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Was the Monument Altered? by Peter Farey

I do wish that Oxfordians and, alas, even some Marlovians would stop claiming that the original Shakespeare monument in Stratford-upon-Avon differed in some significant way from the monument as it is now.  It didn't.¹

It is, of course, very easy to see how such a belief came about, and it is in fact one that I myself held for a while after first reading Charlton Ogburn's Oxfordian book The Mystery of William Shakespeare,² as the earliest published picture of it was indeed very different. This had appeared in Sir William Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, published in 1656, and was produced by the engraver frequently used by Dugdale, Wenceslaus Hollar.

The main differences seem to be these:

• The main body of Hollar's monument is only about 30% taller than it is wide, whereas the present monument is some 75% taller.

• In Hollar's etching, the small boys (putti) are sitting on the cornice with their legs dangling over the edge of it, but now they are not. Each now appears to be sitting on something, rather than on the cornice itself. Although not easy to see, the one on our left is still holding a spade, and the other – shown by Hollar as holding an hour-glass – now has, according to Samuel Schoenbaum,³ an inverted torch in his left hand and his right hand resting on a skull.

• Above the leafy capitals, the tops of the two columns, which nowadays are plain, have the faces of lions or some such large cat adorning them in Hollar's version.

• In the earlier version, a solemn droopy-moustached figure of Shakespeare is shown resting his hands on a plump sack of some sort, with knotted corners, where today there is a fairly flat cushion with tassels at the corners. In the modern version a fatter-faced Shakespeare with a Poirot-type moustache and goatee has a pen and paper, which are missing in the earlier one, and he seems to be wearing an "undergraduate-type" gown of some sort, rather than just the jerkin of the earlier illustration.

•  The curved "ceiling" of the alcove, undecorated in the Hollar etching, now has what seem to be gilded Tudor roses embellishing it.

• The greatest difference, however, is that in Hollar's etching the whole structure is clearly shown as standing on the floor, with three "feet" (two at the front and one at the back) on what must presumably be a triangular base. Nowadays it is half-embedded in the wall some eleven feet above the floor, the weight in fact being mainly taken directly by a remodelled window-sill, and three consoles (brackets) fixed to the wall.

Dugdale wasn't the only person to provide illustrations showing such differences, however. In Nicholas Rowe's 1709 Some Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespear, a different engraving by Gerard Van der Gucht had all of the differences noted above, despite there being a few minor changes to the Dugdale illustration, as did the engraving by Charles Grignion in John Bell's 1786 "literary edition" of Shakespeare, although the lions seem to have mutated into dogs and the spade into an arrow.

With three such "witnesses" testifying to the existence of such an earlier version of the monument, it might appear that there can really be no doubt of the fact. If so, the whole thing must have been completely rebuilt some time after 1786, to make it 45% taller in relation to its width, to have a rectangular rather than a triangular base, and to be hoist into a new location eleven feet up the wall, resting upon a new shelf created by taking a great chunk out of the existing window-sill and wall below. In the process they must have completely scrapped the former putti and replaced them with new ones, added Tudor roses to the architrave, and taken a new piece of limestone to create a brand new bust (with a different head, a gown, a hand designed to hold a quill, a piece of paper and a cushion with tassels).

Unfortunately, there is no record whatsoever of such work being undertaken, and in any case, would it not be reasonable to ask the simple question of why they would have found it necessary to make all of these very expensive changes?

There is something else which is very strange about this, however, because over sixty years before Grignion's illustration, and five years before the second edition of Dugdale's Antiquities (with the same illustration as before), Alexander Pope's 1725 edition of the Works was published, with an engraving by George Vertue showing it much as it is today, wall-mounted and with the occupant using a cushion to support the paper he is writing on.⁴ Although Vertue gets a few minor details wrong – apparently allowing himself artistic licence – even the size of the stones in the wall is accurate.

Furthermore, in 1737 Vertue sketched Edward Harley, second earl of Oxford (by the second creation), his patron, standing in front of a wall-mounted monument which, along with the surroundings, all looks fairly similar to how it does today.

