The Outcast Dead, by Paul Slade
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The Outcast Dead, by Paul Slade. © Paul Slade 2013, all rights reserved. This book first appeared on http://www.PlanetSlade.com. The Outcast Dead by Paul Slade Contents Introduction 2 Chapter 1: The Romans 4 Chapter 2: Arriving at the vigil 7 Chapter 3: Laying siege 10 Chapter 4: Samhain at the gates 12 Chapter 5: Birth of the Liberty 15 Chapter 6: Emily’s plaque 23 Chapter 7: The Black Death 27 Chapter 8: The Invisible Gardener 34 Chapter 9: Farewell to the stews 38 Chapter 10: The Southwark Mysteries 43 Chapter 11: Bardic Bankside 45 Chapter 12: Going underground 51 Chapter 13: Puritans and plagues 56 Chapter 14: Crossbones Girl 61 Chapter 15: The stink industries 64 Chapter 16: Say my name 66 Chapter 17: Resurrection men 69 Chapter 18: John Crow’s megaphone 75 Chapter 19: Seeking closure 78 Chapter 20: What happens next? 89 Appendices 92 Sources & footnotes 117 © Paul Slade, 2013, all rights reserved. This book first appeared on www.PlanetSlade.com. 1 The Outcast Dead, by Paul Slade. © Paul Slade 2013, all rights reserved. This book first appeared on http://www.PlanetSlade.com. Introduction “I have heard ancient men of good credit report that these single women were forbidden the rites of the church so long as they continued their sinful life and were excluded from Christian burial. And therefore, there was a plot of ground, called the single woman’s churchyard, appointed for them far from the parish church.” - John Stow’s Survey of London, 1598. “Sleep well, you winged spirits of intimate joy.” - Note taped to Cross Bone’s fence, 2011. “Where to, mate?” the cabbie asked as I settled in my seat. “To London’s outlaw borough,” I thought. To the sanctuary sought by every runaway Roman slave; to the Liberty of the Clink where London’s own jurisdiction is left far behind. To the home of whores, killers and cut-purses throughout our capital’s dark history. To the city’s dumping-ground for its desperate and its despised; to the streets where Victorian industrialists placed their filthiest factories; to the site of London’s wildest acid house parties of the 1990s. Where to? “To Shakespeare’s London,” I thought. To the site where he and his friends built the original Globe theatre with stolen timbers; to the taverns and brothels where he found his models for John Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet. To the broiling nightlife of bear pits and dogfights, where the young Bard himself was dragged into court for threatening another man’s life. To the home of so much great London theatre today. Where to? “To Shard City,” I thought. To the latest tumour spawned by London’s financial district, where Renzo Piano’s jagged office block is now the tallest building between Guangzhou and Chicago. To the equally soulless developments coming in its wake. To a place of female power, now overshadowed by the biggest prick in Europe; to a giant shiv waved in the face of London’s poor. Where to? “To a patch of unquiet graves,” I thought. To the site where London’s paupers were buried in unconsecrated ground; to a cemetery built for the Bishop of Winchester’s licensed whores, but later annexed for outcast burials of every kind. To graves which were routinely emptied after only a few months to make room for the newly dead; to the shallow pits where victims of London’s regular plague epidemics were hastily consigned. To a burial ground where London’s most notorious gang of corpse- snatchers knew they’d always find easy meat. Where to? “To a modern shrine,” I thought. To the spot where a shamanic local writer has led over 100 monthly vigils to honour its humble dead; to a site which now attracts 50,000 visitors a year. To a pair of gates which Britain’s prostitutes have made a memorial to their own; to perhaps the only place in Britain where the murdered women of Ipswich, Bradford and Nottingham are given their due. To the display of a thousand fluttering white ribbons carrying the names of three centuries’ dead; to a patch of 2 The Outcast Dead, by Paul Slade. © Paul Slade 2013, all rights reserved. This book first appeared on http://www.PlanetSlade.com. wasteland made beautiful by an invisible gardener. To one of London’s most neglected, yet most potent landmarks. “Where to?” he asked again. “Redcross Way,” I replied. “It’s in Southwark.” 