The London Journal
Volume 25 No.2 2000
ABSTRACTS
VIRGINIA DAVIS, Mendicants in London in the Reign of Richard II (pp. 1-12) The four main mendicant orders of the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites and Austin Friars all had substantial and impressive houses within the City of London, established in the thirteenth century. There was also a house of Crutched Friars near the Tower of London. The membership of these houses in the later middle ages can be at least partially reconstructed using the episcopal ordination lists which survive for the diocese of London from 1361. An analysis of ordinations from the bishops' registers identifies a total of just over 750 individal friars attached to mendicant houses in the City of London in the period from 1361 to 1400. The ordination list material can be used to investigate the changes in recruitment patterns of each of the London mendicant houses. This reveals a particular enthusiasm for those houses associated with ascetic practices. In particular the houses of Carmelites and Austin Friars were being supported but also the smaller house of Crutched Friars which seems to have substantially increased its recruitment as reflected in ordination lists between the 1360s and 1390s.Housing increased markedly in seventeenth-century London despite numerous royal building proclamations and parliamentary statutes against its proliferation. A housing needs approach is used here to better understand the housing circumstance of the poor and mechanick classes in the face of these policies. The schema provides a consistency framework to order what is a composite of various household behaviours and housing opportunities. By partitioning these classes into their respective housing circumstances, we canbegin to appreciate the types and relative magnitudes of housing deprivation they encountered. Depending upon their degree of poverty, the poor sought free shelter, charitably-provided shelter, or crowded into rooms, chambers, tenements, divided housing and so on. But the upper end of the mechanick class might have been able to afford new construction. This aspect is explored first by charting the distribtuion of the quality of housing enjoyed by most Londoners based on their occupation and the number of hearths in their housing. Then some tentative estimates are made of the cost to bukld new housing and what it might lease for annually. Finally, these costs and their associated number of hearths are plotted against the initial distribution of employment and hearths to make a rough assessment that some of the mechanick class could have afforded new construction built according to proclamation requrement and especially to the standards established in the Rebuilding Act following London's great fire. Such an analysis also permits an assessment of the effects on housing provision by the various building proclamations.
This article will argue that the poor relief institutions of seventeenth-century London proved incapable of adequatley responding to the increased poverty caused by the economic disruption of the English Civil War. In so doing it challenges previous 'optimistic' interpretations of poor relief in Civil War London, in particular that of Ronald Herlan. This study uses qualitative rather than quantitative sources to chart the rise of Civil War poverty, but draws on a wide range of materials from the City of London and the suburbs to evaluate the response of poor relief institutions to the wartime social problems. This subject is of vital importance in recapturing Londoners' experience of the war, and this paper will therefore contribute to the understanding of the role of London in the 'English Revolution'.
To overcome London's gross unpreparedness for war seen during the September 1938 Munich crisis, a regional organisation was inserted between Whitehall and the Town Halls to co-ordinate the work of the local authorities responsible for taking Air Raid Precautions. Co-ordinated by this unelected body, London was reasonably prepared when the blitz opened in September 1940. However, severe problems were exposed and these were successfully tackled on a regional basis. So well did most London local authorities cope with their unprecedented wartime responsibilities that, although executive action was necessary in Stepney and West Ham, the national government declined to consider the reform of London government on regional lines for two decades. Although W.A. Robson argued stridently for an elected regional authority, the status quo ante was restored in 1945 since when the valuable experience of London's wartime regional government has been effectively ignored.
The purpose of this essay is to compare the working lives of London and New York dockworkers. It was their relationship to work that defined their day-to-day existence, a trait shared by all workers. London and New York City dockers challenged definitions of their work by creating a cultural identity that recognized their skills and 'knowledge' of the job. The post-World War II working world of London and New York dockworkers had changed little since the beginning of the twentieth century. The increasing use of forklifts had alleviated some of the heavy lifting, but the physical movement of cargoes in and out of ships remained a backbreaking job. What is remarkable about both sets of workers was their shared sense of work. True, there existed enormous differences in terms of race and ethnicity. While New York longshoremen were strictly segregated by race and ethnicity, London dockers on the whole were a unified but not necessarily monolithic group. When examining their respective work cultures what is evident are the connections between them, that is, similarities of the work transferred into attitudes and behaviour on the job. The intention of this essay is to highlight those connections by examining the job of the dockworker, the attitudes of the men to the work, the perils of the job including accident rates and poor sanitary conditions, and the use of pilferage as a vital indicator of entitlement.
Contents List of Vol. 25 No. 2