Unless, as some Oxfordians actually do,⁵ we subscribe to the ludicrous idea that Vertue simply imagined it all, and that these imaginings were subsequently turned into reality, we must deduce that Grignion's engraving was based not upon first-hand observation, but upon those earlier ones done for Dugdale and Rowe. And if he did this, then it seems quite possible that Van der Gucht had based his 1709 Rowe illustration upon Hollar's in exactly the same way.

It would therefore appear that by 1725 the monument was more or less as it is today, with a rectangular base (rather than a triangular one) set into the north wall of the chancel, its weight now taken mainly by the base of the window-sill cut away to accept it.  If Hollar's version is correct, then those major changes must have been undertaken some time before 1725, and (as it was said to be "in" the north wall) the alcove presumably left by its removal invisibly repaired.

Once again, however, there was not a word in the records to suggest any such major changes to the church's fabric. The only time since 1621/2 when some notable renovation took place was in 1749. According to Joseph Greene, the church parson and headmaster of the grammar school, in 1746 an acting company performed a play (allegedly Othello) in Stratford to help towards the "repairing of the Original Monument of the Poet."  The benefit was for "the curious original monument and bust (that). . . is through length of years and other accidents become much impaired and decayed."⁶  In 1748,  Greene writes of "repairing and re-beautifying" the monument, proposing that the painter John Hall do the work, provided "that the monument shall become as like as possible to what it was when first erected," and in 1749 Greene said it had been "repaired and re-beautified." Questioned about the stone used in the original, he apparently replied: "I can assure you that the bust and cushion before it (on which as on a desk this our poet seems preparing to write) is one entire limestone . . . ," adding that "... really, except changing the substance of the Architraves from alabaster to Marble; nothing has been chang’d, nothing alter’d, except supplying with original material, (sav’d for that purpose,) whatsoever was by accident broken off; reviving the Old Colouring, and renewing the Gilding that was lost."

In other words, too little and too late for the significant changes we are discussing.

So just when were those changes made? We might have been left in this quandary, had it not been for a discovery made by Charlotte C. Stopes and revealed in 1914. The original sketch by William Dugdale, upon which Hollar had based his engraving, still exists. George Greenwood (1925) also mentioned it, but it was not until Diana Price included a photograph of it in her 1997 article "Reconsidering Shakespeare's Monument" that the first glimmering of light began to appear. It is the missing link in a pictorial equivalent of the game "Chinese whispers."

Looking at Hollar's etching and the monument as it appears today, what we find is that Dugdale's sketch is like a bad drawing of both of them. Going back to that list of differences we see:

• The drawing is so roughly done that one would not expect the ratio of width to height to be at all accurate anyway. The lines of the structure are actually impossible, like a drawing by M.C. Escher.

• He is certainly responsible for the putti being shown sitting on the edge of the cornice with their legs dangling over it (three legs in one case!), but they do both appear to be sitting on something else as well, as they are now. The hour-glass is particularly interesting, since there is no sign of any such thing in his left hand today, but Vertue did show one on the cornice next to the other boy. Schoenbaum says that the right hand putto is holding an inverted torch, and Vertue apparently guessed that they might have both been holding lighted torches the right way up at one time. That Dugdale missed the skull next to the other boy, which is not all that obvious from ground level, is hardly surprising.⁷

• He certainly included some squiggles at the top of the columns, and one can see that (rather like a Rorschach test) the one on our left could be interpreted as the head of a large cat of some sort, but the one on the right is far less identifiable. Perhaps a Tudor rose? He left out the ones which now appear on the "ceiling" of the alcove.

• The figure in the drawing could be resting his arms upon a sack, a pillow or a cushion, the corners of which are either tied up or decorated with tassels according to however one chooses to interpret it. It really is far from clear, as are the facial features and the question of whether or not he is wearing an academic type of gown. Dugdale has omitted the real quill pen (which may have indeed been missing at the time) and the piece of paper (perhaps too dusty to see?), but this seems rather unimportant, given that at some point he has written above the sketch, "In the North Wall of the Quire is this monument fixed for William Shakespeare the famous poet."

