7
One of the few compensations for the obliteration of Silver Street and its environs is that the area has been thoroughly studied by archaeologists. Most of the excavation took place in the 1950s, under the aegis of W. F. Grimes, Keeper of the London Museum. His work, done before the wholesale redevelopment of the area, has been supplemented by more recent, small-scale digs under Elizabeth Howe and David Lakin.40 Finds relating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are sparse, because this stratum was disturbed during the Victorian era, when cellars and basements were dug beneath existing properties. The sparseness of evidence may also relate to the social status of the area, for it suggests that most household rubbish was hauled away, rather than dumped in the yards behind properties - a desirable state of affairs for the Jacobean resident but disappointing to the later archaeologist.
Two sites have been excavated just to the south of Silver Street, one between St Olave’s churchyard and Oat Lane, and the other near the churchyard of St Mary Staining.41 Most of the finds that belong at least broadly to our period are the usual relics - shards of pottery, including bowls, jugs, cups, cauldrons and cooking-pots. The pottery is of various kinds popular in the city - ‘post mediaeval redware’ (fired from clay with a high presence of iron, giving it a reddish-brown tinge), ‘Tudor green ware’, ‘Cheam whiteware’ and ‘coarse border ware’ originating from the Surrey-Hampshire border. But among these fragments were found some objects which offer a more intimate glimpse of daily life in this corner of Cripplegate - a knife with a spirally decorated bone handle; a tobacco pipe; a porringer; and, in the back-fill of a brick-lined pit, a complete seventeenth-century chamber-pot.
There was also found some imported ware - two stoneware drinking jugs, one from the famous kilns of Raeren in eastern Belgium; and, more unusually, a small bowl in Valencian lustre-ware, decorated in blue and copper lustre with motifs suggestive of Arab calligraphy - a flicker of exotic colour in a sombre Cripplegate interior.
Another interesting discovery was part of an alembic, or, as Shakespeare spells it in Macbeth, a ‘limbeck’. This was a vessel used in distillation: a domed container with a long spout near the rim. Its presence could be connected with metal-working in the area, or possibly with the medical profession. The use of distillation and sublimation in preparing medicines was part of the controversial new ‘chymicall physick’ proposed by the followers of the German mystic and healer Paracelsus - mercury preparations for syphilis were especially popular.42 An alembic was also an essential part of the alchemist’s laboratory.
Also suggestive is the skeleton of a female peregrine falcon, found in a stone-lined cesspit off Oat Lane. The peregrine - ‘the most spectacular and prestigious bird used in falconry’ - is an indicator of high status. Elsewhere were found remains of a goshawk and three sparrowhawks. These were birds kept for hunting and sport - the open land beyond the city walls was used for falconry. Shakespeare was knowledgeable about hawking (as about so much else), and deploys his knowledge in over forty separate images in his plays, as in the marvellous lines from Othello likening an unfaithful wife to a ‘haggard’ or untrained falcon -
If I do prove her haggard,
Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings,
I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind
To prey at fortune. (3.3.264-7)
These random relics come from the kitchens, bedrooms, work-shops and bird-roosts of houses close to Silver Street, at a time close to Shakespeare’s residence there. We could guess at hundreds of other objects that might have been there, but these things were actually there. There are not very many of them, and most are only fragments, but they are authentic in the way that a guessed object - the costume-drama prop - is not.
They belong to the community of which Shakespeare was briefly a part, but they do not take us into the Mountjoy house. To cross that threshold we have to turn not to the preserved contents of the parish’s tips and middens, but back once more to the papers and parchments of the Belott-Mountjoy suit. Shakespeare could not remember ‘what implementes and necessaries of houshould stuffe the defendant gave the plaintiff in marriadge’, but the plaintiff himself remembered well enough, and they are listed in the first set of interrogatories. We are thus privileged with a brief inventory of some of the furnishings - though by no means the best or smartest of them - in the Mountjoy house in 1604:
One old featherbed
One old feather bolster
A flock bolster
A thin green rug
Two ordinary blankets woven
Two pair sheets
A dozen of napkins of coarse diaper
Two short tablecloths
Six short towels & one long one
An old drawing table
Two old joined stools
One wainscot cupboard
One twisting wheel of wood
Two pair of little scissors
One old trunk and a like old trunk
One bobbin box
The list is precise - the furnishings go from the bedroom to the dining room to the workroom - and somewhat bitter in its phrasing: things are ‘old’ or ‘little’ or ‘thin’ or ‘coarse’, when they might have been new, large, plush and soft. Belott refers to them at one point as ‘some few trifles’ (deposition of Thomas Flower). The list has an agenda - how stingy the provisions of the father-in-law for the new couple setting up together - though it also offers a broader sociological point. These meagre furnishings - these few ‘parcells of goodes’ - convey the bareness, the unaccoutredness, of the great majority of rooms in Jacobean London.
This is lumber from the house on Silver Street - not the actual stuff in Shakespeare’s rooms, but something very similar: the featherbed, the green rug, the wainscot cupboard.