CHAPTER 3

A TIME FOR GIFTS

As far as I can see, it was always winter in the medieval period. At least, that’s how it seems in pretty well every film I’ve seen set then. Always winter, usually raining, perpetually grey, and certainly never, ever Christmas. It’s as if the White Witch ensorcelled an entire era.

It wasn’t like that. The medievals loved colour: they painted everything they could get their hands on, dyed their clothes, and coloured their windows, so even light became saturated with colour. As for the eternal winter, in fact they lived through the Medieval Warm Period, so while there were certainly still winters, the summers were hotter, longer, and more predictable than in the succeeding centuries. In fact, early Hollywood, with its men in tights, Technicolor saturation, and assignations in gloriously verdant forest glades, was probably more accurate in its depiction of medieval times than contemporary film-makers: think The Adventures of Robin Hood over The Name of the Rose.

But even colouring everything in imagination, medieval London remains distant. Although it would not have seemed so to the people living between 1066 and 1485 (the conventional dates for the Middle Ages in England, beginning with the Conquest and finishing with the end of the Wars of the Roses and the accession of the House of Tudor), seeing as how they had to deal with the Black Death, Crusades, and wars internal and external, still this was the most stable period of London’s long history. Apart from a fairly brief interlude when Jews lived in the city – of which more below – London was a city with a single faith and one church; very different from before and after. So while the arches and buttresses, the severely upright figures and kaleidoscopic colours of medieval architecture are, to my mind, humanity’s greatest achievement in stone and place, yet this period stands apart from me, a vivid counterpoint to London’s usual cacophony of competing beliefs. While more remains, physically, of medieval London than its Roman and Anglo-Saxon versions, yet it seems more distant to us: a remote mirror, angled away. So I won’t stop too long in the London of Chaucer and Dick Whittington, but we can still take a while to wander its streets and visit its churches, to learn something of the religious life of what was now, indisputably, England’s greatest city.

But before that, for two centuries, from shortly after the Conquest to 1290, there was a thread running through the cloth of Christian London, a Jewish thread. There is no record of any Jewish population in Anglo-Saxon England, but William invited Jews, from Rouen in Normandy, to England soon after the Conquest. Usury, the lending of money at interest, was forbidden under Church law but permitted for Jews. In fact, since they were unable to own land, and entrance to the medieval craft guilds was barred to them, moneylending and medicine, along with pawn broking, were about all the activities allowed to London’s Jewish population.

The newcomers settled on the north side of Cheapside, their presence still commemorated in the road, Old Jewry, and the church St Lawrence Jewry. And, at first, the relationship between the communities seems to have been curious and even cordial. In 1092, Gilbert Crispin, the abbot of Westminster, wrote to Archbishop Anselm in Canterbury (the man responsible for the ontological proof of God’s existence, the most logically watertight and least viscerally convincing of all the rational arguments for God) of his discussions with a London Jew:

I wrote it recently, putting to paper what a Jew said when formerly disputing with me against our faith in defence of his own law, and what I replied in favour of the faith against his objections. I know not where he was born, but he was educated at Mayence; he was well versed even in our law and literature, and had a mind practised in the Scriptures and in disputes against us. He often used to come to me as a friend both for business and to see me, since in certain things I was very necessary to him, and as often as we came together we would soon get talking in a friendly spirit about the Scriptures and our faith. Now on a certain day, God granted both him and me greater leisure than usual, and soon we began questioning as usual. And as his objections were consequent and logical, and as he explained with equal consequence his former objections, while our reply met his objections foot to foot, and by his own confession seemed equally supported by the testimony of the Scriptures, some of the bystanders requested me to preserve our disputes as likely to be of use to others in future.¹⁴

Crispin goes on to give the arguments of his Jewish interlocutor in an account that is notable for its fair-mindedness and calm – no trace here of the hysteria that tinges so many later sources. Indeed, under William and his immediate successors, in particular Henry I, London’s Jewish population was positively privileged, with the oath of a Jew worth that of twelve Christians. In fact, under Henry I, Aaron of Lincoln became the king’s chief moneylender, working with a network of Jewish agents throughout the country to bankroll the king’s expenditure as well as financing the building of many monasteries, particularly those of the Cistercians. Aaron became so wealthy that he reputedly grew richer than the king. However, indicating the precarious nature of Jewish existence, on Aaron’s death all his money was seized by the Crown, on the grounds that as a usurer, his estate was escheat to the king. All money gained through usury reverted to the Crown on the death of the usurer, whether Christian or Jew, but since Christians were debarred from lending money at interest, this law when applied to the Jews provided major windfalls to perpetually cash-strapped kings.