• Perhaps of the greatest importance, however, is that what Hollar interpreted as three feet (two at the front and one at the back) free-standing on the floor, can just as easily be seen in the sketch as those three consoles fixed to the wall which Vertue showed it resting on, and which are of course how it is today. The drawing has none of the indications which Hollar used to show it was standing on the floor. So this must be just what he imagined Dugdale to have intended.

It therefore seems perfectly clear to me that what Dugdale drew (rather badly) was a monument which in all major matters was much as it is today. Unfortunately, it contained several errors, which Wenceslaus Hollar – who clearly never saw the monument itself – copied, and also ambiguities (like those three "feet") from which Hollar made the wrong choice. Neither Gerard Van der Gucht nor Charles Grignion can have actually visited the place either, so they simply copied Hollar, whilst varying the detail just enough to avoid charges of plagiarism.

In fact, the first actual illustrator to visit the monument and record it relatively accurately was George Vertue. Not that his version was entirely correct either. The stained glass windows are omitted, the head has been replaced with one apparently based on the so-called Chandos portrait, he uses italic script for the inscription and, as mentioned earlier, he has the putti holding lighted wands or torches. All of these seem to be quite deliberate, however, and well within what he would have considered acceptable artistic licence.

So, just like the "Francis Archer" who for several years was believed to have been the killer of Christopher Marlowe, the man clutching a sack of wool or corn in some earlier version of the monument also turns out to be a myth. 

 © Peter Farey, September 2012

Peter Farey has been manning the Marlovian barricades on the internet for the past 14 years.  His Marlowe Page  is one of the most respected sites about Marlowe on the web.  He is a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society. 

¹It is stated as a fact in the "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" and in the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition's "Exposing an Industry in Denial." I am actually not aware of the idea appearing in any Marlovian publication other than when Peter Barker gave it as a fact in Mike Rubbo's film Much Ado About Something, but I nevertheless find the theory being argued by fellow Marlovians every so often
²Ogburn, Charlton (1988). The Mystery of William Shakespeare. London: Cardinal. p.159
 ³Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987). William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life. Oxford University Press. p.308. One can't help remembering that the title of the Introduction to Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning was "A Torch Turning Downward," relating to the motto on the putative portrait of Marlowe at Corpus Christi, and the similar version Quod me alit me extinguit. Just a coincidence
 ⁴Dugdale's Antiquities was reissued in 1730, still with the same floor-standing version. The editor, Dr. William Thomas, assured his readers that he had tried to make sure that there were no "manifest mistakes." As the evidence from George Vertue shows, he doesn't seem to have made a very good job of it, at least as far as this monument is concerned. 
⁵For example, Richard Kennedy in his 2005 "The Woolpack Man" and Richard Whalen in his 2005 "The Stratford Bust: A Monumental Fraud," both of whom completely ignore the problem posed by those three floor-standing feet. 
⁶Fox, Levi, ed. (1965). Correspondence of the Rev. Joseph Greene, 1712–90. London: HMSO. 
⁷The positioning of the putti seems to be fairly flexible. When the monument was vandalized in 1973, and the opportunity taken to spruce it up again, they were in fact replaced on the wrong sides of the coat of arms, with the right-hand putto on the left and vice versa. Amazingly, it was three years before anybody noticed!

Times Literary Supplement on The Marlowe Papers

"[Barber's] research into Marlowe's documented life forms a series of gripping flashbacks." For the review by Jackie Watson, click here.

Aldrich, Oxinden and Fineux by Peter Farey

One of the more colourful characters to appear in biographies of Christopher Marlowe is someone referred to as "Mr Fineux of Dover." Reporting the words of his elderly friend Simon Aldrich in early 1641, Henry Oxinden wrote the following in his commonplace book.¹

Mr Ald. said that Mr Fineux of Dover² was an Atheist & that he would go out at midnight into a wood, & fall down upon his knees & pray heartily that the Devil would come, that he might see him (for he did not believe that there was a Devil). Mr Ald. said that he was a very good scholar, but would never have above one book at a time, & when he was perfect in it, he would sell it away & buy another: he learned all Marlowe by heart & divers other books: Marlowe made him an Atheist. This Fineux was fain [i.e. obliged] to make a speech upon The fool hath said in his heart there is no God, to get his degree. Fineux would say as Galen said that man was of a more excellent composition than a beast, & thereby could speak; but affirmed that his soul died with his body, & as we remember nothing before we were born, so we shall remember nothing after we are dead.

