London

by Edward Rutherfurd

  And so it was, time after time, that his clients had seen iron appear in molten lead, or silver apparently made from iron, tin or mercury. Only one thing they had never seen. The production of gold.

  For this was the Sorcerer’s cleverness. If he could transform base metal into silver, then surely, one day, he would succeed in achieving that last step, and make gold. Their faith was strong, and their greed was even stronger. Like men drunk with gambling, they came back to him again and again. With money.

  “It’s not the iron or the mercury,” he would explain. “Besides, you can bring that. But it’s the powder for making the Elixir. It costs a fortune. For that I need your help.” Indeed, he could not make so much as a grain of it for less than five marks.

  The Elixir was composed mostly of chalk and dried dung, and so Benedict Silversleeves, until he found preferment in his profession, made a very good living indeed.

  Why did he do it? When he informed Bull that his fortune was modest, he had made a huge understatement of his real position: in fact, a downright lie. For by the time his widowed mother died, so shrunken were the family’s resources that he was practically penniless.

  It did not do for a young man to be penniless. A rich merchant might welcome a younger son of a gentry family into his house: the family’s wealth gave the boy some standing, and there was usually some financial help to get him started. He might accept an ambitious fellow from an old London family like Silversleeves, and with good prospects, on the assumption that he had some means behind him. But take that same young man and make him penniless, and he became an adventurer, an object of suspicion and of scorn. And so it was that Silversleeves had invented his modest fortune; his fine horse and rich clothes all paid for by his secret gulling of poor fools like Fleming. He must keep this up, moreover, all through the long and delicate courtship of a wealthy bride. If nothing else, his patience and his nerve were exemplary.

  Fleming had been easily caught from the first moment he had begun to converse with this scholarly young man in the George. Month after month he had bought more of the powder, watched metals sublimate themselves to silver, secretly eroded his savings until he could not even pay the poll tax. And still he had dreamed. For when at last the gold came through, they would live a life of such ease. Why, he could buy the George, the Tabard, every inn from Southwark to Rochester and on to Canterbury too. Dame Barnikel could do as she pleased. He would give her all the furs and gorgeous clothes that she wanted. How she would bless him, love him, even respect him as other wives did their husbands. And Amy should marry a gentleman. Or, if she preferred, Carpenter. What happiness would be theirs. His heart in his thin frame swelled; his concave face glowed. And perhaps, this very night, it would all come to pass.

  Most of the charlatans who practised this criminal activity would explain their failure by some defect in the equipment, or in the ingredients supplied. Silversleeves, however, had a more elegant solution.

  “The Elixir is perfect,” he would say. “You’ve taken the silver we made and had it tested. You know it’s pure. But the final transition to purest gold – that’s hard. Even the Elixir must operate with the benefit of the planets and the stars. When all are in the right conjunction, we shall succeed, I promise you.” It was for this reason – and the fact that he had decided to buy Tiffany a new hood that afternoon – that as dusk had fallen on that dark day at the midnight of the year, he had sent a fellow to the grocer with an urgent message.

  “Mercury is in the ascendant. Come tonight.”

  The great cataclysm of 1381 took Geoffrey Ducket by surprise. But then very few people in England saw it coming either. The spring of that year had passed rather quietly. If Fleming had seemed subdued, the youth, knowing nothing of his master’s addiction to alchemy, thought little of it. He visited Tiffany once or twice, and heard in the Bull household that Silversleeves was seen by the whole family with ever-increasing favour.

  True, he heard the stories of discontent in the countryside. The new and outrageous poll tax was causing problems. The peasants were furious; there was widespread evasion, especially in the eastern counties. But this did not affect him much.

  In March the poll tax returns were inadequate. And this time, the boy king’s council was determined to act. Ducket heard the news one morning. “They’re sending the tax collectors back into Kent and East Anglia.” Rich and sturdy Kent, close to the capital, shared much of the robust London spirit. But East Anglia, besides its ancient independence, had a particular problem with the poll tax. For whereas in the more feudal counties, most villages had a lord of the manor who might, out of kindness or self-interest, help the poorer peasants with the tax, in East Anglia, with its pattern of small independent homesteads, there were fewer manorial lords and the peasants were hit hard.

