London on Ice

The English obsession with weather means we have one of the oldest sets of climate records in the world.  They reveal a very different London than the one we know now.  In the 21stC, London and particularly the City, possesses a distinct micro-climate created by the buildings, the heat and gases they produce and the underlying geography.  Why is it always windy in Farringdon, and at Bank?  Why is it bizarrely still in Paternoster Square?  Why is the air quality on Holborn regularly the worst in Britain when it has less standing traffic, and certainly fewer buses than the King's Road?  Who knows, but one thing we do know is that London is much warmer than it was three centuries ago.  Hundreds of thousands of centrally heated buildings and offices spill heat into the air, meaning if it does snow it doesn't settle and it never gets cold enough to really freeze.  Three hundred years ago, the City of London froze regularly between December and March, and the 1690s recorded six winters when the temperature was consistently below 3'C for more than three months; definitely the sort of weather when a man like Samuel Pepys would have worn two shirts, a waistcoat and a jacket.  

The streets weren't salted, but many were paved so they became treacherous in freezing weather.  Horses had sacks tied to their metal-shod feet, and 'slippers' fitted to the wheels of their vehicles to prevent dangerous sliding.  Working men wore hobnailed boots, sometimes with sacking tied over them (with the studs poking through) for a bit of extra grip.  Many gentlemen would resort to them in freezing weather, although the sacking was unlikely.  Women did not wear pattens in icy conditions (I have tried on a pair of pattens and attempted to walk around in them, and I am not convinced anyone wore them in the street let alone worked in them as they are lethal).  Where the streets and passages were just mud or dirt and on the banks of the Thames, duckboards were put down for people to walk over.  It was not uncommon to find vagrants, or unfortunates who had frozen during the night, including one man in the Fleet ditch, discovered standing upright, but dead and solid.  The price of coal rose, and the poorest Londoners had to cut wood from the common land, if they hadn't already.

Before Bazalgette's Embankment the Thames was a wider, slower river with gently sloping muddy banks, again covered in duckboards, which must have been very slippy in wet and icy conditions.  The bridges were shored up with wide wooden 'sparrows' which trapped debris and slowed the current, making it easier for ice to form.  Sets of stone steps jutted out to the water, where people could hop on and off the little boats plying their passenger trade.  When the Thames froze all river traffic stopped, but some people were not quick enough to get out of the water: in the hard winter of 1771 the Thames began to freeze and 'a waterman...had his boat jammed in between the ice and could not get on shore, and no waterman dare venture to his assistance.  He was almost speechless last night and it is thought he cannot survive long'.  The couple of days it took for the Thames to freeze completely must have been a dangerous time.  The watermen, some of London's poorest workers would have wanted to keep trading as long as possible and some traded their lives for the opportunity of one last fare.  

The Thames froze more often than is commonly thought, due to it being fairly shallow, but it froze in chunks as the picture in the gallery from 1677 shows.  Whilst dramatic and great fun, it meant that it wasn't easy to venture out onto the ice, and was unsuitable for one of the famous Frost Fairs for which the Thames is so well-known.  Frost Fairs have been recorded since Elizabethan Times, when it was customary to push a printing press out onto the ice as a test, and if it held, souvenir cards were printed off and sold as a memento of the occasion.  Booths and cook-stalls were set up, selling skates made from whalebone, puppets, gloves, hats and scarves as well as hot chestnuts and pork sandwiches from spits, along with sticky gingerbread and baked apples eaten from newspaper with a spoon.  There were street performers, puppet shows and other entertainments such as singing.  Sometimes, as in 1683, the freeze was so solid that the Thames became a miniature shopping village and the booths were arranged into 'streets'.  I'd imagine the overall feel was like that of the German Christmas markets with their covered, but portable wooden stalls.