However, their position slowly deteriorated, with the blood libel – the rumour that Jews kidnapped, killed, and used the blood of Christian children in their rituals – first being circulated in the latter part of the twelfth century. Then, when Richard I acceded to the throne, a party of prominent Jews came to pay homage to him at his coronation at Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189. When the king refused to meet them – he didn’t allow women into the ceremony either, so Richard’s prejudices seem to have been fairly broad – a rumour spread that Richard had authorized their massacre and a mob gathered in Old Jewry, attacking the homes there. The houses were too strong to be stormed, but they could not resist fire, and the people sheltering in them were burned to death. Richard was enraged at this assault, although probably more because, by this time, the status of Jews in England had been settled as that of king’s men, like the Norman barons, and an assault on the Jews of London was an indirect assault on him. However, Richard, set on crusade, made little effort to catch the perpetrators of the London massacre. As king’s men, Jews had the right to move and settle anywhere they chose, under the king’s protection, but in return for this protection the Angevin kings grew to look more and more on England’s Jews as their personal bank, to be raided whenever they needed money – and they always needed money. When Richard was taken hostage by Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, on his way home from the Crusades, the Jews of England had to pay 5,000 marks towards his ransom, three times the amount the City of London contributed.

Although the kings who reigned after Richard squeezed the Jews harder for money, they found them less and less forthcoming: their demands were bleeding the community dry. But since Jews could provide less towards the Royal Exchequer, they became less valuable to the Crown, particularly when new, Christian, moneylenders (step forward, my Italian ancestors!) began moving into town. Then, in 1275, Edward I issued the Statute of the Jewry, forbidding Jews to earn living from moneylending, as well as restricting their abode to certain towns and requiring them to wear a yellow identity badge sewn upon their clothing. The statute further required the country’s Jews, within fifteen years of the law’s proclamation, to be making their living as farmers, merchants, craftsmen, or soldiers. But farming is not a skill easily acquired, the medieval craft guilds would not accept Jews, and few wanted to become tailors or carpenters, let alone soldiers. So, in 1290, Edward issued the Edict of Expulsion: the community that had enjoyed early wealth and honour and then endured increasing persecution through two centuries was expelled.

They left behind only their dead, in the Jewish cemetery at Cripplegate that, until 1177, was the only licensed resting place for Jews in the kingdom; so it received the dead from communities around the country. Archaeologists, when they investigated the site in 1961, found only empty graves and the skeleton of a dog, perhaps indicating that the site had been desecrated after the Jews left the country. No tombstones were found during the dig, but parts of six were found when sections of the city wall were demolished through the centuries: they had been recycled into the city’s defences. They were later lost, and the inscriptions were not transcribed particularly well, but the stone found in Ludgate probably read: “Here lies Rabbi Moses, son of the honourable Rabbi Isaac”.

With the departure of the rabbi’s co-religionists, the 200-year sojourn of Jews in medieval England ended and London returned to the single faith and single church that characterized it through the Middle Ages.

But while there was one Church, the city had many churches. The frenzy of church-building in late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman times meant that the city was thoroughly supplied with places to worship. What was left to do was the beautification of these churches, the turning of places of stone into pedagogical instruments through painting, sculpture, and glass. At a time when literacy was still far from common (although it was more widespread in London than elsewhere, as the city’s merchant classes needed to be able to read and write), the interiors of churches were the most obvious places to teach men and women the basic elements of Christian belief. It’s almost impossible to imagine how vivid these churches must have been: five centuries of iconoclasm have whitewashed our memories and scrubbed the surviving medieval churches of their colour. To get some idea of what even simple parish churches must have looked like, think of the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, with its sky-blue ceiling and astonishing frescoes by Giotto, Cimabue, and Simone Martini. While London’s parish churches likely did not have access to artists as talented as Giotto, yet the overwhelming colour, the sheer life breathed into stone, gives some idea of what medieval London churches would have been like.

The religion they practised was just as vivid; the weft that threaded the warp of every aspect of London’s life, from the guilds that attempted to regulate the crafts and trades through to baking. (Archaeologists have found a ceramic sweetmeat mould that, when baked, would have transformed the encased doughy mixture into an edible St Catherine of Alexandria – she of Catherine wheel fame.) Medieval Christianity was as intensely physical as it was spiritual, and the two aspects come together perfectly in a fifteenth-century finger ring, which was plain on the outside but engraved on the inside – the skin side – with images of the Trinity, the Virgin and Child, and St Thomas Becket: the holy in constant contact with the physical.

