Spitalfields Life

Oxford St in March

Early in the lockdown I pulled the volume of Samuel Pepys’ diary for 1665 from the shelf and, as my daily exercise, wandered over to St Olave’s in Seething Lane to walk in his footsteps through the vacant city.

At first, his diary consoled me like a dark mirror, describing a tragedy so much grimmer and more extreme than in our own times. It was at the end of April that he noted ‘Great fears of the Sickenesse here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up.’ Yet with every day that passed as the numbers of deaths increased, the difference in our circumstances lessened and his words acquired greater immediacy for me.

I took off my watch and let time go adrift since there were no longer any appointments or meetings. From that moment I forgot which day of the week it was, and the rituals of a daily walk and cooking dinner prevailed as the measure of time.

Searching for objective news, I deliberated each evening over the ascendant curve of the mortality rate, willing it to level off and decline until my anxious curiosity was rewarded by the realisation that these figures were unreliable and the true numbers were much higher.

I struggled to write of my experience because I was thinking of those who were suffering while I had the good fortune to remain healthy. As long as I was able to sit safely at home, this crisis was happening to others elsewhere but, without fail, every day on my walk I encountered an ambulance in the street as a constant reminder that it was all around me.

I began sleeping later, discovering that it was the traffic noise which previously woke me early each morning. I slept again as I did when a child, falling off the edge of consciousness into a soft dark oblivion and awakening to birdsong to find the world unfamiliar, as if – every morning – I were a traveller returning from a long journey to wonder at the changes.

Like Pepys, I was grateful that I had written my will and my affairs were in order. I am older than Pepys who was thirty-six years in 1665 and I feel I have already lived many lifetimes, even if I am not ready to leave this one. For the first time I found I was grateful that my parents are dead, since they have been spared these times. I realised was mentally preparing myself for whatever might come.

Each Friday, I cycled to deliver essential supplies to a couple of older friends in West London who live alone and of whom one was shielded. I shall never forget the solitariness of my first trip as the only cyclist in Oxford St on a cold afternoon in spring, traversing the lonely city as if I were the last human alive. Each week, more boards appeared upon the closed-up shops, seemingly in anticipation of the gathering apocalypse. I changed my route, cycling through the back streets of Bloomsbury and Marylebone in a vain hope of avoiding exposure.

I did the most conscientious spring clean of my house I have ever done and sewed all the missing buttons back on my clothes. I did it all slowly. I darned my quilt and I lay on the floor for two days, sewing patches on the sofa where the cat had torn it apart. Each day, I watered the garden and delighted in the plants flourishing as they gained inches in height from one day to the next in the exceptionally warm spring.

Other writers have written of their relative ease in adapting to the lockdown, since our work is solitary by nature and, over years, we learn to be comfortable with our own company. Thus it was with me too, until I fell into a hole when the coronavirus struck.

The virus – and my dawning recognition of the scale of the calamity – have left me with a mental paralysis. I had always been able to force myself to write, resisting tiredness, laziness or indolence. It is different now. I cannot force myself any more, I have to wait until the impulse arises. This is a significant departure for one with such a puritanical work ethic, yet for the first time in years the dark rings have gone from under my eyes. Now I can sit with the cat on my lap in the sunlight and spend the afternoon looking out at the garden, letting my thoughts drift into daydreams just I did in childhood.

When I picked up Pepys’ diary again, I discovered I had fallen out of sympathy with him. At the time of writing this, the cumulative death toll in London has passed ten thousand, as many people have died as perished in a single week in 1665 in a much smaller city. I realised that the quality of Pepys’ diary lies in its emotional authenticity, including some callous observations which make uncomfortable reading. At the height of the plague, he was filled with delight and self-satisfaction that his career was in its ascendancy and his bank account was growing. He was shocked when his coachman was struck down with the plague mid-journey in Holborn and horrified when confronted at night by a corpse on a stretcher on the watermen’s stairs, yet he lived in a bubble of privilege that permitted him to compartmentalise with astonishing disregard.