Simon Aldrich

From 1569 until his death in 1602, the Register (i.e. registrar) of the Archbishop’s Consistory Court of Canterbury was one Francis Aldrich. This Aldrich had two sons, Francis and Simon, both of whom went to Cambridge like their father, who appears to have been at Corpus Christi. Francis went to Clare and then Sidney Sussex College, where he was one of the first Fellows, and was later elected Master, albeit holding the position only briefly, due to his death in 1609.³ The executors of his will were his brother Simon and his mother, with the Headmaster of the King’s School Canterbury, Roger Raven, as overseer. There are no lists of boys attending the King's School when the Aldrich brothers would have been there, but from the information given above it must be very likely that they did.

Simon Aldrich matriculated from (i.e. started at) Trinity College in about 1593/4 – the records are missing – but he is listed as a scholar there in Easter 1596, and went on to be awarded his B.A. degree in 1596/7 and M.A. in 1600, having been elected a Fellow in 1599. ⁴ On 30 December 1606, Simon was licensed to marry Elizabeth Hamon of Canterbury at Marlowe's own church of baptism, St. George's, and although there is no record of the wedding itself, there is no reason to assume that it didn’t happen, as the existence of the son-in-law mentioned below indicates. In 1607 he became a Bachelor of Divinity, and on 13 March 1611, vicar of Ringmer in Sussex. Having resigned from this position in 1626, he retired later to Denton in Kent where he lived with his son-in-law, John Swan, in a house called Little Maydeken, possibly until his death in July 1655.⁵

Henry Oxinden

Little Maydeken was owned by the gentleman and letter-writer Henry Oxinden, who lived in a house called Great Maydeken, at Barham, about three miles from Denton. Another Canterbury man, having been baptized there on 18 January 1609, Oxinden seems to have had a particular interest in Christopher Marlowe – a good thing for us, since he recorded in his commonplace book several things about him. Most of them were learned from Simon Aldrich, and they have been of great help to Marlowe’s biographers, not least that his father was a Canterbury shoemaker, the first source of this information. Aldrich, via Oxinden, also seems to have been the source of the epitaph in Latin verse upon the death of Sir Roger Manwood, and the fact that Marlowe wrote it. Also of considerable interest to biographers, perhaps, is that he, reporting Aldrich, is probably the most trustworthy witness that Marlowe was "an atheist" who had convinced at least one other person that he was right, and that he had written "a book against the Scripture" which he would have had printed, but "it would not be suffered." Oxinden was married, but his first wife died in 1640 and he remarried two years later. He died in June 1670.⁶

Mr Fineux of Dover

Mark Eccles, who first brought together and reported on the references to Marlowe in Oxinden's commonplace book, thought that the Fineux referred to was Thomas Fineux, who was baptized as "Thos. son of Thos. Fineux" on 16 May 1574 at Hougham, three miles from Dover. His father, Thomas the elder, apparently commanded the garrison at Moat's Bulwark (Dover) as early as 1593 and as late as 1624, and was buried on 6 Jun 1627.

There is no record of Thomas's schooling, and the records for the King's School Canterbury between 1580 and 1590 are apparently missing, but he matriculated from Corpus Christi, Cambridge, at Easter 1587. However, there is no record of his taking a degree. He married Elizabeth Rooke (of Mersham in Kent) at St. Paul's Canterbury on 19 Apr 1604, and around 1620 (according to The Visitation of Kent, Taken in the Years 1619-21) he was living back in his place of birth, Hougham.

