The Story of London in 50 Novels: 5 - "A Burnable Book," by Bruce Holsinger

The City of London, having lost at least half of its population to the Black Death in 1348, recovered surprisingly rapidly. The decades that followed offered unprecedented opportunities for those who had been fortunate enough to survive: the sons of peasants from Kent and Surrey, Suffolk and Norfolk, flocked to the capital to take the place of the thousands of apprentices who now lay buried in the mass graves beyond the City walls. There were fewer opportunities for girls than for boys, although some doubtless made good marriages, and the most talented could find well-paid work as embroiderers: for those less fortunate, prostitution offered a very uncertain lifeline.

The wool-trade was at the centre of London's prosperity in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. In the countryside, labour-intensive subsistence farming gave way to pasture for sheep, whilst, in the cities, the export of raw wool was gradually replaced by the more profitable trade in dyed and woven cloth. Ships from Spain, France, Flanders, and Venice, arrived at London's docks, bringing silks, wine and spices, in return for woolen cloth and linen. Ideas, as well as goods, were exchanged, and numerous languages were spoken in the streets leading up from the wharves.

Medieval wool merchants, from Filippo Calandri's Trattato di Arithmetica 1491, Biblioteca Riccardina, Florence, Ricc. 2669 (image is in the Public Domain). 

The fluctuations of the English wool trade. Image: Dr Jennifer Paxton

Map of London in 1300. Image: Grandiose (licensed under CCA).

The City was largely self-governing, its administration centred in the guilds, and in the Guildhall, and the language of governance was English. Since 1066, Norman French had been the language of the royal court and aristocracy; Latin the language of the church and scholarship; and English the language of trade. Now, with trade increasingly the basis of England's prosperity, English came into its own as a literary language. Poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower turned away from French and Latin, to write in English. Fluent in all three languages, they created a new language, recognisably "English," rather than Anglo-Saxon, with much borrowing from French and Latin. 

Bruce Holsinger's novel, A Burnable Book, is set in the City, and in Southwark, in 1385. Richard II is on the throne, and Chaucer and Gower are both characters, as are a group of prostitutes, who move between the stews around Winchester Palace, and Gropecunt Lane, in the heart of the City. Like many of the elite of their age, Gower and Chaucer are well-connected, both internationally and within the City. Chaucer has traveled in Italy on enigmatic diplomatic missions; whilst Gower's son, Simon, has worked there for the English mercenary, Sir John Hawkwood, here depicted, convincingly, as a brutal thug (although he is believed by some to have been the model for Chaucer's knight in The Canterbury Tales). When a mysterious book is brought to London from Italy, prophesying the death of the King, all of the characters are thrown into a turmoil of intrigue and suspicion, from which they will struggle to escape.

Geoffrey Chaucer, from Thomas Hoccleve's "The Regiment of Princes," 1412 (image is in the Public Domain).

The tomb of Sir John Hawkwood, by Paolo Uccello, 1436, Florence Cathedral (image s in the Public Domain).

"Under a clouded moon, Agnes huddles in a sliver of utter darkness and watches him, this dark-cloaked man, as he questions the girl by the dying fire. At first he is kind seeming, almost gentle with her. They speak something like French: not the flavour of Stratford-at-Bowe nor of Paris, but a deep and throated tongue, tinged with the south. Olives and figs in his voice, the embrace of a warmer sea. He repeats his last question. The girl is silent. He hits her. She falls to the ground. He squats, fingers coiled through her lush hair. 'Doovery lleebro?' he gently chants. 'Ileebro, mee ragazza. Ileebro.' It could be a love song. The girl shakes her head."

"We live in a hypocritical age. An age that sees bishops preaching abstinence while running whores. Pardoners peddling indulgences whilst seducing wives. Earls pledging fealty while plotting treason. Hypocrites, all of them, and my trade is the bane of hypocrisy, its worth far outweighing its perversion. I practice the purest form of truthtelling ... I have become a trader in information, a seller of suspicion, a purveyor of foibles and the hidden things of private life. I work alone and always have, without the trappings of craft or creed. John Gower. A guild of one." 

John Gower, University of Glasgow, MS Hunter 59 (Tl 17, 6v - image is in the Public Domain).

"'You can't be direct with her about it,' Chaucer was saying. 'This is a woman who takes the biggest cock in the realm between her legs. She's given Lancaster three bastards at last count - or is it four?' He waited, gauging my reaction. 'What is this book, Geoffrey? What does it look like? What's in it?' His gaze was unfocused and vague. 'To be honest with you, John, I don't know. What I do know is that this book could hurt me.' He blinked and looked at some spot on the wattle behind me. Then, in a last whisper of French, 'it could cost me my life.'"

