The Story of London in 50 Novels: An Interlude

As the Roman administration of Britain collapsed, during the course of the Fifth Century AD, London was progressively abandoned. Urban life becomes impossible in a land without reliable infrastructure: some Londoners probably took refuge on the continent, still, at least nominally, under Roman rule; others melted away into the countryside, where they could, at least, produce their own food, and where they were less obvious targets for increasing numbers of Saxon pirates.

The Pagan Saxons from northern Germany, who had, at first, come to Britain as mercenaries, and then as raiders, now came as settlers, but the walled city of Londinium, with its high wharves, had little interest for them. They established their city, Lundenwic, to the west, in the area that is now Covent Garden, running parallel with what we call "The Strand," then literally a strand (or beach), on which they could haul up their shallow-draft open ships, with their cargoes of Baltic amber; Russian furs; and Irish & Scottish slaves.

Earl Medieval brooch (650-670 AD), found with a woman's burial at Covent Garden. PAS/British Museum ID 257458 (licensed under CCA).

In the Ninth Century, new Pagan raiders, the Vikings, began attacking the now Christianised Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. During the winter of 871 AD, they camped within the ruins of the old Roman city, fortifying it against the possibility of an Anglo-Saxon counter-attack. Having expelled the invaders, Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, took the decision to resettle the walled city, beginning in its south-western corner. Lundenwic was abandoned, and Lundenburh was born.

London Wall outside the Museum of London. Photo: www.mikepeel.net (licensed under CCA).

In the decades and centuries following the Norman invasion of 1066, the military and spiritual defences of the city were developed and enhanced. William the Conqueror built the White Tower, the first element of the Tower of London, in the city's south-eastern corner; he licensed his knights to build other fortifications, Chastel Baynard and Montfiquet Tower, to the west; and he began the construction of Saint Paul's Cathedral. Within a few centuries, these constructions were joined by around a hundred parish churches (many of them tiny, but built in stone, unlike most of the houses, which were of wood and thatch), and dozens of monasteries and priories.

The White Tower. Photo: IncMan (licensed under CCA).

The Norman St Paul's Cathedral digital reconstruction based on a model of 1908. Photo: Bob Castle (licensed under CCA).

The Medieval London Bridge, as depicted by Claus Visscher in 1616 (image is in the Public Domain).

Perhaps surprisingly, I struggled to find novels to reflect this period of almost a thousand years in London's emergence as a city and port. There are, doubtless, plenty of novels set in this period, in which at least some of the action happens to take place in London (if only because many of the leading royal and religious figures of the time spent much of their time here): but, for this series, I was seeking something more than this; novels in which the city itself is, at least to some extent, a character in its own right. If such novels exist for this period, I have not read them.

I therefore return to the first novel that I explored here, Edward Rutherfurd's "London," who covers the period in a series of interlinked stories: "The Rood" (604 AD); "The Conqueror" (1066); "The Tower" (1078-97); "The Saint" (1170-72); "The Mayor" (1189-1224); and "The Whorehouse" (1295); in all of which fictional characters mingle and interact with historical figures of the time.

The Rood.

"Above the wooden jetty, a small group of buildings included a barn, a cattle-pen, two storehouses, and the homestead of Cerdic and his household, surrounded by a stout wattle fence. All these buildings, large or small, were single-storey and mostly rectangular. Their walls, made of post and plank, were low, only four or five feet high, and strengthened on the outside by a sloping earth bank, turfed over. Their steep thatched roofs, however, rose to a height of nearly twenty feet ... The floor of Cerdic's hall was slightly sunken, so that one stepped down onto the wooden floorboards covered in rushes. The space inside was warm and commodious but rather dark, since when the door was shut the only light came from the vents in the thatch, made to let out the smoke from the fire in the stone hearth near the centre of the floor. Here the entire household gathered to eat."

The Tower.

