TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
This small book printed in 1863 is a reproduction of the original‘Catalogue’ published in 1677. The many printing errors andinconsistencies in spelling and punctuation in that Catalogue weredeliberately carried forward to this 1863 book, which notes in theIntroduction that it was “here reproduced as almost a fac-simile”.
This etext has also retained these misspellings and inconsistenciesand not tried to correct or ‘improve’ the content, and only spacingbetween words is different—two or three or more spaces in theoriginal text have been condensed to one space in this etext. A fewother minor changes are noted at the end of the book.
THE LITTLE
LONDON DIRECTORY
OF 1677.
THE LITTLE
LONDON DIRECTORY
OF 1677.
THE OLDEST PRINTED LIST OF THE
MERCHANTS AND BANKERS
OF LONDON.
REPRINTED FROM THE EXCEEDINGLY RARE ORIGINAL;
WITH AN INTRODUCTION POINTING OUT
SOME OF THE MOST EMINENT
MERCHANTS OF THE
PERIOD.
LONDON:
JOHN CAMDEN HOTTEN,
PICCADILY.
1863.
INTRODUCTION.
This little book might easily, bya competent pen, be made thetext to a volume, as large, ifnot as useful, as the huge “PostOffice Directory,” of which it was the modestprecursor. No such ambitious object as theproduction of a volume of that class is to behere indulged in. On the contrary, the purposeof the present short introduction is tooffer a few suggestions upon topics obviouslybelonging to the contents of this commercialrecord of the merchants and goldsmiths ofLondon in the second half of the seventeenthcentury. It will be found to demonstrate the[vi]value of not a few family names as significantelements of the history of social progress.
It has, indeed, been so in all time. FromHomer’s catalogues down to the knightly nomenclatureof the “Roman de la Rose,” andother long-breathed poems of the middle ages;from the Battle-abbey Roll of the conqueror’schiefs at Hastings, and from that of KingHenry’s army at Agincourt to our modernmusters, such documents elucidate acceptablythe course of military heroism. The conjectur