The duck and the owl are depicted in 
Pierre Belon’s L’Histoire de la 
Nature des Oyseaux (Paris, 1555), a 
French naturalist’s early attempt at 
bird classification. While taking cues 
from nature, Shakespeare also drew 
on legendary associations and 
birdlore, such as the belief that 
shrieking night owls bode ill, 
especially at a birth. 
The Stocks, in Cornhill Ward, were a marketplace for 
flesh and fish. Billingsgate, one of the main city wharves, 
also offered freshly caught fish, but not until much 
later — in 1696 — did Parliament allow a daily market 
there. A small portion of Smithfield was reserved, as in 
times past, for marketing horses and cattle. Bakewell 
Hall, in the little ward of Bassings Hall, was 
immemorially “employed as a weekly marketplace for all 
sorts of woollen clothes broad and narrow, brought from 
all parts of this realm, there to be sold.” Farmers fetched 
their poultry to Leaden Hall Market, where other 
commerce went on as well. 
Tradesmen and sellers of wares kept shops everywhere: 
mercers and haberdashers on London Bridge, goldsmiths 
in Cheapside, pepperers and grocers in Bucklesbury, 
drapers in Candlewick Street, skinners in Bridge Row, 
stockfishmongers, cooks, and ironmongers in Thames 
Street, poulterers in Grace Street, while “the brewers for 
the most part remained near to the friendly waters of the 
Thames.” In the old days the bakers of London were 
enjoined to sell no bread in shops or houses: only in the 
market in Bread Street. Such centralization had long 
since vanished in the wake of urban growth, but in a 
regulated economy nothing is more stringently controlled 
than the price and quality of the daily bread. Elizabeth’s 
Privy Council still enforced the “statutes and ancient 
customs for making and retailing of all lawful sorts of 
bread.” 
In Elizabethan England, the Crown sought also to curb 
excess in apparel, but not very successfully. The 
fashionable reveled in luxurious materials (silks and 
velvets from Italy and France) ornamented with precious 
jewels. But if the upper classes consumed conspicuously, 
and the mercantile classes with balance-sheet 
moderation, many in this period lacked any means at all. 
They wore rags. 
High- and low-born, whether in tatters or finery, people 
thronged to the capital. Of the magnets drawing the 
hurrying folk, one or two are especially conspicuous. 
Fronting the Cornhill stood the gigantic emporium that 
Sir Thomas Gresham, a mercer of London, had 
commissioned Flemish architects to build in imitation of 
the great Bourse at Antwerp. In the cloistered piazza of 
the Exchange, merchants gathered to conduct their 
affairs while above, in the Pawn, tradesmen — milliners, 
haberdashers, armorers, apothecaries, glass-sellers, and 
the rest — carried on their retail businesses in shops 
illuminated by wax-lights. Here one went for a 
mousetrap, a birdcage, a shoehorn, or a lantern. At the 