"The two men sat facing each other across a table. For a while neither of them spoke as they considered their dangerous work, though either could have said, 'If we get caught, they'll kill us.' It was Barnikel who had called he meeting in his house by the little church of All Hallows, which now overlooked the rising Tower, and he had done so for a simple reason. For the first time in the ten years of their criminal activities, he had jut confessed: 'I'm worried.' And he had outlined his problem. To which Alfred had just offered a solution. When Alfred the armourer looked back, it often amazed him how easily he had been drawn into the business ... It had all started ten years ago, the summer that Barnikel's wife had suddenly died. All Barnikel's family and friends had rallied round, taking turns to keep him company. His children had encouraged the young apprentice to go too. Then, one evening, just as he was leaving, the Dane had put his huge arm around Alfred's shoulders and muttered into his ear: 'Would you like to do a little job for me? It could be dangerous.'"

The Mayor.

"A long-nosed man on a piebald palfrey was leading an elegantly mounted lady and two packhorses over the quiet waters of the Thames and into the city of London. The man was Pentecost Silversleeves. The lady was Ida, the widow of a knight, and despite herself she had just started to weep ... As she looked at the city before her, it seemed to Ida that the world had turned to stone. The great walled enclosure of London seemed like a vast prison. On the left she could see the thickset stone fort by Ludgate. On the right, down by the waterside, the grey, square mass of the Tower, surly even in repose. All stone. Over the two low hills of London covered by houses loomed the dark, high, narrow line of Norman St Paul's, dreary and forbidding ... as the horses' hooves clip-clopped softly on the wooden bridge in the morning quiet, the sound of a striking bell came over the water with a solemn, sullen sound, as though it, too, were made of stone, to summon stony hearts to stony prayer."

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Streets of Old Southwark: Bermondsey - Docks and Slums

A visitor to London, exploring the Borough of Southwark, and having visited Peckham, may board a Number 78 Bus from Peckham High Street to Tower Bridge. The route takes us through further residential suburbs, and over the site of Bermondsey Abbey, founded in 1082. The Abbey of Saint Saviour was a Benedictine establishment, and was dependent on the French Abbey of Cluny, one of the wealthiest and most politically influential monastic institutions in Medieval Europe. Today, only a few architectural fragments of the abbey are visible in the basement of the Lokma Restaurant, in Bermondsey Square.

Bermondsey Abbey, reconstruction drawing by Sir Walter Besant, 1894 (image is in the Public Domain).

"A Fete at Bermondsey," possibly a marriage feast, c 1579, by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder (image is in the Public Domain).

Alighting at Tower Bridge, we find ourselves back on the river-front, and at the southern end of one of London's most iconic landmarks, looking across the Thames towards the Tower of London. The bridge itself was built, to the then fashionable neo-Gothic design, between 1886 and 1894, as part of an ongoing effort to ease the passage of people and goods between the City of London, to the north of the river, and the Borough of Southwark, to the south. At the time of its construction, however, the "Pool of London" (the stretch of river between Tower Bridge and London Bridge) remained one of the most important elements of London as a port, hence the imperative to design a bridge that could be raised, to allow the passage of ships, and lowered, to accommodate road traffic.

Tower Bridge under construction, 1892 (image is in the Public Domain).

Tower Bridge, looking back from Shad Thames. Photo: Colin (licensed under CCA).

Strolling eastward along the river, we come to Butler's Wharf and Shad Thames, where a series of warehouses, completed in 1873, have now been converted into high-class restaurants and boutiques, with luxury apartments above. Beyond them is Saint Saviour's Dock, once owned by the monks of Bermondsey, who had a tidal mill at the point where the (now largely invisible) River Neckinger flowed into the Thames. The river's name, however, post-dates the monks (we have no idea what they would have called it): it recalls the "Devil's neck-cloth," or hangman's noose, for it was here that Eighteenth Century pirates were hanged, and their bodies exposed as a warning to others.

Shad Thames warehouses. Photo: David Iliff (license CC-BY-SA-3.0).

Saint Saviour's Dock. Photo: C.G.A. Grey (licensed under CCA).

