London: The Biography полностью

Two other sanctuaries were connected with the coining of money. They were located by the Mints at Wapping and in Southwark, as if the literal making of money were as sacred as any activity which took place in monastery or chapel. In the mid-1720s legal officers attempted to infiltrate and expel the “Minters” of Wapping but were fought back. One bailiff was “duck’d in a Place in which the Soil of Houses of Office [lavatories] had been empty’d” while another was force-marched before a crowd with “a turd in his mouth.” The connection between money and ordure is here flagrantly revealed.

Other sanctuaries still clung around the churches, as if the tradition of begging for alms had continued in a more dissipated form. The area which had once been dominated by Blackfriars was a notorious haunt of criminals and beggars. A sanctuary in the neighbourhood of Westminster Abbey was for centuries “low and disreputable,” and Shire Lane beside the church of St. Clement Danes was known as Rogues’ Lane. Here were houses known as “Cadgers’ Hall,” “The Retreat” and “Smashing Lumber,” the last being a manufactory for counterfeit coin, wherein according to Old and New London “every room had its secret trap or panel … the whole of the coining apparatus and the employés could be conveyed away as by a trick of magic.” In any alternative London topography, sanctuaries, like prisons, become highly specific sites of ill fame. Tread there who dares.

If the places of crime and punishment do not necessarily change, but leave a steady mark, there may also be continuity among the criminals of London. We read of fourteenth-century forgers and blackmailers, and the coroners’ inquests of 1340 reveal a long tally of “bawdy-house keepers, night-walkers, robbers, women of ill fame.” The city was even then so filled with thieves that in this period the right of “in-fangthief” was given to the city authorities; it permitted them “to hang thieves caught redhanded (cum manu opere)” without trial by jury.

It was not until the sixteenth century, however, that the literature of London crime becomes extensive. The works of Robert Greene and Thomas Dekker, in particular, reveal an underworld of thieves and imposters which remains as old and as new as the city itself. Certainly the argot or cant of the thieves had very ancient roots, while some of its more expressive phrases endured well into the nineteenth century. “And bing we to Rome-vill, to nip a bung” can be translated as “Now let us travel to London, to cut a purse.” How London acquired the name of “Rome-vill,” long before it was ever compared to that imperial city, is something of a mystery. “Yonder dwelleth a queer cuffin. It were beneship to mill him” (“There lives a difficult and churlish man. It would be a very good thing to rob him”).

The individuals, as well as their words, come to life in the pages of these old catalogues of crime-“John Stradling with the shaking head … Henry Smyth who drawls when he speaks … John Browne, the stammerer”-each of them engaged in some kind of fifteenth-century cheating trade. That trade, too, has survived. The game of cups, in which the spectator must choose which one conceals the ball, is still played on the streets of London in the twenty-first century; the fraud has now existed for over a thousand years in the capital.

In their record of “abraham men” (who pretended to be mad), “clapper dodgers” (who fished for goods from open windows) and “priggers of prancers” (horse thieves), Dekker and Greene may on occasions be guilty of over-emphasis; the streets of sixteenth-century London might not have been quite as violent or as perilous as they suggest. Nevertheless real criminality could be found in many specific areas. The neighbourhood of Chick Lane and Field Lane in Clerkenwell, for example, was always notorious. In Chick Lane itself there was a dwelling, once known as the Red Lion inn, which upon its demolition in the eighteenth century was discovered to be three centuries old; C.W. Heckethorn, in London Souvenirs, reveals that it contained “dark closets, trap-doors, sliding panels and secret recesses.” One of these trap-doors opened upon the Fleet Ditch, and “afforded easy means of getting rid of the bodies.” There was a morass of lanes off Ratcliffe Highway, with names like Hog Yard and Black Dog Alley, Money Bag Alley and Harebrain Court, which were known for “moral degradation.” There was also a dwelling near Water Lane, off Fleet Street, known as “Blood Bowl house” named “from the various scenes of blood that were almost daily exhibited, and where there seldom passed a month without the commission of a murder.”