London

by Peter Ackroyd

  When some citizens of London were on a long voyage to “the remote ends of the world,” they were threatened with shipwreck; but they comforted each other with the words: “what do we with little faith fear who have the good Bartholomew, the accomplisher of so many great marvels, set nigh to us in London? … He will not hide the bowels of his mercy from his fellow citizens.” In the oratory of the church was “an altar hallowed to the honour of the most blessed and perpetual Virgin Mary”; here the Virgin appeared to one lay brother and declared: “I will receive their prayers and vows and will grant them mercy and blessing for ever.”

  That oratory survives still, but it is by no means an object of pilgrimage. St. Bartholomew’s Church is now largely ignored, set back from the circular road which connects the meat market to the hospital and which forms the perimeter of the old Bartholomew Fair. Yet Bartholomew himself might still be considered as one of the sacred guardians of the city and, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are ten streets or roads which bear his name.

  London was once a holy city, therefore, and of Smithfield we read: “Awful, therefore, is this place to him that understands, here is nothing else but the house of God and the gate of heaven to him that believes.” This invocation is echoed by other visionaries and mystics of London; here, in the very grimy and malodorous streets of the city, the “gate of heaven” can be opened.

  There are in London many holy wells of healing, although most were long ago filled in or demolished. The ancient well of St. Clement lies beneath the Law Courts; Chad’s Well is buried beneath St. Chad’s Street. The well of Barnet was covered first by a workhouse and then by a hospital, so its air of healing was not thoroughly dispelled; in the same spirit the curiously named but efficacious Perilous Pond lay beside St. Luke’s Hospital in Old Street. A healing well that was guarded by monks, near Cripplegate, is still recalled by the name of Monkwell Street, while Black Mary’s Well has been transformed into the area still known as Bagnigge Wells beside Farringdon Road. The only ancient well still to be seen is the Clerk’s Well, now protected by a glass window a few yards north of Clerkenwell Green: here for many centuries were staged miracle plays as well as more secular bouts of wrestling and jousting. The holy well of Shoreditch—commemorated by Holy Well Row and Holy Well Lane—marks the site of one of the first English theatres, erected in 1576 by James Burbage, more than twenty years before the Globe. Sadler’s Well was also a pleasure garden and, later, a theatre. So the holy spirit of the wells, in a fashion appropriate to London, turned into theatre.

  Hermits were often chosen to be the guardians of the wells, but their principal stewardship was of the gates and crossroads of the city. They collected the tolls, and dwelt in the very bastions of London Wall. In a sense, then, they were the protectors of London itself, professing by their vocation that this was a city of God as well as a city of men. This was the theory, at least, but it is clear that many were hermits by device rather than by profession; the author of Piers the Plowman, William Langland, condemned them as “Grete lobyes and longe that loth were to swynke” or impostors who were simply unwilling to work. In 1412, for example, William Blakeney was convicted at the Guildhall for going about “barefooted and with long hair, under the guise of sanctity.” Nevertheless the picture of London surrounded, as it were, with hermits who lived in their small stone oratories keeping vigils and reciting orisons is an arresting one.

  The figure of the hermit has another significance also; the stories of the city, throughout the centuries, have been filled with lonely and isolated people who feel their solitude more intensely within the busy life of the streets. They are what George Gissing called the anchorites of daily life, who return unhappy to their solitary rooms. The early city hermits may therefore be regarded as an apt symbol for the way of life of many Londoners. An extension of that hermitic spirit can be traced in the four churches of St. Botolph, which guarded four of the city’s gates; Botolph was a seventh-century Saxon hermit, who was especially associated with travellers. So the wanderer and the interior exile are seen as part of the same short pilgrimage among the streets of London.

