Were there shops like we have now in the Tudor period?
In ‘Elizabethan england’ Alison Plowden describes a shopping expedition by an Elizabethan lady, Lady Ri-Mellaine: ‘Meanwhile, though, work was going on in countless workshops throughout the city, where tailors, printers, and metalwokrers, brewers, coopers, wevaers and upholsterers, seamstresses, embroiderers and harness-makers plied their trades, most of them in their own homes. Down on the riverside wharfs, cargoes of wool and grain, hides and salt, silks and spices, barrels of tar and casks of wine were being loaded and unloaded. By mid-morning the crowds were congregating at the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, built by Sir Thomas Gresham as ‘a public place for the meeting of merchants’ and opened by the Queen in 1571. The Exchange was another of the sights of London and favourably compared by foreigners with the grest Bourse at Antwerp. The open quadrangle where the merchants met to do business was surrounded by a cloistered walk with shops and storehouses opening off it, but the best a