Once I recovered sufficiently to resume my weekly deliveries by bicycle, I found the city had changed with more people on the streets, dispelling the ghost town atmosphere that had pervaded. I want London to renew itself now, but I do not want it to return to how it was before. I have grown accustomed to the peace. My watch sits on my desk – still ticking – keeping the time of that earlier world before all this happened. I wonder when I shall put it on again.

Trafalgar Sq in March

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Margaret Willes introduces her new book The Domestic Herbal, Plants for the Home in the Seventeenth Century published by the Bodleian Library on 26th June
Mugwort
Artemisia vulgaris

London grew rapidly from the late fifteen-hundreds, becoming the largest city in western Europe by the end of the next century. The possession of a garden was a luxury for the few, so markets were a vital source of fruit and vegetables for the table, along with herbs for seasoning and remedies.

The number of doctors in London in relation to the population was tiny, no more than a hundred were licensed by the Royal College of Physicians in the seventeenth century. Their treatments were not only expensive but sometimes drastic, based on purgative drugs and bloodletting. One woman summed up this situation in trenchant terms, ‘Kitchen physic I believe is more proper than the Doctor’s filthy physic.’ Housewives usually had charge of the health of their families and needed to know what herbs they required for a range of ailments.

Two herbals in particular offered a comprehensive survey. John Gerard, a barber surgeon, compiled his Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes that was publishedin 1597. This provided not only information about the medicinal properties of herbs, fruit, vegetables and flowers, but also descriptions of their cultivation, often based on his own experience in his garden in Holborn. His book is huge, with over eighteen hundred woodcuts and so expensive that copies were passed down through generations just like the family bible.

Five years later came The English Physitian, a herbal by the radical apothecary, Nicholas Culpeper, who had his garden in Spitalfields. The subtitle, An Astrologo-Physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs of this Nation indicates his interest in the influence of the planets on medicine. His book had no illustrations because he wanted it priced at a few pence so that it could be widely available.

The seventeenth century saw women beginning to write their own household manuals. One was Mary Doggett’s, compiled at the very end of the century and now held in the British Library. She was the first wife of Thomas, theatre manager of Drury Lane Theatre and fondly remembered today for the annual  Doggett Coat & Badge race for Thames watermen. Mary’s book includes a wide range of recipes for cooking, distilling and brewing, for medicines, and care of the house.

Unlike many women of her time, Mary Doggett could read and write. Margaret Pepys, mother of the diarist Samuel, was a laundry maid who may well not have had her letters. But her son refers to Margaret sending out her maid to buy herbs from the market in Cheapside to cure his mouth ulcer. No doubt she learnt this remedy from her mother. Pepys does not specify the herbs but an early eighteenth-century recipe for mouth ulcers recommends rue, red sage, brambles and the leaves of ivy and honeysuckle added to vinegar and honey.

Garden Rue
Ruta Hortensis

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing seventeenth-century London households was the threat of bubonic plague. Brought by black rats on ships, it affected ports and spread to country villages as fleas were transferred to their brown cousins. There had been many visitations but the most devastating reached London in December 1664, known as the Great Plague.

The herb believed to be most efficacious against the plague was rue, known as the herb of grace because a bunch was added to holy water for exorcisms. John Gerard recommended mashing the leaves with the kernel of walnuts and figs as an antidote. A recipe ‘most esteemed of in the last Great Visitation’ was included in a printed cookery book seven years after the Great Plague. It took rue and sage and mixed them in wine with spices and a pennyworth of Mithridate. This last ingredient is named after Mithridates, ruler of Pontus in the first century BC, who was obsessed with the fear of being poisoned and had a remedy made up from no less than fifty-five herbs and spices. Apothecaries sold Mithridate, sometimes under the name Venetian Treacle.

