William Fitz-Stephen preferred to emphasise the energy and vivacity of the youthful citizens, how they delighted in cockfighting and in “the well-known game of foot-ball” with an inflated pig’s bladder used as a ball. On the holy days of summer, the children engaged in leap-frogging, wrestling and “slinging javelins beyond a mark”; in winter, they indulged in snowballing and ice-skating, using the long shin bones of animals rather like the skateboards of the late twentieth century. Fitz-Stephen is at pains to emphasise the elements of competition and aggression in these games, to complement his description of the valiant spirit which marked out London from other cities. The “lay sons of the citizens rush out of the gate in crowds … and there they get up sham fights, and exercise themselves in military combat.” Young children were often given bows and arrows with which to practise their skills, since one day they might be required to defend their city. They were already “Londoners,” with a strong sense of civic identity and pride. In similar fashion schoolboys were taught how to engage in dispute and rhetorical combat one with another, while “the boys of the different schools wrangle with each other in verse, and contend about the principles of grammar or the rules of the perfect and future tenses.” In well-known public areas, such as the churchyard of St. Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, the children would mount upon makeshift stages and compete in “rhetorical harangues” or recitations. Here lies one of the origins of London drama but aptly, in Fitz-Stephen’s account, the elements of combat and aggression are compounded with spectacle and theatricality. In this respect the children of London are faithful images of the city itself.
One fourteenth-century bishop reproved “impudent youths” who scribbled in the margins of books, while Robert Braybroke in his “Letter of Excommunication” on 9 November 1385 complained of boys “good for nothing in their insolence and idleness, instigated by evil minds and busying themselves rather in doing harm than good.” They “throw and shoot stones, arrows and different kinds of missiles at the rooks, pigeons, and other birds nesting in the walls and porches of the church. Also they play ball inside and outside the church and engage in other destructive games there, breaking and greatly damaging the glass windows and the stone images of the church.”
A baker’s boy was carrying a basket of loaves up the Strand; he passed the bishop of Salisbury’s palace, and one of the bishop’s servants stole a loaf. The boy raised a “hue and cry” and a crowd of children, apprentices and other citizens engaged in what almost became a full-scale riot. Children were, in other words, part of the turbulent life of the turbulent city. The administrative reports of the fourteenth century record “a boy climbing up to a gutter to retrieve his lost ball; of others playing on a heap of timber when one fell and broke his leg; and of another, a schoolboy returning over London Bridge after dinner, who must needs climb out and hang by his hands from a plank on the side of the bridge, and fell in and was drowned.” They played “hoodman blind,” now known as blind man’s buff, and “cobnutte,” which is the present game of “conkers.”
There were rule-books for schoolboys which by indirection preserve the essence of a London childhood in the medieval city, with injunctions concerning “no running, jumping, chattering, or playing, no carrying of sticks, stones or bows, no tricks upon passers by; no laughing or giggling if anyone were to read or sing minus bene, rather less than well.” In turn there survive doggerel poems by schoolboys about their masters:
I would my master were an hare …
For if he were dead I would not care.
In a city where everyone was competing for notice, the children also clamoured. But they also seemed drawn to the forbidden places of London, as if in defiance against its threat. It is the spirit of impudence, or mockery, which has always been noticeable among London children. In the 1950s and 1960s they played a game called “Last Across” in which they would run across the road in imminent danger of being knocked down by cars. It is a question of meeting, and beating, the city on its own terms.
When the young Thomas More walked in the 1480s from his house in Milk Street to St. Anthony’s School in Threadneedle Street, the city pressed upon him in ways which he never forgot. He passed the Standard in Cheapside, for example, where public and bloody executions took place; children were not spared the spectacle of violent death. He passed churches, painted images of the saints, and the “pissing conduit” as well as the stalls of the fishmongers and butchers; he would have seen the beggars, some of his own age, as well as the prostitutes and the thieves or loiterers set up in the stocks. Like an adult he went dressed in doublet and hose because children were not considered “different” from their elders but simply younger versions of the same thing. At school he learned music and grammar, as well as useful proverbial phrases. “O good turne asket another … Many handes maken lite werke … The more haste, the werse spede.” He was also educated in rhetoric, and was one of those children who competitively exercised their talents in St. Bartholomew’s Churchyard. But the important point is, simply, that he was being trained for a career in the legal administration of London. It was undoubtedly and principally a civic education; he was taught to celebrate order and harmony, and much of his public career was devoted to introducing that order and harmony within the streets which he had known since childhood. Yet those same streets hardened him, as they hardened all their children. His own writing is filled with their slang and demotic; the hardness and theatricality of his own nature, as well as his wit and aggression, sprang from a characteristic London childhood.
London children, therefore, confronted harsh realities. If they were poor they were put out to hard service, working hours as long as their adult companions, but if they were the offspring of affluent families they were enlisted within the households of richer or more eminent citizens; the young Thomas More, for example, entered the household of the archbishop of Canterbury. It was necessary to work, or be punished. The records of Bridewell show that nearly half of its inmates were boys accused of nothing but vagrancy; they were “packte up and punnyshed alyke in Brydewell with rogues, beggers, strompets and pylfering theves.” This harshness is reflected in the commentaries of two Londoners, the late fifteenth-century William Caxton, and the early sixteenth-century Roger Ascham. Caxton complained that “I see that they that ben borne within [the city of London] encrease and prouffyte not lyke theys faders and olders,” while Ascham maintained that “Innocence is gone: Bashfulnesse is banished; moch presumption in yougthe.” These sentiments might be considered as the perpetual rage of age against youth, in the context of the changing generations, but it is interesting to note that they were made at a time when the city was expanding. Between 1510 and 1580 the population rose from 50,000 to 120,000, and it suffered from an excess of turbulence, unrest and energy; it seems likely that the children embodied that spirit in the most obvious and, to the older citizens, alarming way.