San Diego Sarah
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San Diego Sarah has posted 9,170 annotations/comments since 6 August 2015.
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Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
San Diego Sarah has posted 9,170 annotations/comments since 6 August 2015.
The most recent first…
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Third Reading
About Friday 26 July 1661
San Diego Sarah • Link
"Having the beginning of this week made a vow to myself to drink no wine this week (finding it to unfit me to look after business), and this day breaking of it against my will, I am much troubled for it, but I hope God will forgive me."
I think Pepys' troubling was how to avoid drinking when everyone dragged him off to the pub at the earliest opportunity. Coffee shops are one answer, but presumably others preferred working in the buzzed condition.
As to God's forgiveness, was his tongue firmly in his cheek?
Was he still sufficiently beholden to religion that he believed God was following his vows?
Did he use the threat of God's punishment as a way to motivate himself without really believing in God's involvement in his life?
Who knows -- since I have observed that in life "what goes around, comes around" I do not judge.
When it comes to vows to live a better life, whatever motivates you is a tool worth using.
About Friday 26 July 1661
San Diego Sarah • Link
Apparently he did, LKvM.
And Pepys could have tried to move Mr. Hill and his ladies to a coffee house -- or did they not admit women?
I think they did admit women, as a 'handbill promoted the launch of Pasqua Rosée’s coffee shack telling people how to drink coffee, and hailing it as the miracle cure for most ailments including dropsy, scurvy, gout, scrofula and “mis-carryings in childbearing women”.'
And 'For women, historian Markman Ellis writes, coffeehouses offered a business opportunity. While it is true, as the satirists of the time wrote, that sex workers used coffeehouses to solicit work, they were far from the only women there. A number of coffeehouses were run by women, often widows, and women worked in them as servers or in other capacities.
'Historians differ in their opinions as to whether women attended coffeehouses as customers – for instance, while Ellis does not believe they did, Pincus writes “there is little warrant for the claim that women were excluded from coffeehouses.” Although there may have been no hard-and-fast rule excluding women, obstacles such as public perception that linked women in coffee houses with sex work may have helped keep women from attending coffeehouses as guests in the same number as men. However, as Pincus writes, the fact that women could and sometimes did attend these places just shows how much they were places of exchange between people of different backgrounds, leading to the creative and transgressive spread of ideas by these caffeine junkies.'
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sm…
How attitudes have changed: women were free to drink wine and beer, but coffee was questionable.
Pepys, help your colleages change their attitudes.
About Bank of Amsterdam
San Diego Sarah • Link
SILVERSMITHS -- from the Wiki article -- "By a decree of 16 April 1684, the bank commissioners secured the monopoly of the trade in silver and silver coins. The few exceptions made here were in favor of goldsmiths and silversmiths and merchants, who received the metal from foreign countries. The export of uncoined metal was allowed only when accompanied by a certificate given by the bank commissioners. These and many other orders were found insufficient to suppress private trade in precious metals, or private changing at Amsterdam."
This goes back to the pirate economy. In New England there were as many silversmiths as there were lawyers -- a strange situation for a part of the world with little in the way of silver mines.
See why -- with much more piratical info., at
https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
About Pieces of eight
San Diego Sarah • Link
CONCLUSION:
The ports also brimmed with silversmiths.
We think of silversmithing as a classic “ye olde” profession; Paul Revere was a silversmith, and they outnumbered lawyers in Colonial America. But why were any there at all, given that the land had little by way of silver mines?
The answer, Mark Hanna explains, is that silversmiths worked as fences, transmuting “pirate metal” into respectable wealth. The first mint in the 13 colonies was established in 1652 by John Hull, who made Massachusetts pine-tree shillings from Spanish bullion. Hull was a silversmith; his brother Edward was a pirate.
John Hull faced charges for backing his brother’s pirate ship, but he was acquitted. Such outcomes were common. Although piracy was a felony, it could also be a bonanza, and sympathetic locals made prosecution difficult.
Moses Butterworth, who had sailed with Capt. William Kidd, was tried for piracy in what’s now New Jersey, an armed militia stormed the courthouse. The judge drew his sword, but he was no match for more than 100 men with guns and clubs. They freed Butterworth and seized the governor and the sheriff, taking them prisoner. They held the governor for 4 days, by which point Butterworth was long gone. (He turned up 3 years later in Newport, Rhode Island, captaining his own vessel.)
