London Merchants and Their Residences - Professor Simon Thurley CBE

well it's very nice to be here again lizard I've been talking about medieval merchants the city and their architecture and those of you who came to my last lecture where I started off this subject you will remember that I looked at the houses of London merchants from the 12th century to the late 14th century so there's a release of early period but this evening I want to move on into the 15th and 16th centuries but as we saw last time any attempt to try and paint a picture of how these merchants lived in the city was badly hindered by the fact that almost everything all the physical evidence all the buildings were either destroyed in 1666 or in later rebuilding or of course ultimately by the Blitz in the Second World War archeology and building accounts and descriptions helped as I showed last time but there was no where you could go in London and see a medieval merchants house well I'm afraid things are little better in the period we are looking at this evening but we must remember that the great fire didn't quite destroy the whole city as you see here this well-known print because the flames didn't reach this area around here and in particular didn't reach this area up here the area a long and Bishopsgate and if we focus on the areas where the great fire didn't reach we find that there are some crumbs of information in fact more than crumbs about the later architecture of the mercantile classes about the merchants themselves and how they fitted into society as a whole so this is Bishopsgate going up here on the copper plate map here's Leadenhall down here and just the beginnings of Bishopsgate obviously going up to the actual gate itself and bishops gate goes out he's woods joins up with all the main roads going out to East Anglia it was a very convenient spot for the merchants to build their houses obviously in the middle of the city wasn't Paul's Cathedral a popular commercial rendezvous but not far away was was was Cheapside the main shopping street where the traders also acted as bankers and closest still was the recently founded Royal Exchange at corn Hill in Elizabeth's reign where wholesale merchants traded and AM spot news and this whole corner of the city up here as you can begin to see was much less densely populated than this central area here so if you were a merchant with a great deal of money you intended to hope to be able to build in this part of the city where you could have a little bit more space and so are actually on Bishopsgate we have evidence of three of the most splendid and important merchants houses ever to be built in London first of all we have sapore inder's mansion the outstanding survival of a London timber-framed house built before the great fire now of course I'm showing you here a coloured print of it but if you want to see pulp in this house you should go to the VNA because that facade you see there is on display in there and galleries it was built around $15.99 by Paul Pinder who you see here he was born in probably 1565 and he dies in 1650 he's a wealthy merchant he's knighted in 1620 by James the first and his business activities enabled him to invest in speculative trading expeditions loan large sums of money Charles the first and contribute to the absolutely colossal sum of 10,000 pounds towards the repair Paul's Cathedral however the problems that the country ran into in the 1640s and Charles the First's inability to repay him some very big loans left Pinder with massive debts which still remained when he died but in 1597 Pinder brought abort several properties on Bishop's Bishopsgate without so there's the wall of the city the ditch there is Bishopsgate itself and he bought some properties and just over here and on these he built a mansion with this famous famous Street facade three and a half stories high and behind that a garden that looked out over the open lands of more more fields and Finsbury fields so you see he gets all this space out the bag and to the right of this there is a sort of gateway which led down the side of the house and gave access to the area behind now facades of several stories with these from jetted fronts weren't particularly rare in London in 1600 but Pinder's house was actually unusually large and this incredible facade was particularly striking and the house was in fact grand enough to serve as the residence of pietro Contin Contarini the Venetian ambassador to the courtesan James in 1617 218 Contarini Chaplin described it as and I quote a very commodious mansion which had heretofore served as the residence of several former ambassadors so not only this particular ambassador staying but obviously other ones had been staying there too now it doesn't look very big when you look at it on this view but this view is very misleading because it doesn't actually show the whole house the whole house lies behind Bishopsgate now unfortunately we don't have a plan of it because it's all got rid of before that happens but the work of antiquarians did start to make a record of it and this is a remarkable piece of survival this is a copy an absolute copy taken from plaster molds of one of the rooms in paul Pinder's house it was made by lady Bailey and was taken to Leeds Castle in Kent and that is where you can see the ceiling of poor