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The Clink Prison Museum

Name: The Clink Prison Museum
Address: 1 Clink Street, London, SE19DG, GB
Telephone: +44 20 7403 0900
Price range: £
Rating: 4.2

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The Clink Prison Museum

Attraction, Museum Owned by the Bishop of Wi******er, The Clink Prison was used to control the riverside part of Southwark known as “The Liberty of The Clink”.
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The Clink Prison Museum stands upon the original site of the Clink Prison, which dates back to 1144 making it one of England’s oldest, if not the oldest prison. Visitors discover a hands-on educational experience allowing them to handle original and reproduction artifacts, including torture devices, as well as the opportunity to view and hear the amazing stories of the inmates and the notorious Ba

nkside. This area housed much of London’s entertainment establishments including inns, theatres, bull and bear-baiting, c**k and dog fighting and twenty two houses of atrocious but very wide repute - much of this lives on today in the street names of Bankside. The Clink Prison was a small but crucial part of the bishop's riverside palace, called Wi******er House. where he often hosted royal functions and drew the envy of kings. Parts of the Great Hall still stand today, including the world famous Rose Window, preserved by English Heritage. The list of famous names that have visited Bankside during the years of The Clink includes Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Henry VIII, William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake, James I, Samuel Pepys, Dr Johnson and many more, why not join them and explore the prison that gave its name to all others? The Clink Prison.

09/01/2024

It was on this day in 1431 the trial of Joan of Arc began in Rouen. Joan, the daughter of a propertied peasant family at Domrémy in northeast France, had reported visitations by St Margaret, St Catherine of Alexandria and the Archangel Michael, all of whom told her that it was her destiny to get the English out of France. She had met King Charles VII, and had impressed him, and then led a highly effective military campaign – armoured as a boy – ending the Siege of Orleans, pursuing the English through the Loire Campaign, and a decisive victory at Patay. Charles was crowned with Joan by his side.

The Hundred Years’ War had started with Edward III’s claim to the French throne, based on the fact that it (or most of it) had previously belonged to Henry II, Richard I and King John before the deplorable John had lost it, along with pretty much everything else that he’d started out with. Edward’s bold initiative to win it all back had become an abiding default project for the Plantagenet Royal family lasting five generations. While Henry V had won a spectacular victory at Agincourt in 1415 and married the daughter of the French king, he had not lived long enough to consolidate his position (leaving the throne to his infant son) and, inspired by Joan’s visions that their cause was God’s Work, the French had forced the English onto the back foot.

In May 1430, after a four-month truce, Joan was captured at Compiègne by the Bergundians, who subsequently sold to their English allies, who very much wanted her dead – Joan’s success, attributed to God’s favour, was proving as bad for their morale as it had proved a fillip for the French – in order to prove that Joan was not God’s soldier after all, the English had her charged with heresy (for dressing as a boy), for which the punishment (under the relatively new law passed by Henry IV in 1400) was burning to death.

08/01/2024

Now we’re into the bleak, cold heart of January, it seems appropriate to consider one of the great historical myths that we hear from time to time; that of sugar and spices being used to cover up the taste of rotten meat – written like that it’s an obvious nonsense – our ancestors (whatever some popular TV programmes might like you to think) weren’t that much stupider than we are, and they did know that rotten meat made you ill, whatever you cooked it up with, besides if someone was rich enough to afford sugar and spices, they were rich enough to have fresh meat – they’d not waste them on bad!

Preserving food over the winter was a serious business – the best way to preserve meat was to keep the animal alive (life preserves meat really well!) but that took fodder, which had to be stored, so older, fatter animals might be slaughtered at the onset of winter – when, of course, it’s colder. While an old farmer’s axiom goes ‘You can eat every bit of a pig except for the squeal’ this meant that unless an old farmer’s wife had an entire wedding feast to prepare, she would know just how to break the carcass down, using the less resilient bits first and storing the rest.

