Time Surfing: Experience History.
Historical Backdrop
In the summer of 1348, ships from English-held Gascony carried a new sickness into the little Dorset port of modern Weymouth. It spread up the roads through Salisbury, Winchester, and Bristol, and by the feast of All Saints — 1 November 1348 — it had reached London, a walled city of 70,000 souls packed into a square mile of timber houses, open drains, fish markets, and dung heaps. Nobody called it the Black Death yet; they called it “the pestilence” or “the great mortality,” and they believed it came from corrupted air, bad planetary conjunctions, or the wrath of God.
Our subject is Sir John Everard, age 43, a working parish chaplain at St Magnus the Martyr, the church standing at the northern foot of London Bridge, wedged between Thames Street and the wharves of Billingsgate. He is not a bishop or a scholar — he is a poor mass-priest who baptizes babies, buries the dead, keeps the parish bede-roll of names to be prayed for, and lives on fees and a small stipend. On All Saints’ Day, the greatest feast of the dead in the medieval year, he says Mass for a full church.
Date/time and location: Before dawn, roughly 4:30 a.m. — a rented upper chamber on Thames Street, beside the churchyard of St Magnus the Martyr, London
You wake in the dark because the cold has crept through the blanket and the river fog has come in under the shutter. Your breath shows. You sleep in your shirt, and you pull the russet cassock over it, tie the hemp cord at your waist, and feel with your foot for the shoes you left facing the door. Below the window, the Thames slaps at the wharf piles and a dog works at something in the gutter. You strike a light, blow the rushlight into a small orange bead, and say the first psalms of the day from memory, because your eyes are too poor for the book in this light. Two men died in Southwark this week with lumps in their groins. You have heard the word from the Bordeaux ships, and you have prayed it is only the sailors’ talk.
Date/time and location: About 5:30 a.m. — inside the church of St Magnus the Martyr, at the foot of London Bridge
You unlock the north door yourself because Hugh, your clerk, is already inside, breathing hard, hauling the great candle-beam bracket into place for the feast. The church smells of cold stone, tallow, mildew, and last night’s incense. You set out the vestments for All Saints, white and gold, and shake mouse droppings off the folded amice. Hugh tells you the ground on the south side of the churchyard is soft again and that he will not dig there. You count the wax candles twice, because wax costs money and someone in this parish has been stealing it. Above your head, the bell rope hangs still, and outside the wall you can hear the first carts rolling over the bridge planking.
Date/time and location: Sunrise, about 7:00 a.m. — the churchyard gate and porch of St Magnus the Martyr, Thames Street
The fog does not lift, it only turns from black to gray. Your parishioners come through the gate in twos and threes, no work today, everyone in their best, which mostly means their cleaner hood. A fishwife asks if it is true that a whole town in Dorset lies empty. A shipwright’s widow wants to know whether the pestilence takes the good along with the wicked. You tell them what the bishop’s letter told you: pray, confess, walk in procession, and do not despair. Behind them the bridge rises into the mist, houses built out over the water, and the smell off the Billingsgate wharves is fish, tar, and the rot of the mudbank at low tide.
Date/time and location: About 8:30 a.m. (the hour of Terce) — High Mass of All Saints, nave of St Magnus the Martyr
The church holds more bodies than it has air. There are no benches, so they stand — apprentices at the back, fishmongers’ wives near the front, children on the font step. You sing the Mass of All Saints at the altar with your back to them, Latin they mostly cannot follow, and the smell behind you is wet wool, unwashed skin, and onions, cut by the frankincense Hugh is swinging in the censer. At the elevation the whole church drops to its knees on the rushes with a sound like a wave breaking, and every head strains to see the host. You add the prayer the bishop ordered against pestilence and mortality of the people. Your voice catches on the word mortalitas, and you hope nobody notices.
Date/time and location: About 9:45 a.m. — procession out of the church, along Thames Street toward New Fish Street
You lead them out with the cross up front and the relics of your church in a small copper box on a cushion. The bishops have ordered processions against the pestilence, and some of the older parishioners have taken off their shoes to walk barefoot in the mud as penance, heads uncovered in the cold. The chant thins out fast because half the crowd does not know the words, so it becomes a drone, then a mumble, then just the wet slap of feet. Shopkeepers who should be at rest today stand in their doorways watching. A carter swears at you for blocking the street, then crosses himself. You keep your eyes on the puddles and the dung and you keep singing.
Date/time and location: About 10:15 a.m. — Botolph Lane, above the Billingsgate wharves
A boy runs into the tail of the procession shouting for a priest, and you know the voice before you see the face. It is Kit’s mother’s neighbor’s lad, and he says Simon Wat the porter went down on the wharf steps at first light and cannot stand. You break away with Hugh and follow him down the lane toward the water. Billingsgate is quiet for the feast but not empty: baskets stacked wet, a hoop of rope, herring scales trodden into a silver crust on the stones, two Gascon shipmen sitting on a bollard passing a leather bottle. Somebody has swept a pile of straw and rags against the wall and left it. The river stinks of mud and fish oil, and you walk faster than a man of your age should.
Date/time and location: About 10:40 a.m. — a rented loft over a fishmonger’s shop, Botolph Lane
