Category: History

Radical Inns and Coffee Houses of London

Radical inns, taverns, alehouses, coffee houses, homes, houses, chapels,
Institutes, debating clubs and Spencean ‘free and easies’
Derived from a reading of Radical Underworld by Ian McCalman,
Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance 1790-1820
by David Worrall,
William Cuffay The Life & Times of a Chartist Leader by Martin Hoyles,
The Spirit of Despotism by John Barrell,
Ian Newman http://www.1790salehouse.com/
and Francis Boorman’s thesis on Chancery Lane
https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/5797/1/Francis_Boorman_- The_Political_space_of_Chancery_Lane_c._1760-1815.pdf

First up, the Bell in Exeter Street, where the LCS was formed in 1791,
To hear Thomas Hardy, founder of the LCS:
‘The Rights of Man’ ‘are not confined to this small island
But are extended to the whole human race, black or white,
High or low, rich or poor’;
Then to the Globe Tavern, corner of the Strand and Craven Street,
Where LCS divisions met in 1794:
‘We must have redress from our own laws and not from the laws
of our plunderers, enemies and oppressors’
Next, to Soho for the Panton Street Debating Club of 1795,
And the London Corresponding Society, once more:
“If the King … dare attempt to trample upon the Liberties of the People,
I hope they will trample upon his head”;
Other LCS pubs: The Friend at Hand, Little North Street,
The French Horn, Lambeth Walk,
The Queen’s Arms, Kennington Lane,
The Fox and Hounds, Sydenham,
But we’re off to Lunan’s public house,
Academy Court, Chancery Lane,
With Jacobins and spies in Bell’s Yard, too:
‘He talked of killing the King with blow-pipe
and poisoned arrow’;

Radical inns, taverns, alehouses, coffee houses, homes, houses, chapels,
Institutes, debating clubs and Spencean ‘free and easies’
Derived from a reading of Radical Underworld by Ian McCalman,
Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance 1790-1820
by David Worrall,
William Cuffay The Life & Times of a Chartist Leader by Martin Hoyles,
The Spirit of Despotism by John Barrell,
Ian Newman http://www.1790salehouse.com/
and Francis Boorman’s thesis on Chancery Lane
https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/5797/1/Francis_Boorman_- The_Political_space_of_Chancery_Lane_c._1760-1815.pdf

First up, the Bell in Exeter Street, where the LCS was formed in 1791,
To hear Thomas Hardy, founder of the LCS:
‘The Rights of Man’ ‘are not confined to this small island
But are extended to the whole human race, black or white,
High or low, rich or poor’;
Then to the Globe Tavern, corner of the Strand and Craven Street,
Where LCS divisions met in 1794:
‘We must have redress from our own laws and not from the laws
of our plunderers, enemies and oppressors’
Next, to Soho for the Panton Street Debating Club of 1795,
And the London Corresponding Society, once more:
“If the King … dare attempt to trample upon the Liberties of the People,
I hope they will trample upon his head”;
Other LCS pubs: The Friend at Hand, Little North Street,
The French Horn, Lambeth Walk,
The Queen’s Arms, Kennington Lane,
The Fox and Hounds, Sydenham,
But we’re off to Lunan’s public house,
Academy Court, Chancery Lane,
With Jacobins and spies in Bell’s Yard, too:
‘He talked of killing the King with blow-pipe
and poisoned arrow’;

Then to Furnival’s Inn cellar in the Strand:
‘The very general resort of the most Jacobinical politics in London’,
Another haunt of the London Corresponding Society,
And the United Englishmen, too;
The George alehouse in Clerkenwell next,
At the junction of Compton Street and St John Street,
Where the United Englishmen debated arming for a coup d’etat –
1799 saw raids on the Royal Oak in Red Lion Passage,
And the Nag’s Head in St John Street;
After that, the Green Dragon in Fore Street (Moorfields)
Became a new radical port of call,
While the Ham and Windmill Tavern in Windmill Street,
Saw spies reporting on Colonel Despard :
“May the wings of Liberty never lose a feather” –
Then in 1802, Colonel Despard was caught in a raid
On the Oakley Arms in Lambeth – and would lose his head …
At his trial in 1803, a soldier spoke of the Ham and Windmill
And how he had been asked to be ‘sworn in’, to ‘a free and easy society’ –
‘Free and Easies’:
Political sing songs, debates, discussions and readings:
‘A free and easy society
To overthrow the Government,
And have our nation the same as the French’;
Next: the Cock on the corner of Lumber Court and Grafton Street, Soho,
Where the Polemic Club met,
And Thomas Spence in his free and easy style, too;
And then, after his death:
The Society of Spencean Philanthropists, founded in October 1814,
By Thomas Evans,
Where numbers grew from around sixty before the end of the French Wars,
To two to three hundred in the febrile days of 1815 to 1820,
With sometimes 2 – 3, 000 regular attenders at political meetings;
Now on to Thomas Evans’ house in Fetter Lane near Fleet Street;
And the Seven Stars in Bethnal Green
Where the United Irishmen practised drilling in the garden in 1798;
Other Spencean meeting places and ‘free and easies’ included
The Swan in New Street Square
(Where Spence held his free and easies from 1803 onwards),
And the Fleece in Windmill Street;
Next up:
’Doctor’ Watson of the Cato St Conspiracy and his surgeon-apothecary shops,
In the Strand at 5 Newcastle Street and 6 Catherine Street,
And later out at Somers Town, in Clarendon Place,
Next, what became the chief Spencean watering-hole:
The Mulberry Tree in Moorfields
(Mary Johnson, wife of the publican, was interrogated as a Spencean in 1798);
Now, for other public houses with a radical reputation:
The Green Dragon in Fore Street and the Ben Jonson’s Head in Red Lion Street

(United Englishmen ports of call in 1798; Spencean after that);
The Baptist’s Head in St John’s Lane,
The Old Paul’s Head Tavern, 5 Cateaton Street,
The Crescent in Jewin Street, Cripplegate,
The Mermaid Tavern – meeting place of the Socratic Club;
Other Spencean ‘free and easies’: the Nag’s Head, Carnaby Market,
The Northumberland Arms, Bethnal Green,
The Waterman’s Arms, Castle Street, Bethnal Green
(‘May the Skin of the tyrants be burnt into Parchment
and the Rights of Man be written on it’),
The King’s Head in St Luke’s,
The Red Lion, Spitalfields,
The Spotted Dog, Clement Lane, Spitalfields,
And the Golden Key in Spitalfields;
A spy reported on Thomas Preston, shoemaker and author,
At the Red Hart in Shoe Lane,
“He usually asked, in the Tap-room he visited, if there were any Men out of Work; if there were, he immediately sent for Bread, Cheese & Beer, saying, ‘It is the Duty of every one not to see any one in distress, but to divide all equally.’”