The whole process of a pig slaughter, from oink to table, was observed by the late American chef Anthony Bourdain in 2000 and described in significant detail in his book ‘Cook’s Tour’ - the soft organs are consumed almost immediately, the carcass hung overnight then washed out with red wine to inhibit bacteria, and then dismembered into hams to be salted and cured, the head boiled up for brawn – nothing is wasted. Even the bladder is dried out, inflated and given to the kids as a football. The process is no more sophisticated than it was in the time of The Clink – and, of course, it still works perfectly well.

07/01/2024

One of the by-products of the Parliamentarian cause in the English Civil War is that it gave a platform and a voice to many other, sometimes more extreme, groups of thinkers that might otherwise have gone un-heard, among these were the Levellers, committed to popular sovereignty, extended suffrage, equality before the law and religious tolerance, the Diggers (the ‘True Levellers’), who believed in common ownership and set out to establish communistic rural communities, and the Ranters, who denied the authority of churches and Scripture, arguing the God was within man (though it has been suggested that the Ranters didn’t really exist and were made up by conservatives for propaganda purposes). Another sect – extreme even by Puritan standards – and active from 1649 to 1660, was the Fifth Monarchists.

The name came from a prophecy in the Book of Daniel that four ancient monarchies (Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman) would come and go and then would come the Kingdom of Christ – the Fifth Monarchy – in 1666 because that contained the Number of the Beast, meaning the end of earthly rule by physical human beings, and therefore the Second Coming of Jesus. Leading the sect was Major-General Thomas Harrison who, as one of the signatories to the death warrant of Charles I, became the first person to be hanged, drawn and quartered for his regicide – and because the new government considered him a threat.

Believing that the ex*****on of Charles I marked the end of the Fourth Monarchy, and considering that both Cromwell’s Protectorate and the Stuart Restoration had interrupted the coming of the Fifth, fifty Fifth Monarchists, headed by a wine-cooper named Thomas Venner, attempted to capture London for ‘King Jesus’ yesterday in 1661. Most of the fifty were either killed or taken prisoner, and Venner and ten others were hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason. Repressive legislation to suppress non-conformist sects followed. Working men finally got the vote in 1918, still not everyone has enough to eat, but the rich remain rich.

06/01/2024

Courtship has always been an inexact science and, not having a phone, an app or even a photographer, Henry VIII had dispatched Hans Holbein, the finest portrait painter available, to paint two German sisters; the king had then chosen the one he liked best, and had paid her brother ten thousand florins for her – for a new queen and a valuable German alliance against the French, it was money well spent – what could possibly go wrong?

It’s hard to judge if it’s the plot of a Shakespeare comedy or a Carry On film but, when he dressed up as a huntsman to meet Anne ‘romantically’ on New Year’s Day 1540, she didn’t recognise him (still less was she impressed with the big bearded stranger, who clearly thought a lot of himself) and he didn’t fancy her either; he spent much of the next week complaining very vocally of his predicament and demanding that his chief fixer, Thomas Cromwell, get him out of it but there was no escape and on this day in 1540, Henry VIII married his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.

A common first impression is that Henry beheaded all six of them like some Renaissance Bluebeard, but he didn’t of course; faced with pictures of Henry VIII and his wives and the question ‘Who died last?’ the most obvious assumption is the last wife, Catherine Parr; after all, Anne Boleyn was famously beheaded and Katherine of Aragon died in the same year, Jane Seymour died following childbirth, and Katherine Howard, like Anne, went to the block. Catherine Parr survived Henry, but not by very much, sadly, since she re-married – and then died herself of childbirth - so, amid all the mortal departures, it’s quite easy to overlook the fact that Anne of Cleves survived the others by a respectable margin, and lived very comfortably in a nice house until the age of about 40.

We sell a ruler with pictures of Henry and all six of his wives in The Clink gift shop.