On the other side of the wharf lay Jacob's Island, one of the most notorious of London's Nineteenth Century slums, the home of Charles Dickens's villain, Bill Sykes, and the place where he meets his untimely death.

Dickens spares us none of the details in his description:

" ... crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses,with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud and threatening to fall into it - as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Jacob's Island."

Jacob's Island, 1813 (image is in the Public Domain).

Folly Ditch, Jacob's Island, c 1840 (image is in the Public Domain).

Some decades later, however, in 1878, Edward Walford tells us of the transformation of the area:

"The foul ditch no longer pollutes the air. It has long been filled up ... there is now a good solid road ... Part of London Street, the whole of Little London Street, part of Mill Street, beside houses in Jacob Street and Hickman's Folly, have been demolished. In most of these places warehouses have taken the place of dwelling-houses. The revolting fact of many of the inhabitants of the district having no other water to drink than that which they procured from the filthy ditches is also a thing of the past. Most of the houses are now supplied with good water, and the streets are very well paved. Indeed, so great is the change for the better in the external appearance of the district generally, that a person who had not seen it since the improvements would now scarcely recognise it."

Most of Bermondsey remained an industrial area, an integral part of the working river, throughout the first three quarters of the Twentieth Century. As cargoes moved from the holds of ships into containers, however, and the Port of London shifted downstream, the districts of London that look out on the river have become so gentrified that even professional Londoners have long since been priced out of the property market. Millionaires now gaze down into clean flowing water, where once the underworld characters evoked by Dickens stared into the abyss, breathing its noxious fumes.

Butler's Wharf and Courage Brewery, 1971. Photo: Dr Neil Clayton (licensed under CCA). 

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books may be purchased from Amazon.

The Year in Medieval Art: May

The beginning of May finds us, this year, still very much within the Easter season: the third week of Easter, to be precise, and Easter has seven weeks, commemorating the forty days and forty nights (a significant time interval in both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures) that the risen Christ remained on Earth before ascending into Heaven; and the further ten days before the Holy Spirit manifested itself to the Apostles, as commemorated in the feast of Pentecost. This year, the Feast of the Ascension falls on the 25th of May, and that of Pentecost on the 4th of June.

The Ascension of Jesus, from the Rabula Gospels (Iraq), 6th Century AD. Image: Dsmdgold (Public Domain). 

Medieval theologians expended much sweat and candle-wax in considering the status of Christ during the period between the Resurrection and the Ascension. The early Church Fathers had agreed, after much deliberation, that the living Jesus was both fully divine (and thus able to turn water into wine, cure the sick and the lame, and raise the dead); and fully human (and would thus have experienced the same pain on the cross as any of us would in the same circumstances, and without which the crucifixion would have had no meaning); but what of the risen Christ? Surely he must have been, in some sense, more divine than human, which might account for the fact that so many people who had known the living Jesus failed to recognise the risen Christ? Books of Hours and similar documents were, however, intended for the use of lay-people, who were, on the whole, happy to leave such weighty matters to the scholars.

The Ascension of Jesus, from The Bamberg Apocalypse, 11th Century, Bamberg State Library MS A II.42 (image is in the Public Domain).

The pages for the month of May in Medieval Books of Hours frequently depict the leisure activities of the wealthy. It was a season for spending time outdoors, and enjoying the natural world. Boat trips on lakes and rivers seem to have been especially popular, and these may very well have been "picnics" in the modern sense: the word "picnic," however, seems not to have been used before the Eighteenth Century, and the Medieval equivalent may well have been Undrentide.

Calendar page for May, from Les Petites Heures du Duc de Berry, 1372-5, National Library of France (image is in the Public Domain).

Boating in May, workshop of Simon Bening, Bruges, early 16th Century, Munchen StB cod.lat. 23638 fol.6v (image is in the Public Domain).

Boating in May, from The Golf Book, workshop of Simon Bening, Bruges, 1520-30, British Library Add.24098, f22v (licensed under CCA).

