by Lara Maiklem
Cardinal Cap Alley, which runs between Bankside’s oldest remaining riverside houses near the Globe Theatre, is the only reminder of these infamous inns – apart from the objects that wash up on the foreshore. It may have been a gentleman caller who lost the hooked tag I found here. Perhaps it had secured his cloak against the biting river wind, or it may have worked loose from a strap used to hook a whore’s skirts out of the mud as she slipped and skidded down a causeway to a waiting wherry. It dates from between 1500 and 1650 and was half hidden in a patch of sand when I saw it. I spotted the decoration first, a pineapple or pinecone, and it is made from cast copper alloy that has acquired a rich patina during its time in the river.
A fair number of the objects I’ve found were probably lost by people travelling and working on the river. While the city’s roads were muddy and its one bridge crowded, the Thames was fast and efficient and everyone in London used it to get around. The river on the Agas map is filled with wherries, some with tiny passengers in the back and the wherryman at the front pulling hard on a pair of oars. A wherry is waiting at Bankside, probably at Mason Stairs, which is almost exactly where the Millennium Bridge is today. There were said to be 3,000 watermen working on the tidal Thames at the end of the sixteenth century. This had risen to 8,000 by the start of the eighteenth century and 12,000 by the end of it. On Bankside, partway down an unassuming street and set into the wall of a modern building, are two stone slabs known as the Ferryman’s Seat. It is thought to have ancient origins, but little else is actually known about it. The seat is narrow and the back slopes forward, which some say was to prevent the watermen falling asleep on the job. It’s certainly very uncomfortable.
There were stairs and causeways all along the tidal Thames. At high tide, people stepped straight off the stairs and into boats; at low water, they negotiated slippery causeways down to the river. On John Rocque’s map of 1746, there are eleven sets of river stairs between Old London Bridge and where Blackfriars Bridge is today, but over the years nearly all of them have been dismantled and the stones of many causeways reused or washed away by the river. The only set of older stairs left along the stretch at Bankside is just to the west of Southwark Bridge. The gate in the spiked iron railings at the top of them is permanently locked so you can’t use them, but they are best seen from below anyway. At the top there’s a short flight of narrow stone steps that widen where they leave the river wall and end on the foreshore at a broad, sett-paved causeway that runs thirty feet or so across the foreshore to the river. Where the causeway ends and the level drops, another five wooden steps lead down to the water’s edge.
It’s noisy down at Bankside. Trains rumble in and out of Blackfriars and Cannon Street stations and suitcase wheels zing loudly along the ridged metal path of the Millennium Bridge. Music drifts down from the buskers on the river path accompanied by the excited squeals of children chasing giant soap bubbles made by the ‘Bubble Man’. It feels more exposed and less protected down here, and without a river wall to hide me from the modern world, people come to join in and ask questions. Even the foreshore itself is less protected here. Anyone with a permit can metal detect, scrape or dig up to 7.5 centimetres at Bankside, and they do. There were little holes heading west in a line where a detectorist had been before me last time I was here and someone had scraped away a large patch of shingle, right down to the mud beneath it.
It can be hard to tune in to the voices of the past when the present is so loud, but I’m a natural daydreamer and I’m practised at listening to them. Rummaging around in some old stuff recently – birthday cards from when I was five, embarrassing teenage love letters and photos of me in my punk phase – I found my old school reports. They were, in all honesty, dreadful, and had one overriding theme throughout: my ability to dream my way through class. The pages are filled with comments like ‘inclined to be rather dreamy … must be willing to concentrate fully … would benefit from more active participation in class … does not seem to realise that she must concentrate at all times …’
I lived in a dreamland at home too, in a house where people had slept and eaten, loved, laughed and cried for over 500 years. I’d pull the strings on the old latched doors thinking of how many thousands of times it had been done before, and run my hands over the undulating plaster walls to feel the time that had passed around them. I could see goblin faces, flowers and birds in the shadows among the lumps and bumps of the old plaster. Had anyone else seen them too? Someone years before had scratched their initials into the plaster beneath the little wood-framed window in my bedroom and I wondered who they were. What was the view from my window like when they were alive? I played with the old Victorian kitchen range that was gently rusting away behind the lawnmower in the unused rooms at the back of the house, and spent long absorbed hours poking around in the garden bed near the front door. This had once been the kitchen midden, where centuries of fire sweepings, potato peelings and old cabbage leaves had enriched and lightened the heavy clay soil. I knew this place was special and that under the fruit bushes and between the thick clumps of bright orange self-seeded calendulas, I’d find evidence of the people who had cooked on the range and slept in my room.
So I was well primed for my riverside imaginings by the time I discovered the foreshore. I understood that there were stories hidden in the mud as there had been stories hidden in the bricks, beams and creaking floorboards of the farmhouse. I knew the ghosts of the past were waiting for me. All I had to do was look for them – and I’d perfected that skill in my childhood.
