Evil May Day
May Day has many symbolic meanings. For many it is the official day of organised labour throughout the industrialised world – and the origin of our own May Day holiday. For others it marks the true arrival of spring, with celebratory dances around the Maypole. But back in 1517, East Enders saw 1 May marked by riots against immigrant workers. The shameful scenes would forever be remembered as ‘Evil May Day’.
There has often been suspicion and fear of incomers in the East End of course. In our time it has surfaced in the Blackshirt marches and the Battle of Cable Street, and most recently in the Brick Lane bomb attack. In the 16th century, the targets of ignorance were not Jews or Bangladeshis, of course. Instead it was the incoming merchants and craftsmen from Flanders, Italy, the Baltic States and France who were on the receiving end.
A study of those immigrants throws up some interesting parallels with the more recent targets of racism. Many of them were fleeing religious persecution in their home countries. And there were common characteristics shared by the new Londoners. Sylvia L Thrupp, in her essay Studies in London History, identifies “a striving towards piety and economic advancement through honest work and mutual help within the group” – a description that could equally be applied to the incoming Jews and Bangladeshis of the twentieth century.
Unfortunately hardworking newcomers are often viewed as trying to steal a piece of the existing pie, rather than creating new wealth of their own. The incoming craftsmen who settled outside the City walls in Spitalfields brought new skills and techniques, which gave them the edge over the existing cockneys. These new skills were in trades as diverse as weaving, silver and gold-smithing, jewellery making, tailoring, clockmaking and brewing. There were celebrated printers, basket makers, joiners and caterers.
Thrupp’s paper paints a fascinating picture of London’s racial mix of the time, with the Italians forming “a commercial and financial aristocracy”. There were Frenchman and Jews. Greeks, Italians and Spaniards comprised London’s physicians, and the servant class was largely made up of Icelanders.
Things would probably have settled down, with the new workers becoming assimilated, with their burgeoning businesses offering employment to the existing Londoners … and of course the existing Londoners adopting and adapting the new skills and techniques for their own advancement, were it not for the medieval version of a recession, which hit in the early 1500s.
A preacher named Dr Beal gave regular rabble-rousing rants at St Paul’s [Cathedral] Cross, a kind of Speaker’s Corner of the day. And on 1 May 1517, his target was the incoming tradesmen (though there was also a ‘denunciation to the death’ of that pagan fertility symbol the Maypole). A mob of apprentices, clerics and ruffians were roused to action by Beal’s racist polemic, and they marched toward the East End, led by a disillusioned broker named John Lincoln.
As they reached the East End itself, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, Sir Richard Cholmley, had his men fire on the rabble in an attempt to turn them back, and the Earls of Surrey and Suffolk rode in with their troops, seizing 400 prisoners.
Justice was swift and brutal. Lincoln and his fellow leaders were hung, drawn and quartered, their remains gibbeted as a reminder to others. The surviving prisoners were charged with the treasonable offence of “breaking the peace of Christendom”, another capital crime. Henry VIII was all for hanging the lot of them, but intercessions by his queen, Catherine, and Lord Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, secured their pardons. The prisoners “took the halters from their necks and danced and sang”.
And the incomers gradually assimilated themselves into the life of London – inter-marrying, bringing their children up as East Enders and, in time, becoming East Enders themselves.