05/01/2024

In Christian tradition there are Twelve Days of Christmas and, even in this country, ‘Twelfth Night’ was celebrated up until the 1950s as the last blast of the Festive Season – in spite of the supermarkets, which rip their decorations down on Christmas Eve, as a reminder to us all to get back to work, and give them our wages, some people still retain their Christmas decorations until Twelfth Night. During the time of The Clink, Twelfth Night was the biggest party night of the year (even more so than Christmas Day), with singing door to door and drinking cups of Twelfth Night punch called ‘wassail’, and slices of a rich fruit ‘Twelfth Cake’. Shakespeare’s play, originally named ‘What You Will’ was renamed ‘Twelfth Night’ after the occasion on which it was first played.

In the Christian calendar, this is the Eve of Epiphany, which celebrates the visit of the Three Wise Men to the infant Jesus; while it seems unlikely that they were kings, they are traditionally known as Melchior, said to be from Persia, Balthasar from Babylon, and Caspar possibly from India. They brought precious gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. One tradition has it that Mary and Joseph sold these to finance their secret journey home, another that they were stolen by Judas Iscariot, a third (and truth is often stranger than fiction) that they were stolen by the two thieves later crucified on either side of Jesus.

Another postscript to the story is that the Wise Men became the first Christian converts and were martyred for their faith, and that their bodies were entombed at Constantinople then moved to Milan, then to Cologne Cathedral by Holy Roman Empower Barbarossa; there they are housed in the Shrine of the Three Kings, where they are venerated to this day. The shrine is of great magnificence and surely contains even more gold than the Wise Men gave to Jesus.

Today’s picture is the Adoration of The Kings as envisaged by Pieter Breughel.

05/01/2024

Ringing in the New Year with a historical twist at The Clink!
Join us as we bid farewell to the old and welcome the new amidst the ancient walls that have witnessed centuries of stories. Here's to a year filled with history, adventure, and unlocking new chapters!
Want to come in a group of 10 or more? Book a self-guided or guided tour and bring the sinister side of London's history to life.
Email [email protected] for details
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04/01/2024

During the State Opening of Parliament, an official called Black Rod summons the Commons to the Lords to hear the Queen’s Speech but, as Black Rod approaches the House of Commons, the doors are slammed in her face and she has to knock three times to be admitted; this emphasises the independence of the Commons from the Crown and dates back to this day in 1642, when King Charles I, having previously dismissed Parliament altogether and ruled without it for eleven years, only to recall it to help him raise taxes, now entered the House of Commons backed by troops to arrest five MPs and one Lord for failing to co-operate.

The film Cromwell shows Richard Harris (in the title role) as one of the five, but it’s not true; Cromwell was just a backbencher at the time – the five MPs were John Pym, William Strode, John Hampden, Denzil Holles and Sir Arthur Haselrig and the lord was Viscount Mandeville. They were nowhere to be seen; King Charles asked Speaker, William Lenthall, where the 5 MPs were. Lenthall replied that he could not say ‘except as this house directed him’. Charles observed famously that ‘The birds had flown’ and departed empty handed. After that the king adopted greater force and tried to use his army to make the country obey him; Parliament’s supporters raised armies of their own, and fought back.

Opinion in England over who should really rule had begun to curdle with the accession of King James in 1603, and was now distinctly polarised; while the king retained strong support in the countryside, the shires, the cathedral cities of Oxford, York, Chester and Worcester, and the less economically developed areas of northern and west, he engendered strong opposition in the industrial centres, ports, and economically advanced regions of southern and eastern England, including the remaining cathedral cities. London was Parliamentarian, and so was Southwark, in which The Clink Prison became a holding facility for Royalist prisoners of war.

03/01/2024

The followers of John Wycliffe might have had it that the split between the traditional and the progressive arms of Western Christianity began with their request that the Bible be translated into English, but the protest that gives Protestantism its name was a set of 95 theses nailed to a church door in Wittenberg in Germany nearly a hundred and forty years later in 1517 by a theologian named Martin Luther.

The good works of the Medieval Catholic Church – inspiring churches, fantastic paintings and statuary, and monasteries that maintained libraries, ran hospitals and provided shelter and food for travellers – were legion but, while Jesus had been a poor man, the church was ostentatiously rich, as well as contradictory, ignorant and transparently corrupt. It was nonsensical for the same holy relic to be on display in three different cathedrals, Pope Alexander VI was not just not celibate, he had made his own son a cardinal, and God’s forgiveness was being sold, in the form of indulgences and pardons, for money – quite often money made from the very crimes that the pardons were for. Faced with a lucid delineation of the church’s flaws, and an opportunity for root and branch reform, it was on this day on 1521 that Pope Leo X excommunicated Martin Luther.

