Metropolitan Geographies of Debt, 1700–1900

Detail from John Rocque's map of the Cities of London and Westminster and the Borough of Southwark, c1746.

I enter in this little book the names of the streets I can't go down while the shops are open. This dinner today closes Long Acre. I bought a pair of boots in Great Queen Street last week, and made that no thoroughfare too. There's only one avenue to the Strand left open now, and I shall have to stop that up to-night with a pair of gloves. The roads are closing so fast in every direction, that in about a month's time, unless my aunt sends me a remittance, I shall have to go three or four miles out of town to get over the way.¹

Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, 1840–1

So Dick Swiveller, one of Dickens's more amiable debtors, made shift to exist on an empty pocket in his single-room dwelling, somewhere 'in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane' around 1840. Dick Swiveller, perhaps oppressed by these restrictions, moves on and we eventually find him in a room in Bevis Marks on the eastern edge of the City, so a good step from Drury Lane, with Sampson and Sally Brass, petty attorneys whose business lies on either side of the credit nexus – arresting debtors on the one hand and devising inflated bills for creditors on the other. And it is surely true that for many others also in the great whirligig of motion that was London, one driver of geographical mobility was debt.

Debt had created its own distinctive geographies within the metropolis from medieval times. The notion of a place of sanctuary from arrest had long English traditions stretching back before the Norman Conquest. It was carried forward by the ecclesiastical authorities in medieval London with churches offering temporary protection and two places offering 'the permanent protection of special sanctuary', at the precinct of St Martin-le-Grand in the City of London and in Westminster in the Abbey precincts, where the old function still clings to the London street map. Sanctuary in church was usually a prelude to forfeiture of all possessions and banishment from the kingdom. But the privileges of the special sanctuaries in London and Westminster developed by the end of the fourteenth century customs and cultures of a more rebellious kind as debtors, thieves, even murderers clustered there to put themselves through strength in numbers out of the reach of the officers of law and other oppressors. It was no accident that this development followed a dramatic enlargement of the powers of creditors to imprison for debt in 1352. Of these two places the position of St Martin-le-Grand proved a fruitful template: its sanctuary was founded not on the church but on the precinct's accidental exclusion from City rule, a tiny self-governing district insulated from the writ of Mayor, Aldermen and Sheriffs, who had no or limited and contested jurisdiction there.²

Ecclesiastical sanctuary was swept away by the Reformation and felons could no longer claim sanctuary anywhere, but the idea of self-governing places, immune from outside interference though land-locked in the giant city, took root. St Martin-le-Grand was joined in the sixteenth century by Whitefriars, on the City's riverside, known by many as Alsatia. Others sprung up and some fell away. By 1697, when all these 'pretended privileged places' were nominally suppressed by an Act of Parliament, there were a dozen: four places near Fleet Street, including Whitefriars and Mitre Court; Fullwood's Rents and Baldwin's Gardens in Holborn; the Savoy in the Strand; in the East End at the Minories; and four in Southwark – Montagu Close, Deadman's Place and the Clink Liberty, all in Bankside along the river west of London Bridge; and the Mint. This last was largest of all by far. Its suppression would in fact take another twenty-five years to effect. But the district and much of its character retained a lingering taint into the nineteenth century.³ [End...