Now for some Spencean debating clubs and taverns:
The Commercial Rooms in Whitechapel,
The George, East Harding Street, and the Cecil in St Martin’s Lane;
Spencean Thomas Wedderburn shook his fist at Robert Owen
In the City of London tavern;
He, along with fellow Ultras,
Also frequented (in addition to all those named above)
His new chapel at the corner of Hopkins St and Brewer St, Soho,
The Falcon in Fetter Lane, the White Horse Tavern,
The Borough Road Chapel, in High Holborn,
Archer Street Chapel (number six),

The ‘New Assembly Room’ for ‘Christian Diabolists’
At 12 White’s Alley, Chancery Lane;
Now to the Saracen’s Head
(Where Samuel Waddington practised comic, burlesque Spenceanism),
And the Scotch Arms in New Round Court –
Waddington also entertained at trades’ alehouses
In Goswell Street and the Barbican;
There was a radical printing works at 21 Clerkenwell Green;
The ‘Society of Infidel Publicists’
Met at the Patriot Coffee House, Soho,
And at the apothecary-pressman Griffin’s place in Holborn.
The First London Cooperative Manufacturing Society
Was established at the Spencean
Charles Jennison’s shoemaking place in Old Street,
Before moving to be closer to Robert Owen’s Grays Inn Road Exchange,
Where Owenite festivals were held –
Allen Davenport’s play about ‘Co-operation’, The Social Age,
Attracted an audience of some 300 at the Charlotte Street Exchange,
He lived by Goswell Street, frequenting, with fellow Radicals,
The Cornish Coffee House, Bunhill Row, and the Hope Coffee House –
As president of the Tower Street Mutual Instruction Society,
And the Gould Square Mechanics’ Institute,
Honorary member of the Finsbury Mutual Instruction Society, in Bunhill,
And of William Lovett’s somewhat Dickensian-sounding
National Association for Promoting Social and Political Improvement;
The Cato Street conspirators met beneath a portrait
of executed Arthur Thistlewood
At Walker’s Coffee House, Union Street, Spitalfields,
While other Ultras, apart from James Walker,
Opened coffee houses as way of avoiding too much surveillance:
For example, James Whittaker, Thomas Evans
And James Ings, who was, of course, beheaded
With Thistlewood at Newgate, after Cato Street –
The spy, Shegog (nom de guerre?) faithfully delivered reports
On these coffee houses, as well as the Patriot in Soho,
The Chapter and the Sun in the Barbican,
And Williams’ Coffee House in St Martin Le Grand
(Shegog: “the most successful auxiliary the seditious and corrupt press have”);

Just around the corner from Walker’s was
Sampson Elliot’s Coffee Shop in Old Street,
And close by in these radical coffee shop environs:
The Phoenix in Grub Street, The Cambridge in Shoreditch,
And the Albion Coffee House in Lantern Wall, Shoreditch;
The British Forum republican anti-slavery debating club,
With its practice of discussion, readings, debates and singing,
Met five times in the week at Lunts Coffee House, Clerkenwell Green,
While Spencean free and easy traditions
Were perpetuated into the 1820s and 30s
At the Mercer’s Arms, Longacre,
The Cheshire Cheese became the haunt of radical shoemakers
And some who had been on the fringes of the Cato Street Conspiracy;
The shoemaker’s union and sundry Spenceans
Also met at the York Arms, Holborn,

Members of groups pivotal to the formation of metropolitan Chartism –
From organisations such as the 1830 Metropolitan Political Union,
The National Union of the Working Classes,
The Finsbury Forum of 1834-35,
The East London Democratic Association
(Became the LDA) 1833-34) –
Veteran Spenceans and Ultras such as Davenport, the Neesoms and Waddington
Met regularly at old favourites such as Lunts, the Albion,
And Benbow’s Commercial Coffee House at Temple Bar;
The blasphemous chapels were favourites too:
The Philadelphia Chapel in Windmill Street,
The Old Borough Chapel in Chapel Court,
Benbow’s Chapel at 8 Theobald’s Road,
The Bowling Square Chapel, Bethnal Green;
And then, old pubs were remembered too:
The Green Dragon in Fore Street,
The Spotted Cow in the Old Kent Road,
And the Standard of Liberty in Brick Lane,
(Spies wrote of Benbow meeting in Hoxteth alehouses,
In 1834, discussing assassination plans),
While eleven years later, close by the Mulberry Tree,
Elizabeth and Charles Neesom, at 5 Moor Lane,
Would nurse Allen Davenport as he declined towards death;
Over in Pentonville, when Davenport was younger,
Shegog the spy reported that
‘many of the Spencean’, ‘And other seditious characters’
Were congregating in ‘some of the Publick Houses’
‘In the neighbourhood’ of the Belvidere Tavern, Pentonville Road,
Where some Ultras were optimistic that
‘some enthusiastic characters may be worked upon to commit Assassination’;
Thomas Preston was one of those involved in the planning
Of the aborted uprising at Bartholomew’s Fair in 1817,
But when he went to the Broad Arrow Tavern in Grub Street,
‘One of his Daughters … implored him not to begin on account of the soldiers’ –
But Shegog reported that the Revolutionaries
‘Are very busy in getting Arms and Ammunition & Cutlasses’ …
He attended the meeting held at the Duke’s Arms, Upper Marsh, Lambeth,
‘There were about 40 or 50 of the Chief leaders present,
Some from Bethnalgreen, Spittalfields, Bermondsey, the Borough and Lambeth,
Men of the worst description, ready for any desperate enterprize’;
Thomas Preston exclaimed that ‘if 25,000 men would join him
He would give Liberty to the world’;
The future Cato Street Conspirators embarked
on a ‘desperate enterprize’, of course,
And they met regularly at the White Lion in Wych Street:
“a Little man in a black Coat & White Apron a large Pistol in a Black belt the rest to the amount of 40 all armed & loaded …
Thislewood came in & inspected them …”;
They also met at the White Lion in Turnmill Street,
Pledging to attend a meeting in Covent Garden ‘armed …with Flags’,
They also frequented Pitts Place, Drury Lane,
And the Rose in Wild Street, Drury Lane;
In the wake of Peterloo, in August 1819,
Two hundred heard John Gast read the news
at the George in East Harding Street,
Nearly three hundred met in sombre mood at the Jacob’s Well
Almost a week after Peterloo, on August 22nd 1819;
A spy reported on ‘monies being expended on ammunition’
At the Red Cross in Fore Street, Cripplegate,
While a report from the Crown & Anchor at Seven Dials,
Mentioned that ‘several’ were ‘armed with Pistols & spring Bayonets’ …
In conclusion, we remember the Fox and Goose in Pooley Street,
And the Salmon and Ball, Bethnal Green Road:
‘Sing and meet and meet and sing,
And your Chains will drop off like burnt thread’,
While we walk, talk and map the streets and palimpsests
Of radical London pubs, coffee house, chapels, institutes and meeting places,
c. 1790-1850,
On Thomas Spence’s birthday, June 21st,
Focusing upon Islington, Hackney, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Finsbury, Spitalfields, Holborn, Marylebone, Soho,
& South of the river:
Lambeth and Southwark,
Not forgetting the site of Thomas Spence’s bookshop,
The Hive of Liberty in Little Turnstile, High Holborn;
And Spa Fields, Clerkenwell,
The Globe, Shoe Lane, Fleet Street
(A postal collection point in 1830,
For the Metropolitan Political Union),
Cold Bath Fields Prison, Clerkenwell,
The Reformers’ Memorial in Kensal Green,
And remembering Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt’s triumphal entry into London,
On his way to stand trial, less than a month after the Manchester tragedy,
And there, the ghosts of the future Cato Street conspirators,
There, in the ‘tens of thousands’,
Together with the ghost of John Keats:
“It would take me a whole day and a quire of paper
to give you any thing like detail…
The whole distance from the Angel Islington to the
Crown and anchor” in the Strand “was lined with multitudes” …
Within a week, he would pen lines that could speak to Spenceans,
And their dream of common ownership of land:
‘To Autumn’ …
‘… Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor …

