Johnson's Life of London Page 6

  William retreated south and west, and eventually crossed the Thames as far away as Wallingford in Oxfordshire, before wheeling across to Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. From there he issued a fresh invitation to the Londoners to pack it in—and again, the citizens delayed. By now it was late autumn of 1066, and disease and campaigning were surely taking their toll on the Norman army.

  Behind the city walls the defences were organised by one Ansgar the Staller, who is named in some chronicles as the “mayor” of London. The Staller had been injured at Hastings, and had been heroically carried into the city on a stretcher. For weeks, perhaps even months, Ansgar the Staller stalled away.

  He might have stalled to victory had he not been let down by his allies. Edgar the Atheling—the Anglo-Saxon alternative—was supposedly backed by Edwin, Earl of Northumberland, and his brother Morcar. At the critical juncture they seem to have vanished back up north, taking their troops with them. Another Edgar backer, Archbishop Stigand, switched sides and went over to the Conqueror, and by December 1066 the Staller could stall no more.

  Like Suetonius Paulinus, William marched down what is now the Edgware Road, but this time he turned right at (what is now) St. Giles’s Circus and established his HQ at Westminster. There he constructed “siege engines and made moles and the iron horns of battering rams to destroy the City . . . to reduce the bastions to sand and bring down the proud tower to rubble.”

  It is not clear what Guy of Amiens means by “the proud tower,” but he is presumably referring to the remaining Roman fortifications. Ansgar and Co. are said to have put up a vigorous resistance, with what little soldiery they had left. But William’s knights were tougher. They “inflicted much sorrow upon London by the death of many of her sons and citizens.”

  William was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey, on Christmas Day 1066. It is a measure of the extreme tension in the city that the ceremony very nearly ended in disaster.

  The turncoat Archbishop Stigand was given the honour of placing the English crown on Norman temples (even though he had crowned Harold in the same year), and he turned to the English contingent and asked them, in English, if William was acceptable as their king. They shouted their assent—as well they might, given that they were surrounded by Norman knights.

  Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances then put the same question in French, for the benefit of those in the audience who could not speak English. The Norman knights shouted Oui! so loudly that the guards outside thought there was some sort of revolt going on. They torched the neighbouring buildings, and the congregation fled—some to fight the flames, some to loot the houses. A handful of clergy and monks were left to complete the consecration of the King, who was trembling from head to foot. As for Ansgar the Staller, his lands at Enfield were confiscated and he went on to have a quiet career as a minister in Westminster Abbey.

  There are many senses in which Norman rule in London was merely a continuation of what had gone before. The new king issued a famous Charter for Londoners, in which he greeted all the burgesses, French and English, in a friendly manner and assured them that all the laws of Edward would continue to apply. “And I will that every child be his father’s heir after his father’s day and I will not suffer any man to offer you any wrong. God keep you,” said the benign new ruler. London’s political system was kept intact, with the Saxon portreeve evolving into the Norman sheriff, and Londoners by and large retained the freedoms they had acquired in the reign of the Confessor. According to William of Poitiers, one of the more bootlicking Norman chroniclers, the English were absolutely thrilled to be conquered.

  “Many English received by his liberal gift more than they had ever received from their fathers or their former lords. . . . He gave them rich fiefs in return for which they willingly endured hardship and danger. But to no Frenchman was anything given unjustly taken from an Englishman.”

  It is not clear that the English saw it this way. William devastated the north of England, and in any objective reading the Norman Conquest was a cultural and political catastrophe for the Anglo-Saxons. Lands and titles were plundered and handed over to Norman noblemen. Many English aristocrats were driven to flee the country, some to Flanders, some to Scotland. Some turned up as soldiers in the Byzantine empire’s Varangian Guard, some were sold into slavery.