This is an extract from the poem, Sir Orfeo, written between 1330 and 1340, probably in London or the South Midlands of England (if the words sound familiar, you may have heard the recording by The Medieval Baebes). The original poem is to be found in the Auchinleck Manuscript, now in the National Library of Scotland:

"Bifel so in the comessing of May
When miri and hot is the day,
And oway beth winter schours,
And everi feld is ful of floures,
And blosme breme on everi bough,
Over al wexeth miri anought,
This ich quen, Dame Heurodis
Tok to maidens of pris,
And went in an undrentide,
To play bi an orchardside
To se the floures sprede and spring,
And to here the foules sing ... "

Illustration from the Auchinleck Manuscript, NLS Adv. MS 19.2.1 (image is in the Public Domain).

The poem tells a story of enchantment, derived from the Roman author, Ovid (the queen falls asleep on the grass and, in her dream, is transported to the world of the fairies), but the context is recognisable enough in the modern world, and recalls my own season of "undrentides," as a student, punting from the "Backs" of Cambridge up to Grantchester, for picnics with "prized maidens."

May, from Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The Duke is shown setting out for the countryside from his Parisian residence, L'Hotel de Nesle, accompanied by some gentlemen, and rather more ladies (of the latter, he reportedly said "the more the better, and never tell the truth"), 1412-16, Musee Conde, Chantilly (image is in the Public Domain).

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Wards of Old London: St Bartholomew - Physick and Surgery in the City

A visitor to London, walking up the Great North Road (Aldersgate Street) can take any one of a number of small passages leading to the west, and thus pass from the Ward of Aldersgate Without into that of Farringdon Without. Such a visitor should, however, allow time for the possibility of getting lost in the confusing maze of alleys and passages, with names more evocative than most of the surviving buildings (the area was badly hit by bombing during the Second World War): Half Moon Court; Cloth Fair; Bartholomew Place; before arriving in a quarter of the City that did not entirely survive the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, but did, for the most part, survive the Blitz of the Twentieth.

It seems that, in the Twelfth Century, a man named Rahere, who was certainly both a priest (a Canon of Saint Paul's from 1115) and a courtier (his counsel greatly valued by King Henry I), and who may also, according to some accounts, have been a jester and minstrel at some point in his life, made a pilgrimage to Rome. On the way, he was taken ill, and experienced a vision of Saint Bartholomew, who told him that, on his return to London, he must build a hospital. This he did, in 1123, and the hospital, part of an Augustinian priory dedicated to the saint, was London's first.

The tomb of Rahere, in the Church of Saint Bartholomew the Great. Photo: Mike Dunn (licensed under CCA).

The priory itself, like London's other religious houses, was suppressed under Henry VIII, but he re-established the hospital as a secular institution. Elements of the Medieval priory, however, are preserved in two parish churches, Saint Bartholomew the Great, and Saint Bartholomew the Lesser.

Saint Bartholomew the Great, one of London's best preserved Medieval churches. Photo: David Iliff (licensed under CCA; CC-BY-SA 5.0).

Saint Bartholomew the Lesser. Photo: ChrisO (licensed under GNU).

The professions of medicine ("physick") and surgery ("chirugery") were quite separate from one another in the Medieval and Early Modern eras. The most famous medical director of "Barts," as the hospital is still known, William Harvey (1578-1657), was a physician trained at the Universities of Cambridge and Padua, and laid down rules that chirugians (who learned their trade by apprenticeship) should operate only under the strict supervision of physicians.

William Harvey, by Daniel Myters (1627), National Portrait Gallery (image is in the Public Domain).

Harvey, who acted as personal physician to James I and Charles I, conducted pioneering research into the human circulatory system, and took his students into the nearby slaughterhouses of Smithfield, so that they could observe the parallels between the circulation of blood in humans and animals, as the last drops bled from the bodies of cattle, sheep and pigs. In an age in which human corpses for dissection were hard to come by, each student could examine, in detail, the hearts and other organs of a freshly killed beast.

Harvey's illustration of veins in the human arm. Image: Wellcome Collection (licensed under CCA).