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours…’

The Life of Allen Davenport

Allen Davenport

Prologue

When you were there at the Hopkins Street political chapel,
Or the Archer Street chapel in Soho,
Or listening at the Mulberry Tree in Moorfields,
In those months before the Cato Street Conspiracy,
There, with Robert Wedderburn –
Your rhetoric celebrating atheism,
Denouncing Christian hypocrisy
And espousing armed sedition,
In this, the most revolutionary
Of all the Spencean and political chapels,
Did your mind ever wander madeleine-like,
To the green in Ewen where you taught yourself to read,
And where you taught yourself to write?

(‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’)

Part the First

You had been a friend of Thomas Spence,
Since you had first met him in 1804,
It was Spence’s Restorer of Society to its Natural State
That set you on the path to political prose and poetry,

Allen Davenport

Prologue

When you were there at the Hopkins Street political chapel,
Or the Archer Street chapel in Soho,
Or listening at the Mulberry Tree in Moorfields,
In those months before the Cato Street Conspiracy,
There, with Robert Wedderburn –
Your rhetoric celebrating atheism,
Denouncing Christian hypocrisy
And espousing armed sedition,
In this, the most revolutionary
Of all the Spencean and political chapels,
Did your mind ever wander madeleine-like,
To the green in Ewen where you taught yourself to read,
And where you taught yourself to write?

(‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’)

Part the First

You had been a friend of Thomas Spence,
Since you had first met him in 1804,
It was Spence’s Restorer of Society to its Natural State
That set you on the path to political prose and poetry,

Spence’s writings were an epiphany for you:
‘’Tis reason’s light – an intellectual sun,
Whose influence, none but fools and tyrants shun.
‘Tis human knowledge, and a sense of right,
That burst upon me like a flood of light’;

You would be Thomas’ biographer,
A prolific versifier and poet,
A delegate to the Shoemakers’ Union,
And in defiance of the Combination Acts,
A supporter of a general strike,
In 1813, just after the northern Luddites;
Later, a radical and revolutionary writer,
Turning towards physical force
After ‘reason’s light’ failed to sway ‘fools and tyrants’,
A government spy reported thus on the Spencean view
About the projected peaceful meeting at St Peters Fields
(When Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt famously declared:
‘Bring nought but your self-approving consciences’) –
‘They expect the Row to begin, and this they look upon as the signal to begin. They will be much disappointed if that meeting goes off quietly.’

Part the Second

There was a rush of Spencean publications
In the lead up to Peterloo:
Address of the Society of Christian Philanthropists to All Mankind,
on the Means of Promoting Liberty and Happiness’
More Plots, More Treason, More Green Bags,
But you, Allen, still remembered the quintessential
Principles of agrarianism:
‘Thus all the world BELONGS TO MAN,
But NOT to Kings and Lords;
A country’s lands the people’s farm,
And all that it affords:
For why? Divide it how you will,
‘Tis all the people’s still:
The people’s country, parish, town;
They build, defend and till’.
But, part of the web and fringe of Cato Street Conspirators,
You spoke thus in the wake of Peterloo:
‘War … has … been declared against us why then should we hesitate,
for my own part I am ready now … I compare the present time to the crisis of the French Revolution, we must arm ourselves as they did.’
A close confidante of Robert Wedderburn,
Radical atheist and physical force revolutionary,
Arthur Thistlewood ‘ says he depends more on
Wedderburn’s division for being armed than all the rest’;

