Part 12
Part of his duty was the actual police work of “searching out of sundry that were receptors of felons.” In the course of this duty he tells Burghley on another occasion of the discovery of a den that Dickens might have used as a model in Oliver Twist, so little had the ways of criminals altered from Elizabeth to Victoria. “Amongst our travels this one matter tumbled out by the way, that one, Walters, a gentleman born and some time a merchant of good credit, who falling by time into decay, kept an alehouse at Smart’s Keye (Quay) near Billing’s Gate, and after some misdemeanour being put down he reared up a new trade of life and in the same house he procured all the cut-purses about this city to repair to his same house. There was a school-house set up to learn young boys to cut purses. There were hung up two devices, the one was a pocket, the other was a purse. The pocket had in it certain counters and was hung about with hawk’s bells, and over the top did hang a little sacring bell; and he that could take out a counter without any noise was allowed to be a publique foyster, and he that could take a piece of silver out of the purse without the noise of the bells, he was adjudged a judicial nipper.” Note that a foyster is a pick-pocket, and a nipper is termed a pick-purse or a cut-purse.
The path of an honest judge in the days of Elizabeth was beset with difficulties. Although bribes were not actually offered to the individual magistrate, yet he was written to by influential persons about the Court, and he had to choose between doing his duty and incurring the dislike of powerful men. Fleetwood complains “that when by order we have justly executed the law ... we are wont either to have a great man’s letter, a lady’s ring, or some other token from some other such inferior persons as will devise one untruth or another to accuse us of if we prefer not their unlawful requests.” Our honest Recorder is strong to maintain the principle that all men are equal in the sight of the law.
Here is a typical case of which he complains: “Mr. Nowell of the Court hath lately been in London. He caused his man to give a blow unto a carman. His man hath stricken the carman with the pommel of his sword and therewith hath broken his skull and killed him. Mr. Nowell and his man are likely to be indicted thereof, I am sure to be much troubled with his letters and his friends, and what by other means, as in the very like case heretofore, I have been even with the same man. Here are sundry young gentlemen that use the Court that most commonly term themselves gentlemen; when any of them have done anything amiss, and are complained of or arrested for debt, then they run unto me and no other excuse or answer can they make but say—‘I am a gentleman, and being a gentleman I am not thus to be used at a slaves and a colion’s (scullion’s) hands.’ I know not what other plea Mr. Nowell can plead. But this I say, the fact is foul.”
A “gentleman” in England in Elizabethan days seems to have thought himself as little amenable to law as an American millionaire, but Fleetwood had the English gist of the matter in him when he says “the fact is foul.”
But though the Recorder stood firm against the hangers on of the Court, London was not a happy soil for judicial integrity. He never attained to the promotion he deserved, and maybe it was because he could not dishonour his office to serve his friends at Court. Such mercy as the Recorder could honestly show to a prisoner, he was only too ready to exercise. “Truly, my Lord,” he writes, “it is nothing needful to write for the stay of any to be reprieved for there is not any in our commission of London and Middlesex but we are desirous to save or stay any poor wretch if by colour of any law or reason we may do it. My singular good Lord, my Lord William of Winchester was wont to say: ‘When the Court is furthest from London then is there the best justice done in all England.’ I once heard as great a personage in office and authority as ever he was and yet living say the same words. It is grown for a trade now in the Court to make means for reprieves; twenty pounds for a reprieve is nothing, although it be but for bare ten days. I see it will not be holpen unless one honoured gentleman who many times is abused by wrong information—and surely upon my soul not upon any evil meaning—do stay his pen. I have not one letter for the stay of a thief from your Lordship.”
But Elizabethan mercy was not a very vigorous virtue and did little to temper the wind to the criminal lamb. Here is a typical day’s work and its terrible results. “Upon Friday last we sat at the Justice Hall at Newgate from seven in the morning until seven at night when were condemned certain horse-stealers, cut-purses and such like to the number of ten, whereof nine were executed and the tenth stayed by a means from the Court. These were executed on Saturday in the morning. There was a shoemaker also condemned for wilful murder committed in the Black friars, who was executed upon the Monday in the morning.” The superior criminal dignity of murder over larceny appears to have given the murderer two days further life.
The Recorder’s main work however, was a constant warfare with rogues and masterless men. The Elizabethan vagabonds were to be “grievously whipped and burnt through the gristle of the right ear” unless they could find someone who under penalty of five pounds would keep them in service for a year. Rogues and vagabonds were all those able-bodied men having no land or master practising no trade or craft and unable to account for the way in which they earned their living, and further included actors, pedlars, poor scholars and labourers who would not work for what employers called “reasonable wages.” London swarmed with these vagabonds, and Fleetwood seems to have been the official who was made responsible if they committed any excesses.