Since there appears to have been a very brief overlap of the times when Thomas Fineux and Christopher Marlowe were at Corpus Christi, this identification has been accepted by most of Marlowe's biographers, including Frederick Boas,⁷ William Urry,⁸ A.D. Wraight,⁹ Charles Nicholl,¹⁰ Roy Kendall,¹¹ and David Riggs.¹² In his article on Christopher Marlowe for the 2004 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Nicholl also says: "In his last weeks at Cambridge he may have met Thomas Fineux of Hougham, near Dover, who entered Corpus in the Easter term. According to a well-informed contemporary, Simon Aldrich, ... young Fineux fell drastically under Marlowe's spell."

Constance Brown Kuriyama¹³and Park Honan,¹⁴ however, thought that a better candidate might be Thomas's younger brother John, who had been considered by Eccles but, probably rightly, was thought too young to have been acquainted with Marlowe.

A "John Finnix" is listed among the pupils at the King's School Canterbury in 1590,¹⁵ and a "John Fineux (or Fennis)" went up to Trinity College Cambridge around 1593/4, where he obtained a B.A. degree in 1596/7 and M.A. in 1600. In The Visitation of Kent, Taken in the Years 1619-21 he is described "of St. Margaret at Cliffe." The most common spelling of the family name in the parish records at around that time seems to have been "Fineas," but it was the spelling "Finnis" which stuck, and there have been people of that name living there right through to the present day.¹⁶ St Margaret's-at-Cliffe is also about three miles from the centre of Dover.

Thomas or John?

Most biographers seem to have favoured Thomas as "Mr Fineux of Dover," mainly because his time at Corpus Christi overlapped very briefly with Christopher Marlowe's. I would suggest, however, that there are rather better reasons for assuming it to have been John.

It is worth noting to start with that Simon Aldrich and John Fineux were probably exact contemporaries at the King's School Canterbury. They also seem to have arrived at Trinity College Cambridge at the same time, and taken their B.A. and M.A. degrees in the same years too. They were therefore very closely associated over many years, whereas there is no indication of Aldrich having known Thomas at all. Yet what he reports is just the sort of thing that a fellow student would have been sure to know about, and if it had not been his close acquaintance John, then surely he would have made it clear which one he meant.

Second, Thomas would have been at Cambridge from 1587 until about 1590 at the latest. For him to have "learned all Marlowe by heart" during that period would have been impossible, since the earliest of Marlowe's works to be printed, Tamburlaine parts 1 & 2, weren't published until August 1590. When John left university, all of his works except Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta were in print.

Third, John Fineux took two degrees, but there is no record of his brother Thomas having taken one. Yet Aldrich apparently said that "This Fineux was fain to make a speech upon The fool hath said in his heart there is no God, to get his degree."

Lastly, when their father, another Thomas, died in 1627, he left everything to "John Fineux of Dover." The correspondence with Aldrich's description is interesting, and it also seems to indicate that the younger Thomas had died twelve years or more before Oxinden wrote this up in his commonplace book.¹⁷

Does it matter?

I think we can reasonably assume that Eccles and others were right to find John Fineux too young to have been acquainted with Marlowe, even though they were apparently both in Canterbury in 1592, when Marlowe was having his confrontation with William Corkine and John was still at school there. So what I find particularly interesting about this is just how Marlowe "made him an Atheist" if, as is argued above, it was in fact John Fineux whom Aldrich was discussing. How could Fineux's having "learned all Marlowe by heart" do this? Charles Nicholl¹⁸ says "The influence was perhaps mainly literary—Dr Faustus springs to mind," but he seems to have forgotten that Dr Faustus didn't appear in print until 1604, and there is in any case no obvious reason why this or any of the other plays, even the Tamburlaines, would have had such an effect.¹⁹

The obvious answer is that what he read was Marlowe's "book against the Scripture," also mentioned in Oxinden's account. It was what Thomas Drury called "the book that doth maintain this damnable sect," the script of "the atheist lecture" Marlowe allegedly read to "Sir Walter Ralegh and others," and what William Vaughan called a "book against the Trinity." It would also have been the main reason why Marlowe eventually found himself in real trouble.