  During April and May, reports of the collectors’ activities came frequently. The city of Norwich had been hit: six hundred furious tax evaders had been found within the walls of this one town. Out in the East Anglian countryside, over twenty thousand had been caught and forced to pay – more than one adult in ten!

  At the start of June, the reports became more ominous. “They’ve killed three tax collectors in Essex.” A day later: “There are five thousand peasants on the move. They’re sending messengers across to Kent.” And sure enough, before sundown the rumour ran along the stalls in the Cheap: “Kent is rising.” On the morning of 7 June, Ducket heard a report that the rebels had attacked Rochester Castle. He did not believe it; but seeing Bull in the street later on, he asked him. “True, I’m afraid,” the merchant grimly confirmed. “I’ve just heard that half the peasants from around Bocton have gone down there. They’ve elected a leader too,” he grunted. “Some fellow called Wat Tyler.”

  England’s great Peasant Revolt had begun.

  While the men of Essex were massing, and the rest of East Anglia preparing to rise, Wat Tyler led his men swiftly down the old road to Canterbury. The archbishop, whom they blamed for the poll tax, was not there, so they sacked his palace and broke open his prison. Then Tyler turned them round. It was time to go to the boy king.

  Besides giving Tyler a chance to organize his men, the march to Canterbury had had one other important effect. At the archbishop’s prison they had liberated a preacher named John Ball, who had long been in trouble with the Church for his inflammatory and unorthodox preaching in the countryside. No scholar like Wyclif, who would have abhorred him, he agitated for radical reform of the whole kingdom and to many of Tyler’s followers he was a folk hero. With Tyler as general and Ball as prophet, the enterprise was becoming a peasant crusade.

  And now London began to tremble, for the twin forces approaching from the east were formidable: from the north side of the Thames Estuary came the men of Essex; up the south side, Tyler’s men. Each horde numbered tens of thousands. The boy king and his council joined the frightened archbishop in the safety of the Tower; but they had no troops that could handle such huge numbers of rebels. The archbishop, hopelessly out of his depth, begged to resign the chancellorship, and no one else knew what to do.

  Ducket and Fleming were just closing the stall on Wednesday afternoon when the word came. “They’ve arrived. The Essex men are going to camp at Mile End.” This was only two miles outside the Aldgate entrance to the city. “Tyler’s at Blackheath.” About the same distance on the Thames’s southern side. All down the Cheap, the traders were hurrying home, and the grocer did likewise. As they crossed London Bridge they were told: “The mayor’s giving orders to raise the drawbridge here tonight.” All down Southwark High Street, people were boarding up their houses, and at the George, Dame Barnikel met them with a grim expression. In her hand she was carrying a huge club. They stored the goods, locked up, and barred the gate to the courtyard. It was all they could do. Dame Barnikel, having inspected the premises, nodded her approval.

  “Where’s that girl?” she asked impatiently. Amy, it seemed, had slipped out somewhere. A few minutes later, however, she reappe
ared and went quietly indoors, and her mother, after a satisfied grunt, took no more notice of her. But when Ducket entered the kitchen he suddenly felt his arm caught, and pulled, and found himself in a corner, face to face with Amy. He realized that she was unusually pale.

  “Help me,” she whispered. When he asked what the matter was: “It’s Ben,” she cried softly. “I can’t find him. I’m so afraid he’ll get himself hurt.”

  “I shouldn’t worry,” he reassured her. “He can’t be far. And none of the rebels have entered the city yet,” he added. But at this she only shook her head.

  “You don’t understand,” she hissed. “It’s the other way round.” And seeing him baffled: “I think he’s gone to join them. I think he’s at Blackheath.”

  Ducket enjoyed the walk. As it went towards the south-east, the Kent road rose gently from the valley floor up the series of terraces that led to the higher ground, until, at the point where the river completed its big southern loop at the hamlet of Greenwich, it emerged on the sweeping ridge above. Here, on a broad plateau running eastward under open skies, lay the great expanse of heathland known as Blackheath.