One January afternoon in 1582, Her Majesty at even was taking of the air in her coach at Islington, in which suburb she had a Lodge. During her drive, writes Fleetwood, “Her Highness was environed with a number of rogues. One, Mr. Stone, a footman, came in all haste to my Lord Mayor, and after to me and told us of the same.” No mention is made of any molestation, but the complaint rouses the Recorder to extraordinary efforts. “I did, the same night,” he writes, “send warrants out to the said quarters and in the morning I went abroad myself and I took seventy-four rogues whereof some were blind, and yet great usurers and very rich.” All these were sent to the Bridewell, and the next day “we examined all the said rogues and gave them substantial payment, (a euphemism for grievous whipping), and the strongest we bestowed in the mylne (mill) and the lighters. The rest were dismissed with a promise of double pay if we met with them again.” In the Southwark district, forty rogues, men and women, were taken and “I did the same afternoon peruse Poole’s (St Paul’s) where I took about twenty cloaked rogues.” All these went to the Bridewell and to punishment. The constables of the Duchy (the Savoy), brought in “six tall fellows that were draymen unto brewers. The Master did write a very courteous letter unto us to pardon them. And although he wrote charitably unto us, yet they were all soundly paid and sent home to their masters”; which seems to have been in excess of the Recorder’s jurisdiction, as the draymen were clearly not “masterless.” Another day a hundred lewd people were taken and the Master of Bridewell received them and immediately gave them punishment. The bulk of these poor wretches were unemployed seeking work in the City, which they could not obtain in their own counties. And Fleetwood writes: “I did note that we had not of London, Westminster nor Southwark, nor yet Middlesex nor Surrey above twelve, and those we have taken order for. The residue for the most were of Wales, Salop, Chester, Somerset, Buckingham, Oxford and Essex and that few or none of these had been about London above three or four months. I did note also that we met not again with any in all our searches that had received punishment. The chief nursery of all these evil people is the Savoy, and the brick-kilns near Islington.” It is curious to remember that a hundred and fifty years afterwards Defoe writes of the beggar boys getting into the ash-holes and nealing arches of the glass houses in Ratcliff Highway, and that to-day one of the difficulties of Manchester magistrates is to keep vagabonds from sleeping in suburban brick-kilns. Truly the ways of the vagabond seem to be a force of nature which centuries of progress and reform have done very little to amend.
The history of the Bridewell which was filled with so many generations of evil-doers, is a very curious one. An ancient palace of the Kings of England, it was in the reign of Edward VI. standing empty. The suppression of the monasteries and other religious houses filled London with multitudes of necessitous and to some extent dissolute persons. It was Bishop Ridley who wrote to Sir William Cecil: “Good Mr. Cecil I must be a suitor unto you in our Master Christ’s cause,” and pointed out that “there is a wide, large empty house of the King’s Majesty called Bridewell, that would wonderfully serve” to house these poor wanderers. Thus in a spirit of pure charity, did the good Bishop open the doors of one of the most miserable prisons that ever disgraced humanity. Already we see in Fleetwood’s time how it had fallen away from the Bishop’s ideal Christian home to shelter the hungry, naked and cold. What it was then it remained for more than a hundred and fifty years, as we may see in Hogarth’s print in the “Harlot’s Progress,” with its pillory and its whipping post, and the heavy log to be fastened on the prisoner’s leg and the gaoler with his rod standing over the wretched woman beating out the hemp with her mallet.
The Recorder seems to have had absolute power in dealing with prisoners charged with offences, to use force to obtain confessions. Here is a very horrible story which Fleetwood reports to Lord Burghley as a matter of every day routine. A French merchant charged a carrier’s wife with stealing £40. After great search the money was found and restored. The carrier’s wife denied all knowledge of it. “Then,” says Fleetwood, “I examined her in my study privately, but by no means, she would not confess the same, but did bequeath herself to the devil both body and soul if she had the money or ever saw it.” After much cross-examination, the woman refused to answer anything further. “And then,” continues Fleetwood, “I took my Lord Mayor’s advice and bestowed her in Bridewell, where the Masters and I saw her punished, and being well whipped she said that the devil stood at her elbow in my study and willed her to deny it, but so soon as she was upon the cross to be punished he gave her over. And thus, my singular good Lord, I end this tragical part of this wretched woman.”