This seems to indicate that a manuscript of the book was to be found at Cambridge (probably in either Corpus Christi or Trinity) some time between 1593 and 1600. If so, the chances of it surviving would presumably be pretty slim, as would the name of its author. But I wonder if anyone would realize just who the author probably was if such an anonymous manuscript did still exist? It took a Marlovian, Calvin Hoffman, to identify the Corpus Christi portrait's probable identity, after all!

© Peter Farey, August 2012

¹Eccles, Mark (1935). "Marlowe in Kentish Tradition", Notes & Queries, 139. p.40. (I have modernized the spelling). Eccles's piece was in fact submitted in four parts, and my thanks are due to Ros Barber for giving me the chance to read all of them.
²In fact there are two versions of Oxinden's notes. The original version, held at the British Library, was written in about 1640–1, and there is a copy written by him some ten years later, now in the Folger. The first says "one Finis of Dover" which was changed by Oxinden in the later version to "Mr Fineux of Dover."
³Edwards, D. L. (1957). A History of the King’s School Canterbury, Faber & Faber. p.82.
⁴Venn, John & J.A. (eds. 1924). Alumni Cantabrigienses, a biographical list of all known students, graduates and holders of office at the University of Cambridge, from the earliest times to 1900, Cambridge, The University Press. Similar information given later is from the same source.
⁵Eccles, Mark (1935). "Marlowe in Kentish Tradition", Notes & Queries, 140. p.58.
⁶Hingley, Sheila (2004). "Oxinden , Henry (1609–1670)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press.
⁷Boas, Frederick S. (1940). Christopher Marlowe: A Critical and Biographical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p.110.
⁸Urry, William (1988). Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury. Faber & Faber. p.60.
⁹Wraight, A.D. and Stern, Virginia F. (1965). In Search of Christopher Marlowe: A Pictorial Biography. Macdonald. pp.11, 59.
¹⁰Nicholl, Charles (2002). The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (2nd edition). Vintage. pp.244–245.
¹¹Kendall, Roy (2003). Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys through the Elizabethan Underground. Associated University Presses. pp.54–55.
¹²Riggs, David (2004). The World of Christopher Marlowe. Faber & Faber. pp.229–230
¹³Kuriyama, Constance Brown (2002). Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life. Cornell University Press. p.160.
¹⁴Honan, Park (2005). Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy. Oxford University Press. p.250.
¹⁵I haven't examined this list myself, so I don't know whether Aldrich is mentioned too.
¹⁶Memorials to men named "Finnis" of St. Margaret's at Cliffe are to be found from both World Wars, and Ted Finnis, brother of the aviation historian Malcolm Finnis, still lives there.
¹⁷Eccles, Mark (1935). "Marlowe in Kentish Tradition", Notes & Queries, 144. pp.134–5. Even if this timing is wrong, Thomas's widow remarried eight or nine years earlier, in 1632.
¹⁸Nicholl, Charles (2004). "Marlowe , Christopher (bap. 1564, d. 1593)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press.
¹⁹David Riggs (p.230) does say, however, that Fineux, "who 'affirmed his soul died with his body & as we can remember nothing before we were born: so we shall remember nothing after', had grasped the true meaning of 2 Tamburlaine."

Getting the Body to Deptford by Peter Farey

It is the evening of 29 May 1593. Imagine that it is your responsibility to take charge of the body of John Penry, after his execution at St. Thomas à Watering, and to convey it to Eleanor Bull's house at Deptford Strand.¹  How do you think that you would go about it? Fortunately, you do have a warrant – signed by the Coroner of the Queen's Household, William Danby – to receive it from the sheriff, but how best to transport it to widow Bull's place without arousing any suspicions as to the legitimacy of that destination? Four bodies a year were allowed to go to the Company of Barber-Surgeons for dissection, but their headquarters was certainly not located in Deptford.

Even though the distance from St. Thomas à Watering to Deptford Strand was less than three miles by road, I would have had some concerns about carrying a body in an easily followed horse-drawn cart, especially if it was apparently setting off in the wrong direction. So was there another way? Thanks to information now available to us on-line it seems that there very probably was.