3 The Outcast Dead, by Paul Slade. © Paul Slade 2013, all rights reserved. This book first appeared on http://www.PlanetSlade.com. Chapter 1: The Romans. Southwark got its first brothels when the invading Roman army arrived in 43AD. The Iron Age settlement once sited there had long since been abandoned, leaving nothing but a patch of swampy ground on the south bank of the Thames. General Aulus Plautius marched his troops straight here from their landing point on the Kent coast, a distance of about 63 miles, meeting little or no resistance along the way. Forced to halt by the river, they camped opposite what is now Cheapside, where a network of tracks branched out towards every corner of the island. It was there, on the river’s north bank, that Britain’s defenders had chosen to make their stand. Plautius ordered his engineers to build a platoon bridge at the relatively narrow, shallow spot where Southwark Bridge now stands and this was quickly done. The Romans made short work of the British fighters waiting at Cheapside, replaced their original pontoon bridge with a permanent wooden structure and set about expanding their Southwark camp into something more like a small town. “At the bridgehead, they established their commissariat and stores, because Southwark – and not London – would have been their resistance base if the campaign had gone wrong,” Ephraim Burford writes in his 1976 book The Bishop’s Brothels. “At least a cohort must have been stationed there and at that period a cohort comprised between 600 and 1,000 men, to which must be added the supporting establishment and the camp followers. There would have been at least 2,000 people in that settlement at any one time.” Those camp followers included a good number of Roman prostitutes, who set up shop in the new timber and thatch buildings provided just off the military highway. Any army camp of that size would have produced ample demand for the girls’ services and this grew further once the Romans had established landing docks nearby to disembark new soldiers and unload supplies. (1) Within seven years of arrival, the Romans had already pushed their British frontier all the way to a diagonal line between the Humber and Severn estuaries – now marked by the old Fosse Way. It was also around this time that Roman merchants first built a town on the Thames’ north bank, surrounding it with defensive earthworks and christening the place Londinium. Tacitus, the Roman historian, tells us that the Londinium of 61AD was already “much frequented by merchants and trading vessels”. By 75AD, Southwark had grown into a large suburb, snaking out a string of taverns along the access roads to its south. Throughout the Roman occupation, these were the busiest roads in the country, lined all the way to the coast with grog shops and inns, each one with a resident whore on 24-hour duty. As its population grew, Southwark shipped in slave girls from all over the Empire to keep its brothels staffed. Evidence of busy landing docks and slave markets from this period has been found all along the Thames’ north bank opposite Southwark at sites such as Queenhithe, the Tower and Billingsgate.(2) A steady supply of new girls was essential to replace the many prostitutes who Southwark simply worked to death. “Once sold, these slaves had no rights whatsoever,” Burford says. “Each one would spend the rest of her life on her back, day and night, submitting to every sexual vagary forced upon her by exigent men, until she died. If she were not lucky enough to be bought by some admirer for his personal pleasures, she would die of exhaustion or disease by the age of 30.” 4 The Outcast Dead, by Paul Slade. © Paul Slade 2013, all rights reserved. This book first appeared on http://www.PlanetSlade.com. Disease was a problem for the Roman army too, if only because it didn’t want its men too clap-ridden to fight. In an age where condoms and penicillin were still centuries away, however, there was nothing much their commanders could do to combat venereal disease but order every soldier to give his genitals a good scrub every now and again. The only other precaution available was to ensure that any girl who was obviously diseased be banned from further whoring and that responsibility fell to a band of civic officials called the aediles. Every Roman city had a team of these men, who were charged with keeping a register of all the town’s licensed prostitutes. They financed this operation by collecting a licence fee and taxes from every girl registered and from every licensed brothel-keeper too. Once she’d got a licence, the girl could choose a name to work under, tell the aedile what type of clients she planned to serve and then hang up a shingle outside displaying her prices. The licence gave her a measure of protection under Roman law, but in return she had to succumb to the aedile’s regular health inspections and agree never to dress in a way which concealed her profession.