  He joined a stream of people along the way. Whether they wished to join the rebels or were there out of curiosity, they were coming out from the villages all around: from Clapham and from Battersea behind him, from Bermondsey and Deptford down by the river. Considerable numbers of the Essex men from Mile End had also taken ferries across the river to fraternize with the men from Kent. Yet even so, Blackheath took his breath away.

  He had never seen a crowd like this before and could hardly guess their number: fifty thousand, perhaps? The huge, informal camp, bathed in the warm light of the early summer evening, spread across the heath for over a mile. There were a few fires alight, a scattering of tents and some horses and wagons; but most of the folk there were just resting on the ground, having walked sixty miles from Canterbury. They were country folk. Ducket saw broad, sunburned faces, peasant smocks, stout boots. In the June warmth, many wore no leggings. Everywhere there was the rich, pleasant smell of folk who had been working on farms. But most noticeable of all was their temper. He had expected to find a sullen and angry army; yet few of the peasants carried arms, and they seemed cheerful. It’s more like a holiday than a battle, he thought.

  He was afraid he would never find Carpenter, but after a quarter of an hour he spotted him, talking to some Kentish craftsmen. Hoping the solemn fellow would not mind that he had followed him up there, Ducket went over to him.

  Carpenter seemed delighted to see him. He looked more animated than usual. After introducing the apprentice to his friends, he took him by the arm and led him across to a spot from where they could see a figure on horseback, giving directions to some men. “That’s Tyler,” the craftsman said, and Ducket gazed at the sturdy figure. He was wearing a leather jerkin, with bare arms, and his swarthy face had already assumed a look of command.

  When Ducket suggested gently that Amy was concerned about him, and that Dame Barnikel was getting ready to defend the George Inn against the rebel horde when it attacked, Carpenter only laughed. “You don’t understand,” he said. “These good people,” he gestured around him, “are all loyal. They’ve come to save the kingdom. The king himself,” he explained, “is coming to a parley here tomorrow, and once he’s heard us, everything will be all right.” He smiled. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  To Ducket this sounded unlikely, and he might have been tempted to argue, if there had not, just then, been a movement on the southern edge of the gathering. Some men were drawing up an open cart. A whisper seemed to be running through the whole camp; and already people were starting to get up and walk, as if drawn by some unseen hand, towards the cart. “Come on,” said Carpenter.

  They got a good position, well forward, and did not have to wait long. Only minutes later, Tyler appeared; riding beside him on a grey mare came a tall, large-boned man in a brown cassock who, having dismounted, leaped up on to the cart. Straight away, he raised his hands and, in a deep voice that carried right across the heath, called out:

  “John Ball greeteth you well, all.” And fifty thousand souls fell silent as a mouse.

  The sermon of John Ball was unlike anything that Ducket had ever heard before. The theme was very simple: all men were born equal. If God had meant there to be masters and servants, He would have made it so at the Creation. Unlike Wyclif, who said that all authority must derive from God’s Grace, the popular preacher went much further. All lordship was evil; all wealth must be held in common. Until it was so, things would never go well in England.

  But what language! Truly this preacher knew how to speak to the English heart. With rhyme and heavy alliteration he called out the phrases that could be remembered by every hearer. “Pride reigneth in palaces,” he cried. “Government is gluttony. Lawyers are lechers.” And at each phrase, Ducket could see Carpenter beside him nodding and muttering: “This is true. This is just.”

  “Why is the lord warm in his manor and poor Peter Ploughman frozen in the field?” Ball demanded. “Now is the time,” he cried menacingly, “for John Trueman to chastise Hobbe the Robber. Take courage today. You shall smash them. With right and might. Will and skill.” It was the thick, strong, echoing language of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. Then, returning to that simple biblical theme, he chanted loudly, so that not a man there could fail to hear, that couplet for which his sermons were famous, and which has remained like a haunting cry in the folk sayings of England ever since:

  When Adam delved and Eve span

  Who was then the gentleman?

