Clerkenwell persists in London’s history as a kind of shadowland, therefore, complete with its own recognisable if ambiguous identity. But it is also important to realise that the same effects may be found almost anywhere within the city. Of violence, for example, there is no end.
Violent London
An anonymous engraving of the Gordon Riots in London in 1780; here the mob attacks and fires Newgate Prison, one of the most hated symbols of the city’s oppressive authority.
CHAPTER 52
A Ring! A Ring!
London has always possessed a reputation for violence; it stretches back as far as the written records. In a signal instance of city savagery the coronation of Richard I in 1189, for example, was marked by the wholesale murder of the Jews in London; men, women and children were burned and cut to pieces in one of the first but not the last pogroms against resident foreigners. Under cover of the general savagery of the Peasants Revolt, which was also a London revolt, apprentices and others fell upon the Flemings and butchered many hundreds while “the cries of the slayers and slain went on long after sunset, making night hideous.”
But the violence was not directed at aliens alone. The record of bloody attacks upon tax-raisers like William de Aldgate (stabbed to death) and John Fuatara (finger bitten off by a woman) emphasises what one historian, G.A. Williams in Medieval London, has called the Londoner’s reputation for “reckless violence.” In the Latin records of London’s courts in the early thirteenth century, that violence is vividly depicted. “Roger struck Maud, Gilbert’s wife, with a hammer between the shoulders, and Moses struck her in the face with the hilt of his sword, breaking many of her teeth. She lingered until Wednesday before the feast of St. Mary Magdalen and then died … while he was conducting him to the sheriffs the thief killed him … They dragged him by the feet on to the stairs of the solar, beating him severely about the body and under the feet, and wounding him in the head.”
Violence was everywhere-“endemic” is the word used by one scholar. Robberies, assaults and manslaughters are recorded with predictable frequency; quarrels degenerated quickly into fatal affrays, while street fights often turned into mass riots. Random brutality was common, and at times of political crisis the crowd to the well-known cry of “Kill, kill!” would set upon perceived enemies with unmatched ferocity. Many of the trades-notoriously those of saddler, goldsmith and fishmonger-were prone to “periodical gusts of homicidal rage,” while the guilds fought one another in the most pugnacious way. The religious orders were not immune from violence. The prioress of Clerkenwell took barley from disputed land belonging to the prior of St. Bartholomew’s “with force and arms to wit with swords, bows and arrows.” The memoirs of every century are filled with blood lust.
There was also violence against animals. When a horse being baited by dogs seemed likely to be spared, a seventeenth-century London crowd “cryed out it was a cheat, and thereupon began to untyle the house, and threatened to pull it quite down, if the Horse were not brought again and baited to death. Whereupon the Horse was again brought to the place, and the dogs once more set upon him; but they not being able to overcome him he was run through with a sword and dyed.” Cock-fighting was the Shrove Tuesday sport of schoolboys, so that the young Londoner could acquire an early taste for blood and death. Bears and bulls were often baited together, and “at such times you can see the breed and mettle of the dogs, for although they receive serious injuries from the bears, are caught by the horns of the bull, and tossed into the air so frequently to fall down again upon the horns … one is obliged to pull them back by the tails and force open their jaws.” Evelyn, a more fastidious citizen than most, complained about the “barbarous cruelties” as well as the “rude and dirty” pastimes of the people. He remarked, on visiting the famous bear garden by the Bankside, that “One of the bulls tossed a dog full into a lady’s lap, as she sate in one of the boxes at a considerable height from the arena. Two poor dogs were killed: and so all ended with an ape on horseback.” It might be remarked that blood sports are common to every culture and to every city; nevertheless this form of London violence is described as something intrinsic and particular. As Dryden put it in the seventeenth century:
Bold Britons, at a brave Bear-garden fray,
Are rouz’d: and, chatt’ring Sticks, cry Play, Play, Play.
Mean time, your filthy Foreigner will stare, And utter to himself, Ha! gens barbare!
This was indeed how Europeans considered Londoners-as barbarous people-although, as Dryden’s couplets intimate, that ferocity was perhaps a matter of civic pride. “If two little boys quarrel in the street,” one seventeenth-century French traveller observed, “the passengers stop, make a ring round them in a moment, and set them against one another, that they may come to fisticuffs … During the fight the ring of bystanders encourages the combatants with great delight of heart … The fathers and mothers of the boys let them fight on as well as the rest.”
“A ring! A ring!” was one of the perennial cries of the London street. “The lower populace is of a brutal and insolent nature,” another traveller remarked, “and is very quarrelsome. Should two men of this class have a disagreement which they cannot end up amicably, they retire into some quiet place and strip from their waists upwards. Everyone who sees them preparing for a fight surrounds them, not in order to separate them, but on the contrary to enjoy the fight, for it is a great sport to the lookers-on … the spectators sometimes get so interested that they lay bets on the combatants and form a big circle around them.” This is “congenital to the character” of Londoners, according to yet another foreign reporter, which suggests how unfamiliar and alarming these street fights in fact were to non-Londoners.
Combats between men and women were also frequent-“I saw in Holbourn a woman engaged with a man … having struck her with the utmost force, he retreated back … the woman seized these intervals to fall upon his face and eyes with her hands … The Police take no cognizance of these combats of individuals.” By “the Police” is meant the watch in each ward, which took no notice of these fights because they were common and familiar. Yet it did not end there. “If a coachman has a dispute about his fare with a gentleman that has hired him, and the gentleman offers to fight him to decide the quarrel, the coachman consents with all his heart.” This pugnacity could, and often did, have fatal consequences. Two brothers fought, and one killed the other outside the Three Tuns Tavern-“His brother intending, it seems, to kill the coachman, who did not please him, this fellow stepped in and took away his sword, who thereupon took out his knife … and with that stabbed him.”
A “diversion” of the English, according to many reports, was female combat in places of resort and amusement such as Hockley-in-the-Hole. It was recorded that the “women fought almost naked with two handled swords which, at the points, were sharp as razors.” Both combatants were frequently cut with these weapons, and retired briefly to have their wounds “sown up” without the benefit of any anaesthetic other than their own animosity. The fight continued until one of the participants swooned, or was so badly wounded that she could fight no more. On one occasion, one combatant was twenty-one and the other sixty. It became a highly ritualised, if bloody, affair. The two female warriors would bow to the spectators and salute each other. One was decked in blue ribbons, the other in red; each carried a sword, about three and a half feet in length with a blade approximately three inches wide. With these fierce weapons, and only a wicker shield for defence, they attacked each other. In one fight a swordswoman “received a long and deep wound all across her neck and throat”; some coins were thrown to her from the crowd, but “she was too badly hurt to fight any more.”