Richard Blakemore’s new book, “Enemies of All,” addresses this theme. In Pennsylvania, Blakemore notes, a prominent pirate married the governor’s daughter and was elected to the legislature.
An even more prominent pirate, Henry Morgan was arrested and hauled to London. Then, after being released without punishment, he was knighted and returned to Jamaica, where he served several stints as the acting governor. When Morgan died, in 1688, he received a state funeral in Port Royal, with a 22-gun salute. Pirates were reportedly given amnesty to join the mourners.
Much more at
https://www.newyorker.com/magazin…
About Pieces of eight
San Diego Sarah • Link
"The ocean is a lonely, perilous place. It is especially so when you are aboard a leak-prone wooden vessel laden with a rich cargo of sugar, silks, and opium, ... " So starts a New Yorker article on pirates told me about the English 17th century need for Pieces of Eight, and other things piratical:
Privateers often relied on letters of marque that were invalid, expired, or issued after the fact, when they had letters at all. For the most part, the authorities didn’t mind. So long as the pirates had their prows pointed in the right direction, their work was good for business. Not only did they harry England’s rivals; they also enriched its colonies.
McDonald notes their importance in furnishing new settlements with enslaved people, who were initially hard for English colonists to buy through normal trade. The Africans sold into bondage in Virginia in 1619 (the event that prompted the 1619 Project) had been seized from a Portuguese slave ship by an English privateer carrying a Dutch letter of marque.
Pirates also supplied cash. The Americas produced prodigious amounts of silver and gold, but the mines were in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The English colonies suffered chronic shortages of the metal they needed to pay England’s taxes and buy its goods.
One turn-of-the-18th-century observer estimated that the average coin lasted only 6 months in America before leaving for England.
Since imperial rules and rivalries blocked English colonists from trading directly with their Spanish and Portuguese counterparts, pirates and smugglers (overlapping categories) were indispensable. They tapped the rich vein of minerals flowing from the Americas to Iberia, irrigating the English empire with hard currency.
“Pieces of eight” and “doubloons” sound like colorful pirate talk, but they were the English names for Spanish coins, which the pirates stole in their raids, earned from their trade, and spent on their sprees. These, plus gold coins from Indian Ocean plunder, flooded colonial societies.
The familiar dollar sign was originally the American symbol for the peso, the fabled “piece of eight.”
In cash-parched America, illicitly acquired Spanish silver was the predominant currency, so it became the sign for money.
Pirate sexuality is relevant here, because sex was a crucial conduit through which foreign coin entered the colonies. The ports that pirates favored were hotbeds of prostitution. This was illegal, and in the pirate haunt of Port Royal, in Jamaica, “common strumpetts” were jailed in a “cage by the turtle market,” a visitor wrote.
But, rather than locking these women in the wench kennel, Jamaica should have erected statues to them for resolving the colonial liquidity crisis. The largest statue should be of the unnamed woman who talked a pirate into giving her 500 pieces of eight just to watch her strip.
Forget Blackbeard; she’s the outlaw they should be making television shows about.
About Jovial Crew, A (Richard Brome)
San Diego Sarah • Link
dirk during the first round contributed this review:
"The Jovial Crew"
By Richard Brome, c.1590-1652, English dramatist. He was the friend, servant, and disciple of Ben Jonson. Primarily a writer of realistic satiric comedy, picturing the life and manners of Caroline bourgeois London, he also produced several tragicomedies, but with much less success. The main features of his plays are the humor characters, complicated comic intrigue, and an abundance of action. The majority of his comedies were performed between 1629 and 1642, the most noteworthy being "The Northern Lass," "The City Wit," and "The Jovial Crew."
From a dead website
@@@
A&C Black, Jun 25, 2014 - Drama - 328 pages
"A Jovial Crew, or the Merry Beggars," is a comedy about four noble lovers who join the beggar community for a pastoral life of dance and song.
Or is it?
Whilst maintaining its unremitting good humour, "A Jovial Crew" shows that the literary depiction of beggar life, and real beggar life, are profoundly different. Daily aspects of life in the beggar world – poverty, dirt, licentiousness – come as a surprise to the well-born, who are ultimately led to question their own values.
The last production mounted before theatres were closed for the English Civil War, "A Jovial Crew" is an exploration of class, commonwealth, kinship and kingship shows an intense engagement with contemporary politics.
