Winter, 1664–1665• 31sage 910 feet long and 20 feet wide, crowded with structures on both sides.
Visitors gaped at 20 -foot houses reaching to three or four stories. There was
also a chapel, a square for festive events, a drawbridge to allow river traffic
through, and a curiosity like none other, appropriately called Nonesuch
House—a veritable palace on the river put together without nails. At peak
hours it was anyone’s guess how all the carts and carriages got through the
narrow space into the city or back to suburban Southwark and the country-
side of the southern counties: Kent, Sussex, and Surrey. The Thames could
also be crossed by boat, of course. Hundreds of watermen living in cheap
housing at the water’s edge ferried persons and their goods for moderate
fares. Those traveling in the best style could hire a flat-bottom wherry to
take a coach and horses across the river.
Several roads from the north served as a vital lifeline for Londoners’ appe-
tites, conveying produce and livestock each week to the city’s markets and
slaughterhouses. The farm-country carters and their wagons competed for
space with carriages bringing in people from the Midlands and North Coun-
try. Samuel Pepys’ father and mother shuttled back and forth between the
city and the family’s ancestral home in Cambridgeshire. Samuel frequently
took to the northern roads, passing through Aldersgate and Bishopsgate.
Two other openings in the northern wall at Cripplegate and Moorgate eased
the congestion. Still, on a busy day traffic could be bottled up for hours at
these narrow gates. Conveniently, taverns clustered around the gates, beck-
oning weary travelers.
For Londoners with interests at court, two additional gates led to West-
minster and on through the southwestern countryside to Salisbury, Ports-
mouth, Southampton, and Bristol. Ludgate connected Whitehall with Saint
Paul’s busy churchyard. North of Ludgate, Newgate linked the nerve center
of London commerce at Cheapside via poor suburbs to open land where
some of the most powerful persons in the realm were building new man-
sions. Pepys frequently took that route on business with high officers of the
crown, stopping on the way at the inn of his cousin Kate and her husband in
a less desirable neighborhood.
Ceapis an Anglo-Saxon word for barterortrade,and Cheapside lived up
to its name, emerging from Newgate’s thriving livestock “slaughters” and
food markets and proceeding eastward to the Royal Exchange and the poul-
try markets, where it branched into Threadneedle and Cornhill Streets and
the more southerly Lombard Street. The jousting bouts and small structures
of Cheapside’s olden days had given way to row upon row of shops three,
four, or five stories high, featuring the wares of goldsmiths and mercers. But