Walter Besant

“ To the Benedictine monks the river presented the spectacle of a procession as noisy and as animated as that which in the old days had made a stepping-stone of the island from one ford to the other. In short, there was never any time, from the beginning of the Roman occupation to the present day, when the Isle of Bramble was a quiet, secluded, desolate spot. Always crowded, bustling, and noisy. Why should not a Benedictine monastery be planted in the midst of the people? ”

“ But I will show thee the richest monastery in England, where the Brethren toil not, nor spin, and have no cares, but that they must grow old, and so daily draw nearer to the Fires of Purgatory. I will show thee gardens beautiful as the heart of man can desire; and, for their lodgings, the house of the Abbot is finer than the Palace of the King, and the chambers of the Prior and the Sub-Prior are delicate and dainty and desirable. ”

“ Stable-boys and grooms are up already, carrying buckets of water; dogs are leaping and barking; when the sun lifts his head above the low Surrey hills and falls upon the wall and towers of the Palace, the narrow lanes are full of men slowly addressing themselves to the work of the day. Clear and bright against the sky stand the buildings; huddled together they are, certainly—it is not yet a time for architectural grouping, except in the design of an abbey, which is generally placed where there is room enough and to spare. Where there is the King there is an army ”

“ A coronation; a Royal wedding; a great funeral; the flight of a Queen—Elizabeth Woodville: or a Duchess—as the Duchess of Gloucester—to sanctuary; the death of a King—Henry IV.—in the Abbey; these things gave the Brethren something to think about, something to quicken the slow march of Time.
There were, and are, however, other residents of the Abbey besides the monks; there are all the dead Kings and Queens and Princes; all the dead nobles and the dead ignobles; the dead men of letters and the arts who lie buried in this Campo Santo, the most sacred spot in all the Empire. ”

“ Therefore no one would build good houses, and the vicinity of the Abbey remained covered with mean tenements and populated by the scum and refuse.
For these reasons Westminster has had residents of all conditions—from king and noble to criminal and debtor. But it has had no citizens, no corporate life, no united action, no purpose. The City of London is a living whole: one would call its history the life of a man—the progress of a soul; the multitudinous crowd of separate lives rolls together and forms but one as the corporation grows greater, stronger, more free, with every century. ”

“ There is already, from this side or that, the tinkling of a mandolin, the scraping of a crowd; yonder fantastic group, the first to enter when the Palace gates are thrown open, are mummers, jugglers, and minstrels, who come to make sport for the archers and for the Court if the King’s Highness or the Queen’s most excellent Grace so wills. These people can play a mystery if needs be; or they can dress like fearful wild beasts, or dance like wild men of the woods ”

“ There were taverns without the Palace precincts where the noise of singing never ceased. There was the clashing of weapons; there were the profane oaths of the soldiers; there was the blare of trumpets; there were the pipe and tabor of the minstrels and the jesters; the monks in their cloister, which should have been so quiet, could never escape the clamor of the barrack. The world, in fact, was always with these good monks—they could not escape it ”

“ CHAPEL OF THE PYX.
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why is everything that the natural man longs for sinful?—the singing, like the voice of a bird for silver sweetness—it sank into the soul, and blurred the page of the Psalter, and made him giddy—the singing to the tinkling of the mandolin—the singing of girls. All that life, that worldly life, the life of those who feasted and drank, sang, made love, and died on the battlefield, going headlong—there was no doubt whither—might be heard all day long in the cloister of the Abbey. ”

“ It leads into Dean’s Yard, the quietest of squares, and, under ancient gates, into ancient cloisters and covered ways, and the relics and fragments of the Benedictine Abbey. Behind Great College Street stand Barton Street and Cowley Street. And for quiet and solitude these should belong to a city of the dead; or better still, they should be what they pretend to be. For the houses among themselves pretend to be the Cathedral Close; they whisper to the stray traveler: “Seek no farther. This, and none other, is the Close of the Cathedral or Collegiate Church of St. Peter. ”

“ Such a brother will become Abbot in due course. One observes here and there the face of a scholar: such a brother is moody and irritable; he cannot, even after forty years, reconcile himself to the wearisome iteration of services. Here and there one observes an ascetic, thin, pale, fiery-eyed; here and there the face of a saint—the kind of face which you may see on the marble tomb of Westminster’s greatest and noblest Dean. The rest are like our friend Hugh de Steyninge: they are dull and heavy-eyed; their faces express the narrowness of their lives; they are not alert, like other men ”

“ King’s House of Westminster, there now remain nothing more than a single hall much changed, a crypt much restored, a cloister, and a tower. But this is autumnal opulence compared with the Palace of Whitehall. Of that broad, rambling place, as taken over and enlarged by Henry VIII., there now remains nothing at all—not a single chamber, not a tower, not a gateway, not a fragment; everything is gone: even the disposition of its courts and lanes, generally the last thing to be lost, can no longer be traced. ”

