Gunter grimaced as the guns upon the walls and bulwarks were “shot for joy,” in the phrase of the mayor, while the merchants of the several crafts walked in procession past the Great Cross of Cheapside. The men of the wards then progressed in their ancient array; the citizens of Bridge and Walbrook carried lances all red, for example, while those of Farringdon and Aldersgate had black lances powdered with white stars. There followed behind them a group of citizens riding in disguise, as if for a mummery. Some were dressed as knights, in coats and gowns of red, with visors upon their faces; one was arrayed as the emperor and after him, at some distance, came one like the Italian pope accompanied by twenty-four cardinals. In the rear were seven others masked with black visors, unamiable, as if they were in the service of some foreign prince; they were hissed by the crowd of spectators, who were eager to enter the spirit of the proceedings.
He walked over to the corner of Friday Street and Cheapside, where he could better see the traditional procession of the poor men, each one wearing a straw cap with a badge of lead pinned to it; they were assembled to personify the Book of the Midsummer Watch’s claim of “None but rich men charged, and poor men helped.” Gunter knew them well and knew, also, that they took their place in the vast hierarchy of need and service; they were not citizens free of the city, but they were not loiterers or lost men. Nor were they beggars known as “louse men,” from the proverbial expression, “he is not worth a louse.” These were in the third degree of want, and were known as “masterless men.” They would change their employment according to the season – woodcutters in winter and shoemakers in the autumn – and whenever they had earned as much as they required they simply stopped working. It was their unwritten rule. Or, as Gunter used to say, it was the law of London. Their garments came at second hand, with faded colours and frayed hems. They were at the lowest level of the commonalty before the stage of abject need and misery, and they made up a considerable number of the city’s population. That is why they were given their own procession.
As the physician watched them passing by, raucously singing a hymn to the Virgin, he felt for an instant that he was being watched. He turned instinctively, but all those clustered around him seemed intent upon the moving pageant. Two tall men were now walking past on stilts. They were impersonating the giants, Gog and Magog, who were the twin guardians of the city; they were masked as lions, and wore artificial wings. Thomas Gunter decided to walk down Friday Street, where each door was garlanded with green birch and long fennel, white lilies and orpin or “live-long,” in honour both of London and of the Virgin. He still felt uneasy, as if someone else’s natural humour were shadowing his own. He walked faster and looked back once or twice, as the sound of minstrelsy began to fade.
“For Christ’s love!” Gunter was startled by this voice coming from nowhere. “For Christ’s love give meat or money to a poor man!” A beggar, with bag and staff, had stepped from an alcove by the corner of Watling Street; it was a “passing point” known to the citizens as a “pissing point.” “I am in heaviness, master. I have lost all that I had.” The light of the sun surrounded him. Gunter observed the shape of his prominent nose and the breadth of his wide forehead. He might have been a great scholar, but by chance or destiny he had become one who sits in the dust and stares at the world.
The physician took out a penny. “God comfort you,” was all he said.
“Sir, I thank you of your goodness towards me.” It was clearly a ritual acknowledgement, long practised. “I pray God I may one day make you amends.”
Gunter was used to all the odours of the human body, and he was not offended by the smell of this man which suggested night things. He seemed in good health except for curious ring-like markings upon his forehead. “Do you have the scabbado beneath your hair?” The beggar nodded. “When you go into the fields, gather the weed commonly known as liverwort. It grows in wet places. Make a paste of it with your own spittle, and then press it down upon your head.”
The beggar laughed at this. “It is a hard world, my master, when a man must grow grass instead of hair.”
“Not so hard that it may not help you. God keep you.” The beggar’s laughter had recalled to his mind the song he had learned as a child. He repeated it under his breath as he turned the corner.
“Nos vagabunduli
Laeti, jucunduli,
Tara, tarantare, teino.”
There was also a saying, beggars are God’s minstrels. The song was still in his head as he walked along Watling Street, but once more he was filled with fear of being followed. Quickly he turned down Lamb Alley and into Sink Court; he heard footsteps behind him, and he waited impatiently for the one whom he feared. There came out a man in middle life, wearing an old-fashioned surcoat of leather and a leather cap. It was Bogo the summoner, whom he had lately treated for an inflammation of the thigh. In his sudden relief Gunter called out to him. “How is this, Bogo? You know my door. Why haunt me in the street?”
