The Medieval Murderers - The Tainted Relic

Needless to say, neither my two friends nor I were Londoners by birth.

A word about the three of us.

We-Abel Glaze, Jack Wilson and I, Nicholas Revill-are members of the King’s Men, formerly the Chamberlain’s Men, based at the Globe theatre in Southwark. We are players, at your service. Or at the service of King James I, to be precise. Jack Wilson was the longest-serving player among us three and Abel Glaze the most recent, but we’d all notched up a good few years by now with London’s premier acting company.

Jack and I had set our hearts on playing from quite early days, but Abel had joined us by an odd route. He had once made a good living-a very good living, much better than the wages he earned on the stage of the Globe playhouse-by trickery. As a counterfeit crank, he had regularly tumbled down in the public highway, foaming at the mouth (the foam produced by a sliver of soap tucked into his gob) and with eyeballs rolling upward in his head. The outskirts of a town were the best place, he said. Abel would wait until the road was clear and a well-dressed party was picking its way along. Younger women were the softest marks and sometimes middle-aged men, he claimed, because girls were naturally tender hearted (unless they were very well dressed) and prosperous middle-aged men generally had something to atone for. Abel once defended this practice to me by saying that, when he’d succeeded in parting these gullible spirits from their money, he was sure that they went on their way with a lighter heart than his own. His practices were an incentive to charity, weren’t they? But now Abel Glaze had gone straight, or as straight as a life in the playhouse would permit.

At the moment I could see Abel’s tapering nose almost quivering while he gazed across the crowd milling round the stalls of Bartholomew Fair.

‘Looking for likely marks, Abel?’ I said.

‘Those days are well behind me, Nick.’

‘Smell that,’ said Jack Wilson. ‘That is Ursula’s smell if I’m not mistaken.’

He sniffed appreciatively and gestured towards the source of the smell, a nearby stall which was advertising its wares with a pig’s head stuck on a pole. I couldn’t help recalling the traitors’ heads which are displayed at the southern end of London Bridge. But those blackened, wizened objects looked less human than that of the pig on the pole, which to my eyes had something beseeching about it. Beneath it was a sign saying: ‘HERE BE THE BEST PIGS. THE PIG’S HEAD SPEAKS IT’.

I’d had breakfast not so many hours earlier but I felt a sudden hunger at the sweet, crisp aroma of roasting pig. Later, I promised myself, we would visit Ursula’s stall for a taste of her wares. Later, after we’d concluded our business at Bartholomew Fair.

‘And look there,’ said Abel. ‘You mentioned marks, Nick…there’s a whole crowd of ’em.’

From our position by the railings that edged the fair, I looked. On an open patch of ground was standing a handsome ballad singer with fair, curled hair surmounted by a red cap. He’d just finished a song and was nodding and smiling at a little gaggle of spectators who, by their own smiling and scattered applause, showed that they appreciated him almost as much as he appreciated himself. He raised his hands placatingly as if they were compelling him to offer one more number. Oh, very well…if you insist. He tossed his red-capped head like a frisky colt before bending once more over the lute that was strung round his neck.

‘I’ve seen him before,’ said Abel. ‘He calls himself Ben Nightingale. You could say it’s his stage name. But Ben Magpie would be more fitting.’

After a few moments’ fiddling with his instrument, all done to heighten audience expectation, the singer called Nightingale struck up to his own accompaniment. He had a pleasant voice which carried clearly through the other shouts and cries in the area. The words were distinct.

My masters and ladies, good people draw near,

And take to your hearts these words you do hear,

Look well to your purses, of robbers beware,

At ’tholomew Fair, Bartholomew Fair .

Cling fast to your goods and tight hold your purse,

Or else you had better been starved by your nurse.

Here are bad men a-plenty, all worthy the noose,

But none, say I, worse than Master Cutpurse.

And so he wound on with his execrable verses. But the bystanders seemed to be enjoying it, nodding in agreement with the sentiments or laughing at the foolishness of those who allowed themselves to become victims of ‘Master Cutpurse’.

‘ He should be hanged…’ I said.

‘A bit severe,’ said Jack.

‘…for rhyming “noose” and “purse”.’

‘This piece of his is called “A Warning against Cutpurses”,’ said Abel.

‘Very public spirited of the singer,’ said Jack.

‘Oh, very,’ said Abel. ‘But see the individual at the edge. That one there. His name is Peter Perkin.’

Slightly to one side of the group there stood a short man, his head bent sideways to scoop up the singer’s words. He was squinting as if to concentrate the better on the sound. But I noticed that, beneath half-closed lids, his eyes were darting to and fro. He was dressed as though he’d just come in from the country for the day. There were even a few stems of straw sticking to his rustic hat. Aha, I thought, I bet I know what those straws are for…

All the time the red-capped singer was running through half a dozen stanzas, each of them reflecting on the iniquity of cutpurses and the need for honest citizens to be on their guard, Perkin kept his head down. And as the singer thrummed on the lute strings to signal the end of his piece and the audience’s hands hovered over their pockets and pouches, the short fellow’s eyes flickered ever more rapidly. When Nightingale concluded with a flourish, this bystander was foremost in the applause. I noticed, however, that he didn’t dive for his own purse.

The singer removed his cap and moved among the audience, smiling in the way that all performers smile at the end of the show. To judge by his expression, each coin dropped into the upturned cap appeared to come as a genuine surprise. Why, it seemed to say, you mean that I am to be paid for what is purely my pleasure! As the little audience began to disperse and he was tipping the coins with a practised movement into his own purse, I saw him motion very slightly with his head to his confederate, Peter Perkin. You wouldn’t have guessed that there was anything to connect the two of them if it hadn’t been for that briefest of gestures. This second gentleman casually took himself off in pursuit of a couple of well-padded dames. No doubt, once he’d relieved them of what they were carrying, he would track down others whose fat purses he’d noted while he was pretending to listen to Nightingale.

You had to admire the slickness of the operation. The singer drew the crowds and took their honest tribute once he had rounded off his session with a song against the cutting of purses. Meantime his associate kept watch on where those purses were stashed. It saved time later on if he knew exactly which part of the body to target. Even some bumpkin clinging for dear life to his wordly wealth wouldn’t be secure. It’s wonderful how a straw gently tickled in the ear will cause anyone to let go of what they’re clutching, and our friend in the rustic hat had his armoury of straws.

A cruder pair of thieves would have robbed the spectators there and then while they were listening. But there was a double disadvantage to this: the singer wouldn’t have been paid for his pains if their purses had gone missing and so a little profit would have been forfeit, and-perhaps more important-some suspicion might have been directed at him for distracting the crowd. This way, Ben Nightingale was free to set himself up in another quarter of the fair. It was a trick which he and his accomplice might play two or three times that day, depending on how greedy they were.