  By 1086 the Norman cuckoo had shoved almost all the Saxon fledglings over the side of the nest, and the English aristocracy retained a pathetic 8 percent of its original landholdings. Half the country was owned by 190 men, and a quarter by just 11 men. All were Normans. Lovely Anglo-Saxon crafts of embroidery and metalworking were lost. Above all, a foreign language was imposed on the country, and French was to be used by the ruling classes for the next three hundred years.

  As Sir Walter Scott pointed out, the subjection of the Saxons is visible in the language today, where we use an English word for a farm animal and a French word for the cooked meat it provides. So the Saxon servants would take a cow and provide the Normans with beef, or they would take a pig and offer them pork, or a sheep and offer them mutton. Scott composed a little ditty, which he put into the mouth of someone called Wamba. It was “Norman saw on English oak, On English neck a Norman yoke; Norman spoon to English dish, And England ruled as Normans wish.”

  It was a humiliation, and I have always been fascinated by the politics of the Conquest. “Et fuga verterunt Angli,” it says on the Bayeux tapestry—and the English turned in flight. To any modern English-speaking person the message is clear: We, the English, lost. And the Normans conquered us, right?

  I ask the Yeoman Jailer whether he thinks that we—the English—were conquered by foreigners. He pauses and then says judiciously: “I think in the end, sir, that we conquered them. In a hundred years they were calling themselves kings of England.” I suppose that is true; but for two hundred years beyond that, the language of the elite in England became French, and the Anglo-Saxons were ruthlessly pushed down the social scale.

  When William died he was buried not in London but in his Norman home of Caen. He had become so fat that they could not fit him into the sarcophagus, and when the officiating bishop tried to push down on the lid, his body burst, releasing such appalling vapours from his ventral cavity that the congregation swooned.

  It seems unlikely that he was mourned by any of the four thousand Anglo-Saxon lords who lost their land, because the sad truth is that the Conquest was a nightmare for the Anglo-Saxons; and yet it was terrific for London.

  Suppose it had been William, not Harold, who had taken one in the eye at Hastings. Or suppose that Ansgar the Staller had won the battle of London. Without the Norman Conquest the city would never have had the unity and peace that goes with firm government.

  The chronicler tells us that under the Conqueror a young maiden could travel the length of England without being injured or robbed, and it is security that is the paramount condition for trade. Merchants from Caen and Rouen came over to buy and sell, and London flourished under its famous charter. It is an indication of the city’s favoured status under the Normans that it was not required to submit to the Domesday Book—even Winchester was eventually required to tot up its assets.

  Norman London was to become emphatically and officially the capital of England—perhaps for the first time since the Romans. And William enshrined one reform that was crucial for the development of the city.

  Edward the Confessor had originally moved the court from outside the Alfredian/Roman boundaries, because he wanted to oversee the rebuilding of the eighth-century West Minster monastery, which he turned into the Abbey. William not only decided to be crowned in the Abbey, but he established the Norman court—the centre of administration and justice—at Westminster.

  So it was that London acquired its bicephalous identity, with the centre of political power at one remove from the centre of wealth.

  Sometimes the moneymen have infuriated the politic
ians, and sometimes the politicians have egged on the mob against the moneymen. But for a thousand years London’s commercial district has had easy access to government—and yet been apart from it; and that semi-independence has surely contributed to the City’s commercial dynamism.

  We have the Normans to thank for that, just as we can thank them for the rule of law, for a series of socking great castles, and above all for adulterating the language so vigorously with French. If Harold had won at Hastings, or if Ansgard the Staller had held London, then we would never have been blessed with the hybrid language that was to conquer the world.

  The success of that hybrid has been ascribed to the genius of our next great Londoner—the first in the series to have been actually born in the city.

  * * *

  Just before we come to Chaucer, we must consider an important detail about his pilgrims. Think of them all: the fornicating friar, the randy old widow, the cook with the ginormous zit, the drunken miller, the pretentious prioress. If they came from London or anywhere north of the river, there was only one route to get to Canterbury, and that was my daily commuter trek. London Bridge was still the only crossing, and in the years of England’s Norman kings it was a very rickety affair.