This edition, with dedicated sections on music and language in the play, argues that "A Jovial Crew" also offers a nostalgic farewell to English theatre. It explores Brome's attitude to performance and print, and follows "A Jovial Crew" from its first, Caroline staging, to its later manifestations as a Restoration comedy, an 18th-century opera, and a 20th-century proto-Marxist tragicomedy.
https://books.google.com/books/ab…
About James Ussher
San Diego Sarah • Link
BC. Before computers indeed!!! Very funny, Terry.
But it does bring up a question which did not bother Pepys, but the thinkers around him were at least aware of, and we may give some thought to:
[The Rev.] Bede had experimented with [refering to the years before Christ as] ‘the year before the incarnation of the Lord’, and ‘In the year before the birth of Christ’ was used by the German monk Werner Rolevinck in his world history of 1474, but it was not until 1627 that ante Christum, ‘Before Christ’, first emerged in France, introduced by a Jesuit theologian called Denis Pétau.
While AD was adopted in its Latin form relatively early, initially by Bede but also in legal and ecclesiastical documents in Latin, the period ‘before Christ’ was of limited interest to medieval lawyers or clergymen; ‘before Christ’ emerged in a post-Reformation, vernacular-speaking world, so it was more natural to adopt an English expression.
Alternatives have arisen over the centuries, including vulgaris aerae, or ‘vulgar era’, (c.1615), ‘Christian era’ (1652) and ‘common era’ (1708). While these often make no specific reference to the birth of Christ, they are nonetheless based on the same point of division as BC/AD. Most failed to gain widespread traction.
More recently, a subtle revision to the seemingly ‘standard’ (Western) dating system of BC/AD has emerged and is quietly replacing it. In contemporary historical discourse there has been an explicit move to rebrand BC/AD as Before Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE). These terms were first proposed in the early 18th century, in an English astronomy book by David Gregory, The Elements of Astronomy, Physical and Geometrical (1715). They reflect a post-enlightenment departure from the ubiquity of religion in society and nascent scientific thought and writing.
Why is all this important? In losing BC and AD, we would only stand to gain a relatively nondescript replacement in BCE/CE. What is a ‘Common Era’? What can we expect from the period ‘Before Common Era’? These phrases have simply piggybacked the existing conceptual dating framework and revised the wording with similar – but largely meaningless – terms. ..."
https://www.historytoday.com/arch…
About Tuesday 23 July 1661
San Diego Sarah • Link
Agreed, Nate -- Pepys' trip to Brampton must have brought things to a head at home. In his absence, Pall tested her boundaries with Elizabeth.
Of course, Uncle Robert was also Pall's uncle, so it is possible she knew the man and wanted to mourn him, only to find the need for her to empty the chamberpots and cater to Elizabeth's whims increased with Pepys' absence.
Making her Pepys' servant wasn't a long-term solution for the what-do-we-do-with-Pall-since-we-can't-afford-a-dowery-for-her fundamental problem IMHO.
About Monday 30 September 1661
San Diego Sarah • Link
As reported by Pepys today, a ceremonial procession was held to celebrate the public entry into London of Sweden’s Ambassador, Count Nils Nillsson Brahe, in September 1661.
But when the coach carrying the Spanish Ambassador forced its way in front of the French Ambassador’s coach, the Spanish delegation opened fire and several Frenchmen and horses were killed, forcing the French delegation to withdraw from the procession.
As street protests continued, the French Ambassador, Godefroy d’Estrades, complained to Louis XIV’s ministers that “in the course of 8 days, I was twice in danger of being assassinated and a musket ball went through my hat; soldiers and a mob have come to attack me in my own house.”
-- an excerpt from "Devil-Land: England under Siege, 1588-1688" (Allen Lane, 2021), by Clare Jackson, the senior tutor of Trinity Hall, Cambridge University. She has presented a number of highly successful programs on the Stuart dynasty for the BBC and is the author of "Charles II" in the penguin Monarchs series.
