Daily Life in Elizabethan London, 1590s: Shakespeare's City
Lives Before Ours
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In 1598 a German lawyer stood on London Bridge and counted the human heads on the gate at the far end. He recorded more than thirty. Nobody crossing beneath them was looking up.
Three and a half hours inside Tudor London in the 1590s — Shakespeare's decade, and the hungriest one the city had known. A penny to stand in the yard at the playhouse and a chained bear in the ring next door. Butter forced down to threepence a pound by three hundred apprentices. A plague that took roughly one Londoner in eight, counted by elderly women the city refused to believe. A tax office that chased an unpaid thirteen shillings and fourpence across four jurisdictions, which is how we know where Shakespeare moved. Built from parish registers, court depositions, account books, tax rolls and one letter home about a bed of parsley — and read slowly, at a low volume, for listening in the dark. Where the record runs out, the script says so.
00:00 — The Crossing
07:10 — The Wall and What It Held
18:22 — Indoors, After Dark
29:27 — A Penny to Stand
42:50 — What the Poor Paid With
54:40 — One Word
1:09:11 — Bound
1:20:01 — The Law About Fish
1:32:35 — The Cries
1:43:47 — Strangers
1:57:09 — Setting the Price
2:07:28 — The Sworn Word
2:20:42 — Six in the Morning
2:32:17 — The Road In
2:42:51 — The Sickness
2:56:40 — Coming In and Going Out
3:08:18 — The Last of the Light
SOURCES
John Stow, A Survey of London (1598)
Philip Henslowe's Diary and the Alleyn Papers, Dulwich College
Edward Alleyn's letter to his wife Joan, 1 August 1593 — transcribed from the manuscript by Prof. Grace Ioppolo, Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project
The casebooks of Simon Forman, Bodleian Library — transcribed by the Casebooks Project, University of Cambridge (Lauren Kassell and colleagues)
Thomas Platter's travel diary, September 1599
Paul Hentzner, Itinerarium — England, 1598
Parish clerks' memorandum books, St Botolph without Aldgate (Thomas Harridance, clerk 1582–1601)
Bridewell Court Minute Books, Bethlem and Bridewell archive
London Consistory Court depositions — Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers (OUP)
Lay Subsidy rolls, St Helen's Bishopsgate — Shakespeare Documented, Folger Shakespeare Library
Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors: The Untold Story
Statutes: the Statute of Artificers (1563), the Navigation Act (1563), the Witchcraft Act (1563), the Vagabonds Act (1597)
Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds · David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order · Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage · Museum of London Archaeology, excavations at the Rose (1988) and the Globe (1989)
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Daily Life in Elizabethan London, 1590s: Shakespeare's City
Lives Before Ours
7,887 views
In 1598 a German lawyer stood on London Bridge and counted the human heads on the gate at the far end. He recorded more than thirty. Nobody crossing beneath them was looking up.
Three and a half hours inside Tudor London in the 1590s — Shakespeare's decade, and the hungriest one the city had known. A penny to stand in the yard at the playhouse and a chained bear in the ring next door. Butter forced down to threepence a pound by three hundred apprentices. A plague that took roughly one Londoner in eight, counted by elderly women the city refused to believe. A tax office that chased an unpaid thirteen shillings and fourpence across four jurisdictions, which is how we know where Shakespeare moved. Built from parish registers, court depositions, account books, tax rolls and one letter home about a bed of parsley — and read slowly, at a low volume, for listening in the dark. Where the record runs out, the script says so.
00:00 — The Crossing
07:10 — The Wall and What It Held
18:22 — Indoors, After Dark
29:27 — A Penny to Stand
42:50 — What the Poor Paid With
54:40 — One Word
1:09:11 — Bound
1:20:01 — The Law About Fish
1:32:35 — The Cries
1:43:47 — Strangers
1:57:09 — Setting the Price
2:07:28 — The Sworn Word
2:20:42 — Six in the Morning
2:32:17 — The Road In
2:42:51 — The Sickness
2:56:40 — Coming In and Going Out
3:08:18 — The Last of the Light
SOURCES
John Stow, A Survey of London (1598)
Philip Henslowe's Diary and the Alleyn Papers, Dulwich College
Edward Alleyn's letter to his wife Joan, 1 August 1593 — transcribed from the manuscript by Prof. Grace Ioppolo, Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project
The casebooks of Simon Forman, Bodleian Library — transcribed by the Casebooks Project, University of Cambridge (Lauren Kassell and colleagues)
Thomas Platter's travel diary, September 1599
Paul Hentzner, Itinerarium — England, 1598
Parish clerks' memorandum books, St Botolph without Aldgate (Thomas Harridance, clerk 1582–1601)
Bridewell Court Minute Books, Bethlem and Bridewell archive
London Consistory Court depositions — Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers (OUP)
Lay Subsidy rolls, St Helen's Bishopsgate — Shakespeare Documented, Folger Shakespeare Library
Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors: The Untold Story
Statutes: the Statute of Artificers (1563), the Navigation Act (1563), the Witchcraft Act (1563), the Vagabonds Act (1597)
Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds · David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order · Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage · Museum of London Archaeology, excavations at the Rose (1988) and the Globe (1989)