Pinder's house bizarrely in the so called heraldry room and you can see it's a magnificent M ceiling so the work of antiquarians saved bits of the house including the the facade and in the V&A and this the ceiling but also made this record and what this record shows is a record actually of blood gate prison and not of poor Pindus house but here is Bishopsgate Street and here is the famous house and actually the house really contains all this space here at the back and this really is just these Street facade and what we will be seeing this evening is that these very large pair of merchants houses very often had extremely modest at street front expressions and really that the size and magnificence lay behind the main thoroughfare now although we know very little actually about poor Pinder's house apart from the famous front facade we know quite a bit more about the slightly earlier house built within the city walls on the west side of Bishopsgate by Sir Thomas Gresham the man to whom we owe the pleasure of sitting here this evening thank you very much the Thomas aggression bought an acre of land on the west side of Bishopsgate this is a huge amount of land in the city and here we see Bishopsgate and here we see the acre of land that Gresham bought and I think it's interesting to note that the Bishopsgate facade is this tiny thing rather like Paul Pinder's house this little um archway here he actually owned a very big street frontage on on Broad Street here but he chose not to make it the principal entrance to his house and in fact this is a range of arms houses built along here because the prestigious entrance where all the other top merchants were living was was on Bishopsgate so that's where his entrance actually was so this is William Morgan's map of 1682 by which stage his house as you can see by the lettering here had been turned into Gresham College array you can see it also just on the copper plate map and if you follow up Bishopsgate here I think what you're looking at here is just the just off the top of the plate the the that the house of Sir Thomas Gresham it was a very big house and it was immortalized because of course on his death it was left to Gresham College to be its headquarters and in this state it was engraved by George virtue and published in wards lives of the professor's of Gresham College a book published in 1740 from which this dates now by then many changes had taken place but the key features of this original mansion can still be seen and I'm a bit disappointed that this seems to have become very pixelated on this screen so it's a little bit difficult to see but when you go home and consult your own copy of wards lives of the aggression professors published in 1740 you will see that an up here wishes where Bishopsgate is there is a little tiny gate and a little passageway leading to a courtyard that leads into the house itself and the main house belonging to Gresham in the Elizabethan period is here this is the Great Hall here are the ancillary buildings and this of course later on tends to be the college and these are those arms houses along a broad street that I showed you on the map now unfortunately although we have this wonderful drawing we don't have a plan of these rooms here be wonderful to have a plan this but we don't have that unfortunately we know from looking at various and deeds and descriptions that there was indeed the Great Hall we know that he had a long gallery tempting to think that maybe the long gallery was along here looking over the gardens but we don't know but the fact is is that although this was certainly in the top two or three of the grandest houses the Elizabethan merchants we don't really know much about it and so we get to where I want to get to this evening we have to turn to a third House on Bishopsgate and of this house some parts still exist and this of course is Crosbie place or as it's known Crosbie Hall this house was described by John Stowe in his survey of London when he calls it of stone and timber very large and very beautiful and the highest at that time in London pretty high praise and as it happens the praise was probably not exaggerated for as we shall see this was an extraordinary house but first of all where is Crosby all today well I'm sure most people in this room know that Crosby Hall is not in the City of London it is now in fact in Chelsea and this is the stone hall which you see here it survived the great fire in that corner of the city which survived it it survived various other perils including an 18th century fire and eventually the site of Crosby Hall was bought by the Bank of India for redevelopment and after a huge campaign the bank agreed to pay to move Crosby Hall stone by stone bulk by bulk to a site in Chelsea that was given by the London County Council moved to Chelsea it was remodeled by the architect Walter Godfrey the arts-and-crafts architect who added this additional accommodation here to accommodate the federation of university women and it became a hall of residence for them they continued to occupy it until it was purchased by the financier Christopher Moran in 1989 now what Christopher Moran inherited was the Great Hall of the of the 15th century house and as far as we can tell in all Godfrey's note survived the thing really was moved very very carefully and what