The Devil's Domain

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‘A time of bloody tribulation! Of horrid sights! The season of murder and subtle trickery!’ is how the chronicler of Westminster described the late summer of 1380. The old monk sat in his carrel overlooking the cloister garth, scratching the edge of his quill against his unshaven cheek. How could he truly describe these times? The King was only a boy; the Regent, his uncle John of Gaunt, that bloody man of war, ruled the kingdom. Some even whispered he wanted it for himself. The French were at sea, their war fleets attacking the English galleys and cogs along the sea lanes from Bordeaux to Calais. At home, the summer harvest had been good; prices, however, still climbed out of the reach of the poor who swarmed along the highways over Southwark Bridge and into the city.

The kingdom was waiting! All the signs and portents were there. A coffin had been seen in the skies above St Paul’s: draped in a ghostly pall, it had moved from east to west before disappearing into the low, threatening clouds to the north of the city. Many said that was where the danger would arise, from the fields and villages north of Cripplegate. The men of the soil, the earthworms, who laboured and spun so the great ones could clothe themselves in silk and ride great destriers, drink deep of the blood-red claret and count their silver and gold coins. In the streets of London, sepulchral voices were heard crying woe, prophesying disaster. Black-draped barges, rowed by ghostly hands, were glimpsed on the river shooting the turbulence under London Bridge. Were these, the gossips chattered, the ghosts of men who had defied the Regent and lost their heads which, salted and pickled, decorated pikes along the rail of that same London Bridge?

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