Though Northampton has admittedly lost some of the illustrious burnish since its Alfred the Great heyday, it’s still an important central pivot of the country for two hundred years after the conquest, and still has its mint. A thriving, pretty little market town, by all accounts, since Dick the Lionheart grants it its charter in 1180-something. Cobblers and leather-workers all up Scarletwell Street and the old Gilhalda, the original town hall there on the Mayorhold, where they hold their Porthimoth di Norhan, although no one nowadays knows what that might have been. Something to do with boundaries. Henry the Third seems rather taken with the place at first and wants to give the town a university, before he’s had a chance to fully understand the fiery and unusual spirit of the ancient settlement. The Bacaleri di Norhan, the stroppy students, are protesting Henry’s imposition of a forty eight-strong council — the exact same number of the bastards that Rome Thompson currently contends with weekly — who are lining their own pockets with the profits of the town. Henry decides he doesn’t like the locale after all and sends his troops in through the wall of the old Cluniac priory where St. Andrew’s Road is now. They pillage, rape and burn until Northampton is an ugly, smoking wreck. And when he says Northampton, Roman means the Boroughs. Henry’s promised university ends up in Cambridge, and with Henry’s death in 1272 they take away the mint as well.
His reputation for exacting startling retribution, whether against individuals or institutions, means that anyone who’s heard of him knows that they’re better off not picking fights with Roman. Which leaves those who haven’t heard of him. He’s visiting the cellar bar outside the Grosvenor Centre, near where Wood Street used to be, for a quick drink. There are these nineteen-, twenty-year-old soldiers from some camp outside Northampton, half-a-dozen getting rowdy in the lounge, shoving past regulars. When Rome asks one of these latter-day roundheads to watch where he’s going, he’s got the whole mob around him swilling their testosterone and vodka smoothies. “Yeah? What are you gunna do about it, Catweazle?” Six of the nation’s finest, being all they can be with a stick figure in his mid forties. Roman puts his palm up. “Sorry, lads. I’m evidently in the wrong pub. I’ll just finish up me pint and go.” He leaves them to their night out without answering them, without saying what he’s gunna do about it. Never cross someone with neither want nor fear of anything. Like he tells Alma while he’s lounging calmly in the middle of a blazing bonfire on that camping holiday in Wales, “It’s all about will, Alma, ain’t that right?” She pulls upon her reefer and considers while he starts to smoulder. “Yeah. Well, will and flammability.” They have to drag him from the flames and beat him out, but Roman feels he’s made his point. He’s put his money where his mouth is.
As does England after 1272 when Henry’s dead. The number of mints are reduced to six — rebellious Northampton not included — with the main one at the Tower of London from 1279 onwards, housed there for the next five hundred years, the only game in town by 1500, a monopoly. Northampton, far from being King Alfred’s de facto capital, is on its way to being somewhere that’s unmentionable. Roman doesn’t think this is because the place is unimportant, more that it’s important in a way that’s toxic to authority’s best interests, churning out its Doddridges, its Herewards, its Charlie Bradlaughs, its Civil War agitators, Martin Marprelates, Gunpowder Plotters, Bacaleri di Norhan or its Diana Spencers. At best huge embarrassments and at worst riots or heads on poles. Perhaps Northampton has become the anti-matter capital, an insurrectionist parallel universe, not to be spoken of. While this is clearly just how everything was always going to work out, Roman blames Henry the Third, a spiteful little fucker at the best of times. And his son Edward’s even worse. In 1277 some three hundred of the Jewish population centred around Gold Street are all executed — stoned to death as Rome hears it: accused of clipping bits from the old hammered coins to melt down and make new ones. Actually, the royals owe the Jews a wad of cash. Survivors are first driven out of town and then all Jews are banished from the land, brutally welching on the debt, putting the plan into Plantagenet.
All about will and flammability, so Alma says, and Roman thinks she’s right. Having the fire of will and spirit is a must, but useless if your fuel’s damp or goes up like tinder. What’s important is the way you burn. He can remember Alma telling him about how she has Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond from the KLF turn up one day at her house on East Park Parade to show the film of them torching a million quid up on the Isle of Jura, where George Orwell completes 1984. She says she likes a movie where you can see every penny of the budget up there on the screen but Roman’s not sure how he feels at first about all that potentially life-saving lucre going up the chimney. Still, as Alma points out, if the million had gone up their noses nobody would raise an eyebrow. In the end, Rome comes to the conclusion that it’s glorious, more than just a gesture. It’s the whole idea of money being burned, not just the actual loot. It’s saying that the golden dragon that enslaves us, that allows a tiny fraction of the global population to own nearly all the wealth, that ensures almost universal human poverty by its very existence, doesn’t actually exist at all, is made of worthless paper, can be taken care of with a half-box of Swan Vestas. Drummond is Northampton reared, a hulking Scot from Corby who goes to the art school here and works at the St. Crispin’s nuthouse for a while. Rome fancies you can see the town’s brand on the renegade rock-god: incendiary, justified and ancient.
This is money from a local point of view, a shell-game with evolving rules, a long con given centuries to hone its act; achieve a peak of predatory sophistication. Looking at the hundred or so years after the Norman occupation, with the number of mints dwindling as the manufacture of the coin is centralised and brought under control, Roman can see the obstacle that money-hungry kings are left with. Cash is still too real, too physical. Getting the planet to accept that discs of precious metal represent a crop or herd is an immense accomplishment, but coins with their smooth hammered edges are still vulnerable to clipping, and material gold and silver pieces are less easy to manipulate and conjure with than something that is hardly there at all. It’s in the twelfth or thirteenth century that the Knights Templar, hanging out at the round church in Sheep Street and collecting dues from local businesses as an ecclesiastical protection racket, come up with the idea of the internationally-valid promissory note or money order. They invent the cheque, have the idea of money as a piece of paper long before 1476 when William Caxton’s earliest English printing press makes banknotes possible, just in time for the Tower of London’s mint to assume its monopoly in 1500. Given all the harm caused by the Templar’s fiscal origami, Rome feels it’s an insult that they get wiped out because Pope Clement claims they’re gay, two men on one horse, all that Catholic bollocks.
Roman’s own epiphany comes with the heart attack that marks his fiftieth birthday. It’s around the sleeping-in-a-campfire period of Rome’s existence, when the mania that drives him is at its most phosphorescent. His behaviour at this point is already more than halfway to dismantling his family so he’s alone there in the house all night, on his own, when the left-arm lightning hits. He sprawls there, on his back in the dark living room, and can’t move. There’s no one to call for help and Roman knows that this is it. He’s going to die, and in a few days he’ll be back under the dirt like that time down Paul Baker’s yard except with no Ted Tripp to haul him out. Under the dirt forever, and with so much unresolved. During his long hours in the twilight between quick and dead, Roman reviews his life and is astonished to discover that his foremost fear is dropping off the twig before he gets the nerve up to tell anyone, himself included, that he’s homosexual. All those years he’s taken pride in never backing down to anyone or anything, not to police or management or to those drunken square-bashers or even to the element of fire, to find that he’s been bottling the biggest, pinkest challenge of them all. Roman resolves that if by some chance he survives this he’ll go out for some queer fun and then tell everyone about it. As it turns out that’s what happens, but he’s not expecting love. He’s not expecting Dean, the two of them together on the one horse from then on.