"A notable shew of horses": equine encounters in John Stow's 'Survey of London'

In John Stow's 'A Survey of London' (1603) horses hide in plain sight. The Survey is a seventeenth-century chorography that offers an unrivalled insight into the history of early modern London by walking the reader through the City ward by ward. Along the way, the Survey looks beneath the urban topography and uncovers associated traditions past and present. For this reason, the Survey is frequently cited in literary and historical studies of early modern England and is itself the subject of scholarly attention. However, what has been hitherto unrecognised is the significance that the Survey draws on a pronounced horse culture and participates in the sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century revival of chivalric romance literature as a way of engaging with how the Reformation and early modern urbanisation changed the City. My thesis aims to redress this considerable gap in Survey scholarship. Drawing on animal, memory and literary studies, my cross-disciplinary approach is the first to explore how the depiction of urban horse-men hybrids evokes what I describe as chivalric nostalgia in the Survey and how this nostalgia functions as a set of textual strategies. Chapter Two examines the nostalgia-inducing properties of processioning aristocratic and civic horse-(wo)men and concludes with an analysis of reflective nostalgia in the Survey's portrayal of pre- and post-Reformation Midsummer Watches. Chapter Three explores how the Survey establishes the gold standard for all equine encounters through the lens of likely and unlikely martial horse-men. The resulting chivalric nostalgia is shown to put Smithfield under concrete threat of early modern urbanisation. Chapter Four demonstrates how the Survey engenders zoomorphic horse-man hybridity in its nostalgic renderings of public punishments in Cornhill and judicial processions to The Elms gallows in Smithfield. Ultimately, this thesis argues that chivalric nostalgia in the Survey sets up Smithfield as the equine heart and seat of chivalry in the City and as a historiographical phenomenon of genre-spanning importance warrants further investigation.