The Invention of Fire. Bruce Holsinger

deaths in some form of misery: exile, murder, deposition. Chaucer included among the monk’s examples both the ancient and biblical – Adam, Samson, Hercules, Caesar – as well as contemporary greats only recently deceased. Pedro of Castile, Hugh of Pisa, even Bernabò Visconti, the lord of Milan who had passed away in December.

      We know we are writing tragedy, I once heard Chaucer say, when our verses weep for Fortune’s assault upon the proud. Chaucer, one of the most blindly vain men I knew, loved nothing more than attacking the vice of pride in his own verse, yet beneath the particoloured skein of this monk’s stories I discerned a subtle warning to certain magnates of the realm. King’s favourites all, and Richard kept them in subsidies and baubles, created them earls and dukes with no counsel from the wise. Men whose hold on power seemed always on the edge of collapse, yet who managed to survive the various turns in royal favour.

      Nor was I alone in sensing a quick and lethal shift afoot in the realm, its traces winding stealthily through Chaucer’s pretty tales. Whispers of discontent, of angry lords and weakening wills, of a sinking softness at the top. The tense truce between King Richard and the Duke of Lancaster had held for several years, notwithstanding some notable gaps. Yet Lancaster was in Spain that fall and would remain there for many months, leaving behind a void that other magnates seemed only too eager to fill with their grudges and cavillings.

      A monk’s warnings are not to be taken lightly, even if voiced by a poet toying with his oldest friend. Sixteen deaths indeed, I thought grimly. Watch yourselves, my lords, this monk’s tale warned the realm, or you too shall suffer a long fall, and meet your end in a sewer.

      ‘Another messenger, Master Gower.’ Will Cooper, appearing in mid-stanza. ‘This one from Heath, concerning a new prisoner.’

      Lewis Heath, a beadle of Lime Street Ward. I had several men there, as I did in most of the wards, paid to bring me news as it arose. Anyone above a common labourer brought into the city gaols and I would likely hear about it.

      ‘It is Peter Norris,’ Will continued, his voice somewhat strained. ‘He has been taken for theft, and jailed at the Counter.’ One of the city’s three busier gaols, holding pens for criminals of all varieties.

      ‘Which?’

      ‘In the Poultry,’ said Will. ‘He is to go before the Mayor’s Court Tuesday morning.’

      The news came as little surprise. For a habitual thief like Norris there was a short ladder from the stocks to the gallows, despite his former prominence in the city government.

      ‘Will?’

      ‘Yes, Master Gower?’

      ‘Did you learn what he stole?’

      He hesitated, knowing the implications. ‘Gold wares, Master Gower. A cup, I am told, and a girdle of purses. He had them in hand when taken.’

      I sighed. Steal a pair of breeches and Peter Norris might have returned to the stocks, perhaps lost a foot. But pinching items like this meant he would need some extraordinary luck not to hang.

      On the Tuesday I went across the river for Norris’s trial, with the likely futile aim of learning the name of his witness. The Guildhall always stank on court days. Though the building’s large main chamber normally felt airy and spacious, the ritual of gaol delivery would empty the city’s prisons, their inhabitants led over to be crammed into the northeast corner, screened off from the trestle tables at either end that served as the mayor’s and sheriffs’ benches for the twice-weekly sessions of the city courts. There they would stand until their matter was called, a thicket of dirt and fleas, the itchy scent filling the hall, with no breeze to mitigate the foul air. Some of these poor souls had lain in the Counter or Newgate for weeks, fed little more than crumbs, and showing it: gaunt faces, thinned limbs, bones protruding from shoulders and cheeks.

      On that day a dozen prisoners awaited their turn before the city court. The accused were mostly men, though a few women were mixed in, all of them visibly aware of the sad spectacle they had become. They were a striking contrast to those at the Guildhall on civil matters, which would be heard before the common council. All men, most with self-important airs about them, seated in a double row around the open square of tables formed by the mayor and aldermen, awaiting their moment. One of Brembre’s recent and more controversial innovations, this allowance for spectators at the city courts seemed to me little more than a show of power, of a piece with the man’s preference for elaborate and expensive ceremony at every opportunity. I found a seat along the low cabinets by the Guildhall’s northern wall, allowing me to watch the proceedings at the bench while keeping an eye on the prisoners.