Four generations later, one of the hospital's most eminent surgeons, Percivall Pott (1714-88), noted an unusually high incidence of scrotal cancer in chimney-sweeps, making him the first to identify environmental factors as potential carcinogens.

Percivall Pott, by Edward Hedges, after Nathaniel Dance-Holland (image is in the Public Domain).

The hospital buildings that can be seen today were built in Pott's lifetime, and William Hogarth, one of the leading artists of the day, was commissioned to decorate them with murals.

The main entrance to Bart's Hospital. Photo: Nevilley (licensed under GNU).

William Hogarth's mural of Christ at the Pool of Bethseda. Photo: Nevilley (licensed under GNU.

Plan of Bart's Hospital in 1893. Image: Wellcome Trust (licensed under CCA).

When, back in the Twelfth Century, Henry I had lent his support to Rahere's plan to build a hospital, he also instituted an annual fair within the precincts of the priory, to help with fundraising. "Bartholomew Fair" took place every August, initially over three days, but this increased to two weeks under Charles II: it was a cloth fair, attracting merchants from all across Britain, but it was also an occasion for much rowdy revelry. Because Saint Bartholomew's lay outside the city walls, the gates could be closed at the normal times, containing the revelers without.

Bill for a puppet-show at Bartholomew Fair, 1700. Image, Houghton Library, Harvard University, TS 555.1 (Public Domain).

Bartholomew Fair, 1721. Image: Wellcome Collection, V0014666 (Public Domain).

By 1855, however, with most of the City's gates demolished, this containment was no longer possible. The fair was abolished by the City authorities, but the medical tradition continued, and "Bart's," where the functioning of the human heart was first explained in detail, now supports one of the most important coronary care units in Europe.  

An operation at Bart's in 1908. Photo: Wellcome Collection, L0018253 (licensed under CCA).

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is currently working on The Cheapside Tales, a London-based trilogy of historical novels.

The Wards of Old London: Castle Baynard - The Defence of Body and Soul

A visitor to London walking along the Thames from the Tower of London towards Blackfriars finally passes from Queenhithe into Castle Baynard Ward. Of Castle Baynard itself, there remains not a trace visible above ground: not, I might add, in either case, since the place-name refers to two quite separate buildings, which did not even stand in the same place.

Shortly after the Norman conquest of 1066, work began on the construction of what would eventually become the Tower of London, William the Conqueror's citadel in the south-eastern corner of the city (it was, initially, a timber fortress, the stone-built White Tower coming some twenty years later). William had few reasons to expect loyalty from the people of London, most of whom probably thought of him as "the Bastard," rather than "the Conqueror," so his rule would have to be imposed, if not by force, then certainly by the threat of it. To his knight, Ralph Baynard, he entrusted the building of a second fortification in the south-western corner of the City, just inside the Roman wall, beside the outfall of the River Fleet. William charged another retainer, whose name was Montfichet, or Montfiquet, with the construction of a third fortification, immediately to the south of Ludgate.

The original Chastel Baynard may have been a hastily thrown up timber palisade on an earth motte, such as this one at Hastings, shown on the Bayeux Tapestry, built in the days following the establishment of a beach-head by William the Conqueror (image is in the Public Domain).

Within twenty years of the conquest, Chastel Baynard (as I shall refer to it, to avoid confusion with a later building) and Montfichet Tower were (like the White Tower), substantial stone fortifications of a sort that no English man or woman had ever seen before (unless, perhaps, he or she had travelled within the Muslim world). Neither, incidentally, was located within the old Castle Baynard Ward: both were in Farringdon Within.

Building fortifications was a hazardous business  for invading dynasties. By the early 13th Century, William's great-great-grandson, King John, was at war with the descendants of the very Norman knights to whom the Conqueror had entrusted the defence of London and other English cities. Chastel Baynard was held by Robert Fitzwalter, who was ranged against John in the Barons' Revolt. Robert was, perhaps, defending more than his political rights and privileges: it was said that the King desired his daughter, Matilda the Fair (believed to be the inspiration for "Maid Marian" in the Robin Hood stories). Fitzwalter found an ally in Robert Montfichet, and they probably enjoyed the support of many in the City, resentful of the increasingly onerous taxation imposed by the King.