  But those streets can also be filled with prayer. There was in Marylebone, before the redevelopment of Lisson Grove, a Paradise Street approached by Grotto Passage; in the immediate vicinity were Vigil Place and Chapel Street. Perhaps here we have evidence of an ancient hermitage, or sacred spot, linking the city to eternity. In the immediate vicinity of St. Paul’s are to be found Pater Noster Row, Ave Maria Lane, Amen Court and Creed Lane: here we may usefully imagine a procession through various streets in which particular prayers or responses were chanted. So the old churches of London maintain their ancient presence and seem periodically to relive their histories.

  That is why the area around St. Pancras Old Church, for example, still remains desolate and dreary. It has always been an isolated and somewhat mysterious place—“Walk not there too late,” counselled one Elizabethan topographer. It is the traditional terminus for murderers, suicides and those who were killed while fighting duels at Chalk Farm, but no true resting place: the corpses are continually being dug up and reburied. The last great removal occurred in 1863 when the railway lines of St. Pancras Station were laid through the site. The tombstones were placed against a great tree, the roots of which curl among them; from a distance it would seem that the headstones are indeed the fruit of that tree, ripe and ready to be gathered. Among these ancient memorials will be some to the Catholic dead; it was for them a holy place. St. Pancras is believed to be the first Christian church in England, established by Augustine himself, and is reported to contain the last bell which was able to toll during the Mass. Pancras has therefore been construed as Pangrace; a more likely derivation, associated with the saintly boy named Pancras, is Pan Crucis or Pan Cross—the monogram or symbol of Christ himself. So we have a Vatican historian, Maximilian Misson, asserting that “St. Pancras under Highgate, near London … is the Head and Mother of all Christian Churches.” Who could imagine the source of such power in the wasteland north of King’s Cross Station?

  It has its bells, like the other London churches. The bells of St. Stephen, Rochester Row, were named “Blessing,” “Glory,” “Wisdom,” “Thanksgiving,” “Honour,” “Power,” “Might” and “Be Unto Our God For Ever and Ever Amen Alleluiah.”

  We do not necessarily need the evidence of the famous nursery rhyme to realise that the bells were a familiar and friendly presence in the life of Londoners:

  You owe me five farthings,

  Say the bells of St. Martin’s.

  When will you pay me,

  Say the bells at Old Bailey.

  In 1994 the Meteorological Office reported that, before the sound of motorcars entered the already crowded streets, the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside “would have been audible all over London.” In a true sense, then, every Londoner was a Cockney. Yet the East End may lay an especial claim to that honorific, perhaps, since the oldest business in that area is the Whitechapel Bell Foundry which was established in the fifteenth century. Citizens used to bet which parish could make its bells heard at the greatest distance and it was said that bell-ringing was a salutary way of keeping warm in winter. It was sometimes surmised that at the Last Judgement the angels would peal the bells of London, rather than sound their trumpets, in order to convince the citizens that the day of doom had truly arrived. The bells were part of the sound and texture of its life. When the protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984 recalls the famous song with its mention of St. Clement’s and St. Martin’s, Bow and Shoreditch, he seems to “hear the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten.” Some of the bells of that lost London can still be heard.

  The Early Middle Ages

  A map of London, drawn by chronicler and illuminator Matthew Paris in 1252; it shows the Tower, St. Paul’s and Westminster.

  CHAPTER 4

  You Be All Law Worthy

  In the last month o
f 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, marched down St. Giles High Street before turning south to Westminster. He had already savaged Southwark and now intended to lay siege to London Wall by Ludgate, which was then the principal entrance to the city. It was commonly said at the time that London “neither fears enemies nor dreads being taken by storm” because of its defences but, in fact, after some form of secret treaty or negotiations, certain Saxon nobles opened the gate. William’s troops made their way to St. Paul’s and Cheapside but then “in platea urbis”—an open space or wide street—they were attacked by a group, or perhaps even an army, of citizens who refused to countenance the entry of the foreign leader. A late eleventh-century chronicler, William of Jumieges, records that the Norman forces at once “engaged them in battle, causing no little mourning to the City because of the very many deaths of her own sons and citizens.” Eventually the Londoners capitulated. But their action demonstrates that they considered themselves to dwell in an independent city which could withstand foreign invasion. On this occasion they were mistaken, but for the next three hundred years Londoners would assert their sovereignty as members of a city-state.

