London: The Biography полностью

Other places have remained objects of London fear. It is believed the cries of drowned Jews, murdered in the great expulsion of 1290, can still be heard at low tide near Gravesend. The “Field of Forty Footsteps,” which now lies beneath Gordon Square, was considered to be “charmed” or “blasted,” according to taste. Here were once picked plantain leaves which were supposed to influence dreams but, more importantly, on the same spot two brothers killed each other in a duel. The imprint of their fatal footsteps was thought to have lingered, while the area of the killings could produce no grass. Southey did indeed decipher the outlines of seventy-six footsteps “the size of a large human foot about three inches deep” and in the summer of 1800, just before the area was built upon, Moser “counted more than forty.”

Washington Irving observed the inhabitants of Little Britain, behind Smithfield and beside Aldersgate, in the 1830s. “They are apt to be rendered uncomfortable by comets and eclipses,” he wrote in the guise of “Geoffrey Crayon, gent,” “and if a dog howls dolefully at night, it is looked upon as a sure sign of death.” He also listed the “games and customs” of the people. We may include here the ancient ceremony of beating the bounds, an act of parish assertiveness which derives from the importance of beating the devil out of the locality; once charity children were whipped at each boundary with white willow wands, but in more recent years the particular walls are simply beaten with sticks. There are altogether some fifty-six annual customs and ceremonies in the city, ranging from the “Swearing on the Horns” in Highgate to “The Verdict of The Trial of the Pyx” in Goldsmiths’ Hall, but the rituals of May-day are the most enduring if not necessarily the most endearing.

In the first recorded ceremonies the “merry Milk Maids” of London would carry upon their heads a “Pyramid” of “Silver plate” instead of their usual pails; this may sound quaint, but the connotations of the practice were more ritualistic and barbaric. The maids were hardly “merry”-they were some of the most poorly paid and heavily worked of all city trades-and this parade of silver plate, borrowed for the occasion from pawn-brokers, can be seen as a token of their financial enslavement during the rest of the year. The first of May was also a day of sexual licence and, in recognition of this lubricious fact, young chimney-sweeps joined the maids in a later version of the spectacle. Grosley reports that their black faces “are whitened with meal, their heads covered with periwigs powdered as white snow, and their clothes bedaubed with paper-lace; and yet, tho’ dressed in this droll manner, their air is nearly as serious as that of undertakers at a funeral.” Chimney-sweeps, like miners, have always been associated with the dark and promiscuous forces of the world; hence their appearance on “May-day.” But the young sweeps, with their “serious” air, were also the most harshly treated of all London children. Many were killed, burned or deformed in the exercise of the trade, which was literally to climb up the flues of the chimneys and dislodge any soot or cinders. So their labour, and suffering, were paraded for one day of levity.

There is a painting of great interest, dated around 1730 and entitled The Curd and Whey Seller, Cheapside; it depicts a blind girl sitting at the foot of the conduit in that street, holding out her hand to three young sweeps. This conduit was their usual haunt, and their expressions are of startling vivacity. The faces of two of them are so blackened that only their eyes and mouths are visible. They are all very small, and one of them seems to have a deformed back. They do indeed seem like the grotesques of the city, with a suggestion of threat or menace directed against the blind and very pale street-seller. It can be suggested, therefore, that the procession of sweeps on May-day was a re-enactment of their threat which was to be symbolically alleviated by laughter. Like all London rites, however, the ceremony gradually became more fanciful, with the introduction in the late eighteenth century of a “Green Man” covered in twigs and leaves. He was known as “Jack-in-the-Green” or simply “Green” and, accompanied by milkmaids and sweeps, was paraded in various parishes as some garish token of spring. May-day ceremonies were eventually taken over by street performers, before disappearing altogether.