we have there today although this outer cladding is mostly dating from the 1910s everything else inside is very much the original original building but what the current owner has decided to do is to build a mansion around it in 16th and 17th century architectural styles to try and put this Great Hall back into some sort of context and so today when you look at it across the river this is what you see here is the river facade here is the gable of the original Great Hall and this remarkable sort of what looks like us of jacobian facade is in fact this with big gables put on the top and the windows enlarged so you have a Jacobean range here you have a sort of early 16th century range here and if you were to sit in that window there and look out and take a photograph that's what you would see you would see this facade facing the river and built in the style of the 1520's you steel this dining room facade built in the style of the 1570s courtyard in the middle and to the left the original Great Hall so although we have what was almost certainly the greatest of the medieval merchants halls in London it's very obviously not in the city and it's very hard to get any any feeling of what it was like in its heyday but before it was moved in 1910 it was already the most celebrated relic of mercantile architecture in London and since the late 18th century it had been drawn and measured by antiquarians and architects and so as well as this very precious surviving relic the hall we actually have a completely unique record of this very remarkable house but my starting point this evening is not the architecture of Crosby place but its founder John Crosby and here I show you the tomb of Sir John Crosby and his wife Agnes from a book called Capote Kuril monuments printed in the 18th century and this monument you see here remains today in st. Helens Bishop's great Bishopsgate where you can still if you're prepared to clamber across the tambourines and junkets get close to it in the church and admire it and it is an absolute masterpiece of late 15th century alabaster carving here is Sir John on the right not dressed in his automatic robes but lying in full plated armor with his mantle gathered up over his right shoulder he's bareheaded and you can see his cropped hair and underneath his head it's not a pillow but that's his helmet he doesn't carry a sword but at his waist which is fastened by a belt is a dagger and at his feet which I couldn't photograph because there were too many tambourines in the way you can see when you go there and it's really worth going in and they're very very easy and relaxed about letting you in if the place is locked I didn't ring on the doorbell is this wonderful lion who's looking up and looking at him in the eye so he is in this tomb and the original tomb had a brass inscription round it which is now lost but this inscription originally encouraged people to pray for the soul of my quote John Crosbie Knight alderman and during a portion of his life mayor of the staple of the town of Calais now I think this tomb is one of the most fascinating things in the whole of the City of London here is the tomb of possibly the richest merchant of the middle of the 15th century and he describes and depicts himself as a soldier not as a merchant now why is this and what do you think it tells us about this incredible house that he built in Bishop's Cape well we don't know exactly when John Crosbie was born but we do know that he became a freeman of the grocer's company between 1452 and 1450 for now you normally became a freeman when you were around 25 years old and so Crosby was probably born sometime around 14 27 the young Crosby was apprenticed to a successful grocer a man called John young the details of his apprenticeship are lost but apprentices from wealthy families and we think Crosby came from one of those normally paid a fee to their master and reimbursed the master for and food and lodgings while he was an apprentice it was normal for and grocers to be in print in apprenticeship for about a decade after which period the training was declared over and the apprentice would buy their freedom for a fee Crosby won his freedom of the company and his fee of three shillings and fourpence payable on being sworn in was entered into the grocer's ledger of 1452 254 now the grocer's had originally been called the peppers because they were trading in pepper but in recognition of the increasing diversity of the goods in which they traded in the late 14th century they changed their name to grossest their primary business was in spices obviously pepper but they also traded in fruit and generally some high-value raw materials such as wax dyes saltpeter and alum most of their trade was with the Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula and goods from there arrived in London and were weighed on the great beam a huge balance used weights gauged in the heavy mercantile pound the pound called the gross and of course it was from this unit of measurement the gross that the company took their name the grocer's so imported goods which had been weighed and the beam were then traded across England and their ships returning to the Mediterranean were loaded up with English cloth and wool for export this was an incredibly lucrative trade and one that made the grocer's amongst