The Midnight Man

by Paul Doherty

  Puddlicot did have a leman, Joanne Picard, and took sanctuary in St Michael’s, from which he was dragged and dispatched to the Tower. The clerk, John Drokensford, later Bishop of Bath and Wells, was Puddlicot’s nemesis: a mailed Oxford clerk, utterly loyal to the King. Drokensford allowed nothing to get in his way; at one time he even carted off a hundred monks from Westminster and lodged them in the Tower.

  The principal robber twisted and turned but eventually he was brought to judgement and sentenced to death. He was hanged in Tothill Lane just outside Westminster Abbey, after being taken to the gallows in a wheelbarrow. The route stretched the entire length of the north bank of the Thames, and the spectacle was both public and noisy. A contemporary chronicler, The Annales Londinienses describes it as follows: ‘In that year, Puddlicot the clerk was led in a hand-cart from the Tower of London to Westminster, and there judged on the account of his violation of the King’s treasury.’ Others may have joined him there, including John Rippinghale, a defrocked priest whose confession also exists. For hundreds of years no one knew what Rippinghale was saying – it was a farrago of nonsense. In the end, I concluded that Rippinghale was simply buying time, leading Drokensford on a wild goose chase. Of course, no one escaped the gallows. There were further humiliations in store, probably for Puddlicot and his henchmen. Beneath the hinges on an ancient door leading to the chapter house at Westminster is what antiquarians have described as ‘human skin’. There is every possibility that once he’d been hanged, Puddlicot’s body was not only gibbeted but skinned; this was then dried, cured and hung on that door in the south cloister as a warning to the monks. The existence of this skin was first noticed by the antiquarian G. G. Scott in his book, Gleanings from Westminster Abbey, published in 1861. On page forty, Scott asserts: ‘On the inner side of the door, I found hanging from beneath the hinges some pieces of white leather. They reminded me of the story of the skins of Danes. One theory was that marauding Danes in the eighth and ninth century had been captured and skinned. However, it is highly unlikely that the monks would have allowed this. Another theory was that the skins were hides used as draught excluders.’ Scott continues: ‘A friend to whom I’d shown them sent them to Mr Quekett of the College of Surgeons who, I regret to say, pronounced them to be human. It is clear that the entire door was covered with them, both within and without.’ If this is true, Edward I may have had the corpses of all the robbers skinned and nailed to the door as a warning to the monks, a logical step of Puddlicot being hanged on the abbey’s gallows in Tothill Lane.

  I have been privileged to visit the crypt beneath the chapter house at Westminster Abbey. I have been down the ancient steps; you can still see where the wooden stairs were once used. In the crypt below I have examined the great pillar, bricks of which can still be taken away. I have seen the sixth crypt window without its sill, a reminder of John of St Albans’ crafty skill in obtaining access to the King’s treasure. The crypt is a brooding, gloomy place. I read in a modern account of the abbey how at night the security guards report all sorts of phenomena; having visited the abbey and researched Puddlicot’s story, I can well believe it!