1.
Panorama of London
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The city of London has long been a subject for panoramas by artists, mapmakers, and topographers. Many of their works have this as their title, wenceslaus Hollars 1647 Long View of London from Bankside is an exception. Projected from a single viewpoint it resembles the perspective of a panoramic photograph. Amongst the earliest known is that drawn Wyngaerde, produced around 1543, and here shown in 19th-century printed copies
2.
William Shakespeare
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William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the worlds pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called Englands national poet, and the Bard of Avon and his extant works, including collaborations, consist of approximately 38 plays,154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright, Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children, Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a career in London as an actor, writer. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, at age 49, Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories, which are regarded as some of the best work ever produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, in his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and it was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as not of an age, but for all time. In the 20th and 21st centuries, his works have been adapted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship. His plays remain highly popular and are studied, performed. William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden and he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual date of birth unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April. This date, which can be traced back to an 18th-century scholars mistake, has proved appealing to biographers because Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and he was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son. At the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, the consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. The next day, two of Hathaways neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage, twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596, after the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance of his name in the bill of a law case before the Queens Bench court at Westminster dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589
3.
Newington Butts
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Newington Butts is a former hamlet, now an area of the London Borough of Southwark, that gives its name to a segment of the A3 road running south-west from the Elephant and Castle junction. The road continues as Kennington Park Road leading to Kennington, a right is Kennington Lane. It is believed to take its name from an archery butts, the area gave its name to an Elizabethan theatre which saw the earliest recorded performances of some Shakespearean plays. The Middle English word butt referred to a strip of land. The 1955 Survey of London published by London County Council could find no reference to archery butts in Newington although the connection is mentioned elsewhere. The name may have derived from the triangle of land between the roads, as the word butts is used elsewhere in Surrey to refer to odd corners or ends of land. Newington was a village that grew up on the Walworth Road at its junction with the Portsmouth Road. Being outside the jurisdiction of the City of London it became home to such as plays that were banned near London during hot weather. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the triangle of ground between the roads was known as the Three Falcons and was copyhold of the manor of Walworth, in 1791 the leading scientist Michael Faraday was born at Newington Butts. In 1802, Thomas Hardwick reported that the estate consisted of a number of tenements in bad condition. In the spring of 2008, St Marys Churchyard, the open space on the northern border of Newington Butts, was given a face lift. The largely grassy area now contains a childrens playground, dotted about within the playground and on the grass elsewhere are concrete mounds with rubber surfaces which were designed to add interest and topography to the developed area. These mounds might recall archery butts but this has been denied by the Elephant, in Cockney rhyming slang, Newington Butts means guts. 320–329, ISBN 978-0-521-23012-4 transcribes the original manuscripts relating to Newington Butts playhouse, Shakespearean Playhouses, by Joseph Quincy Adams, Jr. from Project Gutenberg Newington Butts, Kennington photograph, c
4.
Bermondsey
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Bermondsey is a district in south London, and a part of the London Borough of Southwark. Thus Bermondsey need not have been an island as such in the Anglo-Saxon period, Bermondsey appears in Domesday Book as Bermundesy and Bermundesye. It was then held by King William, though a part was in the hands of Robert, Count of Mortain, the kings half brother. Its Domesday assets were recorded as including 13 hides, a new and handsome church,5 ploughs,20 acres of meadow and it also included interests in London, in respect of which 13 burgesses paid 44d. The church mentioned in Domesday Book was presumably the nascent Bermondsey Abbey, which was founded as a Cluniac priory in 1082, monks from the abbey began the development of the area, cultivating the land and embanking the riverside. They turned an adjacent tidal inlet at the mouth of the River Neckinger into a dock, but Bermondsey then was little more than a high street ribbon, leading from the southern bank of the Thames, at Tooley Street, up to the abbey close. The Knights Templar also owned land here and gave their names to one of the most distinctive streets in London, King Edward III built a manor house close to the Thames in Bermondsey in 1353. The excavated foundations are visible next to Bermondsey Wall East close to the famous Angel public house, as it developed over the centuries, Bermondsey underwent some striking changes. A pleasure garden was founded there in the 17th century, commemorated by the Cherry Garden Pier, Samuel Pepys visited Jamaica House at Cherry Gardens in 1664 and recorded in his diary that he had left it singing finely. Though not many survive from this era, one notable exception is the church of St Mary Magdalen in Bermondsey Street. This church came through both 19th-century redevelopment and The Blitz unscathed and it is not just an unusual survivor for Bermondsey, buildings of this era are relative rarities in Inner London in general. A new church was built for the population of the area. It was from the Bermondsey riverside that the painter J. M. W, turner executed his famous painting of The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up, depicting the veteran warship being towed to Rotherhithe to be scrapped. By the mid-19th century parts of Bermondsey, especially along the riverside had become a notorious slum — with the arrival of industrial plants, docks, the area around St Saviours Dock, known as Jacobs Island, was one of the worst in London. Dickens provides a description of what it was like. Bermondsey Town Hall was built on Spa Road in 1881 but Blitzed in 1941, the area was extensively redeveloped during the 19th century and early 20th century with the expansion of the river trade and the arrival of the railways. Londons first passenger railway terminus was built by the London to Greenwich Railway in 1836 at London Bridge, the first section to be used was between the Spa Road Station and Deptford High Street. This local station had closed by 1915, the industrial boom of the 19th century was an extension of Bermondseys manufacturing role in earlier eras
5.