All might have been well if Luther’s ideas had not assumed such wide appeal, and it was not just morally that the church was flawed; Galileo’s observations of the stars had told him that the earth was not the centre of the universe (and he said so until the Papal authorities told him very firmly to shut up); in many areas science was clarifying issues on which the church had generally obfuscated for centuries and, in that light the Pope saying ‘You can’t go to Heaven anymore’ didn’t seem as scary as it used to. Of course, the other convincing Protestant argument was that few German princes liked sending taxes to the Pope, and Martin Luther had given them reason to wonder if they really needed to.

02/01/2024

Yesterday, New Year’s Day 1753, a young woman named Elizabeth Canning may have been kidnapped and then held for a month in a house of ill repute at Enfield Wash by Mary Squires and ‘Mother’ Susannah Wells, who had wanted to employ her as a pr******te. She said she had been dragged there by two men, had had her stays stolen, and had been kept on bread and water (plus a mince pie she had had in her pocket) for a month – her emaciated condition seemed to confirm this.

At first is seemed a straightforward case of kidnap and the women, both known to be bawds (and Gypsies) were condemned to hang, but ex*****on was postponed and new evidence heard and Elizabeth Canning’s story started to collapse – the window she said she’d had to force had been unlocked all the time, and within easy reach of the ground and – since the big pile of human manure under it was undisturbed (that is pretty disreputable even by the standards of ill repute) – nobody had climbed out of it. Many people testified to having been in that very room – Elizabeth could have left with any one of them – and none of them had seen her. At least one of the accused women had been in Dorset, and there were witnesses.

The case began to draw huge public interest, and was reported in the press all over the country, with Henry Fielding championing Canning and Sir Crisp Gascoyne supporting Wells and Squires; each side had its set of supporters – the ‘Canningites’ and the ‘Egyptians’. Elizabeth Canning (suspected by some of having hid a pregnancy) found herself in the dock charged with perjury; she was found guilty (though the jury stressed their opinion that she meant no harm) and sentenced to seven years transportation. She married in Connecticut, had five children and died there in 1771 – wherever she had been during January 1753 remains one of the most baffling and controversial mysteries of Eighteenth Century England.

01/01/2024

Following his father’s ex*****on at the end of January 1649, Charles Stuart, Prince of Wales was languishing in exile in the Dutch town of Breda when he was visited by a delegation from the Scottish government; the Scots were outraged that the English Parliament (to whom they had sold Charles I in 1646) had tired of the king’s constant duplicity, tried him for treason, and chopped his head off, so they now wanted to help his son restore the English monarchy - albeit with certain conditions – one being that Prince Charles sign the Covenant, affirming his adherence to strict Scottish Presbyterianism.

It was anything but an attractive idea for the young prince; Charles’ religious leanings were decidedly Catholic, and his idea of a pleasant Sunday was a leisurely breakfast, an hour in church and the afternoon riding, while the Scottish clergy demanded he listen to six hours of sermons concerning the wickedness of sin (and Charles rather liked sin). Following the Scottish defeat at the Battle of Dunbar the clergy, rather than accept the blame for the demands they themselves had made of the general, insisted that Charles write a letter accepting responsibility himself. Faced with the prospect of having to surrender to Cromwell, he led the Scottish army in an invasion of England – this ended with defeat at the Battle of Worcester (and transportation for many Scottish soldiers), but Charles escaped.

He spent the next few months as a fugitive, hiding in priest holes and (famously) up the Boscobel Oak, while Cromwell’s soldiers (equally famously) passed within feet of him; he finally escaped to France and lived in Paris for a while until his romantic extravagances became too much even for the famously libertine French court (this may be some sort of record and should, perhaps, be more famous), and they offered him money to go away. While Charles returned to England as king in 1660, he never once returned to Scotland (his coronation there had been on this day in 1651).