For Dr. Jackson's opinion of the challenges faced by ambassadors to the Court of St. James's in those years, see https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
About Charles Colbert (Marquis de Croissy)
San Diego Sarah • Link
BOOK REVIEW: DEVIL-LAND by Dr. Clare Jackson, Senior Tutor of Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, offers a riveting insight into foreign diplomats’ perceptions of 17th-century England
Few 17th-century diplomats relished the prospect of London as their next posting. In 1652, England was nicknamed ‘Devil-Land’, or ‘Duyvel-Landt’, by a Dutch pamphleteer. Reversing familiar Latin puns, whereby the English (‘Angli’) were to be cherished as cherubic angels (‘angeli’), the English appeared as diabolically dreadful king-killers. (In January 1649, they had sent shockwaves throughout the Continental by putting their divinely ordained king, Charles, on trial for high treason and executing him in public. Three days after the regicide, the dazed Spanish Ambassador in London, Alonso de Cárdenas, reported to Philip IV “we are here in utter chaos, living without religion, king or law, subject entirely to the power of the sword.”)
In "Devil-Land: England under Siege 1588-1688," foreign diplomats are center stage, supplying detailed commentaries on the most turbulent century in English history.
Bookended by two invasion attempts, Devil-Land opens with Spain’s failed Armada in 1588 and concludes with William of Orange successfully landing at Torbay, Devon a century later, with 500 ships and 15,000 soldiers and prompting his Catholic uncle and father-in-law, James VII & II, to flee to Louis XIV’s France.
As Devil-Land reveals, diplomats’ observations supply incisive critiques of Stuart rule in England as foreign ambassadors continually calibrated the standing of their own country vis-à-vis that of other states through interactions at court, intelligence gathering and unofficial patronage.
At the same time, ambassadors’ assessments were inescapably subjective and distorted, since diplomats deployed a double vision, observing events in their host country less in terms of their domestic impact than as the basis for reports to be returned to their own country.
As Louis XIV reminded a new envoy to London in 1663, “there is nothing in the whole world that does not come under the cognisance and fall within the sphere of an ambassador.”
To foreign envoys residing in London, ‘Devil-Land’ was inherently unstable and infuriatingly unpredictable: its political infrastructure was weak, its inhabitants were dangerously capricious, and its intentions were impossible to fathom.
As one flummoxed Venetian envoy, Anzolo Correr, concluded in the 1630s, “there was no school in the world where one could learn how to negotiate with the English.”
When it comes to trading insults, ... has [anything] changed from 1638 when Louis XIV’s chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, “stated emphatically that, at present, England might be called the country where they talk of everything and conclude nothing.”
Excerpts taken from the book review of "Devil-Land: England under Siege, 1588-1688" (Allen Lane, 2021), by Clare Jackson
https://diplomatmagazine.com/devi…
About Tuesday 23 July 1661
San Diego Sarah • Link
Pall moved in with Sam and Elizabeth on January 2, 1661
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
She made it for 7-1/2 months. Now what will become of her? Chambermaid at the Tower of London (as the Duchess of Albermarle had done)? You can meet such interesting people there!
Is there another relative willing to provide board and lodging for the angry/rebellious 21-year-old?
What does Pepys have in mind?
About Brennoralt, or The Discontented Colonel (Sir John Suckling)
San Diego Sarah • Link
Sjoerd gave this review during the first round:
Brennoralt, by Sir John Suckling
Apparently Pepys liked the play enough to see it two more times over the coming years.
"Although 'The Goblins' is Suckling's most satisfactory performance, the tragedy 'Brennoralt' is a work of more promise and a more striking evidence of his poetic capacity. It did not appear till 1646; but it had been printed in a shorter form in 1640 as 'The Discontented Colonell.' The interest of 'Brennoralt' lies mainly in our seeming to detect in the hero something of the inner self of the author, and to find that self better and sounder than the shallow prodigal who caught the public eye. The gloomy colonel, despite his strict loyalty, is clearly aware of defects in his king. The rebel Lithuanians are meant for Scots, of about the year 1639. The rebels having been informed that the king cannot be unjust to them "Where there's so little to be had," their leader Almerine replies, "Where there is least, there's liberty." Suckling's style perceptibly strengthens in the play.”
https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/…
About Barbara Palmer (Countess of Castlemaine)
San Diego Sarah • Link
Bishop Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715) says this about Barbara Villiers Palmer:
"Married to one Palmer, a Papist, soon after made Earl of Castlemaine; and she when separated from him, was advanced to the Duchess of Cleveland. A woman of great beauty, but enormously vicious and ravenous, foolish but imperious, very uneasy to the King, always carrying on intrigues with other men, even while she pretended to be jealous of him. His passion for her, and her strange behaviour to him, disordered him so that he was oftentimes neither master of himself nor capable of business…"
About Tapestry
San Diego Sarah • Link
In 2024 Hever Castle reopened the Bolyn family rooms after renovations. They looked at contemporary paintings before decorating, so the rooms lined with ceiling-to-floor curtains (keeping out drafts) is correct.