Dissolution of the Monasteries
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Although the policy was originally envisaged as increasing the regular income of the Crown, much former monastic property was sold off to fund Henrys military campaigns in the 1540s. Professor George W. Bernard argues, The dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s was one of the most revolutionary events in English history. one adult man in fifty was in religious orders. Very few English houses had been founded later than the end of the 13th century, there was a Medieval proverb in England that said if the Abbot of Glastonbury married the Abbess of Shaftesbury, the heir would have more land than the King of England. The 200 houses of friars in England and Wales constituted a distinct wave of foundations almost all occurring in the 13th century. Friaries, for the most part, were concentrated in urban areas, however, the religious changes in England under Henry VIII and Edward VI were of a different nature from those taking place in Germany, Bohemia, France, Scotland and Geneva. Bernard says there was concern in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries about the condition of the monasteries. Pastoral care was seen as more important and vital than the monastic focus on contemplation, prayer. English monasticism in the 1530s may have faced grave and urgent problems, Henry wanted to change this, and in November 1529 Parliament passed Acts reforming apparent abuses in the English Church. These Acts sought to demonstrate that establishing royal jurisdiction over the Church would ensure progress in religious reformation where papal authority had been insufficient, the monasteries were next in line. The stories of monastic impropriety, vice and excess that were to be collected by Thomas Cromwells visitors may have been biased and exaggerated. Levels of monastic debt were increasing, and average numbers of professed religious were falling, only a minority of houses could now support the twelve or thirteen professed religious usually regarded as the minimum necessary to maintain the full canonical hours of the Divine Office. Extensive monastic complexes dominated English towns of any size, but most were less than half full, renaissance princes throughout Europe were facing severe financial difficulties due to sharply rising expenditures, especially to pay for armies, fighting ships and fortifications. Most tended, sooner or later, to resort to plundering monastic wealth, protestant princes would justify this by claiming divine authority, Catholic princes would obtain the agreement and connivance of the Papacy. Monastic wealth, regarded everywhere as excessive and idle, offered a standing temptation for cash-strapped secular, in terms of popular esteem however, the balance tilted the other way. By the time Henry VIII turned his mind to the business of monastery reform, the first case was that of the so-called Alien Priories. As a result of the Norman Conquest some French religious orders held substantial property through their daughter monasteries in England, some of these were merely granges, agricultural estates with a single foreign monk in residence to supervise things, others were rich foundations in their own right. Such estates were a source of income for the Crown in its French wars. If the property with which a house had been endowed by its founder were to be confiscated or surrendered, then the house ceased to exist, whether its members continued in the religious life or not
6.
Edward Alleyn
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Edward Ned Alleyn was an English actor who was a major figure of the Elizabethan theatre and founder of Dulwich College and Alleyns School. Alleyn was born on September 1,1566 in Bishopsgate, London, Alleyn does record his birth date in a diary several times but never distinctly identifies his birthplace as Bishopsgate. In the St. Botolph parish registers it is recorded that he was baptized on the day after his birth and he was born a younger son of Edward Alleyn with three brothers named John, William, and Edward. His father was an innkeeper and porter to the queen, and his mother and his mothers link to the Lancashire Townley family is somewhat of a mystery. Alleyn said she was the daughter of John Townley of Townley, regardless of this, the road that passes Alleyns School was named after her in 1884. He was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and he was known to contemporaries as Ned, his surname is variously spelled Allen or Alleyne. Edward Alleyn was four years old when his father died and his mother remarried an actor named Brown. Alleyn, growing up in the home of an actor was believed to have raised in the theatre culture. It is not known at what date he began to act and he was rated by common consent as the foremost actor of his time, his only close rival was Richard Burbage. He played the roles in three of Christopher Marlowes major plays, Faustus, Tamburlaine, and Barabas in The Jew of Malta. He created the parts, which were written especially for him. The evidence for his career is otherwise fragmentary. Other parts thought to be associated with Alleyn are Orlando in Robert Greenes Orlando Furioso, other works, some now lost, are thought to have had Alleyn in leading roles, including plays by George Peele such as The Battle of Alcazar. In a private letter, he mocked himself as a fustian king and this tour consisted of players from Lord Stranges Men and the Admirals Men with which he was associated. The tour extended to Bristol, Shrewsbury, Chester, and York, Alleyn retired at the height of his fame around 1598, and it is said that Queen Elizabeth requested his return to the stage, which he did in 1604, the year after her death. Ben Jonson bestowed praise on Alleyns acting, Thomas Fuller in his Worthies later wrote of Alleyns reputation of so acting to the life that he made any part to become him. Although Alleyn had obtained a good amount of his due to his marriage, he also made much of it from his acting career. Alleyn went into business with his father-in-law Philip Henslowe and became wealthy and he was part-owner in Henslowes ventures, and in the end sole proprietor of several profitable playhouses, bear-pits and brothels
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