“ Now Parliament Street in its turn is effaced, swallowed up in an extended Whitehall. King Street has been completely swept away, as one sweeps a row of crumbs from a cloth, but the part it played in the ancient history of Westminster is not yet forgotten. Undoubtedly the change could be justified: the thoroughfare is an important one, the view as now seen from the direction of Charing Cross one of the finest in the world; yet to gain it we have had to give, and one wonders sometimes whether the gain counterbalances the loss. ”

“ Also I forgot the great company of copyists, illuminators, limners, and those who make and sell vellum and fine parchment for the copyists. And I found, moreover, to my surprise, that there were many, great lords to wit, who cared nothing for cheapness, and who scoffed at my woodcuts compared with the illuminations in red and blue and gold which adorned their written books. He who would embark upon a new trade must reckon with those who make their livelihood in the old trade. Wherefore my Art of Printing had many enemies at the outset, and few friends. ”

“ In every generation there stands out one great citizen, strong and clear-eyed, whom the people follow: he is a picturesque figure, lifted high above the roaring, turbulent, surging crowd, whom he alone can govern. In Westminster there is no such citizen, and there is no such crowd. Only once in its history, until the eighteenth century, do we light upon the Westminster folk. Perhaps there have been, here and there, among them some mute inglorious Whittington—some unknown Gresham. ”

“ She is as lusty as she is tall. Let her tell how she knocked over Sir James of Castile, and cudgelled the robber, and fought the Vicar from the Abbey, so that he lay in the Infirmary for three weeks, and how she dragged the Catchpole through the pond, and how she bobbed Huffling Dick on the noll. And she is as good as she is tall and lusty. ”

“ Thus, many antiquarians, being afflicted with this disease, have found themselves unable to see anything but a collection of miserable hovels in that London of the fourteenth century which was a city of nobles’ palaces, merchants’ stately houses, splendid churches, monastic buildings, beautiful and lofty, side by side with warehouses, wharves, ships riding at anchor, crowded streets, and rich shops. No antiquary, however, is wrong in showing that Westminster was, at this time, nothing more than a City—as yet not called a City—gathered round the Church and the Court. ”

“ It is given to few among mortals to find aught that makes for mirth after the days of boyhood. Mostly their days are full of misery: men of violence rob them; kings and barons drive them forth to war; they are flogged and set in pillory and are clapped in prison. How should they laugh, when all they desire is rest, when they rejoice exceedingly and are glad if they think the grave is near?
This man, as he came forth from the Sanctuary, espied the visitor, and greeted him.
“Sir,” he said, “be welcome. I am John Skelton.” ”

“ Within, every spare foot of wall-space is utilized, and, besides being a perfect storehouse of memorials of departed Guardsmen, the chapel is full of rich but unobtrusive decoration. The sweep of the high pillars and arches of light stone relieves the richness of the mural ornamentation. The side-walls of the nave are covered by an arcade enclosing panels of marble mosaic. The heads of the arches are filled in by terra-cotta groups in high relief, representing Biblical subjects. Between and below the panels are tablets to the memory of those who have served in the Guards. ”

“ No trace is left of Edward's Norman monastery, save the foundations of some of the pillars and a round arch in the cloisters; but we know that his church was nearly on the same place as the present Abbey, and that the old Norman nave stood for many hundred years joined on to the choir and transepts of the new Early English building, and was pulled down bit by bit as the later church grew. For the beautiful Abbey which we see before us now, in the heart of a busy thoroughfare, is the work, not of one generation, but of five hundred years. ”

“ By way of Thorney passed the legions on their way north; craftsmen, traders, mimes, actors, musicians, dancers, jugglers, on their way to the towns of Glevum, Corinium, Eboracum, and the rest. Always, day after day, even night after night, there was the clamor of those who came and those who went: such a clamor as used to belong, for instance, to the courtyard of an old-fashioned inn, in and out of which there lumbered the loaded wagon, grinding heavily over the stones; the stage-coach, the post-chaise, the merchant’s rider on his nag—all with noise. ”

“ I wonder how many living men—even of the few who have seriously studied the Westminster of the past—could draw from memory a plan of Whitehall Palace, or describe in general terms its courts and buildings. Yet it was a very great house; certainly not venerable or picturesque, such as that which stood beside the Abbey: there were no sculptured fronts, no tall gables, no tourelles, no gray walls, no narrow windows, no carved cloisters ”

“ But Westminster is an inert, lifeless form. Round the stately Abbey, below the noble halls, the people lie like sheep—but sheep without a leader. They have no voice; if they suffer, they have no cry; they have no aims; they have no ambition; without crafts, trades, mysteries, enterprise, distinctions, posts of honor, times of danger, liberties to defend, privileges to maintain, there may be thousands{5} of men living in a collection of houses, but they are not citizens. ”

