Alan Moore - Jerusalem

When the Roman legions are withdrawn they leave us with a money habit. From the kick-off of the seventh century, gold and silver coins are struck as local currencies by various small coining operations up and down the country. In Thompson’s opinion, the most famous such establishment is probably at Canterbury although there are gold coins made here in Hamtun dated 600 AD, which have to be amongst the very first produced in Britain. And when he says Hamtun, Roman means the Boroughs. Possibly due to this early aptitude we have an unofficial mint here from 650 onwards churning out a stream of gleam into the Dark Ages’ protracted night, a golden shower. Meanwhile, unobserved in the surrounding information-blackout, the benighted half-mile settlement mysteriously gathers substance and significance: King Offa’s market town supplying his retreat at Kingsthorpe, here in Mercia’s centre at a time when Mercia is the most important of the Saxon kingdoms. To Rome Thompson’s way of thinking, it might even be that pilgrim bringing the stone cross here from Jerusalem around this period which helps cement Hamtun’s mystique as centre-of-the-land, but for whatever reason it’s from this ground during the 880s that King Alfred the failed cake-minder divides the country into slices, adding ‘North’ to the town’s tag and naming ‘Norhan’ as foremost amongst the shires, legitimising its two-hundred-year-old mint, acknowledging its status. Wax-sealing its fate.

He’s not obsessed with cash. He’s never had enough to get obsessed by, but you need to know how money works to understand its necessary complement, this being poverty. The two things are inseparable. John Ruskin claims that if resources were shared equally there’d be no poverty or wealth. Thus, to make someone rich depends on making someone else poor. Making someone very wealthy may depend upon impoverishing an entire population. Poverty is money’s obverse, the coin’s other side. Rome wants to scrutinise its dirty engine and to comprehend the micro-tolerances of hard times. He knows his own hard times have mostly happened not because of money, but because of how he used to drink before the heart attack and his sometimes deranged behaviour. He’s culpable, responsible — he knows all that — and sometimes feels a black pang if he thinks of Sharon, their doomed marriage, his exploded family. He would simply observe that those from a chaotic background frequently tend to be predisposed to alcohol and chaos, and that chaos levels rise as funds go down. That isn’t an excuse; it’s an example of how life is likely to work out in a poor neighbourhood, with more capacity for harm, for wheels to fall off struggling relationships, for nasty incidents. The squaddies eager for a scrap down in the cellar bar off vanished Wood Street. The slagheap collapsing on him in Paul Baker’s yard, crawling through dirt in search of a few bob on the Edwardian empties.

Growing up, Rome thinks the king he’s heard about is called Alfred the Grate because of where he scorched the scones, then later learns about dividing up the shires, effectively making Hamtun the capital, establishing the mint at London (one of a few dozen) as an institution in 886, and all the rest of it. The king is trying to regulate the many regional economies, or so it seems to Thompson, but no one will have much luck with that until Edgar the Peaceful turns up to reform the coinage in his last year as king, 973 AD, and standardises it into a national currency stamped out at forty royal mints throughout the land, with Hamtun being one of them. This is the year you first get pennies turning up with “HAMT” on the reverse, the letters set in the four quarters of what’s known as a Long Cross, one where the arms reach right to the coin’s hammered edge. By Ethelred the Second’s reign, commencing 978, emergency mints are set up to cope with the privations caused by all the Viking raids the King was famously unready for, and by Harold the Second’s rule prior to the Norman conquest there’s at least seventy of them, with the biggest mint being the one in London. Following 1066, William the Bastard changes things. The mints are gradually reduced in number, centralising monetary control and rationalising an inherited and sprawling Saxon system. Disempowered, Northampton’s mint survives until the thirteenth century. Until Henry the Third arrives and really puts the chainmail boot in.

The subsiding fifty-year-old hill of ash and clinker falling in on him, the incident with the drunk soldiers: these are just part of the fire he’s dressed in, the insane debris of circumstance that makes him who he is; that ultimately tears apart his life with Sharon and the kids. He’s foraging for old stone bottles when some half-a-century of the town’s black, incinerated shit suddenly pounds its fist into his scrawny back and drives the precious wind out of his lungs. Dirt in his eyes, dirt in his mouth and enough time to form the thought, so this is how we all end up, before his mucker Ted Tripp grabs him by those matchstick ankles, drags him cursing from the sludge like an uprooted Tourette’s carrot out into the daylight of Paul Baker’s yard, just as the cop cars all come howling in. He owes Ted big time, and so when Ted’s lock-up full of hooky goods is raided some while afterwards and the arresting officers fail to lock up the premises behind them, Roman has the evidence away and leaves Ted to produce receipts so that the angry coppers have to reimburse him for the lock-up’s contents. Debt repaid, this means that Rome feels free to steal Ted’s car on that occasion with the pissed-up and abusive squaddies: Roman’s awesome and apocalyptic payback; his avenging angel-work. He feels that it’s important someone keeps the moral ledger straight, such as it is. The heart can’t keep double accounts, and its books must eventually be balanced.

Though Northampton has admittedly lost some of the illustrious burnish since its Alfred the Great heyday, it’s still an important central pivot of the country for two hundred years after the conquest, and still has its mint. A thriving, pretty little market town, by all accounts, since Dick the Lionheart grants it its charter in 1180-something. Cobblers and leather-workers all up Scarletwell Street and the old Gilhalda, the original town hall there on the Mayorhold, where they hold their Porthimoth di Norhan, although no one nowadays knows what that might have been. Something to do with boundaries. Henry the Third seems rather taken with the place at first and wants to give the town a university, before he’s had a chance to fully understand the fiery and unusual spirit of the ancient settlement. The Bacaleri di Norhan, the stroppy students, are protesting Henry’s imposition of a forty eight-strong council — the exact same number of the bastards that Rome Thompson currently contends with weekly — who are lining their own pockets with the profits of the town. Henry decides he doesn’t like the locale after all and sends his troops in through the wall of the old Cluniac priory where St. Andrew’s Road is now. They pillage, rape and burn until Northampton is an ugly, smoking wreck. And when he says Northampton, Roman means the Boroughs. Henry’s promised university ends up in Cambridge, and with Henry’s death in 1272 they take away the mint as well.

His reputation for exacting startling retribution, whether against individuals or institutions, means that anyone who’s heard of him knows that they’re better off not picking fights with Roman. Which leaves those who haven’t heard of him. He’s visiting the cellar bar outside the Grosvenor Centre, near where Wood Street used to be, for a quick drink. There are these nineteen-, twenty-year-old soldiers from some camp outside Northampton, half-a-dozen getting rowdy in the lounge, shoving past regulars. When Rome asks one of these latter-day roundheads to watch where he’s going, he’s got the whole mob around him swilling their testosterone and vodka smoothies. “Yeah? What are you gunna do about it, Catweazle?” Six of the nation’s finest, being all they can be with a stick figure in his mid forties. Roman puts his palm up. “Sorry, lads. I’m evidently in the wrong pub. I’ll just finish up me pint and go.” He leaves them to their night out without answering them, without saying what he’s gunna do about it. Never cross someone with neither want nor fear of anything. Like he tells Alma while he’s lounging calmly in the middle of a blazing bonfire on that camping holiday in Wales, “It’s all about will, Alma, ain’t that right?” She pulls upon her reefer and considers while he starts to smoulder. “Yeah. Well, will and flammability.” They have to drag him from the flames and beat him out, but Roman feels he’s made his point. He’s put his money where his mouth is.