  The Battle of London, however, was over. Eleven bodies have recently been recovered just south-west of Ludgate, with some suggestion that they had been dismembered, while a hoard of several thousand coins of that period was found by the Walbrook.

  The new monarch’s primary task was to subjugate the city. Work began on three military stockades at various points on the perimeter wall—Montfichet Tower, Baynard’s Castle and against the south-east section of the Wall, a structure that has since become known as the “Tower of London.” But the Tower never belonged to London and was considered by the citizens to be an affront or threat to their liberty. In The Making of London, Sir Laurence Gomme contemplates their displeasure when “they heard the taunts of the people who said that these walls had been built as an insult to them, and that if any one of them should dare to contend for the liberty of the city he would be shut up in them and consigned to imprisonment.”

  After a great fire in 1077 which, like its predecessors, seems to have devastated much of the city, a stone tower was built in place of the original fortification; it took more than twenty years to complete, and pressed labour from the neighbouring shires was used in its construction. It was called the White Tower, and rose some ninety feet in the air to emphasise its power over the city. Elaborate rituals were drawn up in order to formalise the presence of London’s leaders in the Tower for judicial or administrative purposes, but it remained outside their jurisdiction. Built of alien material, cream-coloured Caen stone from Normandy, it was a visible token of foreign rule.

  William was also graciously pleased to grant a “Charter” to London, on a tiny parchment less than six inches in length. It is written in Anglo-Saxon and French. Addressed to “the chiefs of the city” it granted to London “rights” that the city already possessed and had had since the days of Roman domination. “I do you to know that I will that you be all law worthy that were in King Edward’s day,” runs the translation. “And I will that every child be his father’s heir after his father’s day. And I will not endure that any man offer any wrong to you. God keep you.”

  It may seem innocuous but, as Gomme suggests in The Governance of London, it represents “an entirely new constitutional factor in the history of London.” Londoners were to be allowed to live under the rule of law that the city itself had established. The king was asserting his sovereignty over the ancient governance of London.

  William had, however, recognised the one central fact—that this city was the key both to his own fortunes and to those of the country he had conquered. That is why he had inaugurated the transition of London from the status of an independent city-state to that nation’s capital. In 1086 the Domesday Survey left London uninspected, no doubt on the ground that the complex financial and commercial activity within the city could not usefully be considered as part of the king’s revenue. At the same time the Norman king and his successors initiated an inspired plan of public works in order to emphasise the central place of London in the new politics. The cathedral of St. Paul was rebuilt and William’s successor, his son William Rufus, began the construction of Westminster Hall; a number of monastic houses and nunneries, together with priories and hospitals, were also erected in this period so that London and its environs were the site of prolonged and continual construction. The building and rebuilding, have been maintained ever since. The area around the Roman amphitheatre, for example, was cleared in the early twelfth century. In the same area the first guildhall was completed by 1127, and a second built in the early fifteenth century.

  The earliest form of public administration was the folkmoot, which met three times a year, in the Roman amphitheatre and then latterly by St. Paul’s Cross. There was also a more formal court, known as the hustings. These institutions were of the greatest antiquity, dating to Saxon and Danish times when the city was autonomous and self-governing. The territorial divisions of London, still in existence, were also of very early date. By the eleventh century the principal unit of territory had become the ward, which was led and represented by an alderman. The ward was more than a collection of citizens administering their own streets and shops; it was also a unit of defence and attack, with a midsummer inspection when, according to an official document dating from the reign of Henry VIII, “ev’y alderman by hymself musteryd hys owne warde yn the fields, vewyng theym in harnes and sawe that ev’y man had a sworde and a dagger and suche as were not meate to be archars were turnyd to pykes.” As late as the fourteenth century a clerk could term London a respublica, and in this account of a carefully marshalled citizen army it is possible to trace the force and antiquity of the republican ideal.