30/12/2023

Our opening times for over the New Year period,
We are Open on Sunday New years Eve 10am - 6pm
and Monday New Years Day 11am - 6pm

30/12/2023

There’s a neatness to the idea that London Bridge was the only place for display of traitorous heads, but it’s not true, many cities had such sites (the king’s reach being very long indeed), with Mickelgate Bar being that for York; there in 1460 did the heads of Richard, Third Duke of York, and his brother-in-law, the Earl of Salisbury get spiked for opposing the rule of Henry VI – York with a paper crown and a placard ‘Let York o’erlook the town of York’. Salisbury might have been allowed to ransom himself and go free had his tenants not hated him so much – they’d dragged him out of Pontefract Castle and chopped his head off.

The day had seen York lose the Battle of Wakefield to superior Lancastrian numbers; he had very much been a man who would be king – and perhaps he should have been – it’s hard to imagine him being less effective than the weak, vacillating and frequently mad Henry VI, in fact the wonder is that there weren’t more men in the extended Plantagenet royal family urging their own worth as replacement kings and pointing out that, not only was the hapless Henry beholden to a gang of crooks, desperate to maintain their hold over him, his grandad, Henry IV, had stolen the throne from Richard II anyway.

The initially simple mechanism of hereditary monarchy had evolved from the king’s eldest son being the next king and had, by the 1450s grown an extended set of rules to cope with every possible circumstance, but still the rationale behind it seems to have been that, whatever the future held, God would provide the right heir to the throne to deal with it. With the royal family very literally at daggers drawn with each other, and the king incapable of forcing any kind of concord, this was being comprehensively given the lie; the best person to occupy the throne was he most likely to hang onto it, and Richard had left sons.

Today’s very fine picture is by Graham Turner.

29/12/2023

‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest’ is a line with such a fine turn that it’s easy to attribute it solely to TS Elliott’s play Murder in the Cathedral, but it seems fair to presume that Henry II did say something sufficiently similar because four of his knights most definitely did ride to Canterbury on this day in 1170 and brutally murder Archbishop Thomas A Becket. Thomas and Henry had been firm friends until their equally elevated egos clashed over the respective greatness’s of king and God.

Henry II was mortified when he heard the news, and insisted he had never wanted that outcome; he publically repented, wearing sackcloth and ashes, fasting for three days and being flogged by monks in the cathedral. The pope swiftly declared Becket a martyr, and subsequently made him a saint. Becket became very much a cult figure; embraced as a Londoner and adopted as London's co-patron saint with St Paul. Legends included banishing noisy nightingales from Otford in Kent, but also creating two springs of clean water, known now as ‘Becket’s Well’. In Strood, near Rochester, where locals in support of the king had docked the tail of the passing Becket's horse, his spirit is said to have caused Stroodians to be born with tails.

Fifty years after his death, Becket's remains were moved from his first tomb to a shrine in the new Trinity Chapel. King Henry III, the papal legate, the Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton and every kind of dignitary attended the ceremony. The shrine became a place of pilgrimage – most notably as the destination of Chaucer’s pilgrims, who departed from the Tabard Inn, just off the Borough High Street, five minutes dash from The Clink. Shamefully, Becket’s shrine is no longer there because, in 1538, in a monumental act of spite, Henry VIII had it and his bones destroyed, and all mention of him banned. It’s small consolation that Thomas A Becket was clearly frightening royal Henrys 368 years after his death.

28/12/2023

Today is the Catholic feast day commemorating the Massacre of the Holy Innocents; the atrocity whereby King Herod the Great, alarmed at hearing a new ‘King of the Jews’ had been born, ordered the deaths of all male children in Bethlehem below the age of two. Admittedly, Herod’s paranoia wasn’t unfounded; he was king only by virtue of having kicked the previous Parthian rulers out, and because he did what the occupying Romans told him – since his family were fairly recent converts to Judaism and from Edom, he was viewed as only half a Jew – but, while multiple infanticide doesn’t seem wholly out of character, there’s some doubt over whether it actually happened.