the richest and most influential merchants in the city now although John Crosbie was apprenticed to one of the most successful merchants in the most prestigious company he entered the city in around 14:37 a time of profound economic depression in the fourteen 40s and 1450s the total value of English trade declined by one-third as for any recession there were many reasons behind this but of most importance was domestic political instability and a weak and indecisive government that England had this led to various international conflicts and of course trade which needs stable and secure conditions in which to flourish just simply did not have that so this is the man who was responsible for the chaos Henry the sixth and his loss of Normandy then conflicts with Denmark and a war with the Hansa were compounded by a ban on English cloth imposed by burgundy between 1447 and 1452 there was also to make things worse an acute shortage of silver coinage right the way across Europe and this in here veted normal trading transactions severely and in particular made it very difficult to get credit at the same time as this sort of more or less economic meltdown was going on the English Crown's finances were in really terminal crisis by 1449 the crown was three hundred and seventy two thousand pounds in debt and this was in a period where its annual income was about seventy thousand pounds a year merchants were extremely reluctant to lend money to the king suspecting quite rightly that they would never get it back and so in order to raise cash the crown began to undermine the privileges of the city companies and one of the most important of these privileges was the operation of the Calais staple from 1314 all wool traded abroad had to be sold through a town designated as a staple the reason for this was so that the crown could monitor the volume of trade and then tax it appropriately but these staples soon benefited not only the crown but also the merchants because a group of them could band together and form a company that had a monopoly granted by the crown to operate the staple so from 1463 Calais which was then of course an English town was the English cloth staple run by a company of 26 merchants staplers in their 1440s Henry the six desperate to make money started to sell licenses to merchants to trade directly with Dutch cloth makers bypassing the Cali staple and the staplers markup and this became typical of a series of interventions in the patterns of international trade taken by Henry the sixth to benefit the crown and a disadvantage the merchant community in the city now looking at the 15th century it does often seem incredibly complicated the sort of political shenanigans that were going on but actually you know the principles of government in 15th century England were much more straightforward than they might seem more or less all sections of society held a mutual interest in strong monarchy with authority to lead and govern to uphold justice law and order because the Herot the principle of hereditary monarchy was now universally accepted this needs to maintain nor an order was undermined when there was a minority and might be undermined further if genetics through upper a king who was really incapable of effective rule and in these circumstances such as happened under Henry the sixth people saw the job of the aristocracy as to show the king the way to put the king back on the right track to remove bad influences from being around him and help the king re-establish order so in this way monarchy in the 15th century was intensely personal it relied on the character of the king and his ability to command confidence trust and loyalty and this is why ladies and gentlemen under the weak kingship of Henry the sixth with economic recession defeat at war financial mismanagement corruption and the arbitrary exercise of royal privilege we see an increasing politicization of society the aristocracy jockeyed for position to try and either get the king to govern more effectively or to replace him while the mercantile classes in the city would basically back which ever faction was most likely to create stable conditions for trade and it was in this increasingly charged environment is Froebel a political environment that John Crosbie learned his trade in July 1415 an uprising of disgruntled Kentish Commons marched on London they were led by Jack Cade he gave his name to the rebellion and he at the time styled himself Jack a Mendel now Jack fix it all his complaint which he put forward is worth quoting as it summarizes a complaint with which the city merchants came to sympathize and this is what his complaint was we say our Sovereign Lord may understand that his false counsel has lost his law his merchandize is lost his common people destroyed the sea is lost France is lost the king himself is so set that he may not pay for his own meat or drink and he owes more than any King of England ought to so instead of collaborating with the city raising troops and fighting Cade and his rebels as they approached London Henry the six fled leaving the city by itself to face off the Kentish Minh alone this I would suggest was a turning point in the relationship between the merchants and the city and the crown the city oligarchy now knew that they were on their own and with strengthening resolve