I set myself the task for 2024 of reading and then writing about 25 pieces of London fiction I haven’t read before. This is number 21 in the series.
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Chapter Three of Peter Ackroyd’s 2003 novel begins like this:
“The hour before dawn had come quietly into St John’s Street. A pig wandered down Pissing Alley, having escaped the attentions of the night warden, and from one of the many small tenements along the street came the sound of a baby crying.”
Further on, a physician, Thomas Gunter, looks on “while the merchants of the several crafts walked in procession past Great Cross of Cheapside”. After that:
“The men of the wards then progressed in their ancient array: the citizens of Bridge and Walbrook carried lances all of red, for example, while those of Farringdon and Aldersgate had black lances powdered with white stars.”
This is London in the closing year of the 14th Century and King Richard II, having survived as a child the Peasants’ Revolt, with its invasion and trashing of the priory of St John, is facing fresh peril in the person of his nemesis, an avenging Henry Bolinbroke.
The unfolding fate of the monarch forms the context and the fuel for a complex conspiracy by religious fanatics to facilitate Richard’s unthroning. A key character is Clarice, a charismatic nun from St Mary’s, who foments unrest among the capital’s noisome populace of craftsmen, lawyers, clerics, traders, beggars and brothel keepers.
Each chapter is a linked cameo, emulating Geoffrey’s Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, even borrowing some of its characters. Murders are committed, bombs go off, theological debates are had, a curfew has been imposed. Minories, now a street in Tower Hamlets, was then an area of wooded land outside the city walls. The River Fleet, these days covered by Farringdon Road, flows through it all:
“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.”
There is the sound of violence too. A group of women beat up a summoner, an unpopular local figure whose job is to issue court warrants. One of them bites off one of his earlobes. The women howl in delight with his pain: “It was a savage yell, hard prolonged, exultant, which often sounded through London. It was the cry of the city itself.” So too, poverty: “Sir, I thank you of your goodness towards me,” says a poor man on successfully soliciting a penny, this described by the author as “clearly a ritual acknowledgement, long practised.” Some things haven’t changed.
It is a clever novel, an intellectual and scholarly exercise, marinaded in historical knowledge, as you would expect from the author of the gigantic London: The Biography. But it is also a work of imagination, conjuring characters with mouths full of parables from a turbulent Medieval past, moving through streets and places that still exist, in some cases given the names they have today: Threadneedle Street; Little Britain; Turnmill Street.
Walking the ancient streets of Clerkenwell and the Square Mile was already a rich experience. Having read The Clerkenwell Tales, it will be the richer for me now.
John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, editor and publisher of On London. Buy his London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here, here or here. Subscribe to his Substack too. Map from Maps London.