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The London Lord Mayors' Shows were high-profile and lavish entertainments that were at the centre of the cultural life of the City of London in the early modern period. The Show was staged annually to celebrate the inauguration of the new Lord Mayor. The London mayoralty was not simply an entity of civic power, but always had its ritual and ceremonial dimensions. Pageantry was a feature of the day's entertainment. This book focuses on the social, cultural and economic contexts, in which the Shows were designed, presented and experienced, and explores the Shows in textual, historical, bibliographical, and archival and other contexts. It highlights the often-overlooked roles of the artificer and those other craftsmen who contributed so valuably to the day's entertainment. The Show was the concern of the Great Twelve livery companies from the ranks of one of which the Lord Mayor was elected. The book discusses, inter alia, the actors' roles, the props, music and costumes used during the Show and looks at how important emblems and imagery were to these productions. Pageant writers and artificers took advantage of the space available to them just as dramatists did on the professional stage. From 1585 onwards the Lord Mayor's Show was with increasing frequency transmitted from event to text in the form of short pamphlets produced in print runs ranging from 200 to 800 copies. The book also demonstrates the ways in which the Shows engaged with the changing socio-economic scene of London and with court and city politics.
Although few would contend that London and its inhabitants were indispensable to parliament’s war effort against King Charles I, the matter remains to be delineated in detail. This book explores how London’s agitators, activists, and propagandists sought to mobilize the metropolis between 1641 and 1645. Rather than simply frame London’s wartime participation from the top down, this book explores mobilization as a series of disparate but structured processes – as efforts and events that created webs of engagement. These webs joined parliamentarian activists to civic authorities, just as they connected parishioners to vestries and preachers, and forced interaction between committees, Common Council, liverymen, and apprentices. The success of any given mobilizing effort – or counter-mobilization, for that matter – varied. Activists adapted their tactics accordingly, meeting their circumstances head-on. Londoners meanwhile heeded the entreaties of preachers and civic leaders alike, signing petitions, donating, and taking to the streets to protest both for and against war. Initially called upon to loan money and fortify the metropolis in 1642–3, Londoners had by 1644 become reluctant lenders and overburdened caretakers for sick and wounded soldiers. Revealed here by way of a wealth of archival and printed sources is the collective story of London’s evolving relationship to the challenges of wartime mobilization, of the evolution of efforts to move money and men, and the popular responses that defined not only parliament’s wartime success, but the arrival of novel financial expedients that gave rise to the New Model Army and eventually became apparatuses of the state.
important aspects of the Shows. The fundamental question to be considered is, when we talk of the Lord Mayor’s Show, what entity do we actually mean? The performance, the printed text or some ambiguous combination of the two? Building on the large and growing body of knowledge about the London book trade, this chapter will explore who the printers and The Show from street to print 215 publishers of the texts were and what connections they may have had with the writers, artificers and/or the livery companies.4 I will also address the questions of where and by whom the
-established livery company tradition. As corporations that held royal charters, London’s companies were able to accept and manage endowed charities that supported a wide array of social needs – such as almshouses and pensions for the elderly and the infirm, grammar schools, loan funds for young freemen, dowries for daughters of poor company members, and preaching lectureships – across the metropolis and into the far corners of the realm. Typically, the capital associated with the benefactions was invested in property, and the annual revenue the property generated supported the
2 ‘Our devices for that solemne and Iouiall daye’: the writers, the artificers and the livery companies Planning the look and content of the Shows was a complex and expensive business. Such events, Mulryne has written, ‘represent a remarkable coming-together of organisational and management skills . . . [including] the task of harnessing and co-ordinating the talents of writers, musicians, scenographers, choreographers’, as well as performers.1 In addition, being the creator of a Lord Mayor’s Show was often (although not always) a contested position, where
“competent number” of new soldiers. 3 Two days later, on 11 August, Common Council agreed to pass on requests to livery companies for a new £50,000 loan, a sum that would help fund Essex’s march west. Orders bearing Pennington’s name were printed, accompanied by familiar warnings about the “greate and imminent danger to this Citty,” “the neere approaching of the kings forces,” and the “greate and weighty
notable aspects: an endowment is characterised by having a public (or charitable) purpose, being intended to last in perpetuity and historically having a strong connection with gifts of land. The kinds of institutions involved included universities, public and grammar schools, parochial charities, the Irish church, English cathedral chapters and the livery companies of the City of London. Practically all
Paster assumes when she writes of ‘the clear atmosphere of the communities of praise’ and of an absence in the Shows of any ‘ambivalence about urban life’.16 In themselves, as a starting point, the mayoral Shows’ nostalgia and reification of the past were ideological strategies, attempts to fend off what was perceived by the City’s great livery companies as an undesirable decline in their power and influence. As Hentschell has written in relation to the cloth trade, there was ‘in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a recurrent strain of loss and nostalgia
seemed boundless. Livery companies and the politics of lending Deteriorating relations between the king and parliament did little to change the fact that Ireland’s Protestants were in need of aid and by June 1642 it was clear that another large sum of money would be needed to help fund a relief expedition. London’s livery companies seemed a natural answer to the problem. Wealthy
, ‘drinking howse’, buttery, yeomanry hall, and armoury, was not unusual. 5 The established literature on gifting and London's livery companies is exclusively focused upon the gift as an act of civic philanthropy by the city's most successful mercantile elites. 6 By contrast here we explore a significant but overlooked culture of material gifts within London craft companies, and consider a series of questions