The Straw Men(6)

The dead were also being buried. The break in the weather meant requiems could be sung, graves hacked out of the iron-hard ground and mourners allowed to provide their beloved departed with the appropriate religious farewell. Coffins bobbed on shoulders or bounced in hand carts as mourners, preceded by a priest pattering the psalms, led funeral processions to this chapel or that cemetery amidst the fiery glow of candles, lantern boxes and torches. Gusts of incense sweetened the air. The throng of citizens divided to allow the dead to pass before the crowds closed again, surging in every direction. Athelstan could only murmur his own prayers and keep his hands, freezing cold despite the woollen mittens, tightly on his writing satchel. The tribe of filchers, nips and foists were out, eager for plunder, hunting the swinging purse or loosely hung wallet. Cranston was recognized. Insults were hurled when the ‘parishioners of the devil’, as the coroner called them, fled up alleyways and runnels. At last they approached the bridge, though this was fast becoming a battleground involving a group of scavengers clearing the dirt. They had clashed with street hawkers, hucksters and chapmen who insisted on taking up their position with their baskets of eggs, butter, cheese, brushwood and heather ‘fresh from the countryside’. A group of fish wives from Billingsgate, their thick leather aprons encrusted with blood, had joined the fray equally determined to sell their eel tarts, fish pies, oysters and mussels. The air was riven with curses and obscenities hurled backwards and forwards. The tumult had blocked the approach to the bridge. Cranston barked out an order. Flaxwith brought out a hunting horn from beneath his cloak and blew strident blasts before bellowing at the top of his voice that everyone was to keep the King’s peace and step aside for the Lord High Coroner. The tumult subsided. As the brawlers dispersed into the shadow of the overhanging houses, Cranston swept on. Once he had passed, the tumult began again. Athelstan heaved a sigh of relief as he glimpsed the bridge’s high gates and towers as well as the cornices, sills and steeple of the Priory of St Mary Overy. They had to pause for a while as an execution party made its way down to the gallows – three wolfsheads who’d escaped from sanctuary at the priory and been wounded during the affray. Each had been summarily tried, condemned and loaded into wheelbarrows, commonly used to collect dung, and were now being taken from the Compter Clink to the riverside gallows. Athelstan blessed each of the groaning men then passed on to the bridge through the cavernous gate, its curving rim spiked with the boiled heads of traitors.

They made their way along the narrow lane between the houses and shops, which rose above them, leaning over to block out the sky. Beneath them echoed the thunderous roar of the river as it crashed against the starlings protecting the pillars of the bridge. Athelstan was sure the bridge was moving; as always, he tried to distract himself while keeping a wary eye on the ground beneath. A cluster of eel stalls stood at the near end of the thoroughfare and the discarded skins made the lane more slippery than ice. Athelstan glanced to his left and right. He was always fascinated by the apparent wealth displayed by the stalls and shops along the bridge. Some of the costliest items in London could be purchased here. Cloths and fabrics from Constance, Tournai and Rouen. Canvas from Westphalia and silver thread from Cologne were sold alongside amber and bone beads, ivory combs, silk girdles, brass rings, leather hats and hand mirrors of steel, crystal and jasper. Apprentice boys loudly proclaimed the virtues of buckram, silk, sarcanet, lawn and dyed wool. Jewellers and goldsmiths offered diamond necklaces, buckles and girdles, precious stone paternosters, mazer cups, silver gilt goblets and salt cellars, as well as spoons of every precious kind studded with gems or embroidered with gold or silver tracery. Another stall, manned by three clerks, ‘learned in the halls, schools and Inns of Court,’ offered to write or copy letters, deeds, leases, memoranda or bills of exchange. Between life-size statues of St Catherine the Virgin and St Nicholas of Colenso, the haberdashers of the hat, haberdashers of the small wares and ironmongers offered kerchiefs embroidered with religious devices, pyxes or kissing boxes, night-time laces, pepper mills, girdles and pouches, the latter adorned and embroidered with silver clasps. At Becket’s shrine in the centre of the bridge, merchants met bankers before going into the chapel either to seal documents at the altar or pass money over. All this was recorded by the chapel’s clerks in a leather-bound book of debts kept in an iron chest beneath the relic stone; this made repayment a matter of faith not just business. In the stocks next to the chapel, a vintner, found guilty of mixing cobbler’s wax with the dregs of his wine, was sitting with his legs firmly clasped. The disgraced merchant was being forced to drink a draught of his own adulterated beverage. A market beadle slowly emptied another jug over the unfortunate man’s head while a second beadle loudly proclaimed, ‘That Richard Pemrose, vintner, could do no further trade in wine or any other commodity for a year and a day’. Beside Pemrose sat an imprisoned cook’s apprentice from a nearby pie stall. He had sold pies and patties stuffed with the flesh of hen, goose, duck, lark and fish, but he’d also plucked at the costly gowns of passers-by and so, as the notice around his neck proclaimed, ‘damaged their clothes with hands dirtied and fouled’. Cranston paused to take a drink from his wine skin. He offered this to Athlestan, who refused even as he shook off the grasp of a chapman eager to sell him a trinket.