The most famous Frost Fair is that of 1814, but I think the one of 1683 sounds more fun, despite the fug caused by the smoke of coal-fires hanging heavy in the air.  The souvenir card in the gallery records the following carried out on the ice (including booths set up as 'branches' of land-based businesses):

The Duke of York's Coffee House
The Tory Booth (?)
The Roast Beefe Booth
The Half way House
The Musick Booth
The Printing Booth
The Lottery Booth
The Sledge drawing coals
The Horne Tavern Booth
The Toy Shoppe
A boat drawn by a horse
A boat drawn on wheels
Bull-baiting and Bear-baiting
Boys sliding (proof that some things never change)
Nine-Pinn Playing
Sliding on Scates

You can see from both pictures there seems to be little or no snow on the ground (but lots of dogs and cats).  Even the earliest Frost Fairs had merry-go-rounds for children, boat-swings and pony-drawn rides, but life off the river probably wasn't quite so much fun. One of the greatest problems during freezes such as this is that the ground froze to depths of two or three feet, making the drawing of water from the wells in the streets difficult, if not impossible and ice had to be gathered and melted, then boiled for domestic use.  One group of people not complaining were the ice merchants who used this weather to fill their under-ground stores and cellars with the cold stuff, packed in straw so that it could be sold in warmer weather.  By the 1720s, the demand for ice had become great enough for dealers in 'ice and snow' to be making a living.  

The thaws, when they came, were sudden and terrifying.  I can find no accounts of booths falling through the ice, so the stallholders were savvy enough to realise when to get out, but there are stories of a ship, moored to the quay of a public house which pulled down both when it fell back into the thawed river in 1789.  There is also the piteous tale in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1763 of a wretch, 'with skaits on..found frozen to death upon some floating ice over against the Isle of Dogs.'

The Thames froze for the last time in 1814 and was solid for four days; solid enough to lead an elephant across the ice near Blackfriars Bridge and erect fairground rides.  The innovations of the Victorian period, such as the new London Bridge and the Embankment caused the river to become narrower, deeper and faster thus ending London's life on ice.

 

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Let us tarry here a while: Advanced Courtship in Georgian London

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Modern commentators are very keen to perpetuate an image of young couples entering into marriage and procreation in a state of complete ignorance but this is not really the case outside the aristocracy (and then only for the girls).  The idea that 18thC swains and shepherdesses met at the country fair, then married after a few chaste kisses is not impossible, but in reality is highly unlikely.  The openness of courting in England in general (outside particularly religious communities) was observed with both astonishment and approval by Continental travellers, who noted young unchaperoned couples eating picnics together on Sundays in London's various pleasure gardens.  Any reader of Samuel Pepys is aware of the amount of grappling a young woman could expect if caught unawares, or if she had led a man to think she might permit it.  I think Sam was rather enthusiastic in his approach, but he certainly sheds light on the interaction between the sexes in the late 17thC and it appears women were not exactly put on a pedestal, unless they were worth a very great deal of money.

As previously noted, during the long 18thC the average age of marriage for men was in the late 20s, and for women, the early 20s.  This doesn't include the upper classes, where sexual continence for the women was paramount before marriage.  To imagine that all these other young, healthy people abstained from sex for over a decade after puberty is plainly rot.  'Bundling' or 'tarrying' is put forward as one theory whereby young couples in an established relationship might engage in minor foreplay and achieve physical intimacy without intercourse: try before you buy, as it were.

This approach makes perfect sense: as a parent you weren't condoning pre-marital sex.  The opposite in fact.  The girl had a knot tied in the bottom of her nightdress, or was wrapped up in a blanket, and the couple were allowed to sleep together, at the girl's home.  This means the parents were approving of the young man, but setting limits upon the relationship.  The man was to stay dressed and outside the blanket.  It is alleged that the Puritans used a 'bundling board', but I think this is more like for the event of strangers sharing the same bed, rather than courting couples.  Only a minute's thought will reveal tarrying to be both a sensible idea, and a bit of a cheat for the girl.  Still, it was infinitely preferable to getting married without knowing your arse from your elbow, so to speak, and very useful for making sure you weren't going to buy the last chicken in the shop.