“I saw you standing in the way of the pageant, Master Gunter, and I could not refrain from breaking my mind to you as soon as may be. These days be evil, as St. Paul says.” Bogo was not well liked. He was the summoner of the newly made ward of Farringdon Without, which included Smithfield and that part of Clerkenwell encompassing Turnmill Brook and Common Lane, but his reputation was more generally known. He was employed to call citizens to the church courts and to the local assize, although it was suggested that warrants might be destroyed upon the payment of a certain sum. He was known as “the devil’s rattle-bag,” and was shunned. Bogo came so close to the physician now that Gunter could smell his breath; it had the savour of some interior sickness, some cancer. “You have heard that the king fled Carmarthen in the guise of a monk?”
“That is old news, Bogo.”
“A few nobles are with him. I am told it was a piteous sight.”
“Now Richard and Henry parley. We must await the time. But why disturb me with this now, Bogo?”
“It is joined with another matter.” He looked into the physician’s face. “Somebody, Master Gunter, has darked the city.”
“You talk too mistily.”
“Did you know of the giant bishop found at Paul’s two weeks past?”
“Of course.”
“There was a ring found with him, a ring of emerald.” Gunter said nothing. “Upon that ring was the curious device of circles.”
“It is an ancient sign of sacredness. What of it?”
“It is a good sign but it is now in the service of an evil cause. It has been turned to great harm in recent days.”
“How so, master summoner?”
“By the oratory fired in St. John’s Street, a circle was found painted upon the wall. I know it. I have seen it. Where the scrivener lay dead, by the Si quis? door, another circle was to be found. I tell you, Master Gunter, it is a pumice stone to smooth London.”
“Bogo, you are a child. You can imagine the thing that was never thought nor wrought.”
“When I took up one Frowike, on the charge of heresy, I saw in his chamber the book that did prognosticate all this. There are five in one and one in five. The wounds of our Blessed Saviour numbered five, as did the strings upon David’s harp which make up the music of the spheres.”
“This is strange speech, Bogo.”
“I know strange things.”
The physician believed the summoner to be a crafty and subtle man, but not a creature of vain fantasies or imaginings. He suspected, too, that Bogo trod various secret paths and byways to keep pace with news of the city; he knew night walkers and strangers. “Have you seen these circles in other places, Bogo?”
“I have seen the signs everywhere. They are about our death. They chant placebo and dirige.”
“So who are these who are writing down their purpose upon the walls? Heretics such as Frowike?”
“There are bands and affinities in this city who stay concealed, Master Gunter, and who in the broad day pass among us as honest citizens.
They use quaint craft. The world is brittle.”
“Not so brittle, I am sure, that you cannot see through it.”
“Then remember, for the passion of God, what I have said. Are you still acquainted with Miles Vavasour?” The physician had cured the sergeant-at-law of a fistula, three years before, and they ate supper with each other on the anniversary of the operation at the sergeant’s lodgings in Scropes Inn. “Make all this known to him. He is a worthy man who will know what to ask and what to tell. Look. Do you see the torches?” There were footsteps coming down the alley. “The pageant is ending. God be with you.”
The summoner slipped away. Instinctively he avoided crowds and torchlight; he might be buffeted or threatened. In fact one of those now entering Sink Court among the group of revellers was a known deceiver and beguiler of the people, John Daw, who had been arrested by Bogo only a few months before. Daw’s offence was to pretend to be mute and deprived of his tongue in order to beg for alms. He used to carry in his hands an iron hook and pincer together with a piece of leather which looked, in shape, like a little part of the tongue; it was edged in silver and had writing around it which spelled out, “This is the tongue of John Daw.” He had made a noise like that of roaring, continually opening and closing his mouth in a manner which cunningly concealed his tongue. The summoner, suspecting him, had followed him to a tenement in Billiter Lane where the same Daw was seen by him to talk easily and fluently to a woman of the house. He appealed him to the beadle, and Daw was taken up; he was sentenced to the pillory, but after this ordeal he had elected to remain in the city. No one knew how he earned the money he possessed, but he always drank in the same low tavern. The summoner had seen him in the light of one of the torches, but had walked quickly away.
