24 • BeginningsMost Londoners would have been content with attaining Samuel Pepys’
comfortable place within the middling ranks of contemporary English so-
ciety.^18 Pepys was different. He lived life on the edge, engaging in risky busi-
ness arrangements, indulging in a wide range of erotic adventures, and at
times engaging in death-defying acts that set him apart from others in his
class. Consider his activities the day after New Year’s. At his barber’s he had
little chance to talk to “his Jane” alone but gave her something; at the Piazza
he regaled friends with a new “ballet”—a musical ballad “made by the
seamen at sea to their ladies in town.” He had “good sport” with a kins-
woman of the proprietor of the Swan, “without hurt.” And he was lucky in
love at Mrs. Martin’s lodgings, where he did “ce que je voudrais avec her
most freely” (a typical lingua franca allusion in his secret journal to a sexual
encounter).^19 This dalliance cost him two shillings in wine and cake, plus
bearing with the woman’s “impudence,” but he could afford it. The only dis-
turbance of the government entrepreneur’s happy-go-lucky world occurred
at the end of the day. His wife was waiting up with a passage for him to read
by the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sydney on marital jealousy, which, he
said, “stuck in my stomach.”^20
Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys lived in the oldest part of Greater London, a
barely one-square-mile area known as “the city.” A remarkable conglomera-
tion of short, narrow streets, clattering with heavy foot and carriage traffic,
the city contained no fewer than ninety-seven churches, twelve great mer-
chant and craft guilds with sumptuous halls for their wealthy members, and
row after row of multistoried shops and houses. Bounded by an ancient Ro-
man wall on the east, north, and west and the Thames to the south, the city
and its liberties (a series of enclaves just outside the wall that came partly
under its jurisdiction) were governed by the lord mayor, a legislative council,
and the executive-judicial court of aldermen who held forth at the twelfth-
century Guildhall.
Beyond the walled city, London’s suburbs spread out along ribbonlike
roads leading to the open country. These suburban outparishes had once
been villages or fertile farmland. Now they housed four-fifths of the house-
holds in the metropolis, including the vast majority of its laboring families.
While most of the ninety-seven parishes within the wall took in only a few
blocks,^21 the thirty-three suburban units each covered many acres. Saint
Giles Cripplegate reached northward from the wall for a mile and a half and
stretched half a mile from east to west. It was home to 130 trades and a hun-
dred times the population of the largest city parishes. Coal-fueled industries
had sprung up everywhere, providing employment in sugar and soap boiling,