Mystery authors like to choose the locations of
their stories carefully. I know authors who choose certain cities and towns intentionally
so they can build in a readymade readership. Readers like recognizing the café
they frequent or the hair dresser or the main street the protagonist finds the
body.
Other authors will choose a place and change it
subtly to work with the landscape they need in their stories. Santa Teresa is a
stand-in for Santa Barbara in Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series, for
instance.
But I chose London. And not just any London,
but a fourteenth century one. Now although London is a real place, the
fourteenth century London is long gone. I know that we think of England as
eternal and unchanging, but a city like London, even with its few remaining Dickensian
streets, has changed a lot. Two great fires saw to that along with just the
regular amount of tearing down and building up.
I have a few copies of maps from about the
early fourteenth century and a stunning one from the sixteenth century. What
enthralls me about these two maps is how much London grew in two hundred years
and how much it also remained the same.
London began as a Roman
settlement—Londinium—but even before the Romans arrived, the prehistoric
natives had sporadically settled in the area. William the Conqueror, the last
successful invader to England, secured the Anglo-Saxon walls around the city
and built his keep within it. We know this keep today as the Tower of London.
The walls of Anglo-Saxon London stretch from Ludgate and Newgate to the west,
to Cripplegate and Bishopsgate in the north, Aldgate in the east, and Dowgate
in the south. Over the centuries, farmland began to be gobbled up for more and
more city dwellers, well outside the city’s original walls. And the Thames,
once its own sort of border, became merely one more thoroughfare, cutting the
city in two. The north side was where all the main attractions were and the
Bankside in Southwark, was traditionally the place where the brothels and low-life’s
lived. Since actors were also considered low-lifes, the southbank is also where
they put the theatres in Shakespeare’s day.
By the sixteenth century, we can see how much
the city had spread outward. The city of Westminster was only a few miles from
the heart of London. But London encroached so much into the land between, that
there is no telling where London leaves off and Westminster begins. And Westminster
is where the kings had their palace, the footprint of which is covered today by
the Parliament buildings where Big Ben’s Tower stands.
I am attracted to the long-lived history of
England. And I gave a clue to that in a paragraph above. I stated that William
the Conqueror was the last successful
invader of England…and that was almost a thousand years ago. I don’t think any
other country in the world can boast of that.
And it is that settled history that allows for
traditions to carry on to this day. England had a brief period during their
civil war in the seventeenth century where they abolished the monarchy (curse
you, Oliver Cromwell!) but the people, having had enough of the Lord
Protector’s puritanical attitudes, brought it back. There is a ceremony in the
Tower of London where they perform to this day the oldest continuous military
ceremony—something that they’ve been doing at the Tower for seven hundred
years—called the Ceremony of the Keys, where a warder of the Tower locks all
the castle’s gates in a procedure that takes ten minutes. And he--or someone like
him--has done this every single night for the last seven hundred years. The
warder was only slightly late once during World War II when London was being
blitzed by the Germans. A bomb fell close to the Tower and the warder and his
guards had to duck for cover…and then they proceeded on with it. They sent an
apologetic note to the king. Now that’s
tradition, people.
And I love that. I love the continuity of the
English. I love that they love their
pomp and traditions and have maintained them for generations. There will always
be an England, or so it seems. And it’s fun to write about it and have my
fictional protagonist Crispin Guest wade into the real history and make a home
for himself there. I love that I can look at a fourteenth century map of London
and put his dwelling on a real street and then look on Google Earth and find
that same street still there. I giggle with delight at such permanence because
I live in southern California, where even the ground doesn’t stay in one place
all the time. Oh for permanence!
