Checked out of the hotel in Westminster and took the St. James Park tube to Monument, a short jaunt. Walked 10 minutes to the next hotel on Threadneedles Street (love the names).
Greeted with the best customer service I’ve ever experienced.
Then out to the City, what is now the financial district, and what was in Chaucer’s time a one square mile city of thirty thousand inhabitants encircled by the Roman walls built 1,000 years earlier, with seven city wall gates around the city.
Headed to St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, built in the thirteenth century. A curious building, bisected down the middle, with a nunnery on one side, and a parish church on the other. Chaucer’s daughter Elizabeth went here for three years, at the time Geoffrey Chaucer moved to lodgings above Aldgate, a ten minute walk away. Curiously, Prince John of Gaunt paid £51 8s 2d for Elizabeth Chaucer to be accepted into Barking Abbey. That’s about CAN $60,000 in today’s currency. Makes you wonder why (asked and answered in The Storyteller’s Desire).
On the Sunday I visited St. Helen’s it was a lively place full of families engaged in good old fashioned community, a scene Chaucer would have recognized and smiled upon. Curiously the building had been built as a priory church, and then a nunnery had been added, so in time, a wall separated the two – the wall since gone, but the beams dividing the space still evident.
The church was filled with icons and tombs, and has been called London’s Westminster Abbey as it is second only to the Abbey in the number of relics it holds. The building was small but it vibrated with energy, both past and present.
The beautiful original stained glass windows had been blown out by an IRA bomb two decades earlier, but shards had been put back together in the topmost windows.
Then it was time to head south across London Bridge to Southwark. Lunch at the George Inn, one of the oldest inns in greater London.
Chaucer’s famous Tabard Inn from the Canterbury Tales would have stood about a block away. Most if not all inns in London proper had been burnt to the ground in the great fire of 1666 so the George Inn was newer than Chaucer’s 14th century but still provided a wonderful ambience for a pint and a bite. Not a single wall or ceiling was 90 degrees.
The back across the bridge and walking along the path by the Thames. The water was much choppier and rougher than I expected, I assume because the tide was in. I could imagine a barge captain in 1368 having great difficulty trying navigate the water even though the river itself wasn’t that wide..
Past Queenhithe and the only surviving inlet where all manner of goods would have been loaded and loaded. Discovered a fabulous mosaic of London history stretching 30 metres long.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s father John was a vintner and Assistant Butler to King Edward, and would have imported and unloaded Edward’s favourite wine, Vernaccia, a few hundred metres to the east at Three Cranes Wharf, where the Chaucer warehouse would have stood – burnt in the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Then past 177 Upper Thames Street (not much to look at now), where Chaucer was thought to have lived, and that would have also perished in the Great Fire of London.
Then a quick jaunt up to St. Paul’s Cathedral. The service was on, so after a quick peak and wonder, I scooted around to the back side to take in the gardens and St. Pauls’ Cross, where for hundreds of years speakers shared what was on their minds. St. Paul’s in Chaucer’s day was longer, wider and taller than the current baroque structure, with a spire 400 feet tall – one of, if not the, tallest in all of Europe in 1368.
It is the garden by St. Paul’s Cross where I set the puy of The Storyteller’s Desire.
Then back to the hotel and a hot bath and much needed elevation of feet. Tomorrow on to Canterbury!