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35
The noted Mother Needham convicted for keeping a disorderly house
in Park Place, St. James's, was fined 1s., to stand twice in the pillory, viz.:
once in St. James's Street, over against the end of Park Place, and once in
the new Palace Yard Westminster, and to find sureties for her good
behaviour for three years."
Whipping was frequently applied to lewd women, hut other
offenders occasionally suffered this punishment, such, for
example, as treasonable expressions not deemed worthy of the
extreme penalty. For instance, a soldier was whipped in
St. James's Park for drinking a health to the Duke of
Ormond and Dr. Sacheverel, and saying he hoped soon to
wear his right master's cloth. On Court days, Bridewell was
frequented by the fashionables of the day, to witness the public
flogging of loose women.
As regards finances, the only bankers were goldsmiths and
such like, and even this description of banking does not date
from a period much earlier than the Restoration, if indeed it
did not originate in the necessities of the restored monarch.
The financial capital of the world up to that time had been
in the Netherlands, but Antwerp had been desolated and
ruined by the domination of Spain, and now the merchants of
Amsterdam were rapidly being supplanted by those of London,
and, to a less extent, Bristol. From very early times, Jewish
usurers had settled in London, and at the Restoration the
needy classes had already found bankers, or rather discounters,
trading under the sign of the Arms of Lombardy, when
necessity required them to hypothecate articles of wearing
apparel or household furniture. The pawnbrokers of that day,
however, were not held in high esteem bv the more wealthy
traders of the City. Early in the seventeenth century an
Act (1 Jac. I., cap. 21) had been passed "against Brokers,"
which affords both curious and instructive reading.
The preamble of the Act is excessively long, and sets forth
that the ancient Brokers appointed by virtue of the Statute of