But Fleetwood did not spend all his days in the Criminal Courts. As a Serjeant-at-law, he is present when his “brother” Sir Edmund Anderson, was made Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and he took part in the ceremony by following the “ancient” in the ceremony of putting a case to the new Judge. And the way of it was thus: “my Lord Chancellor did awhile stand at the Chancery bar upon the side of the hall, and anon after that the Justices of the Common Place (Pleas) were set, his Lordship came to the Common Place and there sat down and all the Serjeants, my brethren, standing at the bar, my Lord Chancellor my brother Anderson called by name and declared unto him Her Majesty’s good liking and opinion of him, and of the place and dignity that Her Majesty had called him unto, and then my Lord Chancellor made a short discourse what the duty and office of a good Justice was, and in the end his Lordship called him up unto the midst of the Court and then Mr. Anderson kneeling, the commission was read, and that done, his Lordship took the patent into his hand, and then the clerk of the Crown, Powle, did read him his oath, and after he himself read the oath of his supremacy, and so kissed the book, and then my Lord Chancellor took him by the hand and placed him upon the bench. And then Father Benloos, because he was “ancient” did put a short case, and then myself put the next. To the first my new Lord Chief Justice did himself only argue, but to the next that I put, both he and the residue of the Bench did argue. And I assure your good Lordship he argued very learnedly and with great facility delivered his mind. And this one thing I noticed in him, that he despatched more orders and answered more difficult cases in this the fore-noon than were despatched in one whole week in his predecessor’s time.”
So too, when the Lord Mayor was sworn in in the Exchequer, the Recorder presented him in the name of the City, and they “did such services as appertained viz.: in bringing a number of horse-shoes and nails, chopping knives and little rods.” These customs were antiquarian even in Elizabeth’s days, but they are with us still.
And no doubt Fleetwood loved to take part in these things, for he was a good antiquary himself, and we must not think of him merely as a harsh persecutor of the “rogues and masterless,” for away from his work we hear record of his merry and pleasant conceit, and note that he is an eloquent and witty speaker at City banquets. And there is evidence in these letters that he did not love much of his work, as indeed what man can take pleasure in so unfortunate a task, but to him it was a duty, and one to be done like all duties—thoroughly. And that he did it to the best of his ability and with honesty seems clear, but that he longed to be removed from the intolerable toil of it, even as early as 1582, is shown by this pathetic appeal to Lord Burghley. “Truly, my singular good Lord, I have not leisure to eat my meat, I am so called upon. I am at the least the best part of one hundred nights in a year abroad in searches. I never rest. And when I serve Her Majesty, then I am for the most part worst spoken of and that many times. In the Court I have no man to defend me, and as for my Lord Mayor, my chief hand, I am driven every day to back him and his doings. My good Lord, for Christ’s sake! be such a mean for me as that with credit I may be removed by Her Majesty from this intolerable toil. Certainly I serve in a thankless soil. There is, as I learn, like to fall a room of the Queen’s Serjeant; if your Lordship please to help me to one of these rooms, I assure your honour that I will do Her Majesty as painful service as six of them shall do. Help me, my good Lord, in this my humble suit, and I will, God willing, set down for your Lordship such a book of the law as your Lordship will like of.”
The offer of a new law book did not tempt Lord Burghley, and the end did not come until nearly ten years afterwards, when in 1591 Fleetwood resigned with a pension of £100 a year, which the Common Council voted him. And in the next year he obtained the wished for post of Queen’s Serjeant, which he held for scarcely two years, as he died on February 28th, 1594.
And this is the last piece of writing I have found of his, written the day he gave up his Recordership. Even with his resignation upon his mind he notes down for Lord Burghley’s satisfaction the excellent punishment awarded to two lewd people for misconduct against the public health.
“This day I rode to the Yeld (Guild) Hall to sit on the commission for strangers and in the lower end of Cheapside towards Poole’s (St. Paul’s) there stood a man and a woman both aged persons with papers upon their heads. The man was keeper of the conduit there. These two lewd people in the night entered into the Conduit and washed themselves, _et ad hunc et ibidem turpiter exoneraverunt ventres eorum, etc._
This day Mr. Recorder surrendered his office. The lot is now to be cast between Mr. Serjeant Drew and one Mr. Fleming of Lincoln’s Inn. This present Saturday.
Your good Lordship’s most bounden
W. FLETEWOODE.”
This picture of the old Recorder riding out to the Guild Hall for his last sitting and reporting to my Lord the common sights of the City brings back to us a real picture of his days. So that we can almost feel that we are living on “this present Saturday” and regretting with all good citizens that “this day Mr. Recorder surrendered his office.”
THE FUNNIEST THING I EVER SAW.
“Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature.”
—_Sir Philip Sidney._
To ask one to write to such a title is a challenge to be taken up, but one does not expect to vanquish the challenger. The funniest thing I ever saw would not make you laugh because you never saw it and if I had the skill to make you see it probably you would not think it funny. Then again the older you grow the few funnier things you see. What a lot of laughter there was thirty or forty years ago. Whither has it fled? In childhood nearly every discomfort or disaster to others is food for laughter whilst your own little troubles are tragedies fit for tears.