Although the Church was an overarching and possibly overwhelming presence in medieval London, yet there were safety valves, from the boy elected as bishop on the feast of St Nicholas on 6 December, whose authority ran, symbolically at least, until the feast of the Holy Innocents on 28 December, to the Lord of Misrule, who reigned from Hallowe’en to Candlemas (2 February). The great London historian, John Stow, described the Lord of Misrule in his Survey of London:

… first in the feast of Christmas, there was in the king’s house, wheresoever he was lodged, a Lord of Misrule, or Master of merry disports, and the like was to be found in the house of every noble man, of honour or good worship, be he a lord spiritual or temporal. Among these was the Mayor of London, as well as the sheriffs, and each had their Lords of Misrule, ever contending without quarrel or offence who should make the rarest pastimes to delight the beholders. These Lords began their rule on All Hallows’ Eve and continued the same until the day after the Feast of Purification, commonly called Candlemas Day [2 February]. In all this time there were fine and subtle disguisings, masks and mummeries, with playing at cards for counters, nails and points in every house, more for pastimes than for gain.¹⁵

The Church’s overwhelming presence in medieval life was made physical in St Paul’s Cathedral. This vast building dominated London in a way that even its successor, Wren’s cathedral, built after the Great Fire, did not, for Old St Paul’s was longer, wider and, most importantly, taller than its replacement. The church was first begun in the eleventh century under William I, after the previous cathedral had also burned down, but it took a couple of centuries to complete. When it was done – in a style that began in heavy Norman Romanesque and ended in English Gothic – it sat upon Ludgate Hill, piercing the sky with a wooden spire that, traditionally, rose 489 feet into the air. In fact, the whole roof was made of wood, lightening the structure but eventually dooming it. So big was Old St Paul’s that the route north/south through the transepts became an accepted public thoroughfare to avoid making the long detour around the whole of the church, and so long was its nave that walking it became a pastime, reaching its zenith after the Reformation when Paul’s Walk became the accepted place for catching up with City gossip and fashion. While the medieval clergy may have been spared the sight of gallants cavorting down the aisle (Thomas Dekker devotes a whole chapter of The Gull’s Hornbook to “How a Gallant should behave himself in Paul’s Walks”) they had crosses of their own to bear. In the fourteenth century, Bishop Braybrook (bishop of London from 1381 to 1404) complained:

In our Cathedral, not only men, women also, not on common days alone but especially on Festivals, expose their wares, as it were, in a public market, buy and sell without reverence for the holy place… Others, too, by the instigation of the devil, do not scruple with stones and arrows to bring down the birds, pigeons, and jackdaws which nestle in the walls and crevices of the building: others play at ball or at other unseemly games, both within and without the church, breaking the beautiful and costly painted windows to the amazement of the spectators.¹⁶

However big St Paul’s was, it could not hold the whole population of London, and sometimes the whole population – or a fair section of it – needed to hear what was said at the cathedral. So on its grounds a cross was erected, with a platform upon which a priest or bishop could stand and address the multitudes. From Paul’s Cross, Henry III reassured Londoners that he would respect their ancient privileges, excommunications were pronounced, proclamations were made and, sometimes, witches were tried, most notably Richard Walker, a chaplain in Worcester. Having been found in possession of two books of images, Walker was found guilty of witchcraft in 1422. Now of course, this being medieval London, surely he would have been summarily executed and burned at the stake, since wasn’t that what they did to witches then? Well, no. The great witch craze was no medieval frenzy, but a product of the Renaissance and after: it reached a peak between 1580 and 1630. The fortunate Rev. Walker, being a medieval cleric, was simply paraded along Cheapside with the books hanging from his head and back, and then, when he returned to the cathedral, the offending books were burned and he was released. Paul’s Cross would go on to play a part in the religious turmoil of the Tudor years before being finally demolished in 1643. In 1910, a new cross was set up on the site of the old one. Standing by it, on a grey and cold winter’s morning, I listened for the tumults of the past, but all I could hear was the ceaseless sound of the city’s motion.

Frenzy might aptly describe the custom, alluded to by Erasmus, of Londoners processing to the cathedral “with a deer’s head fixed upon a spear, accompanied with men blowing hunting-horns”.¹⁷ But if the blood of a deer shed before St Paul’s represents the wilder reaches of medieval religion, devotion to the saints was the broad stream of the Thames, and in this no saint ranked higher for medieval Londoners than St Thomas Becket. Although Mellitus and Earconwald were the putative patrons of London (along with St Paul, of course, whose tower and spire pierced from the heart of the city seemingly to heaven itself), the murdered archbishop held a unique place in the devotions of Londoners. Becket was a Londoner himself, born on Cheapside, the old Anglo-Saxon artery that had become one of the city’s main market streets, and after his martyrdom under the swords of four of Henry II’s more suggestible knights, his cult spread to such an extent that four years after his death, Henry had to do public penance at Becket’s tomb, walking barefoot into the cathedral at Canterbury and being scourged there by Becket’s monks. Such public humiliation for a king indicates just how great were the Church’s checks on royal and state power in the high medieval period.