senior members of the merchant community began to act to safeguard their privileges and livelihoods prominent amongst these was John Crosby's Master John Young he was elected an auditor of the city in 1449 and young and his brother who's a lawyer Thomas became key figures not only in Crosby's life but in the politics of the city because Thomas Young John Young's brother the the brother of Crosby's master who was MP for Bristol was also the lawyer of Richard Duke of York and in 1451 together with the Duke he devised a legal case to state that York was in fact the rightful heir to the throne of England and that as Henry the sixth had no issue the Duke should be recognized formally as the heir to the throne and this case puts to Parliament by John Young was accepted and on its acceptance the king was furious and Thomas Young was sent to the Tower of London but the Duke of York's chance to press this formal recognition of his status came in the summer of 1453 when the King's mental health deteriorated and he was left in a state of catatonic schizophrenia this is not a thing ladies and gentlemen that you want to have it left him basically sitting on its throne staring into space unable to speak unable really to do anything very much despite the Queen's attempt to grab the powers of government in the name of her newly born infant son it was actually Richard of York who took the Regency and in the year in which he held power before Henry the sixth recovery and resumption of power York down on alien merchants in the city and one more friends in the merchant community since this is the political background to John Crosby's apprenticeship a period in which he lived with John Young who is one of the most important and loyal supporters of the Yorkist cause in the city and so it is not remotely surprising that Crosby too became a strong supporter of the Duke of York as he assumed his independent life as a merchant and Freeman so let's return to his tomb innocent Helens and let's look at this gold collar that he wears round his neck now we're very familiar with these gold collars he's chains of s's that were worn in the Tudor period but the Yorkists had a version themselves and if when we look closely at this collar we will see that is made up of the two most important badges of the Lancastrian kingship there is the white rose of Lancaster of White Rose of York and the the the start that the Sunburst of of York the personal badge of Edward the fourth so John Crosbie is lying there wearing the livery collar of King Edward the fourth well of course as we all know it wasn't Richard Duke of York who was in the end to become the Yorkist King it was his son Edward who with the help of Richard Neville the Earl of Warwick Warwick the kingmaker saw him become King in 1461 Edwards position on the throne was unsteady for a decade because Henry the sixth was still alive and in 1471 with the help of the Kings brother the Duke of Clarence and Warwick the kingmaker the enfeebled Henry the sixth was briefly restored to the throne in the ensuing chaos in which eventually Edward the fourth of course won back his crown Sir John Crosbie had his finest hour in an attempt upon the City of London by the marvelously named bastard fokin burg now thomas fokin burg was one of the bastard sons of William Neville the Earl of Kent a very prominent and Lancastrian heir Stoke rat the bastard was a Seafarer to be more precise a gentleman pirate who succeeded in becoming the leader of a rebellion to unseat Edward the fourth who had been restored to the throne in 1471 burg moved to London with selection of his piratical followers and a sprinkling of troops who he had got from the English garrison at Calais men from all over Kent joined his army as he advanced on the city but as he advanced on the city he heard the news that Edward the fourth had pretty decisively defeated the Lancastrians at the battles first of Barnet and Tewksbury but nevertheless he advanced towards London to confront the citizens from across the river at Southwark the mayor and the aldermen had received his letters asking for safe passage through the city and rejected them not only fearing the chaos that these Kentish rebels would cause in the city but actually having a genuine loyalty to Edward the fourth who after all had just won two incredibly decisive battles over the Lancastrians as cannons were removed from Fokin berg's ships and set up in Southwark facing the city the citizenry rallied to defend themselves and they were in a very good position Edward the fourth had left the Tower of London well-stocked with arms and ammunition and two key Yorkist commanders Lord Dudley the constable of the tower and Lord Rivers the Earl of Essex were in command of the troops but absolutely crucially and this is the crucial point the city oligarchy the aldermen were strongly Yorkist in matters of security law and order the sheriff of the city was in charge having taken an oath on his installation to defend the city and the county of Middlesex and it was in this way that John Crosbie who was one of the two sheriffs found himself in the forefront of the defense of the city against a genuine real and effective attack and the bastards attack was on to prot two fronts two prongs a direct assault on London Bridge and another from the east on all gate and