It is a curious thing that the funny things you see always involve a certain amount of cruelty, pain or at least discomfort to others, and I suppose as one grows older the painful side of the matter oppresses you more than the funny side inspires you to laughter. There are some human attributes that are always laughable. Of these the chief is fatness. The troubles of a fat man or woman are always comic. Littleness, if it amounts to wee-ness, is comic in a somewhat less degree and thin-ness may move folk to laughter but scarcely unless it be added to some amusing eccentricity. Height and tall-ness are not funny. One never heard of a king employing a giant as a jester or a butt. The dwarf on the other hand has been cast for such parts from time immemorial.
I believe quite small babies see a lot of funny things. Certainly they laugh to themselves without end and seem to find their surroundings full of amusement. I have no doubt the funniest thing one ever saw is cinematographed on some ancient film at the back of one’s brain so far out of reach that the memory cannot get at it. Children undoubtedly see most of the fun. I remember many years ago Louis Calvert, the well-known actor, was staying with me in a little house in a remote corner of Wales. The house had a small verandah doorway with two narrow doors, one of which was usually bolted as it was a windy place and the outlet by the half door was, to say the least of it, meagre. Louis Calvert was in those days, I will not say fat or stout or corpulent—these ample men are so susceptible—but he was a fine figure of a man and he was then as he is now a great actor in both comedy or tragedy. It was a summer afternoon and I was lolling in a deck chair beneath our only tree, and the children, four of them, from five years old to twelve, were sitting on the lawn in front of the doorway basking in the sun. Suddenly Calvert appeared at the doorway and accidentally stuck in it as he was coming through. The children caught sight of him and on the moment were off in fits of laughter which good manners required them to stifle as he came among us. But if laughter challenges manners, the latter generally get the worst of it, and the mere memory of the incident sent one or another off into small explosions of laughter. Calvert who always wanted to be in at any fun sought explanations, which only made them laugh the more and reprove each other for doing it, and whilst their attention was so engaged I told Calvert what the joke was. A few minutes later he went back into the house making an elaborate sideway entrance, which started the young audience on the laugh again and all eyes were fastened on the door watching for his return.
And he did return and gave us one of the finest pantomimes I have ever seen. He came along loading a pipe and not looking at the doorway at all and stuck fairly fast in it before he was aware that he was up to it and opened his eyes in annoyance and amazement. Four shouts of laughter greeted him. Fingers of delighted mockery were pointed at him and he made a face as if he were on the brink of tears, which drew echoing tears of uncontrollable laughter from the youngsters. Then his pipe dropped on to the shingle path in front of the door and he dived to get it and failed and grabbed and kicked in the air until the children threw themselves on the ground and sobbed and begged him to leave off for he was hurting them. Then Calvert, to give them a moment’s respite, pulled himself together and still fast in the doorway rested his hand on the door-post and thought dismally while the audience sobbed and sniffed and slowly recovered breath enough to laugh again. By a mighty effort he now backed out of the doorway and approached it as Uncle Remus would say “behime” first. This was a signal for yells of delight, the more so as the manœuvre resulted in the most undignified and comic failure. All beautiful and simple people have a thoroughly broad and healthy laugh for the “behime” quarters of man in awkward positions. A man sitting down on the ice, a man sitting on another’s hat—these are situations that can never cease to be funny whilst there is any fun left in the world and simple minds to be moved to laughter. But this effort at an exit was only one of many. A carefully designed strategetic move edgeways, after the fashion of Bob Acres, which was so nearly successful that it grew really exciting to watch, ended in hilarious shouts and yells, when the climax of it was the victim waving his arms and head out of the door and kicking violently inside the house and calling for help. This business having nearly reduced the audience to exhaustion there was further pantomime of deep expressive thought followed by a solemn retirement within the doors and a laboured and careful pulling at the bolts of the other half of the door and a ceremonial entrance through the whole double space of it with a smile and sigh of supreme content at the glorious triumph over difficulties undergone and vanquished. I can see in my mind’s eye a middle-aged gentleman with tears rolling down his cheeks and four absolutely limp children lying on the grass still gasping with laughter—dying with laughter as the phrase is—and begging Calvert in the intervals of their spasms to “Do it again!”
Now this may not seem one of the funniest things in the world nor was it perhaps the funniest thing I ever saw, for unfortunately I was only the middle-aged gentleman and my days for seeing funny things were more or less over. But to the children it was certainly one of the funniest things they ever saw, only the question that haunts me is—will they, when they grow up, be able to describe the fun they saw so as to impart a tithe of it to those who never saw it? And although I know that, at some period of my life, I must have seen equally funny things that moved me to equally stormy and glorious laughter, yet the storm and the glory have died so completely away that the memory of them is gone and I cannot even remember from what point of the compass they sprang.