Bogo now came out into Old Change, where several bonfires had been lit. They were known as the fires of amity, a custom of Midsummer’s Eve, but they were also designed to purge the infections of the air during the long days of summer. Cresset lamps were placed before each door, lending a strange brilliance to the clustering flowers and branches around the threshold. Tables, with meat and drink, had been set up in the street; already one of them had been knocked over by a party of drunken dancers. That is why Bogo disliked the festival of Midsummer’s Eve; the general spirit of licence threatened his safety.15 A group of women was dancing around one of the fires, singing the song of the prancing pony; some were wearing masks as a token of their liberty, while others wore false beards fashioned out of dyed wool.
And then he was noticed. One of the women screamed out, “There goes Bogo the summoner!” He was not in his own parish, but he was known by sight to many Londoners. “There’s Bogo!” He was grabbed by both hands and dragged into the dance; he was held tightly underneath each arm, and found himself being whirled around the fire at what seemed to him to be an ever increasing speed. And then the women came closer to the flames; they swayed by the edge of the fire and Bogo was aware that the leather of his shoes, and the cloth of his hose, were being singed. He cried out in alarm and the women fell back, laughing, as he scrambled to his feet. Two of them pursued him, kicked him to the ground, and beat him with their fists. Then one of them, instinctively imitating the common practice of street fights, bit off the lobe of his ear. He howled and the women, sensing his pain, yelled in triumph. It was the savage yell, hard, prolonged, exultant, which often sounded through London. It was the cry of the city itself. They left him lying in Old Change, the blood running from his wound into the earth and stone.
Chapter Fourteen
The Miller’s Tale
Coke Bateman, the miller for the convent of Clerkenwell, was kneeling in the north transept of St. Sepulchre. He had just delivered twelve sacks of flour to the parish priest of that church; the priest had agreed to act as arbiter in the miller’s dispute with the bailiff over that stretch of the Fleet that ran between them. The bailiff had in turn presented him with a mastiff, since the priest had complained of roarers and masked men who seemed strangely drawn to the Newgate prison.
The mill beside the Fleet was less than a mile beyond the city gates, and Coke Bateman often drove his cart within the walls. For him it was a city of springs and streams. He had grown so accustomed to the sound of water rushing beneath his mill that it seemed to him to be the sound of the world. He slept with the rush of waters, and awoke with their rhythms in his head. He knew the harsh and hasty sound of the Fleet, therefore, and compared it carefully and deliberately with the other rivers within the city. He recognised the soft sound of the Falcon soughing through reeds, the disturbed and excitable Westbourne with its hidden springs sending out competing currents, the slow and heavy Tyburn winding through marshes, the light Walbrook gliding over stones and pebbles, and the Fleet itself with its strong and sweeping central current running like a sigh through the city. And then of course there was the Thames, majestic, many-voiced, at one moment a mass of dark turbulence and at the next a gleaming sheet of light.
Was that the river in this Jesse window above the north transept, stained in the colour of verdigris, upon whose bank St. Erconwald was standing with arms uplifted? The priest had urged Coke Bateman to see this newly installed treasure, the work of Janquin Glazier who lived in Cripplegate. “Do you recall,” he had asked the miller, “the blazing star of three years ago which kept its course rising west in the north?”
“A great glowing thing. Yes. I recall it very well. It appeared less and less until it was as little as a hazel stick.”
“That star is in the window!”
There it was, glowing in the glass where Richard II knelt before the figure of John the Baptist. Among them curled the branches of the Jesse tree itself; in the central stem, issuing from the body of the sleeping Jesse, were placed in ascending order David and Solomon, the Virgin and the crucified Christ, with Christ in glory above them. At the Mass for the window’s consecration two young brothers, joined by the hip-bone, sang “Mater salutaris” very sweetly.
