The heirs of Ralph became lords of the manor of Clerkenwell, and they in turn granted land and property for the maintenance of two religious foundations. The convent of St. Mary in Clerkenwell was established, roughly where the present church of St. James now stands, and the priory of the Knights Templar-known as St. John of Jerusalem-a little to the south-east on the other side of the green. So from the medieval period Clerkenwell became known, and identified, through its sacred or spiritual affiliations. Since the priory was first in the ownership of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, it was a mustering point for the Crusaders; gradually it grew in size and extent over the adjacent area. The convent of St. Mary was similarly extensive but, as always, the life of the city kept on breaking through.
In 1301 the prioress of Clerkenwell petitioned Edward I “to provide and order a remedy because the people of London lay waste and destroy her corn and grass by their miracle plays and wrestling matches so that she has no profit of them nor can have any unless the king have pity for they are a savage folk and we cannot stand against them and cannot get justice by any law.” This is one of the first reports that the Londoners were indeed “savage,” and it is intriguing to note that the miracle plays were “their” own; it throws a wholly new light upon the presumed sacredness of early drama. Two generations later an even more “savage” and violent assault was mounted against the priory of St. John when, in 1381, the stone buildings of the Order were put to the torch by Wat Tyler’s followers. The priory was badly damaged but not entirely destroyed, while the prior himself was beheaded on the spot because of his role as Richard II’s principal tax-collector. Tyler’s followers camped upon Clerkenwell Green, watching the hall and dormitory of the Knights go up in flame together with the counting-house, the distillery, the laundry, the slaughterhouse and very many other apartments or stables. It seemed as if the whole of Clerkenwell were on fire.
One of the most notorious lanes in the neighbourhood was Turnmill Street (so named because of its proximity to the many mills which harnessed the current of the Fleet), also known as Turnbull Street (because of the lines of cattle which crossed it in order to reach Smithfield). By the late thirteenth century the salubriousness of the area had been under threat from “filth and ordure and rubbage” thrown into the Fleet and, a century later, Henry IV ordered that it be “cleansed anew.” He also obliged the authorities “to repayre a stone brydge over the Flete neare unto Trymyllstreate,” the remote ancestor of the bridge over the Underground line which was once more repaired in the late 1990s.
Yet public works could not affect the public reputation of Clerkenwell; since it was “beyond the bars” it became the harbour for the outcast and those who wished to go beyond the law. So, from the beginning, it has been the home of groups who wish to be separate and separated. In Turnmill Street one William the Parchmenter in 1414 harboured the Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle, and was subsequently hanged, drawn and quartered for his hospitality. Clerkenwell also became the home of Jesuits and other recusants, and the district “was notorious as a centre for papists”; three suspected papists were hanged, drawn and quartered on Clerkenwell Green in the late sixteenth century. The Catholics moved out under the threat of persecution, although they returned in another guise 235 years later when Clerkenwell became an Italian quarter; in the interim other proscribed religious groups such as the libertarian Quakers, the Brownists, the Familists and the Schismatics congregated in the area of the green. Here is further evidence, then, of continuity in persecutions and outlawry. In more recent years the Freemasons have entered the area, with their headquarters in the Sessions House upon the green.
But if Turnmill Street began life as a haven for heretical Lollards and other radical proselytisers, it soon acquired a more dissolute reputation. It was marked down for condemnation in an ordinance of 1422 for “the abolition of Stewes within the City” but, since it was literally “without” the walls, few public measures touched it. In 1519 Cardinal Wolsey raided houses in Turnmill Street and the aptly named Cock Alley. “Now Farewel to Turnbull Street,” writes the anonymous author of The Merrie Mans Resolution in 1600, “For that no comfort yields.” E.J. Burford in London: the Synfulle Citie has reconstructed the topography of the street itself, with no less than nineteen “rents”-alleys, yards or courts-issuing off it. Their conditions were generally described as “noysome” which, in the context of sixteenth-century London, suggests a degree of nastiness which is perhaps not now imaginable. One of them was only twenty feet long and two feet six inches wide, so that “there was not room to get a coffin out without turning it on edge.” Turnmill Street appears very often in city records as the haunt of crime as well as prostitution. In 1585 “Bakers hause, Turnmyll Street” was known as a harbouring house “for masterless men, and for such as lyve by thiefte and other such lyke sheefts,” while, seven years later, a pamphlet entitled Kinde Hartes Dreame cited Turnmill Street as a place in which the owners charged “forty shillings yearly for a little Room with a smoky chimney … where several of these venereal virgins are resident.” The association of Clerkenwell, and Turnmill Street in particular, with prostitution did not end in the sixteenth century. In 1613 Joan Cole and three more “Turnbull Street Whoares” were sentenced to be carted and whipped through the streets; one of them, Helen Browne, had been arrested while concealed “in a lewd house in Turnbull Street in a dark cellar.”
If you come out of Farringdon Road Underground Station and walk a few feet to the left, you will find yourself in the very same Turnmill Street. Its left-hand side makes up the dead wall of the railway tracks, laid where the Fleet River once flowed, while on the other side are office premises and warehouses of a generally unprepossessing nature. There are one or two alleys which act as a reminder of its interesting past; Turks Head Yard, formerly known as Bull Alley, Broad Yard on the site of Frying Pan Yard, and Benjamin Street, first laid down in 1740, are still to be seen. Yet echoes of a more distant past also survive. At the very top of Turnmill Street was, until recent years, a twenty-four-hour night-club of equivocal reputation known as Turnmills. Mad Frank, the memoirs of Frankie Fraser, a member of a notorious London gang, begins: “The Independent had it wrong when their reporter said I’d been shot dead outside Turnmills Night Club in 1991. I was only in hospital for two days that time.” Streets such as this are reminiscent of Henry James’s description of Craven Street, which runs down from the Strand, as “packed to blackness with accumulations of suffered experience.” And, if there is a continuity of life, or experience, is it connected with the actual terrain and topography of the area? Is it too much to suggest that there are certain kinds of activity, or patterns of inheritance, arising from the streets and alleys themselves?
Clerkenwell Green is notable in other respects. The invasion of Clerkenwell by Wat Tyler and his followers is an example of its continuing radicalism, while the popular obloquy directed against the wealthy nuns of the priory beside the green speaks for the individual and the dispossessed. But the ramifications of these actions are rich and complex indeed. That great populist and demagogue John Wilkes, commemorated in the phrase “Wilkes and Liberty,” was born just off the green in St. James’s Close in 1727. One of the first meeting-places of the egalitarian London Corresponding Society was established at the Bull’s Head in Jerusalem Passage just east of the green, and in 1794 “Clerkenwell crowds attacked recruiting offices at Battle Bridge and at Mutton Lane at the foot of the Green” with no doubt the same intensity as early fourteenth-century Londoners showed in attacking the Clerkenwell Priory. A group of radical plotters, the United Englishmen, were seized “at a low public house at Clerkenwell” in the spring of 1798 and then, a year later, a number of United Irishmen were arrested in the Nag’s Head, St. John’s Street, which leads away from the green towards Smithfield. Here undoubtedly is a catchment area of dissent and possible radical disruption.