  But if the ward boundaries were the most significant within the city, they were not necessarily the most distinctive. Beneath the ward were the precincts with their own assemblies, and below them the individual parishes with their self-governing vestries. The city embodied a series of intricately related authorities, and that network of affiliations and interests has materially affected its life. Throughout the nineteenth century, for example, there were continual complaints about the rigidity and stubbornness of the city authorities. This resistance to change was the legacy of a thousand years, affecting and obscuring the capital as powerfully as its coal-smoke and its fog. It is also the setting in which succeeding events are best understood.

  William the Conqueror’s successor, William Rufus, was characterised by his attempt to impose ever more extortionate taxes and dues and tolls on the citizens. In his struggles with the Norman barons ensconced in England, it was also Rufus’s custom to send prisoners to be executed in London; it was a token of its role as capital, perhaps, but also of the king’s authority.

  After the death of Rufus in 1100, his brother, Henry I, hastened to the city in order to be acclaimed as the new sovereign. The records of his reign include a list of aldermen, from 1127, which displays so comprehensive a mixture of English and French names that a thoroughly ordered and working association between citizens who were now properly “Londoners” can be assumed. In fact the study of the names of Londoners becomes of extreme interest and significance in this period, as Old English names are gradually supplanted by those of French origin. Surnames were by no means universal, but were attached to a person because of locality or occupation—Godwinus Baker was thus distinguished from Godwin Ladubur (moneyer) and Godwyn Turk (fishmonger) or Godwinne Worstede (mercer) and Godwynne Sall (hatter). Other citizens were identified by patronymics or, more commonly, by nicknames. Edwin Atter’s name meant Edwin of the sharp tongue while Robert Badding’s implied an effeminate man; Hugh Fleg was “wide awake,” Johannes Flocc had woolly hair, John Godale sold good ale while Thomas Gotsaul was honest.

  Even as they associated with each other in trade and commerce, however, the relationship of the citizens with the king became more problematic. For him, the city was predominantly a place
to be “farmed” for revenue; the reason why Henry rarely interfered in the life of London was simply that he needed it to prosper in order to benefit from its wealth.

  After Henry’s death in 1135, the dynastic struggles of the various claimants to the throne were directly affected by the loyalties and allegiances of Londoners; Henry’s nephew Stephen, Count of Blois, claiming the right of succession, promptly “came to London, and the London folk received him … and hallowed him king on midwinter day.” So says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and another ancient source adds that the “Alderman and wise folk gathered together the folkmoot, and there providing at their own will for the good of the realm unanimously resolved to choose a king.” The citizens of London had, in other words, formally elected a king for the entire country. It is not clear what Stephen promised or granted the city, in return, but from this time forward it takes the first place in national affairs with a degree of independence which suggests that London is almost self-governing.

  The coronation of Stephen, however, was not in itself enough. The landing in 1139 of his rival, Henry’s daughter the Empress Matilda, and his own capture at the Battle of Lincoln in 1141, meant that London was forced to choose again. A great conference was held at Winchester in order to consider the royal claims of Matilda, and a speech in her favour by Stephen’s own brother was concluded with the following significant remarks: “We have despatched messengers for the Londoners, who, from the importance of their city in England, are almost nobles, as it were, to meet us on this business; and have sent them a safe-conduct.” They arrived on the following day, saying that they had been sent a communione quam vocant Londoniarum—“from the community, or commune, of London.” This testimony from William of Malmesbury is the clearest possible evidence of the city’s significance. As the nation divided in baronial wars, London had ceased to be a capital and had once again become a city-state. The events of Matilda’s short subsequent reign reinforce this impression. She tried to curb the power of London and unwisely demanded money from its richest citizens. That is why, when Stephen’s own queen, Maud, approached London, its inhabitants rushed into the streets, according to Gesta Stephani, with weapons “like thronging swarms from beehives” in order to support her. Matilda fled from the irate citizenry, and never regained the throne.