Elizabeth's London Liza Picard Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 342pp, £20 ISBN 0297607294

Liza Picard apostrophises her readers at the end of this book: "By now, you may have been able . . . to think yourself back to the life of an ordinary Londoner in the half-century of Elizabeth's reign." Dear God, she's right there. It is the London of Elizabeth I that she is talking about, and she has left me half-stunned by the few days she has given me in what must surely have been one of the most astonishing and exhausting of all national capitals.

The times were astonishing anyway, and having now experienced them so vividly myself, it seems to me that the single most extraordinary thing about London then was the presence of Elizabeth herself. If my own experience is anything to go by, she was inescapable.Wherever I went I was liable to be squeezed off the road by her vast cortege of horsemen, halberdiers, trumpeters and courtiers, with a thousand torchmen in attendance sometimes, or 300 carts following, and herself all ruffed and chalky-white in the middle of it all (chalky-white because she used heavy cosmetics to hide her smallpox scars).

I was assailed by astounding facts about her. Her make-up went grey if it stayed on too long. Her ruff might contain six yards of pleated cambric. She possessed 40 pairs of velvet shoes, a pet monkey and a musk-cat. She gave the Earl of Essex a magic ring. Whenever she embarked on her barge at Westminster, church bells had to be rung at Lambeth across the river. Every day, I was assured, her divine touch cured of the scrofula "a mighty number" of her loyal subjects, plus foreigners. Her annual expenditure on clothes would have paid the salaries of 30 surgeons at St Bartholomew's Hospital. She gambled a lot, and liked to watch bull-baiting.

As did everybody else. One elderly baited animal was so well-known a character that he had entered the literature as Sackerson the Bear (in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Act I, Scene 1), and in general it seemed to me, as I wandered Liza Picard's kaleidoscopic mise en scene, that most of Elizabeth's Londoners were gifted hedonists.

There were plagues, poverty and filth to contend with, but there was a reasonably effective welfare system, justice appeared to be moderately tempered with mercy, and the general ebullience, vivacity and variety of city life must have been marvellously restorative in itself.

Look on the bright side - the cockney way! If your child habitually wets his bed, you can soon cure him with the powdered stones of a hedgehog. If you urgently need to piss yourself, just hurry along to the Long House on the river above Billingsgate, which can accommodate 64 people at a time. It will cost you only 6d to take your dead boar on the public barge from Gravesend into town, and with luck you will pass the waterlogged corpses of a pirate or two hanging from the mud- gallows at Wapping. My dear fellow, don't bother to take your lute to the barber's - there is sure to be one provided for the convenience of clients.

The living is loose, the living is easy, especially if you are young and reasonably well-off. Girls and boys publicly kiss each other with abandon. Women go to pubs, and not only prostitutes. Both sexes wear clothes of amazing colour and complexity. Men are already smoking so heavily that the veins of one cadaver have been described by a Swiss medico as being "covered in soot just like a chimney". There are ballad-singers and pamphleteers all over the place, and if in theory all males between seven and 60 are liable for the military muster, well, nobody really takes that very seriously. Feel like a breath of fresh air on a Sunday morning? Go up to the roof of St Paul's, where lots of people take a stroll, but don't drink too much milk - it can cheer up melancholy folk, but is "not good for those that have gurgulations in the belly".

Such at least are the impressions I retain, like improbable dream-glimpses, from my reading of this exuberant book. I must not, however, undersell it. It is by no means all escapism. The third in a series of such historical works that Picard has published, it is in fact a conscientious and scholarly analysis of London's condition in the 16th century, contemplating every civic aspect from the sartorial to the gynaecological.

Reading this book is like taking a ride on a marvellously exhilarating time-machine, alive with colour, surprise and sheer merriment. It is a fantastick London Eye, perhaps, queue-less and five centuries retrospective.

Jan Morris's A Writer's World: travels 1950-2000 is published by Faber and Faber in September

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website