Bundling is often asserted to be a one-time only deal, but I'm fairly sure that's not true.  After all, if you liked your daughter's suitor but he didn't have quite enough money to marry but had hopes for the future you'd rather she hung onto him by progressing their relationship under some sort of supervision rather than went off with someone else, or got pregnant after a furtive knee-trembler.  If she did get pregnant, through the blanket obviously, it was expected the couple would marry.  After all, the relationship was established in the family, if not the community.  Apprentices were not supposed to marry during their 7 years, but this method of courtship would allow them much more freedom than simple abstinence.  Bundling was really for younger couples, to allow them to learn gradually about a fundamental part of married life.  It also allowed those stolen moments that are so important to developing relationships.

(A more extensive history of bundling is documented in America, where it continued into the 1920s as a folk custom and ritual part of courtship.  It continued even longer in Amish communities.  Bundling has been recorded from about 1600 in Norway, the Netherlands and Germany, as well as England, and finally appears in the Dictionary for 1781, before which it was known as tarrying.)

Fleet Marriages

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During the medieval period, all that was required to marry was that a man and a woman declared themselves bound to each other in front of witnesses.  No priest was necessary, although it was generally accepted that a wedding blessed by the church was beneficial.  As time progressed, this old-fashioned way caused problems: the main one being women and young people, both boys and girls being coerced or forced into marriage for the profit of their families, or future spouses.  The Marriage Act of 1696 made it impossible to get married without banns or a special license, except within the Liberty (or Rules as it is sometimes known) of the Fleet Prison.  This included the pubs and inns, some which specialized in services and had their own marriage certificates printed up (as in the image: the Ditch Side, what a romantic location).

The Fleet was a debtors' prison, and had many noble and famous inmates during its long history.  Various bylaws made prosecution of Fleet clergy impossible, and so the Liberty of the Fleet became the Elvis Chapel of London.  It was possible to walk in off the street and be married legally, at very little cost.  By the 1740s more than half of all London weddings were celebrated within the Fleet's boundaries.  Thomas Pennant's Account of London in the 1790s records on Fleet Street 'the frequent sign of a male and female hand enjoined with "Marriages performed within" written beneath.'  It was possible to be in, sign and get out in under fifteen minutes, as the mammoth number of records for the period shows: over a quarter of a million in fifty years.  Don't be fooled into thinking these people were impulsive children either: the average man was 29 and the average girl 23. Fleet marriages were particularly useful for a large number of couples, and for varying reasons. 

Immigrants were arriving from all over Europe.  Some of them had reached London with little or nothing.  They wanted to get established as quickly as possible, and had met a nice girl from the same community, but they were not yet part of the congregation of the strict French churches, who required serious attendance and commitment in order to conduct a marriage service.  In the rush to find lodgings, food and work, church-going had fallen by the wayside, but they still wanted to make sure their marital status was clear in their new country, and many of the names in the records are French, with their origins such as Normandy or Nimes, noted.  The Fleet was also handy for soldiers and sailors with limited time in which to get married and group weddings were common amongst ship-mates or poorer regiments, with local pubs such as the infamous Belle Sauvage holding set price receptions for the happy, and no doubt very raucous couples.  Lack of parental consent must also have been a driving force behind some of the Fleet weddings, but the Fleet priests did conduct services for abductors and their captives, for an inflated fee I'm sure.  

Another significant factor in these weddings is that people did separate from partners and spouses.  Many didn't bother to marry, but lived together and had children as if they had married.  When their differences became insurmountable, they moved on.  The idea that marriage was an inescapable trap during the 18thC is a modern one.  (Only the aristocracy were stuck with their spouses, who had usually been carefully chosen with an eye to investment and stability, rather than marital harmony.  They were not expected to stay faithful.)  Bigamy does appear in the courts, but usually only when a husband has deserted one partner for another, leaving the original one in financial trouble, and not moving far enough away to avoid detection.  In the Georgian period, it really was possible to leave one place and life behind, and start again.  A man of thirty arriving in London from Cornwall, Lincolnshire, or Stafford for example, would be completely untraceable provided he disclosed his parish of birth or marriage to no one, and that he was not recognised in the street.  Therefore, he would be 'free' to marry and start over again.  An appealing idea, from time to time.