Part the Third

After the failure of the Conspiracy,
In the quieter 1820s
(The decade of so-called ‘Liberal Toryism’),
You would write verse in praise of Owenism,
Extend the principles of the ‘People’s Farm’
(‘I have no doubt that it was the Agrarian fellowship in land
that presented to the minds of the ancients the idea of Paradise’),
To the wider industrial means of production
And transport infrastructure
(‘Manufacturing machinery’ should be ‘public property’),
Propose action redolent of an Amazon boycott:
‘the middle and lower classes of shopkeepers are as much dissatisfied with the government as the working people are. The plan by which I propose to form an alliance between the working classes and the lower class of shopkeepers or middlemen, is exclusive dealing’.
You would write a ‘Cooperative Catechism’,
Give lectures with fellow working class leaders,
Write for Richard Carlisle’s The Republican,
Write for the Cooperative Magazine,
Support the British Association for Promoting Co-operative Knowledge,
Become president of the Great Tower Mutual Instruction Society
At the Society for Scientific, Useful and Literary Information
(The Bowling Square chapel in Lower White Cross Street),
Support the Society for Promoting Anti-Christian and General Instruction,
Where three hundred could meet at the ‘Optimist Chapel’
(The clergy? ‘robbing the lower class of people
and not only them but the poor Farmers …
Tythes and Taxation all owing to them
by their Extravagance and Luxury’);

Part the Fourth

Speak at protest meetings at the Borough Chapel,
Support contraception on feminist grounds,
Speak for the National Union of the Working Classes,
At the ‘Finsbury Forum’
(Was it really in an old cow shed near St Luke’s,
Before moving to a house in Bunhill Row?),
But the Finsbury group was in the radical vanguard
Over the 1832 Reform Act:
‘Confiscate the estates of obdurate peers!’
It helped lead the unstamped press campaign;
It took the lead with the NUWC,
And led criticism of the new police in 1834 at Cold Bath Fields,
With AD once more in the vanguard:
‘The object of the Government was not to warn but surround and slaughter … this police mob … It behoves every friend of peace, order and good government to be on their guard against these common disturbers of peaceable society’,
Then you’re in Brighton Street at a ‘Mechanics’ Forum’,
Trumpeting the thoughts of Thomas Spence.
‘Author of the Spencean system, or Agarian Equality’
At the London Co-operative Society,
Then a founder member of the London Manufacturing Community,
Becoming its storekeeper,
But still finding the time to use your quill:
‘We manufactured boots, shoes, brushes, etc., and for a time, our little establishment inspired us with the most ardent hopes that it would realise our fondest anticipations, and convince the world of the superiority of the co-operative principle over that of competition.’

Part the Fifth

Your life bridged and fused together
So many different strands of thought,
In a span that stretched from the American Revolution
To the ‘Hungry Forties’ and Chartism:
Agrarianism; Revolution; Owenism; Secularism,
And, finally, metropolitan Chartism:
You were president of the ELDA,
And a founder member of the East London Democratic Association,
You campaigned, spoke and lectured all over London,
Your 1836 biography of the great pioneer,
Life, Writings, and Principles of Thomas Spence,
Was acclaimed by old comrades and new Chartist companions,
When you spoke on the celebration of Spence’s birthday,
Before a rerun of the rousing old songs of Spence,
And when the first Chartist Land Plan scheme
Came to fruition at O’Connorville in Hertfordshire,
You jubilantly declared that ‘The Jubilee is come at last’,
For ‘the Agrarian Revolution’ had seemingly commenced.

Part the Sixth

‘If there were no parks or pleasure grounds, the whole face of the country would present to the eye cornfields, meadows, gardens, plantations of all kinds of fruit trees etc., all to the highest state of cultivation.’

Post-script:

‘I feel I should add a few lines about just what I owed my wife. She was tireless in supporting my work as a cobbler and tireless in helping me develop as a thinker, polemicist and writer. She gave me confidence, love and a child.
When she died, my income though shoemaking plumbed the depths. She was my indefatigable partner in the industrious production of shoes, clogs and boots. And Thomas Spence was too, in a sort of numinous manner: with his dedication of some words to our patron saint, to the ‘Service of St Crispin’, after our 1812 strike failed to improve our lot in the metropolis.’

Post-post-script:

A government spy’s report of Allen’s words after Peterloo: ‘The Yoemanry had murdered our fellow Countrymen but had we in our own Defence shot even one or two of them it would have been called Murder and Rebellion, but [we] will put up with it no longer … we may loose a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are laboring under the yoke of Despotism … these Yoemanry are but few compared with us and it only wants the People to make up their minds as one Man for it is better to Die fighting in the cause of Liberty and freedom than be starved by our Oppressors.’

Post-post-post-script:

Concluding Remarks on Allen Davenport
The King, or Legitimacy Unmasked, A Satirical Poem
Printed by the celebrated exponent of the Spencean burlesque,
Samuel Waddington in Oxford Street in 1819;
This poem written by the son of a weaver in Ewen,
Was bought by a government spy from Robert Wedderburn;
This boy who taught himself to read and write,
Would become a noted writer for Sherwin’s Political Register,
But when he made his last recorded visit to Wedderburn’s chapel,
So he ceased to contribute to the radical press –
The Theological Comet asked:
‘What is become of A.D.?’
Followed by Davenport’s poem,
‘Saint Ethelstone’s Day’,
Which commented upon Peterloo’s
‘Yoemanry Butchers’ who
‘hacked off the breasts of women
and then cut off the ears and noses of men’,
Then his lines about consequent Christian hypocrisy;
So let us remember Allen Davenport with his own concluding words:

‘Every man should study Politics, for my part I study them all Day. I write on them, I dream of them at Night, I stand here twice a week preaching Blasphemy and Sedition (as they call it and will continue to do so unless they rob me of my liberty.’
And, finally, his speech from October 27th 1819: “Let us prepare to knock down this system of tyranny to rush upon the Cannon’s Mouth and if we should not succeed Die gloriously in the Struggle.”

Sources used:
Artisans and Politics in Early 19th Century London John Gast and His Times
Iorweth Prothero Methuen 1979
The Life and Times of Thomas Spence P.M. Ashraf 1983
The Poor Man’s Revolutionary ed by Alastair Bonnett and Keith Armstrong
The People’s Farm English Radical Agrarianism 1775-1840 Malcolm Chase
The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport With a further selection of the author’s work Compiled and Edited by Malcolm Chase Scolar Press 1994
The Muses’s Wreath, containing Hornsey Wood and other Poems Allen Davenport
Radical Underworld Ian McCalman Clarendon Paperbacks
Radical Culture David Worrall Wayne State University

Worker’s Memorial Day Walk Remembering Allen Davenport

Remembering Allen Davenport

‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’

‘If there were no parks or pleasure grounds, the whole face of the country would present to the eye cornfields, meadows, gardens, plantations of all kinds of fruit trees etc., all to the highest state of cultivation.’

