Milton’s England

When John Milton was born on Bread Street in 1608, a Roman road ran through the city—and vanished streams still traced their way beneath London’s streets. What could the boy have seen in a capital built over marshes, rivers and centuries of history?

Writing in the early twentieth century, Lucia True Ames Mead looks back to the London that shaped Milton, from the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 to the poet’s birth. Here, old Roman walls and Saxon place-names stand amid a city alive with the arguments, ambitions and discoveries of a changing England. Milton’s life would span the age of Shakespeare and Cromwell, when struggles over power and liberty reached far beyond the streets he knew. To understand the poet, Mead suggests, begin with the ground beneath his feet. What did this city teach the boy who would become one of its defining voices?

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