“ The building has one association never to be forgotten. On that black day when England shamed herself before the nations by spilling the blood of her King, the scaffold was erected before this building, though the exact site is unknown. It is believed that the window second from the north end is that in front of which it stood, and that the King stepped forth from a window in a small outbuilding on the north side; he came forth to die, the only innocent man in all that great crowd, who watched him suffer without raising a finger to save him. ”

“ In the evening the minstrel will join in the crowd to see the dancing of the girls{70}—the almond-eyed, dark-skinned girls of Syria—who follow the fortunes of the mummers and toss their round arms as they dance with strange gestures and wanton looks, at sight of which the senses swim and the brain reels and the soul yearns for things impossible.
The noise of the Palace grows; it is wide awake: the day has begun. ”

“ Here are drivers with herds of cattle and flocks of sheep; here are long lines of pack horses laden with things; here are men-at-arms, the following of some great lord: this is a procession which never ceases all the year round. And on the river barges are coming down the stream piled up, laden to the level of the water, with farm produce; and at flood tide barges come up the stream from the Port of London, sent by the merchants whom the King despoils,—yet they have their revenge,—boats laden with the things for which this magnificent Court is insatiable: cloth of gold, velvet, and silk ”

“ Let us remember that in our time we cannot make any show, or festival, or pageant—we have lost the art of pageantry—which can compare with the shows which our forefathers saw daily: the shows of magnificent trains, queens and princesses in such raiment as the greatest lady of these times would be afraid to put on, lords and knights and gentlemen of the livery, streets with their gabled houses hung with crimson and scarlet cloth; minstrels and music everywhere; mysteries and pageants and allegories, with fair maidens and giants, angels and devils ”

“ Outside the Palace, the road—there is now a road where there was once a marsh or shallow with a ford—is covered with an endless procession of those who make their way to the Palace and the Abbey with supplies. ”

“ New Palace Yard has been the scene of many eventful episodes in history. Take, for instance, the history of the fight between the men of London and the men of Westminster. From this story may be learned the difficulty of controlling a mob, and that a London mob—and a mob fired with a sense of wrong: that kind of wrong that always fires an Englishman’s blood, when the game is played against the rules. Sport of all kinds must be played by rule. Here were the men of Westminster fairly and honestly beaten. That they should seek to revenge themselves in so mean and treacherous a fashion—oh! ”

“ Had printing been invented two centuries before, it would have been neglected and speedily forgotten, because there was no demand for books. Had it been invented two centuries later, it would have had to contend against some other contrivance for shortening labor and cheapening books. If an ingenious projector discovers some great truth or invents some useful contrivance before or after his time, he is lost—he and his discovery. Thus, in the reign of James the First a man of great ingenuity contrived a submarine boat—he was before his age. ”

“ When one reads of the entertainments, the banquetings, the mumming, the music, the gold and silver plate, the cloth of gold, the blaze of color everywhere,—in the hangings, in the coats of arms, in the costumes, in the trappings of the horses,—we must remember that this magnificence was not in those days regarded as ostentation. So to speak of it betrays nineteenth-century prejudice. It is only in this present century that the rich man has been expected to live, to travel, to dress, to entertain, very much like the men who are not so rich. ”

“ It is the color in everything that makes the time so picturesque and bright. We see how small their chambers were, how narrow were the lanes, how close the houses stood; but we forget the bright colors of everything, the hangings and the arras, the painted shields, the robes and dresses, the windows and the walls, the chambers, halls, and refectories, the galleries and the cloisters. When Time brings in another age of color—it is surely due—we shall understand better the centuries of the Plantagenets.
When the fire destroyed these buildings how much we lost that connected us with the past! ”

“ Whether William Caxton’s father was himself a citizen and freeman, and if so, how the son came to be born in the Weald of Kent, is not known. As the boy was apprenticed to the very richest merchant in the city, and admitted a member of the wealthiest company, it is quite certain that his people were of some consideration in the city: to be received into the house of a great merchant as an apprentice, to be admitted into the Company of Mercers, proves beyond a doubt City connections of an honorable kind. Either Caxton’s father or his grandfather must have been a man of weight and distinction. ”

“ If we take from Westminster Abbey its Kings and Princes, its Abbots, its Coronations, its Funerals, what remains? Exactly that which remains when you have taken out of history the Kings, Barons, and great Lords. There remain the people—in this case the monks, with the servants of the Abbey. If we consider the daily life of one monk, we shall understand pretty well the daily life of all; and we shall presently realize that our old friend Barnaby Googe is not an authority to be altogether trusted; that the monks of Thorney were not all gross sensualists, wallowing in their animalism ”