while the attack on London Bridge was repulsed repulsed fokin Berg's men actually managed to force through all gate and were only driven off by a concerted counter-attack led from the city in the end it was a rout poking Berg's men fleeing for their lives chased by the enraged Londoners seven days later Edward the fourth entered London to great rejoicing and John Crosbie was amongst the aldermen who was knighted for their bravery in securing the city against the Lancastrian rebels now all of this is absolutely vital in understanding Crosby and his building ambitions let's return once again to his tomb in st. Helens if we're to compare this effigy that we've studied quite closely now with the memorial laid down to a wealthy vintner simon seaman who was buried in 1433 and whose brass image survives in sand Mary's Church in Barton upon Humber we can see what the typical self image of a 15th century merchant was he here is dressed in his long rich grat gown as a civilian he stands not on an aggressive lion but on two wine kegs around him and not I mean you can't resi this actually but are not heraldic badges but his but shields containing his merchants mark we also have this remarkable album in the Guildhall showing what ik watercolors of 26 aldermen during the morality of the Mercer John Olney in 1446 215 these men in their all demonic robes are how rich merchants at Crosby's times were portrayed Crosby was different he in fact that the fact is is that very few London merchants had been knighted in the 14th century not even the great Richard Whittington who was much richer than many knights achieved or perhaps even wanted a knighthood this situation drastically changed under Edward the for the King knighted aldermen at both his and his Queen's coronation and after the Battle of Tewkesbury when he came back to London after the bastard had been defeated he knighted twelve aldermen including Crosby and so at a stroke half of the all demonic court were Knights in fact it's from the reign of Edward the fourth that the tradition still going today of knighting the mayor the Lord Mayor of London actually starts so whilst this unquestionably represented Edwards and gratitude to the aldermen for their support it also represents an increased appetite amongst the city elite to be seen as Knights so Crosby at first did not build a house he leased one this is a Bishopsgate he leased one from this institution here which was the nunnery of Helens Bishopsgate and amazingly that big chunk of the nunnery survives today here is the church Crosby's tomb is about here it's a very very unusual Church because it's got two aisles this aisle here was the nuns aisle and here is the nunnery this was the parish I'll which is the parish church right next door to it and that is reflected in the facade of the church you can see today here is the nuns door and here is the the parish door and it is from this this this nunnery that Crosby rents a house here the church I've just shown you is over here here is bishops Kate and here is the land that Sir John Crosby takes on a lease of 99 years from the the prior s in 1466 Minh Thuy trun tidge like the other houses I showed you you entered it through a little alleyway he had six tenements six shops which Crosby owned he used those for rental purposes and but behind those shops was his house the main part of which was the Great Hall which we've already seen here is an Elizabethan drawing showing the great lantern on top of the Great Hall and here is what it looked like in Bishop's great gate with its bay window he's very densely packed windows and this building at right angles to it inside it's magnificent a roof a barrel vaulted roof which we'll talk about in a little bit more in a moment and you can see from an antiquarian drawing here the way these pendants drop down very very fashionable feature pendants just invented in the 14 60s when this hall is it is built and you can see another view of the interior here with these high windows and this plain wall here designed for the hanging of tapestry so at right angles to the hall here was a two-story building on the ground floor of this was the great parlor and on the first floor was the Great Chamber and here you see a view of that building at right angles with the damage at the end here so you can see the great the great ceiling first floor great chamber the ground floor parlor and here you see the staircase in plan so here's the hall this isn't this walls taken out of later day but here is the hall the door through here to the parlor this is the ceiling of the parlor you're looking at and a staircase leading up and you can see in this cross-section here is the Great Hall the parlor on the ground floor and the Great Chamber on the first floor for this wonderful elaborate ceiling by the time this drawing is done it's lost its bay windows but you can see in this drawing there's that fantastic ceiling the floors disappeared off a floor the Great Chamber the the ground floor the parlor with these big bay windows looking out into the courtyard now at first sight this building looks a bit like those three room merchants houses that I was talking about before Christmas oops a Great Hall a parlor for and public entertaining and a room above in which you would sleep just three rooms which is basically what happened