It's a great story, but Matthew’s gospel is the only one to mention it – other chroniclers don’t – and it seems to echo Pharoah’s Massacre of the First Born in Genesis. The estimated body count varies widely from Coptic sources suggesting 144,000, and the Catholic Encyclopaedia a significantly more conservative 30. Whatever the truth, the Three Wise Men, who must have known something of Herod’s character before entering Judea, would have been wiser to have invented some other plausible explanation for their following the star; they were at least wise enough to go home by another way, while the Holy Family departed incognito.

Today’s picture is Pieter Breghel’s re-imagining of the massacre and, as you can see, the artful Fleming has set it in his native Flanders. The troops are Spanish, with German mercenaries so, if you didn’t know that it represents First Century Judea, you could easily mistake it for an atrocity during the Eighty Years' War, possibly in the deep midwinter of 1564-65, with the bearded commander the famously cruel Duke of Alba. Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II acquired one version of the picture, and so disliked the slaughter by soldiers under his family banners that he had the children painted out and replaced by plundered food or animals; that version (fortunately one of several) is in the Royal Collection.

27/12/2023

Since we talked about Wenceslas yesterday, it seems unfair not to talk about Boxing Day today; a holiday whose history seems to have no connection with the sport of boxing whatsoever, in fact it is the day when, traditionally, the family at the manor house would give their servants the day off as one to spend with their families, giving them a Christmas Box of gifts and food (possibly left over from the Christmas table) to take back with them. The practice carried over into the towns, with customers giving cash gratuities to their favoured tradesmen, and masters gave their apprentices the day off and some money to spend on enjoying themselves.

From this grew various Boxing Day customs of groups of lads going door to door collecting presents of money and/or food and alcohol from successive prosperous householders, this might involve performing a song and dance; in Ireland and the Isle of Man the tradition was that the boys would be ‘Hunting the Wren’, with the traditional ‘Hunt the Wren’ song. In the Manx village of St Johns, there is the annual game of Cammag, an all-comers-welcome variant of hockey, which is good-humouredly violent.

It’s easy to see how games like this grew into the tradition of Boxing Day sporting fixtures – typically football, with the bracing winter chill of the terraces, and a cup of hot Bovril, being just the thing to blow away any after effects of over indulgence – but perhaps less easy to recognise is the appeal of ‘Boxing Day Sales’, whereby shopkeepers whose coffers are insufficiently distended after four weeks of Christmas shopping, throw open their doors again as soon as possibly possible in order to make even more money by offering unsold goods at reduced prices to people that cannot bear the pain of spending-withdrawal. We recommend the worthwhile alternative of an enlightening visit to your nearest prison museum instead.

26/12/2023

We’re all familiar with Good King Wenceslas looking out on the Feast of Stephen, but it’s easy to overlook that St Stephen’s Day is today. St Stephen was one of the seven deacons appointed by the Apostles after Jesus’s death to distribute alms to the poor. He later berated the council of Jewish elders, the Sanhedrin, for allowing Jesus to be crucified - he went as far as to say that there hadn’t been a prophet that the Jewish elders hadn’t persecuted, which can’t have won him any friends at all - he caused such anger that he was summarily stoned to death, and the apparatchik later to become St Paul stood by and watched.

The history of Wenceslas – properly Vaclav the Good, Duke of Bohemia – is hardly less gruesome; Vaclav was a third generation Christian, but with a pagan mother – when he was 13, his father died, and his Christian grandmother Ludmilla took over as regent. Jealous of her influence over Vaclav, his mother, Drahomira, had Ludmilla assassinated (apparently strangled with her own veil) – Drahomira then took over and began a persecution of Christians. She was removed in a coup by the remaining Christian nobility and banished. Vaclav became duke at the age of 18.