A government spy’s report of Allen’s words after Peterloo: ‘The Yoemanry had murdered our fellow Countrymen but had we in our own Defence shot even one or two of them it would have been called Murder and Rebellion, but [we] will put up with it no longer … we may loose a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are laboring under the yoke of Despotism … these Yoemanry are but few compared with us and it only wants the People to make up their minds as one Man for it is better to Die fighting in the cause of Liberty and freedom than be starved by our Oppressors.’

Thanks to Deborah Roberts for the above photograph.

Remembering Allen Davenport

‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’

‘If there were no parks or pleasure grounds, the whole face of the country would present to the eye cornfields, meadows, gardens, plantations of all kinds of fruit trees etc., all to the highest state of cultivation.’

A government spy’s report of Allen’s words after Peterloo: ‘The Yoemanry had murdered our fellow Countrymen but had we in our own Defence shot even one or two of them it would have been called Murder and Rebellion, but [we] will put up with it no longer … we may loose a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are laboring under the yoke of Despotism … these Yoemanry are but few compared with us and it only wants the People to make up their minds as one Man for it is better to Die fighting in the cause of Liberty and freedom than be starved by our Oppressors.’

Concluding Remarks on Allen Davenport
The King, or Legitimacy Unmasked, A Satirical Poem
Printed by the celebrated exponent of the Spencean burlesque,
Samuel Waddington in Oxford Street in 1819;
This poem written by the son of a weaver in Ewen,
Was bought by a government spy from Robert Wedderburn;
This boy who taught himself to read and write,
Would become a noted writer for Sherwin’s Political Register,
But when he made his last recorded visit to Wedderburn’s chapel,
So he ceased to contribute to the radical press –
The Theological Comet asked:
‘What is become of A.D.?’
Followed by Davenport’s poem,
‘Saint Ethelstone’s Day’,
Which commented upon Peterloo’s
‘Yoemanry Butchers’ who
‘hacked off the breasts of women
and then cut off the ears and noses of men’,
Then his lines about consequent Christian hypocrisy;
So let us remember Allen Davenport with his own concluding words:

‘Every man should study Politics, for my part I study them all Day. I write on them, I dream of them at Night, I stand here twice a week preaching Blasphemy and Sedition (as they call it and will continue to do so unless they rob me of my liberty.’
And, finally, his speech from October 27th 1819: “Let us prepare to knock down this system of tyranny to rush upon the Cannon’s Mouth and if we should not succeed Die gloriously in the Struggle.”

 

A Prehistory Trip to Stroud Museum

‘Museums make you more aware:
Give You
Sense
Sensibility
Knowledge
A foothold in time
Make you feel a part of it all’

It’s a right regular education
When you visit Stroud Museum,
To process through the rooms,
On a trek to a prehistoric age:

For here’s a cabinet of curiosities:
Twenty-four exhibits, including
The tooth from an ancient Minchinhampton crocodile,
A coral from Newmarket, Nailsworth,
A Nautilus from Rodborough …
The Paris Situationists’ slogan
‘Underneath the pavements, the beach!’
Is displaced by this vista of the vastness of Time:
‘Over our heads as we walk the Stroudwater valleys,
The limitless ancient ocean!’

Stroud Museum and Prehistoric Stroud

‘Museums make you more aware:
Give You
Sense
Sensibility
Knowledge
A foothold in time
Make you feel a part of it all’

It’s a right regular education
When you visit Stroud Museum,
To process through the rooms,
On a trek to a prehistoric age:

For here’s a cabinet of curiosities:
Twenty-four exhibits, including
The tooth from an ancient Minchinhampton crocodile,
A coral from Newmarket, Nailsworth,
A Nautilus from Rodborough …
The Paris Situationists’ slogan
‘Underneath the pavements, the beach!’
Is displaced by this vista of the vastness of Time:
‘Over our heads as we walk the Stroudwater valleys,
The limitless ancient ocean!’

.
And here is another cabinet of curiosities:
A cabinet of ammonites and molluscs
A mixture of the extinct and the extant:
Long gone species such as the ichthyosaur,
But ‘Incredibly, the Lingula bracheopods have existed for some 500 million years’:
It’s enough to blow your mind as you muse on the ineffable nature of Time,
Here by the cabinets in Stroud Museum.
And there within a cabinet,
Carefully labelled and dated
By some fossicking antiquarian,
Lie the exhibits with their discovery date:
May 1939,
That last innocent spring
Spent in ruminative discovery,
Before the Age of Blitzkrieg and Holocaust.

Visitors wander along chatting about the exhibits,
Two plan excursions to fossil sites,
A young mum educates her child,
Friendly staff chat to me about what I am doing,
Another two people pass me,
Talking about Cotswold long barrows,
And here, a board with artists’ impressions
Of a Mesolithic landscape at Stroud,
The Neolithic long barrow at Nympsfield,
And the Iron Age fort at Uley
And here, a photo of Uley Bury in the here and now,
Together with a reconstruction of way back then,
Together with text about Crickley Hill,
And Neolithic arrowheads found there,
And slingstones and arrowheads found at Uley Bury
(built c.300 B.C.)
Then a large cabinet full of old bones,
Including – possibly – the bones
Of a Neolithic hunting dog
Found at the ‘so-called “Soldier’s Grave”,
a Neolithic round barrow at Frocester’,
And here, copper and bronze axes from the Bronze Age,
And Neolithic flint flakes
And Iron Age slingstones
In another cabinet of curiosities,
When along came Ian, a Museum volunteer,
Who told me how he often stands by the Romano-British altars,
And the funerary exhibits,
Reflecting on life, death and the genius loci
OF time and space locked behind the glass doors of the cabinets,
It all felt a bit M.R. James ghost story-like:
‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ …
I wouldn’t dare whistle here if I were you …

For here is a cabinet with a boy’s skull and a beaker,
A Bronze Age cinerary urn
‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ …
There, a Neolithic trephined skull from Bisley,
This is a copy. The original is in the British Museum.
‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ …

Well, tempus fugit and all that,
It was time for me to go;
Sense, sensibility and knowledge all augmented,
Horizons broadened,
Educated, informed and entertained
In the true traditions of public service.
I bought some polished ammonites before I left the museum,
A present for my wife on her birthday,
To help her reflect on the nature of time and mortality,
And walked out into a windswept mad March day,
Feeling slightly wired by what I had seen and read,
Slightly ever so pantheistic,
Aware and part of it all:
The robin singing in the blossom blackthorn,
The rising, rushing Painswick stream by Tescos,
No bow and arrow or slingshot,
But the corvids still cried in alarm.
Clacking and fluttering in the trees on Rodborough Hill
As I ascended the hill to home,
Just as they did five thousand years ago.