  We have seen that Olaf the Norwegian found it easy enough to pull it over with his rowers in 1014, and on ten occasions between that date and 1136 the bridge either collapsed or experienced a disastrous failure, and no wonder.

  The population of the city had doubled between AD 1000 and 1200—to more than twenty thousand. Across this wonky track went growing quantities of people and goods: wool from Dorset, wine from Deauville. It seems unlikely to have been more than 6 metres or 10 metres across at the widest point, and there would scarcely have been room for two carts to pass abreast. Then in 1170 the decrepit Saxon piece of infrastructure faced a new load—a fresh rush of medieval commuters with their defecating horses and pounding heels.

  Henry II had his row with Thomas à Becket about the power relationship between church and state. In one sense the argument ended decisively in Henry’s favour, as Cheapside-born Becket’s brains were splattered over the altar of Canterbury Cathedral. But in death the great Londoner was more powerful than in life. Henry made his penitential pilgrimage, and to the medieval mind that showed the triumph of God over the kings of the Earth.

  To medieval folk who believed in the literal truth of the licking tongues of hellfire, a pilgrimage of their own was a chance to win points with the Almighty. Even greater numbers started to head for Canterbury. A priest named Peter de Colechurch, the chaplain of the church where Becket had been baptised, proposed a lasting solution.

  What was needed, he told Henry II, was a stone bridge. The pilgrims and the holy blissful martyr deserved no less. Fed up with paying for repairs on the wooden structure, Henry agreed. The design appeared to be very expensive, so he announced a tax on wool and set up a monastic guild called the Brethren of London Bridge, who could raise cash through the sale of indulgences.

  Even with these funding streams, the project proved almost too much for twelfth-century England. The river was 900 feet wide, strongly flowing and tidal. The design required twenty stone piers, rising on vast ship-shaped stone starlings that rose from the riverbed and jutted their prows into the current.

  These days you would build a cofferdam, and pump the water out to allow the men to work on the bed of the river. That was beyond them.

  Henry ran out of money and died; Peter de Colechurch was buried in the uncompleted foundations. Richard the Lionheart was too busy with the Crusades. After thirty years and the loss of 150 lives, the project was finished by King John.

  He did a cunning deal with the merchants of London. In exchange for loans to complete the bridge, they could have revenue from tolls and all future bridging rights over the Thames. These days we would call it a private finance initiative. London Bridge was completed in 1209 and was a huge popular hit. Houses and shops were built along it, with the eaves leaning together above the crowd. The congestion was so bad that sometimes it took the pilgrims an hour to cross.

  On they struggled through the next 150 years, with all the disasters of the Middle Ages—the little ice ages, the Black Death, the start of the Hundred Years’ War with France.

  They went to see the shrine of the martyr, because they believed he could help relieve them of their aches and miseries, but there were times when the people’s feeling of oppression was so great that the consolation of religion was not enough.

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  The father of English—now the unofficial common language of humanity

  It was Wednesday, 12 June 1381, the time of year when England is almost at its loveliest. The brief candles were still on the chestnuts, and the evenings were getting longer as the midsummer climax approached.

  A fat and slightly depressed author of about forty was sitting at the window of his flat and starting to feel alarmed. His wife was away, as usual, at the court of the King’s uncle, John of Gaunt, and we have some reason to suspect that her relations with the great prince were not beyond reproach. As for our hero, it was only a year before that he had himself been implicated in a discreditable liaison, in the form of the “raptus” of a young woman named Cecily Champain.