In 1753, Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act was passed, bringing the rules about parental consent for the under 21s and stricter guidelines for the reading of the banns, licences and church celebration.  The Liberty of the Fleet was not exempt.  It did not come into force until the end of the day on 24th of March 1754, when the Fleet Chapel recorded 'near a hundred pair had been joined together' in a single day.  

The London Season and a Curious 'Advertisement'

The London Season came into its own during the 18th century.  Whilst it had always been customary to return to Town at the end of the hunting season, during the 1700s, The Season became established as one long party, beginning in April/May and finishing on the 12th of August.  

A London Season was the aim of most young ladies, who wished to show off their specially purchased finery and hopefully, snare a husband.  For the wealthier girls, getting a husband wasn't the problem; it was finding one who wouldn't gamble it all away that took some nicety in judgement.  Being presented to the Queen didn't start until the Queen Charlotte Ball in 1780, but the 'Marriage Mart' began much earlier.  This mock advertisement tells you more than I could about the realities of looking for a husband in Georgian London.  

Advertisement of a Sale

Be it known to all Men by these Presents, That next Summer at Scarborough (a play on the Scarborough Fair, where exotic goods were sold) will be a vast Collection of fair Hands, brilliant Eyes, rosy Cheeks, nimble Tongues, ivory Teeth, ruby Lips, dimpled Chins, high Fronts, and long Necks; snowy Breasts, handsome Legs, with other valuable Commodities, which will conceal'd till the Merchandizes before mention'd are disposed of: Also large Quantities of kind Glances, studied Courtsies, languising Looks, Sighs, Sneers, Ogles, Smiles, Airs of all sorts, as well as those of Quality, as several invitatory ones from old Maids, and awkward Country Girls: Also some innocent Frowns, stolen Kisses, which may be purchased with a Whisper: Together with several large boxes of right native Blushes, surpassing Carmine, Cochineal or Spanish Wool.

'Tis farther propos'd, There shall be Pictures of all the celebrated Toasts drawn in Black, by a Sett of female Painters, who have such lively Imaginations, that they can paint strongest in the Absence of the Originals, and so nimbly, that they can draw a compleat Piece in the making of a Pot of Tea.  Also several antiquated Faces lately repair'd; Choice of wounded hearts to be had for love: a Cargo of fine Compliments, either with or without a Meaning; vulgar Sayings advanced into Witty Sentences, Jokes Quibbles, Puns, Repartees, and Conundrums in infinite Numbers; Together with Vanity, Scandal, Affectation, Pride, Inconstancy, and some small Remnants of Honour, Virtue, Discretion and Good Behaviour.  Not to omit several Curious Tables, which, besides the visible Furniture of Cards, &c. have secret Drawers, repleat with Oaths, of all sorts, and some new Counterfeit ones for the Ladies, which, with good Management, will pass for real.  There will likewise be some second-hand Faces, Stale Reputations, and Broken Constitutions, for the Use of Batter'd Beaus, maimed Debauchees, and old Batchelors.

This Grand Sale to begin in May next, and continue above four Months.  In the Long Room in the Town aforesaid, Attendance will be given, and the Goods display'd to the best Advantage, every day, Sunday not excepted from 7 till 10 in the Evening. 

N.B. If any Persons would purchase a Quantity of Good Humour, they are desir'd to give timely Notice to procure it, if such a Thing can be Found; otherwise a Stock of Compliance only will be provided against the Sale.  The Ladies may please to observe, that there are several little Drawing Rooms adjoyning to the Ware-house convenient for taking Cold Tea, or other Refreshments.  

The Gentleman's Magazine, 2nd December 1732

 

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