‘Museums make you more aware:
Give You
Sense
Sensibility
Knowledge
A foothold in time
Make you feel a part of it all’

A Wiltshire Town and Peterloo

I travelled on the GWR,
Built not long after the Orator’s death,
Passing through a mill-scape valley
Known well by quondam colleague, William Cobbett,
On past antique ridge and furrow fields,
To Swindon, a town that I am sure
Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt would have admired,
A new industrial work-town,
Full of mechanics and artisans and questioning,
Thence by the 49 bus across the windswept Downs,
Through a leafless Captain Swing landscape
On a Captain Swing late November rain-swept day,
To take my leisure at the Bear in the town square,
Where – against every grain – Henry Hunt took his wife:
‘How this betrothing came about I must now inform my readers, I had often
heard my father speak in very high terms of Miss Halcomb, the daughter of his
old acquaintance, Mr. Wm. Halcomb, who kept the Bear Inn at Devizes, well
known to be one of the very best inns between London and Bath.’

I travelled on the GWR,
Built not long after the Orator’s death,
Passing through a mill-scape valley
Known well by quondam colleague, William Cobbett,
On past antique ridge and furrow fields,
To Swindon, a town that I am sure
Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt would have admired,
A new industrial work-town,
Full of mechanics and artisans and questioning,
Thence by the 49 bus across the windswept Downs,
Through a leafless Captain Swing landscape
On a Captain Swing late November rain-swept day,
To take my leisure at the Bear in the town square,
Where – against every grain – Henry Hunt took his wife:
‘How this betrothing came about I must now inform my readers, I had often
heard my father speak in very high terms of Miss Halcomb, the daughter of his
old acquaintance, Mr. Wm. Halcomb, who kept the Bear Inn at Devizes, well
known to be one of the very best inns between London and Bath.’

I travelled on the GWR,
Built not long after the Orator’s death,
Passing through a mill-scape valley
Known well by quondam colleague, William Cobbett,
On past antique ridge and furrow fields,
To Swindon, a town that I am sure
Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt would have admired,
A new industrial work-town,
Full of mechanics and artisans and questioning,
Thence by the 49 bus across the windswept Downs,
Through a leafless Captain Swing landscape
On a Captain Swing late November rain-swept day,
To take my leisure at the Bear in the town square,
Where – against every grain – Henry Hunt took his wife:
‘How this betrothing came about I must now inform my readers, I had often
heard my father speak in very high terms of Miss Halcomb, the daughter of his
old acquaintance, Mr. Wm. Halcomb, who kept the Bear Inn at Devizes, well
known to be one of the very best inns between London and Bath.’
Middle England was at its elevenses
In the hotel when I arrived,
But there were drinkers in the bar,
Faux Pickwickian coaching scenes everywhere,
No mention of the Orator, of course,
And no mention of him in the square,
Despite the mother and father of all coincidence,
And irony, paradox, juxtaposition and antithesis –
For right opposite the Bear stands a memorial,
A memorial to Lord Sidmouth
Member of Parliament for Devizes,
The hated rather than revered Lord Sidmouth,
He of Peterloo and reactionary infamy,
The repressive Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth,
Operator of spies, informers and agents-provocateurs,
Reviled by Shelley in The Masque of Anarchy*,
The arch-reactionary who congratulated the magistrates
And the yeomanry after the Peterloo massacre,
And who was, in more than just a sense,
Responsible for Hunt’s imprisonment
And consequent solitary confinement:
*’Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by …
Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.’

Swinish Multitude

Edmund Burke‘s Statue, Bristol, December 2018

Edmund Burke on the lower orders – ‘ a swinish multitude’ –

‘Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude … ‘

Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790

Edmund Burke ‘s Statue

Paid for by a Bristol tobacco baron,
We look on your works and despair:
You stand there, commanding Bristol’s heights,
Your ancien regime condescension
Masked by this deceptive commemoration:
“I wish to be a member of parliament to have my share
of doing good and resisting evil.”
Far more truthful if the plinth were etched
With this memorialization:
‘I regard all you common people,
Passing me by on your trivial tasks
As nothing more than a swinish multitude.’

Edmund Burke‘s Statue, Bristol, December 2018

Edmund Burke on the lower orders – ‘ a swinish multitude’ –

‘Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude … ‘

Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790

Edmund Burke ‘s Statue

Paid for by a Bristol tobacco baron,
We look on your works and despair:
You stand there, commanding Bristol’s heights,
Your ancien regime condescension
Masked by this deceptive commemoration:
“I wish to be a member of parliament to have my share
of doing good and resisting evil.”
Far more truthful if the plinth were etched
With this memorialization:
‘I regard all you common people,
Passing me by on your trivial tasks
As nothing more than a swinish multitude.’

Thomas Spence:
Pigs’ meat; or, lessons for the swinish multitude: Published in weekly penny numbers, collected by the poor man’s advocate (an old veteran in the cause of freedom) in the course of his reading for more than twenty years. Intended to promote among the labouring part of mankind proper ideas of their situation, of their importance, and of their rights. And to convince them that their forlorn condition has not been entirely overlooked and forgotten, nor their just cause unpleaded, neither by their maker not by the best and most enlightened of men in all ages.
London: printed for T. Spence, at the hive of liberty, No. 8, Little-Turnstile, High Holborn

Edmund Burke Statue Haiku

Swinish multitude?
Remember Mr. Shelley –
Ozymandias!

All Hail Thomas Spence!
We’re no ‘swinish multitude’!
Pig’s Meat! People’s Farms!

Tokens issued by Thomas Spence and on display include
‘PIG’S MEAT PUBLISHED BY T * SPENCE LONDON (depicting a boar trampling upon the symbols of monarchy, parliament and the established church), and
PIG’S MEAT PUBLISHED BY T * SPENCE LONDON (a boar, once more, trampling upon symbols of authority: coronet, crozier and staff).