  As he came to his conclusion with a loud Amen, the crowd let out a mighty roar. And Carpenter, his eyes solemnly shining, turned to Ducket and said: “Didn’t I tell you everything would be all right?”

  Ducket had hoped to persuade Carpenter to return home after this, but the craftsman would not hear of it. “We must wait for the king,” he declared. So, cursing under his breath, Ducket remained to spend the night in the huge camp under the stars. As he moved about the camp, talking with these men from the countryside, he learned much. Many, like Carpenter, meant no harm at all. They had come to help the king set the world to rights. All that was needed, they assured him, was to rid the land of all authority. “Then,” they assured him, “men will be free.”

  To Ducket the idea seemed strange. In London, he knew what freedom meant. It meant the city’s ancient privileges, the city walls which protected Londoners from the king’s soldiers or foreign traders and craftsmen. It meant that an apprentice could become a journeyman, and perhaps a master. It meant the guilds, the wards, the aldermen and mayor, as fixed in their places as the celestial spheres in the heavens. True, the poor folk might protest about the rich aldermen from time to time, especially if they evaded taxes. But even they knew the need for authority and order: without these, where was London’s freedom?

  Yet in these countrymen he divined a quite different sense of things: an order not made by Man, but vaguer: the order of the seasons. The order of Man, to them, was not a necessity, as it was to the Londoner, but an imposition. “Who needs a master on the land?” asked one fellow. They dreamed of being free peasant farmers, like the Anglo-Saxons of old.

  Ducket noticed something else, too. Asked where they came from, nearly all these peasants spoke of themselves proudly as men of Kent, or Kentish men, as if they were a tribe. Had he been across the Thames with the Essex men, it would have been the same. Angles, Jutes, the various groups of Saxons, Viking Danes and Celts – England like every country in Europe was still a patchwork of old tribal lands. And that evening Ducket began to understand what every wise ruler of England knew, that London was a community, but that the counties, in time of trouble, would always revert to a more ancient order.

  If the men from Kent meant no harm to the king, as Carpenter assured him, Ducket was not so sure about their other intentions. When he asked one fellow what he thought of the sermon, the man replied: “He ought to be Archbish
op of Canterbury.”

  “He will be,” said his companion grimly, “when we’ve killed this one.”

  Ducket mulled over these words as he went to sleep.

  The dawn promised another fine day, but Ducket felt hungry and there did not seem to be any food in the camp. He wondered what would happen next. The sun had not been up long, however, when the whole company, on an order from Tyler, began to move over the edge of the heath and down the broad, handsome slope to the Thames at Greenwich. As they did so, Ducket realized that the huge horde of Essex men was gathering across the river opposite them.

  They waited an hour. Another passed, and Ducket was ready to leave when he saw a large and handsome barge, accompanied by four others, being rowed down the stream towards them. It was the boy king. Ducket watched, fascinated, as the barge drew near. It was full of richly dressed men, the great ones of the kingdom, he supposed. But there was no mistaking the tall, slim, flaxen-haired youth who stood at the front for all to see. Richard II of England was fourteen. A few months before, having reached his majority, he had taken the reins of government into his own hands. His council, led by the terrified and hopeless archbishop, had begged him not to go. But the son of the Black Prince had courage. He was a fine figure, Ducket thought, standing there in the morning sunlight.

  The roar that greeted him was huge and echoed across the river. The figures in the barge, except for the boy king, looked frightened. The barge was stopped about twenty yards from the bank. Then the young king raised his arm, the crowd hushed, and in a clear voice he called out to them.

  “Sirs, I have come. What have you to say to me?” Ducket noticed that he had a slight stammer.

  In answer came another roar in which Ducket could make out many cries. “Long live King Richard.” “Bless the king.” And more ominously: “Give us the archbishop’s head.” “Where are the traitors?” After a few moments, Ducket saw Tyler order some men to row out to the royal barge with a petition. He saw the king read it. “Tyler’s asking for the heads of all the traitors,” someone said close by. Then Ducket saw the king shrug, shake his head, and the royal barge turned round.