Sometimes the objects I find give me a helping hand. Scratched or stamped initials and names tell me something concrete about the people who once owned, made or used them. One cold bright morning I found a thin copper alloy token, about the size of a modern penny, caught against a large chunk of chalk that had once been part of a barge bed close to Old Billingsgate. On one side was a bulky ship with a domed cabin and the name ROBERT KINGSLAND around the edge. On the other side were the words AT SAVERS DOCK and three initials, K, R, E, in the centre. I knew it was a seventeenth-century trader’s token. I’d seen them before in the dirty palms of fellow mudlarks, but I’d never found one myself and I couldn’t wait to get it home to research it.
Seventeenth-century tokens are well documented online and it didn’t take me long to discover who my trader was. Robert Kingsland was the landlord at Noah’s Ark Tavern in St Saviour’s Dock, just across the water and a little further east from where I’d found the token. The crude ship represented an ark and would have helped those who couldn’t read to identify it. The trio of initials stood for Kingsland (K), Robert (R) and his wife (E). From this tiny disc I now had not only the name of a man who had lived 400 years ago, I also knew the name and location of his business and even his wife’s initial. I had resurrected a long-forgotten Londoner. It almost felt intrusive, but I carried on searching and on the National Archives database I found the last will and testament of Robert Kingsland, Victualler of Saint Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey, Surrey. It was written on 24 April 1656 and is very difficult to read. The beautiful handwriting curls and loops across the page almost unintelligibly, but it solves the mystery of his wife’s name. The E is for Elizabeth, to whom he bequeathed all his ‘goods and chattells’ and gave ‘the lease of my house knowne by the name of the Noahs Arke in Saint Mary Magdalen of Bermondsey’.
Most early tokens were made of pewter or lead, which was cheap and easily worked, making it possible for ordinary people to produce their own coinage. They tended to echo the size of the coins of the time, with earlier tokens being the size of small silver medieval pennies. They were produced by, among others, the church, merchants and tavern keepers, and they had a multitude of uses. They were used to keep tally, perhaps of cargo being unloaded from boats, to exchange for goods and services, to administer the Poor Law, as passes, and most importantly instead of small change, which was generally in short supply in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Between 1648 and 1672 the
authorities permitted the use of tokens as a temporary solution to the lack of halfpennies, pennies and farthings in circulation. This is when more professionally made copper and brass tokens, like Robert Kingsland’s, were produced. He would have had between 500 and 1,000 of them made to use as change in the Noah’s Ark. His tokens and others would have been accepted in taverns and shops in the surrounding area, provided the shopkeeper or landlord trusted the issuer, and kept in a tray under the counter until enough had been collected to return them to the original issuer in exchange for silver coins or exchanged through an intermediary called a ‘Farthing Changer’. Since discovering Robert Kingsland, I have also found Ambrose Smith, landlord of the Fountain at Fenchurch Street, and his wife Anne; Richard Sewell, landlord of the Pink in Thames Street; I.A.A. from the Fleeing Horse in Charterhouse Lane; and I.A.C. from the Sword and Dagger in St Katharine’s Lane. All real people and real places.
The government banned the use of tokens in 1672, but despite this people continued to make unofficial lead tokens in large quantities. They were usually struck or cast with crude images to help people identify the issuer. A bottle and glass were commonly used by tavern keepers and I have one token with the traditional sign of a candle-maker, a star and moon. Another of my tokens carries the image of a man in a wig with a prominent nose and chin. The reverse side may be a crown, or an owl if it’s turned the other way up, so perhaps he was the landlord of the Crown or the Owl. Many of the later, eighteenth-century tokens are more simply decorated with a series of lines, cross-hatchings, stylised flowers, stars, tridents, crosses and dots. A personalised doodle was enough to identify the issuer of the token and the moulds for these simple designs could even be produced by the issuers themselves.
The name and life of another publican emerged from the foreshore when I was mudlarking on the Thames Estuary. It was stamped in a crescent into the wide curved shoulder of a brown stoneware flagon, covered with barnacles and bright green weed and home to a dun-coloured crab that slid out with the silt when I emptied it. Safely back on shore, I scraped away the white barnacle crust with my pocketknife to read the name underneath: ‘W MAY, Kings Arms, Lower Thames Street’. I knew where that was. Lower Thames Street runs parallel to the river on the north shore, opposite Bankside. It was redeveloped after the war and it is now a busy road, lined with office buildings. I was intrigued. How had it ended up this far out? Had it been picked up or stolen by a sailor having a last drink in town and pitched off the side before he took to the high seas? It didn’t look that old, so I reasoned it couldn’t be that hard to track down W May.
I began my search the next day, tapping all the information I had into Google and up popped a London pub history website. This was going to be easy! Whoever ran the site had conveniently collated all the information for me: census reports, directories and insurance records. These were the people that lived and worked at the King’s Arms, a list of names that conjured up characters from the past: whiskery men with swollen red noses; a buxom bar wench with an easy laugh; a severe woman in black who ran the pub and took in lodgers to make ends meet; and a thin young man, fresh from the countryside, collecting pots until his luck changed. Perhaps one of them had filled the bottle with wine or ale and given it to a rough-looking chap who was drowning his sorrows before leaving on the morning tide and who wandered away with it, back to his ship.