So you stand there on this Christmas Sunday,
Regarding the yuletide shoppers and beggars,
Most, oblivious to the hypocrisy
Of your words (and your pocket borough past) –
But just once in a while someone walks by,
Muttering ‘Swinish multitude, indeed.’
For they know of the anger caused by Burke,
They know of the radical consequence:
An Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke from the Swinish Multitude
Pearls Cast before Swine by Edmund Burke Scraped together by Old Hubert
Hog’s Wash, later renamed Politics for the People or a Salmagundy for Swine
One Penny’s Worth of Pig’s Meat,; Pigs’ Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude
A Rod for the Burkites by One of the Swinish Multitude
Peas for the Swine and Grapes for Citizen
Husks for the Swine, Dedicated to the Swine of England, the Rabble of Scotland, and the Wretches of Ireland by one of the Herd
The Grunter’s Ode, or, an Heroic Poem, by a Swine … dedicated to Mr Burke, Godfather of the Swinish Multitude
The Rights of Swine
A New Catechism for the Use of the Swinish Multitude to be had in all Sties

Sources used:
Shelley and Burke’s Swinish Multitude Roland Bartel Keats-Shelley Journal Vol 18 (1969)
The Poor Man’s Revolutionary ed by Alastair Bonnett and Keith Armstrong

The Kings and Kingdoms

The hollow roll of dates
chronicling the tired litany of monarchs.
Their dusty bones never sleeping
gasping their phantom moans to every generation:
To keep on fighting for the kingdom.
To never forget king and kingdom comes first.
You are its living instrument
that the dead summon to serve and die buried under the hollow drum roll of dates and kings.
Piling their bloody victories, plundered wealth and the crotch grasping posture of destruction over the thousands of corpses that had to die.
To die like an insignificant fly for the dusty bones and stones cut with the deeds of one homicidal dynasty after another.
Oh but the blood must run, it must run!
The young have to die.
The women will birth our soldiers.
For I can hear the dry bones of old kings and their old wars
drumming in today’s march into oblivion.

The hollow roll of dates
chronicling the tired litany of monarchs.
Their dusty bones never sleeping
gasping their phantom moans to every generation:
To keep on fighting for the kingdom.
To never forget king and kingdom comes first.
You are its living instrument
that the dead summon to serve and die buried under the hollow drum roll of dates and kings.
Piling their bloody victories, plundered wealth and the crotch grasping posture of destruction over the thousands of corpses that had to die.
To die like an insignificant fly for the dusty bones and stones cut with the deeds of one homicidal dynasty after another.
Oh but the blood must run, it must run!
The young have to die.
The women will birth our soldiers.
For I can hear the dry bones of old kings and their old wars
drumming in today’s march into oblivion.

The skeletons return to fight
their wars that do not grow old.
Their yellowed bones
clack under dulled battle gear.
The youth of the living
called again and again
to be sacrificed fresh lambs for the
glorious slaughter.

The skeletons are replenished by our warring
but it is to the black eyes of death
the fighting belongs.
So another generation is harvested
blood and flesh feeding the ridden earth
to fruit skeletons
and masterful ravens,
those wit is the mirror of all our destruction.

Captain Swing in Gloucestershire

‘And lo and behold! Here I am!’

It was a perfect autumn day for a bike ride,
Mournful golds and russets and crimsons,
Sun dappled and splashed as I climbed the wolds,
To leave the pastoral valleys behind,
And so reach the wide, open, brown-ploughed fields,
Up above Avening, on the high, back lanes
Around Chavenage and Cherington and Beverstone,
On my cyclo-geographical trip to the Troubled House inn;

Back in the winter of 1830,
These lanes were thronged with anxious farm hands:
Families were hungry with bread prices high,
With wages low, and winter indigence
Threatened by these new threshing machines;
And so the Captain Swing riots had made their way
From Wiltshire to Gloucestershire –
Smashing threshing machines, burning hay ricks,
Penning threatening letters to farmers, signed by
The half-mythologised gentleman on a white horse,
The impossibly ubiquitous Captain Swing:
“this is to inform you what you have to undergo gentelemen if providing you Don’t pull down your meshenes and rise the poor mens wages the married men give tow and sixpence a day the single tow shillings or we will burn down your barns and you in them this is the last notis
From Swing”

‘And lo and behold! Here I am!’

It was a perfect autumn day for a bike ride,
Mournful golds and russets and crimsons,
Sun dappled and splashed as I climbed the wolds,
To leave the pastoral valleys behind,
And so reach the wide, open, brown-ploughed fields,
Up above Avening, on the high, back lanes
Around Chavenage and Cherington and Beverstone,
On my cyclo-geographical trip to the Troubled House inn;

Back in the winter of 1830,
These lanes were thronged with anxious farm hands:
Families were hungry with bread prices high,
With wages low, and winter indigence
Threatened by these new threshing machines;
And so the Captain Swing riots had made their way
From Wiltshire to Gloucestershire –
Smashing threshing machines, burning hay ricks,
Penning threatening letters to farmers, signed by
The half-mythologised gentleman on a white horse,
The impossibly ubiquitous Captain Swing:
“this is to inform you what you have to undergo gentelemen if providing you Don’t pull down your meshenes and rise the poor mens wages the married men give tow and sixpence a day the single tow shillings or we will burn down your barns and you in them this is the last notis
From Swing”

He came to Horsley at the end of November:
Threshing machines were dutifully broken,
Lord Sherborne rallied the J.P.s of the shire,
And appealed to the agricultural labourers:
Return to your labours and we will listen to your complaints,
But the promise of a ‘just’ response
Was the jailing of nearly a hundred labourers
In the prison at Gloucester …

The cavalry were dispatched to the Trouble House,
Surrounding the inn, with their swords drawn
(‘I’ll give them “Bread or Blood”, be damned’),
The farm hands pausing for some bread and cheese,
Escaping out the back door, into the rain,
Pursued by the cavalry through the plashy fields,
Near two dozen captured in the mud and mire,
Drenched to their skin and bone in their threadbare coats …
The nearby lanes and farmyards were frantic too,
Tetbury, Chavenage, Cherington and Beverstone,
All so surface upper crust these days,
But over a hundred gathered then on the Beverstone Road,
‘Be damned if we don’t go to Beverstone and break the machine!’
Sledge hammers, picks, staves all carried
Under the tutelage of Elizabeth Parker,
To the farm of Jacob Hayward,
To smash that damned threshing machine,
A signal moment for Gloucestershire
In ‘The Last Labourer’s Revolt’ …

And what echoes did I hear today?
What ghosts did I see in the fields and lanes?
(As I cycled past Princess Anne’s Gatcombe Park
But then the home of the economist, Mr Ricardo,
Whose speculations on the labour theory of value,
Would be turned upside down and revolutionised
Within a generation by Chartists and Karl Marx.)
And, more pertinently, perhaps,
How was this event memorialized
Within the here and now quite posh Troubled House?

