cannot be relied upon. (My summary of this is drawn from a helpful history of Globe reconstructions by Gabriel Egan ).
So it seems that the Museum of London giftshop sold me an inaccurate picture of London… it does look good on my sitting room wall, though!
1. E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (1923) .
2. John Cranford Adams, The Globe Playhouse: Its Design and Equipment (1942) .
3. I.A. Shapiro, ‘The Bankside theatres: early engravings’, Shakespeare Survey I (1947) .
4. Gabriel Egan, ‘Reconstructions of the Globe: a retrospective’, Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999) .
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