Free The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl Page B

aldermen of each ward, ‘with as great secrecy as may be’, to make ‘diligent search’ to determine:
    what and how many foreigners are residing and remaining within the same; of what nation, profession, trade or occupation every of them are of . . . what or howe many servants, either men or women, doth every of them keep in their houses; how long they and every of them have been in the realm; to what church every of them resort; whether they keep any English-born people in their house or otherwise set them to work.
     
    The aldermen were told to complete this census within four days, which expresses the urgency of the surveillance but was entirely unrealistic. The certificates were not actually returned until 4 May. 34
    Answers to all the above questions are to be found in the surviving returns, and it is a great pity, biographically speaking, that the Mountjoys do not figure among the 1,100 or so households described there. The census is a snapshot, and their absence from it shows only that they were not in London between 6 March and 4 May 1593. They had prudently moved out for a while. They could possibly have been in Brentford, where we know Mountjoy later leased a property. Or they could have been in Stepney, where we later find Mountjoy’s presumed relative John, and his own widow Isabel. These villages lay outside the scope of the 1593 Return.
    We know little of the Mountjoys’ early years in London, but these are some of the ingredients of their experience. They are prey to the vulnerabilities of the ’migr’. They live with petty restrictions and swingeing taxes. They are objects of curiosity or derision, shading at times into dangerous hostility. These tensions were no doubt counter-balanced with many benefits, but they are an extenuation to be remembered when we hear the crabby tones of Christopher Mountjoy as reported by witnesses at the Court of Requests.
    Though it seems they were out of town in the spring of 1593, it is from around this year that we get our earliest sightings of the Mountjoys in Cripplegate. Two of the deponents in the Belott- Mountjoy suit, both residents of Cripplegate, claim to have known Mountjoy at this time. Daniel Nicholas says he had known him for about twenty years. This would take us back to 1592, which is about the earliest possible date for Mountjoy’s residence in Silver Street, for had he been a householder there in 1591 he would have been listed for taxation in the subsidy rolls of that year. (Thereafter there is a gap in the Cripplegate rolls until 1599, when he is listed.) Humphrey Fludd, meanwhile, says he has known Mountjoy for about eighteen years, i.e. since c . 1594. Retrospective computations by witnesses are not necessarily reliable, but Fludd’s may be accurate. In about 1594, according to his own testimony, he had married Stephen Belott’s mother in France, and not long afterwards he ‘put’ Belott ‘to be the defendant’s apprentice’ in London. Fludd is at least likely to know in what year he was married, and his statement is fairly good evidence that the Mountjoys were in Cripplegate, in business, by about 1594.
    This in turn makes it likely that Christopher is the ‘Mr Munjoye’ referred to in a letter of late 1593. It was written by a young Norfolk gentleman, Philip Gawdy, who sent home a number of valuably gossipy letters from London, where he was studying law. Among them are fascinating glimpses from the playhouses, such as the performance by the Admiral’s Men in 1587 when a loaded musket went off onstage and killed a pregnant woman in the audience - the play was probably Marlowe’s Tamburlaine . In his letter of 7 December 1593, Gawdy reports that he has bought his ‘beloved syster’ - in fact his sister-in-law, Anne - various fashion items she had requested:
    her fann with the handle . . . a pair of knifes, a vardingale of the best fashion, her gold thread, her heare call [hair-caul], her pumpes, and in short there wanteth no thing she