London Under by Peter Ackroyd Read Free Book Online Page B

thereon.”
    At the place where the Fleet and Thames become one, eleven bodies from the early part of the eleventh century were uncovered in the early 1990s by a team of archaeologists working for the Museum of LondonArchaeology Service; the bodies had been dismemberedand decapitated before being buried. A toilet facility of three seats, dating from the twelfth century, was found deposited in the mud as a reminder of one of the river’s original functions. A black rat, the harbinger of plague, was also found.
    Gazing on the maps of the Fleet and the Fleet Valley, and studying the archaeology of the area, can turn the development of London into a dream or hallucination. Buildings rise and fall, road surfaces are relined before falling into disuse, yards and alleys disappear and reappear, doorways and staircases come and go, lanes run through previously unoccupied areas, alleys become streets, wells and new drains and cellars are dug in profusion before being covered over. A dish appears bearing the picture of a Tudor woman, and an anthropomorphic head of the thirteenth century emerges from the mud. Buried in the debris of the Fleet were toys, vessels, tobacco pipes, wooden panels, brooches, pots, bowls, jugs, buckles, pins and pieces of fabric. On one tile was imprinted the fingermark of a small child. It is liquid history.
    The Fleet river was always synonymous with crime and disease, not least because of theFleet Prison that stood beside its eastern bank. This place of dread reputation is mentioned for the first time in documents of the twelfth century, and was no doubt built a few decades earlier. It was erected upon one of the two islands of the Fleet, with a bridge connecting it to the mainland of thecity ditch; the “Gaol of London,” as it was called, was surrounded by a moat 10 feet in width. It consisted of a stone tower with an unknown number of floors; it may have therefore resembled theWhite Tower of the Tower of London. Many cups and mugs have been found in the precincts of the prison; one of them was inscribed “J. Hirst,Fleet Cellar.” The prison stood for almost 800 years before being demolished in 1845.
    Other criminal fraternities congregated along the course of the Fleet. A house, looking over the river close toSmithfield, became in the eighteenth century a haven for thieves and footpads of every description. A trap-door in the building led directly down to the water, and the victims of crime were sometimes unceremoniously bundled out. One sailor had been decoyed before being robbed and stripped; he was “taken up at Blackfriars bridge a corpse.” When “the Old House in West Street,” as it was known, was demolished its cellars were full of human bones.Turnmill Street was notable for its brothels, andSaffron Hill for its robbers. In the nineteenth century William Pinks, in his
History ofClerkenwell
(1881), remarked that “vice of every kind was rampant in this locality, no measures being effectual for its suppression; the appointed officers of the law were both defied and terrified.”
    The association with disease was just as strong as that with criminality. In the twelfth century the monks of Whitefriars complained that the smell of the riverpenetrated the odours of their incense, and that several of their brethren had already died from its “putrid exhalations.” The inmates oftheFleet Prison were also killed by the waters encircling them. In 1560 a city doctor wrote that in the “stinking lanes” in the vicinity of the Fleet, at the time of epidemic fever or plague, “there died most of London, and were soonest inflicted and longest continued.” An outbreak of cholera inClerkenwell Prison, in 1832, was also attributed to the presence of the effluent waters. It was one of the most defiled areas of the city.

    A stairway to the buried Fleet (illustration credit Ill.12)
    Schemes have been proposed to allow the Fleet to flow again through the streets of London. A plan has been made to build