before the 15th century but this house is a lot bigger than that because this apart here was essentially like a sort of series of staterooms the rest of the house was over here another courtyard series of rooms and a whole court at the back containing and kitchens and other ancillary and buildings and what you see here is an antiquarian survey showing the the vaults that existed underneath the rest of Crosby's house that were discovered as a redevelopment went on and as far as we know his best rooms would have been in this and southern range here it's as eastern range here overlooking his gardens and there was a back gate here through which his service quarters could be could be stopped so if you came to visit him you've come in through here you've go into the staterooms or you'd go into his private rooms here and if you were servicing it you'd come in through the back and here is a drawing of that back gate as it survived now unfortunately we don't actually know who designed this great building but we do know that it is extremely similar to this building here in fact looking at this you almost think you were looking at Crosby Hall this is in fact Edward the fourths Great Hall at Eltham built between 1475 and 1483 and you can visit this hall today it's in the care of English Heritage and it was designed by the Kings office of works in which the Master Mason and the master carpenter had to coordinate their design and construction probably in the lead was Edwards Master Mason Thomas Jordan who first comes to notice building Eton College in the 1440s but then gets one of the plum jobs in the city of London and becomes the chief Mason and engineer for London Bridge Edwards master carpenter that was responsible for building this incredible roof inside the Elton Great Hall he was Edmond gravely and he like Jordan was a city man a member indeed a warden of the Carpenters company and if we look at this great Royal Hall in relation to what we have surviving of Sir John Crosby's Hall and we compare their elevations and I'm afraid you can't photograph these two so they're straight on you will see the incredibly similar treatment of these hood molds the way the molds and the windows actually touch each other all along is very tight fenestration there are when you look at the rest of the building there's very similar blade base plinth the parapets are extremely similar and they're both faced with stone and they have a brick core actually inside and when you look inside the building and this is a drawing of that the the bay window in Crosby Hall the moldings used on it are exactly the same moldings that the ones that are used at and Eltham now there's absolutely no doubt that John Crosby will have known Thomas Jordan the Mason and it's very likely given their close relationship that Edward the fourth would have lent his own mason to Sir John Crosby to build his own house because the two halls in terms of the masonry certainly are basically brother and sister but what about this remarkable ceiling I mean it really is a remarkable ceiling well again I think it's quite possible that Edmund gravely the king's carpenter actually was responsible for designing this because although at first sight these two ceilings look very very different they have a fundamental similarity which is they both are actually decorative ceilings this ceiling you see here is not a structural ceiling the that the roof is actually held up by a great a truss which you see here that's what's holding the ceiling up all this is basically decorative work and this is exactly what we have at Crosby Hall this is not a structural ceiling in any way it is in fact a decorative covering the roof is actually held up with a great truss and you can see the way in this cross section shows that the ceiling is basically hanging from this great truss and this is really the first time as far as we know that these ceilings are made to be decorative rather than and it does seem that gravely Edmund gravely the Kings Mason is the mastermind behind developing this new sort of ceiling with its suspension and these pendants which come down in both because of course the repentance on on on here as well to a completely new feature which you don't see in in earlier in earlier roofs now I'm afraid it's unlikely that we will never certainly know that Crosby Hall was in fact designed by the Kings Masons but I think if we look again at the the plan of this house we do see something else which does begin to suggest to me that there is some sort of royal involvement here because what you essentially have at Crosby Hall is a sort of state suite that is completely separate from the rest of his house a suite of rooms with this incredible Great Hall the parlor and the great chamber of unbelievable magnificence that can be used completely separate from the residence of Crosby himself and so it could have been that Crosby Hall could have been intended to be used rather like an Elizabethan country house so that you have on call the whole time this incredibly magnificent set of rooms as a set aside for special occasions whilst the owner of the house himself lives in a separate area and what is extremely interesting is that after John Crosby's death this is more or less exactly how Crosby place was used because it became a sort of Yorkist headquarters