Curtains and tapestries were all referred to as "hangings". Whether Pepys bought curtains or tapestries, I don't know. And if curtains, how extensive they were, I don't know. Keep an open mind.
Pictures at
https://news.artnet.com/art-world…
About William Lilly
San Diego Sarah • Link
Pepys seems to have been evolved enough not to be influenced by service magicians and magical thinking -- but he did have a lucky hare's foot in his pocket.
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
I do wonder about Elizabeth -- his behavior over the years could have provoked her into consulting a practitioner.
About Saturday 20 July 1661
San Diego Sarah • Link
Thank you both for such learned anaysis of the problem I created. How could I forget the summer time adjustment -- and overlooked that Pepys was drunkenly negotiating those fields. DDdduhhh!
About William Lilly
San Diego Sarah • Link
CONCLUSION:
Both religion and magic belonged to a worldview suffused with the supernatural where the potential efficacy of spiritual technologies went without saying.
While service magic was often the domain of the clergy – who were already conduits of sacred power – the Reformation brought a dramatic ‘deregulation’ of supernatural power which saw men and women fulfilling a demand no longer met by priests.
In this respect, the cunning folk are a fascinating window on the growth of literacy and the diffusion of learning to a burgeoning lower middle or upper laboring class.
Some cunning folk were illiterate, but most were not and owned manuscripts referencing such recondite works as the Picatrix (a medieval Arabic compendium of lunar magic).
Many were skilled mathematicians, capable of casting horoscopes.
Cunning folk can be said to have stood outside the boundaries of class – consulting for everyone from the poorest to Queen Elizabeth.
This social fluidity of the figure of the wise woman or wizard reflected the universality of the human concerns they dealt with.
A duchess might not have been troubled by the loss of some spoons, the matter of fertility was as important to the royal family as it was to the humblest labourer, while sinister forms of magic directed towards dispatching unwanted rivals became a valuable commodity at court.
Magic had little to do with morality, and often existed in a grey area of ethics. But where churchmen, physicians and lawyers could not help, service magicians filled in the gaps as technicians of the impossible.
'Cunning Folk' gives a human face to magic in medieval and early modern England, bringing us closer to the hopes, dreams and aspirations of both clients and practitioners.
Like every other service industry, magic was at times a mercenary business, and many of the records we have arise from complaints brought by dissatisfied customers.
But it is hard to conclude that service magicians did more harm than good. As Stanmore observes: ‘Instead of succumbing to the hopelessness they felt, they turned to magic – and, in doing so, they chose to hope.’
Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic
Tabitha Stanmore
Bodley Head, 288pp, £20
The complete review at
https://www.historytoday.com/arch…
About William Lilly
San Diego Sarah • Link
William Lilly would probably count as one of the "service magicians" explored in a new book, ‘Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic' by Tabitha Stanmore, which gives a human face to magic in medieval and early modern England.
I'm excerpting some of the book review as it gives context to Lilly's practice:
When most people think of magic and its practitioners in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, two images come to mind: the witch and the learned magus.
The person accused of witchcraft (usually a woman) is a figure of pity or fascination, while the overreaching and over-learned magus is a character open to derision.
Stanmore shows in 'Cunning Folk' that magic was a more complex field of activity – and business: These ‘service magicians’ performned a grubby and transactional – yet relatably human – necessary business.
Men and women who were neither liable to be accused of witchcraft, nor learned like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa or John Dee, made their living from the practice of magic.
Stanmore has already advanced our knowledge of service magicians with her book 'Love Spells and Lost Treasure' (2022); 'Cunning Folk' brings insights gleaned from the primary sources.
While previous historians have focused on some of the better-known service magicians – e.g. the Jacobean wizard Simon Forman – Stanmore concentrates on the stories of the clients of these magicians, and on the types of magic they employed.
While many service magicians were charlatans, the typical figure who emerges from Stanmore’s research is often more like a sort of proto-therapist: men and women with a refined understanding of human psychology who restored hope to the desperate.
In the post-Reformation society, where the clergy increasingly withdrew from a ministry of reassuring their flocks with demonstrations of sacred power, service magicians acted as a last resort for the resolution of apparently insoluble problems.