Coke Bateman was particularly interested in the figure of the king; he was draped in a robe of red and white, with a large golden crown upon his head. The miller had seen the king once at close hand, when Richard had dined at Clerkenwell with the abbot of the Monks Hospitallers at St. John’s. The king had ridden there beneath a great canopy of gold in order to celebrate the rebuilding of the great hall of the priory, after it had been fired by Wat Tyler and his ragged army. The miller had noticed then how the king had behaved as if he were in the pages of a psalter. He had been wearing the gown known as the houpelande which went down to the knee; it was of scarlet and was studded with fleurs-de-lis in pearls. The king’s ermine cap was embroidered with golden letters, and he wore pointed shoes of white leather tied to silk knee-stockings with chains of silver. Even when he was greeted, and given the kiss of fellowship, he remained impassive. His own silence seemed to enjoin silence upon others, so that the proceedings continued within an expectant hush. It was as if time itself had been suspended. To Coke Bateman, Richard seemed neither old nor young, but somehow the age of the world. In this stained window he seemed to be no different; in five hundred years, in a time beyond the imagining of any then in life, he would still be kneeling there in quietness and piety.
It was difficult for Coke Bateman to contemplate the king’s present troubles. How could this image of sacred order be subject to distress and change? The miller, like everyone else, was acquainted with the news of Richard’s plight. Only five days earlier Richard had surrendered himself into the custody of Henry Bolingbroke. Henry’s words to him had already been repeated in the streets and taverns of the city. “My lord, I have come sooner than you expected, and I shall tell you why. It is said that you have governed your people too harshly, and that they are discontented. If it is pleasing to the Lord, I shall help you to govern them better.” The king’s reply was also well known. “If it pleases you, fair cousin, then it pleases us well.” Certain reports added another detail. Richard had turned to the earl of Gloucester and had
said, “Now I can see the end of my days coming.”
The king was not altogether popular in London. The stage on which his effigy had been paraded during the pageant of Midsummer Eve, for example, had been hooted at. Two years earlier he had demanded the wool and leather duties for life, and in recent months had imprisoned a sheriff for failures in his office. It was rumoured, too, that he intended to impose new taxes on the merchants in order to finance campaigns in Ireland and in Scotland. He was in Ireland when the present rebellion of Henry took shape in the north of England. The king had also become increasingly autocratic. A rumour spread among the citizens that he had erected a throne in Westminster Hall “where he sat from after meat to evensong speaking to no man but overlooking all men, and if he looked at any man, what estate or degree that ever he were of, he must kneel.”
Yet Coke Bateman had defended the king on many occasions. His nature was prone to awe and wonder in the contemplation of majesty. It was the same awe which filled him when he looked into the night sky and its revolving spheres. He knelt down in front of the Jesse window, and began to pray. “Beata viscera Mariae Virginis.” Blessed is the womb of the Virgin Mary. “Quae portaverunt aeterni Patris Filium.” But he was disturbed by errant thoughts. “Which bore the Son of the Eternal Father.” How could the Virgin’s womb have carried God Himself? How could divinity be contained? How could it hide in human flesh?
The miller’s daughter, Joan, had recently produced a child out of wedlock and he had asked Sister Clarice to advise Joan upon her course. The young nun had now become the most important source of authority within the convent, much to the dismay of Dame Agnes de Mordaunt, and Clarice was even visited by deputations of citizens asking for her counsel on civic matters. The prioress had sent a petition to the Bishop of London, Robert Braybroke, begging – or, rather, demanding – that Sister Clarice be sent to another religious house where there might be “plus petits dissensions”; but he was still considering the matter. He seemed strongly inclined towards the nun. In order to teach her humility, however, Dame Agnes had insisted that Clarice continue certain menial household tasks. She washed the floors of the frater and the dorter with a mop and wooden bucket; she scrubbed the bowls and ladles after meals, letting them dry in the sun. The miller had found her shelling peas at a trestle table in the kitchen of the convent; she was wearing a white woollen gown, thick and soft, with a white linen coif and veil. “God send you,” he said.
The Clerkenwell Tales Page 12