Have you ever heard of Earl's Sluice? I certainly hadn't, even though its source was apparently in what is now Ruskin Park, a few hundred yards from where I lived throughout my teens in Herne Hill, south London. It is one of the capital's lost rivers, which rose there, headed north-east through Camberwell and – gathering more waters from the River Peck (which gave us Peckham) – finally flowed into the Thames at Rotherhithe. The earl in question seems to have been Robert, the first Earl of Gloucester, who was an illegitimate son of the Norman king Henry I, and lord of the manor thereabouts. The word 'sluice' suggests that it was more man-made (presumably at the behest of the said earl) than an entirely natural stream.

The interesting thing from our point of view is that the name of the place where Earl's Sluice crossed the Old Kent Road was in fact St. Thomas à Watering. According to Paul Talling, "In 1934, evidence of a medieval bridge was discovered in a trench at the junction of the Old Kent Road and Shorncliffe Road. This section of Earl's Sluice was nicknamed St. Thomas à Watering after it became a popular horse-watering place for pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket in Canterbury."² In terms of latitude and longitude, this is at 51° 29' 18" North and 00° 04' 35" West. That place was of course given some fame by Chaucer in his The Canterbury Tales, it being the first stop his pilgrims made after leaving the Tabard Inn, and where it was agreed that they would tell stories to each other to pass the time.

And off we rode at slightly faster pace
Than walking to St. Thomas' watering-place;
And there our Host drew up, began to ease
His horse, and said, "Now, listen if you please,
My lords! Remember what you promised me.
If evensong and matins will agree
Let’s see who shall be first to tell a tale.
And as I hope to drink good wine and ale
I’ll be your judge. The rebel who disobeys,
However much the journey costs, he pays."³

There is a nice illustration, together with a map of the Sluice and Peck's approximate courses, here at londonist.com.

Nowadays, it is the site of the Thomas A Becket bar and Nolias Art Gallery where, according to their website, David Bowie wrote and rehearsed Ziggy Stardust in an upstairs room. It's amazing what you discover when writing these articles!

In Elizabethan times, however, it was the place of execution for the northern parts of Surrey, a permanent pair of gallows having been erected there in 1559.⁴ We must therefore return to our predicament concerning John Penry. Do we have to follow the pilgrims down the old Kent Road, which certainly went past Deptford? Chaucer's host, after hearing the Knight's tale, even tells the Reeve:

Give us your story, if you've one in stock.
Why, look! There's Deptford and it's nine o'clock!

Earl's Sluice ran to the north of the Canterbury road, heading initially north-east then east from St. Thomas à Watering, and being joined by the River Peck half a mile or so later before finding the Thames. Would it have been navigable by a small boat? There are some indications that it would. We learn that "The 1537/8 accounts of the London Bridge estate, which owned land in south London, include a record of the sale of several loads of timber to a man called Christopher Payne including one load of oak 'for the earl’s sluice' which cost him 8 shillings, which may have been for embanking or for bridging the stream."⁵ We also know that it formed a boundary between Camberwell and Southwark, Rotherhithe and Deptford, and even the counties of Surrey and Kent. It seems unlikely that a simple brook would have achieved such a status. That the river Peck was the tributary also suggests that Earl's Sluice was the larger of the two, and an early print, copied as a watercolour,⁶ in fact shows it as having been a fairly substantial waterway by the time it reached the Thames at Rotherhithe.