The question of whether the magic did or did not work is one that Stanmore declines to answer: ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t there.’
But people kept coming back to seasoned professionals who built up successful businesses with local and even national reputations.
Service magicians delivered what people needed.
Perhaps service magicians recognized their clients were not really seeking the restoration of lost valuables, the name of a thief, or the love of a man or woman, but rather a sense of control over otherwise uncontrollable features of their lives.
In the same way religion promised the bounty of an inscrutable God who did not always deliver, so magic offered to make sense of the world – not as a rival to religion (for it was often deeply enmeshed in it), but as a pragmatic approach to the spiritual world that dealt with mundane matters of no interest to theology.
About Dick Whittington and His Cat
San Diego Sarah • Link
CONCLUSION:
The fable of the cat is borrowed from the East.
Sir William Gore Ouseley speaks of the origin of the name of an island in the Persian Gulf, relates that in the 10th century, one Keis, the son of a poor widow of Siraf, embarked for India, with his sole property, a cat: There he arrived at a time when the Palace was infested by mice and rats, that they invaded the King's food, and persons were employed to drive them from the royal banquet.
Keis produced his cat, the noxious animals soon disappeared, and magnificent rewards were bestowed on the adventurer of Siraf, who returned to that city, and afterwards, with his mother and brothers, settled in the island, which, from him, has been denominated Keis, or, according to the Persians, Keish."
Keis is the name of the son of the widow in the above story, and still today, Keis is the name of a small Iranian island off the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf, with much of the island being occupied by what is labelled on Google maps as an “International Airport”.
Whether there is any truth in the story of Keis and his cat, the article serves to illustrate how stories and legends develop and cross boundaries, and it is almost impossible to be sure of almost any stories about Dick Whittington and his cat.
The original article has maps, pictures and more "facts" https://alondoninheritance.com/lo…
About Dick Whittington and His Cat
San Diego Sarah • Link
Now for the myths.
The Victorians had a stone erected on Highgate Hill:
Historic England listing provides some background of the stone:
“Memorial stone. Erected 1821, restored 1935, cat sculpture added 1964. Segmental-headed slab of Portland stone on a plinth, the inscription to the south-west side now almost completely eroded, that to the north-east detailing the career of the medieval merchant and City dignitary Sir Richard Whittington (c.1354–1423), including his 3 terms as Lord Mayor of London.
Atop the slab is a sculpture of a cat by Jonathan Kenworthy, in polished black Kellymount limestone. Iron railings, oval in plan, with spearhead finials and overthrow, surround the stone.
The memorial marks the legendary site where ‘Dick Whittington’ Sir Richard’s folkloric alter ego, returning home discouraged after a disastrous attempt to make his fortune in the City, heard the bells of St Mary le Bow ring out, ‘Turn again Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London.”
The listing states the memorial was erected in 1821, however it replaced an earlier stone, and a number of newspaper records of the existence of a stone from the 18th century, including the following from 24 October, 1761:
“Monday Night about 9 o’Clock, two Highwaymen well mounted, stopt and robbed a Country Grazier going out of Town, just by the Whittington Stone, of 4s, and his Horse whip. And after wishing him a good Night, rode off towards London.”
A Country Grazier was a name for a farmer who grazed sheep or cows, and the report is a reminder of how in the 18th century, this area was still rural.
The stone marks the legendary site of where Dick Whittington heard the bells of St. Mary le Bow and decided to return to the City.
Whatever the truth of the legend, the inclusion of a cat (added to the stone in 1964) is more pantomime than history, and even in 1824 alternative sources for the cat were quoted when talking about the stone, as in the following which is from the British Press newspaper on 6 September, 1824:
“Towards the bottom of Highgate Hill, on the south side of the road, stands an upright stone, inscribed ‘Whittington’s Stone’. This marks the situation of another stone, on which Richard Whittington is traditionally said to have sat, when, having run away from his master, he rested to ruminate on his hard fate, and was urged to return back by a peal from Bow bells, in the following: ‘Turn again, Whittington, Thrice Lord Mayor of London’.
Certain it is, that Whittington served the office of Lord Mayor 3 times, in 1398, 1406 and 1419.
He also founded several public edifices and charitable institutions.
Some idea of his wealth comes from his burning bonds which he held of Henry V to the amount of £60,000, in a fire of cinnamon, cloves, and other spices at an entertainment given to the monarch at Guildhall.