where Richard Duke of York the future Richard the third was actually based in fact he was based in these rooms here when he made his bid for the throne and in fact Shakespeare who was a local boy brought up on Bishopsgate and who would have known a Crosby place very very well several scenes in his play Richard the third in the house in fact Crosby place was later to become the home of another fabulously rich city merchants sir Bartholomew Reid a goldsmith he became the owner in 1501 and in fact he celebrated his mayoral feast in the Great Hall the following year and apparently this feast was attended by over a hundred people who were told by the chroniclers were too many to fit into the Goldsmith's Hall Henry the seventh after this incredible feast asked Reid whether the house could be used by the Ambassador from Burgundy who had arrived the same year and the huge Burgundian embassy was received in London in great state and the Ambassador lodged at Crosby Hall whether Reid was in residence in the inn in the south wing we we don't know but hold on for a moment we're talking here of a house belonging to a merchant not a member of the aristocracy surely this was extraordinarily presumptuous this architectural statement we are looking at here but we have again and again to return to Sir John's tomb and remember that this was not a man who wanted to be memorialized as a businessman he wanted to be remembered as a member of the Knightly classes a man who went to his grave wearing the King's Own livery collar in fact Crosby represents the start of a completely new sort of mercantile class of super-rich most merchants who were closely aligned with the crown Crosby went on to be chosen by Edward the fourth as an ambassador to the Duke of Burgundy to negotiate commercial trade treaties he then became the mayor of Calais an absolutely critical post not only because of its value in controlling the staple but because royal control of the garrison at Calais was one of the most important strategic posts in England the loss of loyalty and the garrison could turn it into a beachhead for an invasion of England so Crosby was used as an ultra loyal royal fixer a man of business but also much more importantly a man of state and when we look at the two other Bishopsgate merchants with whom I started this evening we see that they very much fit this pattern Thomas Gresham was not only a merchant he was a royal financial agent and an adviser to all the Tudor monarchs from the 1540s like Crosby he was entrusted with important diplomatic missions and managed to be fiercely loyal during the twists and turns of the mid Tudor succession crisis his house in Bishopsgate was visited by Queen Elizabeth who famously died that died dined there before the opening of the Royal Exchange in 1571 Gresham was also an unwilling host to Lady Mary Grey the sister to the unfortunate Queen of nine days Lady Jane Grey on Elizabeth's orders Mary was kept under house arrest in Gresham's house for over three years Paul Pinder who he saw living in Bishopsgate without he like Crosby and Gresham spent huge amount of time abroad he became James the first ambassador to Constantinople he underlined his own indispensable nastain Charles the first by his massive personal loans to the crown he advanced to Charles the first in all some ninety-three thousand pounds in 1638 to nine eight thousand pounds of which was for a large pendant diamond that the King bought in 1638 he just Charles the first had more in his mind than buying diamonds but anyway let's draw a veil over that this Sir Paul observed Sir Edmund Rossing Ham never fails the King when he is in most need so ladies and gentlemen crosby Gresham and Pinder are a different sort of merchants to those who I was describing last week these men succeeded in dissolving the social boundaries around trade they had bank balances houses and appointments equivalent to any aristocrat and they perceived themselves much more as much more than traders or bankers and their houses confirmed this and in particular Crosby Place which is virtually a royal palace in its pretensions well next time I will be talking about a Royal Palace but not in a narrow sense I'll be looking at house and James's Palace once likes and Helens Bishopsgate and nunnery became the colonel around which London's West End grew I hope ladies and gentlemen that you will join me then thank you [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 26,364

Keywords: gresham, gresham talk, gresham lecture, lecture, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham college talk, free video, free education, education, public lecture, Event, free event, free public lecture, free lecture, london merchants, thomas gresham, residences, architecture, london, sir paul pindar, sir john crosby, bishopsgate, crosby hall, crosby place

Id: U2ItHzJtrLQ

Length: 58min 21sec (3501 seconds)

Published: Thu May 10 2018

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During the Middle Ages London was home to one of the largest and richest merchant communities in the world. These men and their families invested heavily in fine architecture both for business and pleasure.

Simon Thurley, Visiting Professor of the Built Environment unearths the lost mercantile buildings of medieval London and shows how influential they were.