The desire to travel, “to explore strange new worlds”, is by no means limited to citizens of the Federation. Medieval Londoners, many of whom were immigrants to the city in the first place, also loved to travel, and pilgrimage was the safest, surest, and most profitable – at least spiritually – form of travel in their day. There were the great pilgrimages, to Jerusalem and to Rome, but far closer at hand and within the means of all but the poorest, there was their very own Thomas, in Canterbury.

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour…

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially, from every shires ende

Of Engelond, to Caunturbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for the seke

That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

(When April with his showers sweet with fruit

The drought of March has pierced unto the root

And bathed each vein with liquor that has power

To generate therein and sire the flower…

Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,

And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,

To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.

And specially from every shire’s end

Of England they to Canterbury wend,

The holy blessed martyr there to seek

Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak.)¹⁸

The traditional start of the pilgrimage was the bridge that symbolized the city: London Bridge. The bridge was commissioned by Henry II, Thomas’s once friend, in part as expiation for the archbishop’s murder. It was the first permanent stone crossing of the river. And for the next 650 years city and bridge became synonymous, the crossing defining London as much as the river had done in previous centuries. The job was huge, complex, and long – Henry did not live to see its completion. Nor did the man who designed and built it, Peter de Colechurch, see it completed in 1209, but his remains did: they were interred in the chapel, dedicated to Thomas Becket, that Peter – a priest as well as an architect – placed at the centre of his great bridge. Old London Bridge was one of the marvels of the age, the longest inhabited bridge in Europe, between 800 and 900 feet long and supported by nineteen stone piers, called starlings, sunk into the river bed, each needing regular maintenance. The starlings were not regular, and the river, squeezed between different gaps, churned and frothed into rapids, with the fall from one side of the bridge to the other sometimes, depending on the tide, being greater than a man’s height. Thames boatmen soon named the different arches – Long Entry and Gut Lock among them – and shooting the bridge’s rapids became an essential part of their trade, although not everyone was willing to take the watery plunge. Cardinal Wolsey normally disembarked above the bridge and met his boat again below.

The chapel to St Thomas on the bridge became the traditional starting point of the Canterbury pilgrimage. It also marked the pilgrims’ return. As pilgrimage grew more popular through the Middle Ages, many shrines began to produce souvenir badges, made of lead and pewter, that they sold to pilgrims to mark the successful completion of their pilgrimage. Piers Plowman describes the sight they presented to onlookers:

Apparelled as a Paynim · in a pilgrim’s wise.

He bare a staff bound · with a broad strip

In bindweed wise · wound about.

A bowl and a bag · he bare by his side;

An hundred ampullas · on his hat set,

Signs of Sinai · and shells of Galicia,

Many a cross on his cloak · keys also of Rome

And the vernicle in front · so that men should know

And see by his signs what · shrines he had sought.

This folk asked him first · from whence he did come.

“From Sinai,” he said · “and from our Lord’s sepulchre;

Bethlehem and Babylon · I have been in both;

In Armenia, in Ajexandria · and many other places.

Ye may see by my signs · that sit on my hat

That I’ve walked full wide · in wet and in dry,

And have sought good saints · for my soul’s health.”¹⁹

Along with the badges, ampoules were favourite mementos, having the advantage of being sealable, so the pilgrim could fill them with holy water from the shrine. Lots of these badges and ampoules have been found in the Thames near the site of old London Bridge, suggesting that many a pilgrim, having returned from Canterbury or some other pilgrimage site, by way of thanking God for his or her safe return, threw a pilgrimage token into the water from the bridge. The modern compulsion to toss pennies into ponds and fountains taps into the same deep human need to give votive offerings into watery keeping.

Among the pilgrims setting off to Canterbury in Chaucer’s tale were a monk and a friar. Monasticism – withdrawal from the world and devotion to a life of prayer – was the paradoxical engine that sustained civilization through the Early Medieval period in Britain, for the communities of monks and nuns that sprang up around the country from the seventh century onwards provided just about the only centres of stability and continuity in a violently uncertain world, where kingdoms rose and fell on the outcomes of a single, bloody skirmish. But, as has ever been the way with religious life, success carried the seed of its own adulteration: the austerity and renunciation of the early monks was gradually vitiated by the gifts of land and gold laid upon the monastic orders through the centuries by a grateful laity, seeking through monkish prayers to ensure their own passage into heaven. Of course, it was no unrelieved decline into laxity with reform movements punctuating the centuries as surely as the wine-bibbing priors of popular protest, yet by the High Middle Ages many of the monastic orders had become synonymous with a life of ease, with only the unflaggingly austere Carthusian order still universally admired for their discipline.