The other most-feared disease was smallpox. While the plague proved most deadly for poorer people, living in close quarters, smallpox was no respecter of status, swooping upon the highest in the land. Several members of the royal family died from the disease, including Queen Mary in 1694 aged only thirty-two. Recipes for treating smallpox are rare, but one seventeenth century remedy, Lady Allen’s Water, used a range of herbs and flowers from the garden. Among these were powerful medicinal plants, such as henbane with painkilling properties, which was added to liquorice and white wine, and distilled.

Liquorice
Glycyrrhiza glabra

Smallpox left physical scars, particularly cruel when one of the most important signs of beauty was to have a fair, smooth face. One recipe advised that as the scabs of smallpox began to dry out, they should be treated with salves. John Gerard considered oil of figs to be particularly good, while rosewater was often added to bacon fat and applied. Many recipes called for rosewater. Damask roses were recommended because their stronger scent made them ‘fitter for meate and medicine’ according to Gerard. To make rosewater required such a very large amount of petals that country gardens often had beds set aside especially for the cultivation of roses. When Elizabeth I ‘persuaded’ the Bishop of Ely to give up his palace and garden in Holborn to her dancing partner favourite, Sir Christopher Hatton, he demanded that he should receive twenty bushels of rose petals each year. These surely would have been destined for the episcopal stillroom to make up into a water. One recommendation to Londoners was that they should purchase rose petals when there was a glut. Mary Doggett may have done this, although her recipe book includes a note that she purchased rose water for the goodly sum of £2 from her apothecary.

Damask rose
Rosa damascena

Mary used the rosewater in several of her recipes for keeping the house fragrant. One unusual idea was for aromatic beads, taking scented gums and rose water, and mixing them with the buds of Damask roses. These were coloured with lamp black, the soot collected from oil lamps, rolled in the hand with jasmine oil, and given a gloss before they were made into bracelets.

Housewives made up ‘sweet bags’ with flowers and herbs dried, powdered and distilled. Added to this mixture were aromatic gums expensively acquired from apothecaries or grocers, so it had to be long lasting. Unlike our potpourris, which are displayed in open bowls, the mixture would be kept in bags tightly sealed to retain the scent. One herb often used was sweet marjoram, which also featured in nosegays, carried to mask the smells of unwashed crowds, and against the plague.

Keeping houses sweet and clean presented a challenge. Floors were strewn with rushes acquired from barges that brought them to Thameside wharves. Added to these were sweet smelling herbs, such as bay and rosemary, which could be purchased from street vendors, as illustrated in Cries of London. The custom of strewing gradually declined with the century and instead straw matting was laid on floors. Marcus Laroon’s Cries of London of 1687 includes a pedlar offering door mats and strips of matting for the bedroom.

Seller of straw mats by Marcellus Laroon

A century earlier, a Dutch visitor remarked on how much the English appreciate flowers for their homes. Lemnius Levinus in his diary noted ‘altho’ we do trimme up our parlours with green boughes, fresh herbes or vine leaves scented … yet no nation does it more decently, more trimmely, nor more sightly than they do in England’. At Christmas evergreen shrubs and branches were brought in to decorate the house, a tradition that endures.

Orpine
Hylotelephium telephium

There was also a floral tradition at the opposite part of the year, to celebrate the festival of St John the Baptist on 24th June. John Stow in his chronicles of London described how every door was garlanded with birch, fennel, orpine and lilies. Orpine, a sedum, has the alternative names of ‘livelong’ because of its lasting qualities, and ‘midsummer men’ because of its connections with the summer festival. Another herb connected with midsummer was mugwort, which Culpeper attributed to Venus, hastening delivery in childbirth. Along with St John’s Wort, the herb was burnt on St John’s Eve to purify communities, probably one of a series of examples of how a pagan practice was adopted by the Church.

 
St John’s Wort
Hypericum perforatum

Woodcuts from Gerard’s Herbal © Bodleian Library

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