He ruled from 921 – 929 and seems to have been a wise and pious duke. He was eventually murdered after a night drinking and feasting by servants of his brother Boleslav the Cruel - Boleslav himself performed the coup de grace with a lance. Vaclav was swiftly declared king after his death, as well as being made a saint. The main square in Prague was named in his honour. His celebrated mission of charity in the snow on the Second Day of Christmas is another question entirely, though some question hangs over why any peasant, whose home was so close to the forest fence, would need to walk a ‘good league’ (three miles) to gather winter fuel – not up to no good, surely?

24/12/2023

WE ARE OPEN TODAY 10am - 6pm.
CLOSED Christmas Day.
OPEN on Boxing Day 11am - 5pm.
MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM EVERYONE AT THE CLINK!

24/12/2023

Little Jack Horner was something of a motif for self-interest in public Eighteenth Century life, included in Henry James’ Grub Street Opera, and was the subject of this epigram by Samuel Bishop:

What are they but Jack Horners, who snug in their corners,
Cut freely the public pie?
Till each with his thumb has squeezed out a round plum,
Then he cries, “What a Great Man am I!

The history of his Christmas Pie begins as a spiced mutton pie, usually made in a large dish called a ‘coffin’, said to represent the shape of the manger that served the infant Jesus as a crib, and the multitude of spices including cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg was, according to the English antiquary John Timbs, ‘in token of the offerings of the Eastern Magi.’ – these being the Three Wise Men that came to visit the Holy Family on the night now known as ‘The Feast of Epiphany’.

Which just goes to illustrate the invention of English Catholicism in conferring a little bit of holiness on a massively indulgent Christmas treat, and it’s an equally trenchant indictment of the Puritans that, once in a position of sufficient authority, they went and banned it. While the pie returned following the Restoration its recipe was dutifully shorn of any association with popery. Over the years, the meat content decreased and, by Victorian times, had generally dwindled down to just the suet, leaving us with the mince pie that we know today, with vegetarian suet an option.

A very fine description of Christmas Pie disapproval was published in the December 1733 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine, citing (possibly made-up) Quaker opinion that the pie was ‘an Hodge-Podge of Superstition, Popery, the Devil and all his Works’ invented by ‘ the Scarlet W***e of Babylon’. This does seem a little bit extreme – we’d have thought, being that scarlet, she’d have had quite enough spicery to occupy her without much time for creating recipes, though maybe she did that as a hobby.

23/12/2023

The ‘Knight in Armour’ pencil sharpeners that we sell in The Clink gift shop are actually quite accurate representations of basic C15 plate armour, and provide useful illustration of just how sophisticated military technology had become by the end of the medieval period; while a suit of armour (or a ‘full plate harness’ to use the proper term) might be composed of more than two dozen separate pieces; these could be wrought to a very high standard, with every apparent decoration and embellishment giving extra strength and deflection. To comfortably put the whole lot on, taking time for the wearer to get accustomed to the weight of each piece, can take upwards of ninety minutes.

To look at a good suit of C15 plate, it can be hard to see just where, in a straight fight, you would manage to get a sword blade in to kill your opponent – an arrow with an armour-piercing head might get through, but swords were the principal weapon that armour was designed to deflect, and armourers, then as now working with the top technology, had got extremely good at that – faced with a full-body deflection suit, metre-long sharp blades simply glanced off – but this simply meant that other weapons got adopted; in spite of its noble status, the sword was being superseded.

The best way to take out an armoured man seems to be to get him off his feet first – this with a heavy mace to get a sufficiently devastating blow at his head, or with a pole arm to yank his legs from under him, and then to get in up close with a dagger – there are parts of the body that no armour would protect so, if a blade could not be thrust under the gorget and into the throat, or through the visor into the eye, there was always up between the legs or (better still) into the armpit – with a nice long blade on your rondel dagger, that’s straight into the heart.

Address

1 Clink Street
London
SE19DG

Opening Hours

Monday	10am - 7:30pm
Tuesday	10am - 6pm
Wednesday	10am - 6pm
Thursday	10am - 6pm
Friday	10am - 7:30pm
Saturday	10am - 7:30pm
Sunday	10am - 7:30pm

Telephone

+44 20 7403 0900

Website

http://www.clink.co.uk/

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