The exact location of the pub was 61 Lower Thames Street. It opened in 1775 and was demolished in 1920. The website listed the records of publicans dating back to 1807. The style of the bottle looked to me to date from the first half of the nineteenth century, so I searched those dates first. Benjamin Weller, a victualler, ran the Kings Arms until 1812 when Thomas Pope is listed as the publican. He presumably passed away, or perhaps ran off with the barmaid, and his wife Sarah is listed as running the pub in 1815 and 1819. There’s no more information until 1832 when William Goodgame is listed as the licensee. Then, after him, is my man, William May, listed as the publican in Robson’s Directory of 1835. But his reign over the Kings Arms was also short-lived and by 1839 he had gone, replaced by Thomas Smith. I had a date and I had a name, but that was all. I ran my eye further down the list. After 1851 the census gives far more information and since their lives couldn’t have been far different to that of William May, I read on.
It made fascinating reading. Most of the publicans came from outside London – Northumberland, Yorkshire and Hampshire – which reflects the general population shift to large cities at the time. They lived with their extended families and employed young women as servants and barmaids and boys to collect the pots. What fascinated me more, though, were the lodgers, almost all of whom earned their living from the river. Sailors – Baccgalupo [sic] G Ballu from Geneva, Frederick Grant from Dorset, William Pinder from Lincolnshire, Cornelius Merxon from Norway, Richard Trevillick from Cornwall, Robert Beechener from Hull; mariners – John Butler from Ireland and John Cohn from Guernsey; and a stevedore – James Sparrow White. These were not the anonymous figures who had eked out a living on the crowded and stinking Thames of the nineteenth century. They were flesh-and-blood men, from all over the country and around the world.
I’ve never been particularly lucky with my searches at Bankside. I usually arrive at the end of the tide, after other mudlarks have already gone over the good spots, and compared to the north shore there’s less to find here, since before around the late eighteenth century it was less busy, with fewer barges and no riverside markets. Still, I’ve collected buttons, buckles, clasps and quite a lot of rose farthings, tiny copper coins barely large enough to cover the tip of my finger, which are found in such quantities on the foreshore that some mudlarks think they were used to pay wherry fares. These tiny coins were struck around the same time as the traders were making their own tokens, between 1636 and 1644, by private mints authorised by the king. They were intended to replace the silver farthings that had become too expensive to produce. The crowned rose on one side gave them their name, and instead of the head of Charles I on the other, there is a crown with crossed sceptres behind it. Their small size may have made them impractical but they were unpopular for other reasons too. People are said to have resented them for not being made of silver and distrusted them for not carrying the king’s portrait. They were also heavily counterfeited, which led to the insertion of a triangular wedge of brass in an attempt to outfox the coiners. Several of my little rose farthings have lost their wedges, perhaps picked out by bored watermen or washed away by the river, leaving a jagged toothy gap in the edge.
But I must admit, erosion is making me luckier at Bankside these days. A barge bed is slowly being eaten away by the river. The compacted crust is cracking and dissolving, exposing the softer deposits beneath it. Impatient people dig into the dark gritty mud, which is speeding its demise, and each time I visit there seems to be less of it left. In past visits, I had found several Georgian pennies here and a Georgian shoe complete with buckle, so with half an hour to spare before a theatre performance at the Globe one summer, I decided to walk up and see if I could find anything. There, lying next to the eroding barge bed, as if it had just been dropped by a passer-by, was a chunky copper coin dated 1797 with the arrogant head of George III looking remarkably composed in the mud. It had been worth trashing my best shoes.
It wasn’t the first of these huge coins I had found so I knew what it was: a cartwheel penny, a numismatic anomaly, named for its broad-rimmed edge and size. Cartwheel pennies were produced to restore the public’s faith in royal coinage at a time when many of the low-value coins in circulation were worn and heavily counterfeited. The penny was pressed from an ounce of copper, equal at the time to the value of the coin and enough for the average person to buy a supply of candles to last a week. The two-pence weighed twice as much. Unsurprisingly, they were not popular coins and production ceased after just one year. They were more useful as weights and must have torn through many pockets and purses before they were replaced with a more practical alternative
. I took my seat in the theatre that afternoon with a whiff of the river about me and a satisfying piece of history in my pocket.
A medieval brooch and a rare Celtic coin have been found at Bankside by other mudlarks, and I once passed a man who was inspecting part of a Viking comb he had just found at the water’s edge, but I have never found anything much older than sixteenth century here, a time when the area was notorious for vice and entertainment. Bear Gardens, a small lane that leads down to the river at the end of which is the Ferryman’s Seat, was named for the bear- and bull-baiting pits close by, where specially bred mastiffs were released to attack bears chained to stakes, ponies with monkeys tied to their saddles and young bulls. Bones from the paw of a bear have been found on the foreshore by a mudlark and at the end of one long day I spotted the tip of a horn sticking out of the mud. I gave it a wiggle and a hard pull, and a huge pair of cow horns broke through the surface. Our farm never had cows with horns. These days most modern cattle are bred polled (without horns), and the horns on those that do have them are nowhere near as big as the ones I found that day. It reminded me of the old breeds, like the aptly named longhorns. Perhaps it had gored a snarling mastiff and fought off several more before being pulled down and torn to pieces.