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

The Wards of Old London: Aldgate - Portals to Heaven and the High Seas

The main road running through London from west to east passes from Lime Street Ward into Aldgate, the easternmost of the intramural wards. At the lower end of Leadenhall Street stood Aldgate itself, one of the city's seven Medieval gates. There had, indeed, been a gate here in Roman times, guarding the road to Colchester, but it was successively rebuilt in the Twelfth, Thirteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, before finally being removed in 1761.

Aldgate in 1610 (image is in the Public Domain).

The poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, had lodgings in the gate-house from 1374 to 1386, whilst he was employed as a customs official. His apartment seems to have been somewhat cramped, certainly not a family home, but it was, perhaps, from here that he observed the comings and goings of knights and millers, friars and pardoners, as they made their way from Essex and East Anglia, through London on their way to Canterbury.

Geoffrey Chaucer, from Thomas Hoccleve's The Regiment of Princes, 1412 (image is in the Public Domain). Since Hoccleve claimed to have known Chaucer personally, this may be among the first works of true English portraiture.

Many of these pilgrims would have found a bed for the night in the Augustinian Priory of Holy Trinity Aldgate, which was just inside the gate itself, its latrines inconveniently located directly beneath Chaucer's window. The priory had been founded in 1108 by Matilda, the wife of Henry I, who chose the Prior (a Norman cleric whose name was Norman) as her personal confessor. He and his brethren were not enclosed, contemplative monks, but "Austin Canons" (or "Black Canons"), priests who ministered to the spiritual needs of residents of, and visitors to, the city. Providing hospitality for pilgrims was an important part of their role. The Elizabethan chronicler, John Stow, who lived through the Reformation, and Henry VIII's dissolution of religious houses, had enjoyed the hospitality of the priory as a child, and remembered it into his old age.

"These priors have sitten and ridden amongst the aldermen of London, in livery like unto them, saving that his habit was in the shape of a spiritual person, as I myself have seen in my childhood: at which time the prior kept a most bountiful house of meat and drink, both for rich and poor, as well within the house as at the gates, to all comers, according to their estates."

He recalled, also, the destruction of the priory:

"Then was the priory church and steeple proffered to whomsoever would take it down, and carry it from the ground, but no man would undertake the offer; whereupon Sir Thomas Audley was fain to be at more charges than could be made of the stone, timber, lead, iron etc. For the workmen, with great labour, beginning at the top, loosed stone from stone, and threw them down, whereby the most part of them were broken, and few remained whole."

Duke's Place, the main entrance to the priory, J. Smith, 1790 (image is in the Public Domain). Fragments remain, reincorporated in modern buildings, but they are not, for the most part, accessible to the public.

The music of the canons' Catholic offices may have fallen silent, but it would, in time, be replaced by religious invocations of a different sort. Edward I had, in 1290, expelled all Jews from England (a Jewish presence almost certainly remained, but any religious activities of this community necessarily took place on a covert basis. In 1657, Oliver Cromwell, as Lord Protector, approached the Sephardic Jewish congregation of Amsterdam, offering to allow a Jewish settlement in England, in return for finance for his navy. He did not, initially, allow them to establish a public place of worship, but Charles II was more relaxed about this. A small synagogue had been established on Creechurch Lane by 1665, when it was visited by Samuel Pepys. This was replaced, in 1701, by the larger Bevis Marks Synagogue, which remains to this day.

Bevis Marks Synagogue. Photo: Deror Avi, reproduced with permission.

By the 17th Century, London was becoming increasingly important as a hub of global trade. The British East India Company, which traded in spices, cotton, silk, indigo, saltpetre and tea, was initially head-quartered within the ward in the mansion of its governor off Fenchurch Street. In 1648 it moved to another Elizabethan mansion, Craven House, which, by 1661 was known as East India House.

"Old East India House," previously Craven House, from a 17th Century Dutch print (image is in the Public Domain).

After the Great Fire of 1666, a new East India House was established on Leadenhall Street, with warehouses accessible from Lime Street. Throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries, the building was successively enlarged and aggrandised, and the opening of East India Dock, to the east of The City, in 1802, established Leadenhall Street as the gateway to the docks, and the high seas beyond; a magnet for some of the most ambitious young men in Britain, keen to make their fortune in the orient.

East India House in 1800, by Thomas Malton the Younger, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Centre for British Art (image is in the Public Domain).

The sale-room of East India House, 1809, by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Charles Pugin (image is in the Public Domain).

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.