Building Bridewell: London’s Self-Images, 1550–1640

Abstract

London hovered on the verge of ‘extraordinary’ and ‘infinite’ growth around 1550. A population boom was gathering steam, and London’s population would more than double in next to no time, reaching roughly 200,000 by 1600 (and somewhere around 400,000 five decades later), thanks to steady streams of migrants. London ‘thou art so thronged with multitudes of people, that they go in and out at thy gates by hundreds and thousands’, Thomas Jackson marvelled in 1609, summing up a common perception of the times, that was no less forceful for that. Already Thomas Lever had worried out loud at Paul’s Cross about vagrants swooping like locusts in 1550 and chided magistrates for not coming up with tough responses, to their ‘great shame’, he added, cuttingly.1 Change was in the air, something City leaders knew full well, along with increasingly anxious authors, like William Bullein: ‘the world is sare chaunged’, he wrote with baited breath in 1564, wondering what might happen next. London grew quickly, spilling over its walls. ‘ Shee swarmes’, Donald Lupton noted in 1632, choosing words that still capture the whirl of this long-past storm for us today.2

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