Having suppressed, for the time, the revolt, and banished both Fitzwalter and Montfichet, King John set about the demolition of both fortifications. No illustration of either exists, but archaeologists have found traces of them in excavations to the east of the River Fleet.

In 1276, the Earl of Kent, Hubert de Berg, pulled down whatever remained of Montfichet Tower, and gave much of the land on which it, together with Chastel Baynard, had stood, to friars of the Dominican Order, whose establishment had outgrown its previous priory in Holborn. Their priory, dedicated to Saint Mary the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist, gave "Blackfriars" its name.

Reconstruction of the plan of Blackfriars Priory. Image: Wellcome Trust, L0001718 (licensed under CCA).

Enjoying royal patronage, the priory was frequently at odds with the City authorities, sometimes siding with the King against the Lord Mayor, and often espousing unpopular causes. In 1255, the Dominican Prior had intervened on behalf of Jews unjustly accused of murdering a child in Lincoln, standing against a tide of anti-Semitism that swept through the City as it swept through other urban communities in England. A subsequent Prior tried, unsuccessfully, to intervene in securing the rescue of Edward II, a King whose unpopularity within the City may have rivalled that of his great-grandfather, John.

Across Christendom, the Dominicans were best known for their vigorous, and often brutal, defence of Catholic orthodoxy against "heresies" of every kind. In Fifteenth Century England the challenge came from the Lollards, Protestants avant la lettre, who wanted to see the Bible translated into English, were hostile to Catholic ideas of Penance (most significantly confession to a priest), and despised the "idolatry" of images. These ideas found favour among some of the wealthier merchant classes (men who were too busy making money to take the time to learn Latin, but who could afford to contemplate the purchase of a handwritten Bible, written out on the skins of forty or more cattle).

The opening of Saint John's Gospel, from John Wycliffe's 14th Century (Lollard) English Bible (image is in the Public Domain).

Many prominent Lollards were tried and condemned in Ecclesiastical Courts within the Priory of Blackfriars, few of them more notable than Sir John Oldcastle (thought to have inspired Shakespeare's character, Falstaff). Convicted by the Dominicans of heresy, and imprisoned in the Tower of London, Oldcastle escaped, with the assistance of a Smithfield parchment-maker, and went on to organise a rebellion against his former friend, King Henry V, for which he was subsequently executed.

What then, of the Baynard's Castle that gave its name to the ward, and actually took up much of the land within it? It was not a castle in any military sense, but rather a palace, occupying a waterfront position to the west of the earlier Chastel Baynard. It was built by the Earl of Clare in 1338, and subsequently rebuilt by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, following a fire. It became a royal palace under King Henry VII, and was granted to the Earls of Pembroke by Queen Elizabeth I. It was gutted by the Great Fire of 1666, but its facade was patched up, and survived through the 18th Century. Not a trace of it remains visible today, its position taken by Baynard House, the Brutalist building designed by William Holford, and now home to British Telecommunications.

Baynard's Castle and the outfall of the River Fleet. Image: Wellcome Trust, L0006919 (licensed under CCA).

Baynard's Castle in the 1540s, with Blackfriars Priory to the west and Saint Paul's to the north (image: Museum of London).

Baynard's Castle in 1790. Image: British Library HMNTS 01349.I.1 (Public Domain).

Baynard House

We have come half-circle in our tour of the City of London, walking through the city, first from west to east, along the main road from Newgate to Aldgate, and then back along the Thames to the banks of the River Fleet, where we began. Over the coming weeks, we will walk first north, and then east, following the course of the Roman and Medieval walls that formed the northern limits of the City, completing our circuit when we arrive back at Aldgate, once home to Geoffrey Chaucer.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is currently working on The Cheapside Tales, a London-based trilogy of historical novels.