Into this monastic morass, the new mendicant orders of friars – the Dominicans, the Carmelites, the Augustinians and, most of all, the Franciscans – burst like a breaking dam. What distinguished them from the monks was their adjective: despite appearances, a mendicant is not someone unable to darn but a religious who subsists on charity. Unlike the monastic orders, which had accumulated sometimes vast estates to support their houses, the friars depended on alms; neither as individuals nor as organizations were they supposed to acquire property. Their locus of action was different too. Where monks withdrew from the world and supported it invisibly but actively through prayer, the friars plunged into the world, living and travelling among ordinary people, acting as the advance guard for spiritual revival. As such, they were greeted with great popular enthusiasm.

But the world wears down the good. Nor can an organization subsist in the same manner as an individual. So while the mendicant orders strove with the world, they had to accommodate to it as well. For the Franciscans, wedded to Francis’s Lady Poverty, this involved the deepest soul-searching. When they first arrived in Britain, not long after Francis’s death, the Greyfriars (named after the colour, or lack, of their habits) had adhered strictly to the strictures of their founder. Their houses were placed in the poorest parts of town, from Stinking Lane – which tells its tale in its name – in London, to the decayed town gaol in Cambridge. When an overenthusiastic townsman built a stone dormitory for them in Shrewsbury, the Greyfriars demolished it and replaced it with mud walls. This was the heroic age of the Franciscans, when they walked, whatever the weather and the way, barefooted and bareheaded through the cities of Europe, leaving bloody footprints as their track, and opening the hearts of the new urban poor to their call. But it is the nature of heroic ages not to last. And while Thomas de Eccleston, writing in the thirteenth century, says how the brothers happily drank sour beer and ate bread made from unsieved, coarse grain, by the latter part of the medieval centuries the Franciscans had also settled into something less than the extreme poverty asked of them by their founder – although, in the cycle of decline and renewal characteristic of the religious life, the attenuation of the Franciscan rule provoked the foundation of the independent Observant Friars in 1415. The laity of medieval times was intensely aware of the austerity, or otherwise, of the mendicant and monastic orders, and their prestige in the eyes of Londoners was directly related to how strictly they kept to their vows.

However, while it was clear when the Franciscans fell back from poverty, for an order such as the Dominicans – founded as the order of preachers – matters were not so clear-cut. The Blackfriars landed in England on 5 August 1221, on the very day that their founder, Dominic de Guzman, died, and the thirteen friars who made up the advance party made their way to Oxford, for from its inception the order engaged with the cauldron of ideas stirring in the new universities springing up across Europe. A London priory soon followed, however, and, as men educated and engaged with the latest contemporary ideas, the Dominicans soon became royal favourites, with Blackfriars acting as royal confessors, ambassadors, and envoys. Such was the political muscle of the Dominicans that when they moved from their initial London premises in Holborn to the area between Ludgate Hill and the Thames, Edward I gave permission for the defensive wall of the city of London to be moved to accommodate their house: the only time when London Wall was moved to allow space for new buildings. The great priory they built there was the site of various meetings of parliament and the Privy Council, but most notably it hosted the prelude to its own destruction: the divorce trial of Catherine of Aragon. But more of that in the next chapter. All that remains of the medieval Blackfriars is their name, tacked on to a railway station, although the order of preachers might have enjoyed the fact that the station now bridges the river below.

The fate of the Dominicans’ London houses reflects that of almost all the city’s medieval establishments: the ceaseless churn – mainly fire, bombs, and builders – that ploughs through the past has destroyed almost everything from that time. If that wasn’t enough, as far as London’s medieval churches were concerned the Great Rebuilder, Sir Christopher Wren, was the Great Despoiler: only a handful of churches survived the Great Fire of 1666 but that was a case of out of the fire and into rebuilding. Wren remodelled almost all the survivors according to his own tastes: out with gargoyles and stained glass, in with geometry and white light.

The Victorians were no slouches when it came to church restoration either, so what Wren missed, they didn’t. The upshot is that there are no medieval churches left in London in their original state: it is a lost time. And maybe that is appropriate, for the era is perhaps further from us today than any other in the city’s history, for it proceeded from a unity of belief that the city would not see again.