So we know where the probably navigable (at least by rowing boat) Earl's Sluice started and where it passed by on the way, but where did it enter the Thames, since no vestige of it apparently remains? Fortunately, we have a clue in it having provided the boundary between Rotherhithe and Deptford. There is one piece of evidence in the form of a stone, right on the Thames embankment, marking the boundary between the parishes of St. Mary's in Rotherhithe and St. Paul's in Deptford. It is about a hundred yards south of the lock at the entrance to the South Dock Marina. A blue plaque tells us that the "stone was on a bridge over the Earl Creek nearby, but was relocated here in 1988."⁷

So where does the water go now? In fact, Earl's Sluice, at least at the Rotherhithe end, exists nowadays only as a part of the Thames Water sewage system. It is redirected by the appropriately named "Earl Pumping Station" in Yeoman Street into the Southern Outfall sewer, dating from Victorian times, which finishes up at the Crossness sewage treatment works, nine or ten miles down-river. Only when the system can't cope does it currently have to rely on the former route to the Thames, which follows Plough Way straight down to the overflow point observable on Google Earth at 51° 29' 35"N and 00° 01' 55"W. This is presumably at the same place as the original confluence.⁸

Assuming that Earl's Sluice could have provided a route for a small boat to reach the Thames, how far was it from St. Thomas à Watering? Calculating from the two locations described by their latitude and longitude,⁹ we find a distance of just over three kilometres (1.86 miles) as the crow flies. Even if we add a certain amount for deviations from the straight line, it is still unlikely to be much more than a couple of miles. And as the drop from the source to St. Thomas was about 21 metres (69 ft.), and from there to the Thames a mere 4 metres (13 ft.), getting the boat up to St. Thomas à Watering in the first place should not have been all that onerous.

Although it is quite likely that Eleanor Bull's house in Deptford Strand was itself on the river, we don't actually know this, so let us head for the middle water-gate shown on the map in Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning.¹⁰ Having reached the Thames after a bit over two miles, it would be only about a further kilometre (0.62 miles) to the water-gate at Deptford Strand. A total distance by water of less than three miles, as it would have been by road, but in this case all downstream.

So, if it was indeed possible, I know which of the two options I would have chosen.

© Peter Farey, July 2012

Peter Farey is a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society.

¹It was David More who first suggested that John Penry's body may have been used in the faking of Christopher Marlowe's death. See his 1997 essay Drunken Sailor or Imprisoned Writer? at http://www.marlovian.com/essays/penry.html
²Talling, Paul (2011). London's Lost Rivers, Random House, pp.109–110. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PNe5ZBe53HYC&pg=PA109
³These two quotations are taken from Neville Coghill's excellent modern version of the book, republished by Penguin in 2003.
⁴http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45279
⁵http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2012/04/caught-by-the-river-peck/
⁶http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/southwark/assets/galleries/rotherhithe/earls-sluice
⁷See it shown at http://www.bermondseyboy.net/2011/07/03/blue-plaques-in-bermondsey-rotherhithe/ . There is also a photograph of it on Google Earth in its exact location, which is just north of where Plough Way meets the river, at 51° 29' 36"N and 00° 01' 57"W.
⁸This appears as the magenta line on the map at http://www.thamestunnelconsultation.co.uk/doclib/earl-pumping-station/
⁹ Using the calculator at http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html
¹⁰Nicholl, Charles (2002). The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (2nd edition), London, Vintage, plate 3.

Library Journal on The Marlowe Papers

Regarding the January 2013 U.S. publication of Ros Barber's The Marlowe Papers by St. Martin's, Library Journal writes:  "Barber does know her stuff. She has three poetry collections and a Ph.D. in Marlowe studies to her name and won the Marlowe Society’s Hoffman Prize for this work. In-house enthusiasm, too, so watch." 

Click here for the full article. 

U.S. readers don't have to wait until January.  You can order The Marlowe Papers now on Amazon.co.uk.

A Kindle edition is also available at Amazon.com.

The Marlowe Papers: High Praise for Ros Barber's Novel

Herald Scotland Review of The Marlowe Papers

"A truly superb achievement."

Time Out London Review of The Marlowe Papers

June 13: " . . . exquisitely poetic descriptions and turns of phrase worthy of the Bard himself, whoever he was."

You can order The Marlowe Papers on Amazon.co.uk.

For U.S. readers, a Kindle edition is available at Amazon.com (U.S. hard copy release is January 2013; U.S. customers can, of course, order the hard copy from Amazon.co.uk - the price after currency conversion, s + h included, is around $29).RosBarber