  Whatever the exact connotations of this charge—from which he managed to exonerate himself by paying a fine—it cannot have done wonders for his reputation or his morale. He had a good job, as Comptroller of the Wool Custom and Subsidy of the Petty Customs, and had established a reputation as a poet. Indeed, he still beats Le Douanier Rousseau as the greatest artist ever to have been a customs officer. In addition to his £10 annuity from John of Gaunt, his poetic gifts had somehow entitled him for the previous seven years to a pitcher of wine a day—about a gallon. Even if he didn’t quite drink it all himself, he knew, as the son of vintners, how to turn wine into money.

  Geoffrey Chaucer was at the epicentre of fourteenth-century England, a merchant who had been a courtier since the age of fourteen, a trusted ambassador who knew the politicians as well as he knew the moneymen, a man of such tremendous bustle that he personally bridged the two cities of London and Westminster. As he looked out of his apartment windows that summer evening, Chaucer saw events unfolding that threatened to turn his world upside down.

  He lived in Aldgate, in a curious castellated structure built above the old Roman gate at the northeast of the ancient city. From one side of his pad, he gazed upon London as it had grown under the French-speaking monarchs who had followed William the Conqueror; and in many ways there had been an embarrassing lack of technological progress since Norman times.

  They might have had windows in their casements, but people still moved by horse and cart and used bows and arrows, and though they had knives and spoons, they had not yet got the hang of the fork. There was no plumbing, there was no hot water. It was still a universe of toothache and constipation. There was abject poverty and appalling infant mortality, and always the risk of plague, sent from heaven as a punishment for our sinful species. And yet the population was growing—up to as much as fifty thousand, though not back to Roman levels; and there was money in London, money on a scale never known before. For centuries the English had been trading with France and the Low Countries, and the money from wool had built great houses for the merchants in the fashionable village of Charing, between the Strand and Westminster.

  Money gilded the tapestries of the merchants and dressed their wives in silk, and the wealth of the mercantile class expressed itself in all the refinements of the age: the carvings on the headboards, the love poetry, the figures in stained-glass windows with their etiolated bodies and their floppy slippers. In fact, some merchants became so rich that the nobility came to resent the signs of their wealth. In 1337 England’s first sumptuary laws were promulgated—a ban on the wearing of furs by certain categories of society.

  Money en
couraged thieves, prostitution and strange entertainments, like the podicinists, the professional farters whose skill Chaucer found so amusing, and the tournaments, where Chaucer and others of his class would put on finely wrought armour and play quintain, tilting at targets mounted on a rotating beam, always being careful not to get clonked on the back of their heads as the beam whirled round.

  Now the governing class of Britain faced exactly that—a terrific clonk on the back of the head, caused by their failure to watch the growing gap between rich and poor. Through the other window, Chaucer looked out of town, over Essex, at the countryside where the bulk of the population still lived. Life out there was not, as a rule, much fun.

  A fourteenth-century poet describes a man hanging on his plough, his coat of coarse cloth, his hood torn, his shoes broken, his mittens only rags. His four scrawny heifers can hardly move the plough, and his wife walks beside him with ice-cut bare feet and a baby wailing for her at the end of the furrow. By 1381 the past decade had been rotten for harvests, and successive plagues had devastated the villages.

  Time and again, in Chaucer’s lifetime, people were struck by a biblical horror, as buboes erupted in their armpits and groins. Children buried their parents with a regularity that almost matches sub-Saharan AIDS. Over the period 1340–1400, roughly Chaucer’s lifespan, the Black Death cut the population of England in half. To cap it all, these God-cursed peasants were told they had the honour of paying yet another tax to the state, supposedly to finance yet another attempt by the King to gain kudos on the battlefield in France. It was a poll tax, meant to fall equally on every head in the country.

  It was grossly unjust. Assuming our wretched ploughman had to pay for his wife as well, and assuming he earned 12 shillings a year, he would have had to pay the same amount as Chaucer, who earned a hundred times as much. In May that year, a spark had been lit in the village of Fobbing in Essex, where they refused to pay the tax collector (they fobbed him off); and now the tinder was crackling with popular indignation.