A framed newspaper cutting from the last century
Recounts stories of “troubles’ at the inn,
Including

‘MEMORY OF A RIOT

About 120 years ago, when disturbances broke out among agricultural workers and there was frequent rioting, owing to manual labour being displaced by new farming machinery, the old inn, then known by the name of the “Wagon and Horses”, was the scene of one such outbreak.
So intense had grown the feeling of workers on the land in these parts that farmers who had become possessed of any of the new “contraptions” were obliged to keep them in hiding.

MENACING CROWD

One day a carter was attempting to convey, with as much secrecy as possible, a hay-making machine to a certain farm in the Tetbury neighbourhood. He had it covered up on a wagon, but as he was passing through a quiet side street of Tetbury it was detected by the wife of a farm worker.
Quickly she spread the news about and within a few minutes an infuriated crowd had gathered with menacing cries of “Down with machinery!”
The carter and the hay-making machine were surrounded and bundled outside the town to a lonely spot, where the horses were unharnessed. Bundles of straw were fetched, piled up, and the wagon and the hay-maker burned out.
Having thus whetted their appetites for destructiveness, the mob proceeded to various farms in the locality and destroyed other machines which they found in hiding.
So serious did the sabotage become that the authorities sent post-haste for a company of horse-soldiers stationed at Dursley. By the time the military arrived, the mob had reached the “Wagon and Horses” Inn, and it was here that the struggle between the rioters and the soldiers took place.

ARRESTED AT THE INN

Needless to say, the military soon gained the upper hand and a number of the rioters’ men – and women – were arrested and taken to Gloucester to await trial. Some were eventually liberated, but the ring-leaders were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.’

There is another framed, yellowing newspaper cutting,
Over on the wall towards the toilets,
Another litany of Trouble House woes,
With the unnamed Captain Swing Riots
Featuring once again, similar in tone,
But with slightly different facts to the other narrative:
‘New machine’
This time the ‘new fangled machine’ is for mowing,
Hidden as before, but now ‘brightly painted’,
It could cost ‘ten men their livelihood’;
‘Fire Raisers

A possee was waiting for the carter as soon as his wagon had cleared the town.
The men unhitched the horses and fired the wagon and its hated load. Their success as they watched the bonfire blazing whetted their appetite …
The mob were quenching their thirst at Trouble House when the mounted soldiers overtook them. It was a short struggle with victory for the military never much in doubt.
Men and women fire-bugs were arrested and hauled off to stand their trial at Gloucester Assizes.’

I took photos and cappuccino,
Rather than small beer and bread and cheese,
But the ghosts of the twenty-three were there,
Out in the October autumn-brown
Large-spread new ploughed fields,
And as I cycled home along the old back lanes,
Who should I see but a man upon a white horse?

‘What a coincidence!’ I cried.
‘Why? What coincidence?’
I explained about Captain Swing and his white horse.
‘And lo and behold! Here I am!’

The Burial Chamber

It stands at the end of a street
(Bungalows, cars, caravans, camper vans,
Children playing in the road and on the driveways),
There, behind a gate and beyond the signposts.

A six thousand year old burial chamber,
One giant stone forty-five degrees athwart
Another four, in a suburban enclosure,
Precarious yet adamantine-firm;

Cremated bones were found here.

It stands at the end of a street
(Bungalows, cars, caravans, camper vans,
Children playing in the road and on the driveways),
There, behind a gate and beyond the signposts.

A six thousand year old burial chamber,
One giant stone forty-five degrees athwart
Another four, in a suburban enclosure,
Precarious yet adamantine-firm;

Cremated bones were found here.

We fingered the stones’ provenance.

A bat flew through the twilight,
Geese cried their plangent nightlight summons,
Rooks gathered in a silhouette roost,
Just as they did when these stones were lifted,
And the bones of an excarnated body
Were laid to embered rest.

And that night, when awake,
An owl called to me across space and time.

Nevern, near Newport, Pembs

Faith, Time and Tide

We wandered windfall pilgrims’ paths,
Past hedgerows bright with sloe and crimson haw,
Swallows, too, following their autumnal call,
While murmurations of starlings,
And flocks of melancholy geese,
Patterned a darkening estuarine sky,

The ghost-church at Cwm-yr-Eglwys
Tolled an ancient knell of parting day,
A sea-storm squall shifted drowned sailors’ bones,

But we slipped past circles of stone,
Past Carn Ingli – the Hill of Angels -,
To seek penance and resurrection,

Faith, Time and Tide

We wandered windfall pilgrims’ paths,
Past hedgerows bright with sloe and crimson haw,
Swallows, too, following their autumnal call,
While murmurations of starlings,
And flocks of melancholy geese,
Patterned a darkening estuarine sky,

The ghost-church at Cwm-yr-Eglwys
Tolled an ancient knell of parting day,
A sea-storm squall shifted drowned sailors’ bones,

But we slipped past circles of stone,
Past Carn Ingli – the Hill of Angels -,
To seek penance and resurrection,

A scrupulous dappled procession,
On the high narrow path above the roiling waters,
Past a sacred yew with bleeding stigmata,
Past Celtic cross tracery and Ogham script –
For three pilgrimages to St David’s
Will earn eternal salvation,
As much as one to Jerusalem –

We joined the joyous throng of ghosts,
Some solemn, withdrawn and pentitential,
Some hiding their womanhood beneath their tunics,
To reach the Pilgrims’ Cross, inscribed in rock,

Where we placed our feet in perfect symmetry,
In the well-worn indentations of the soles
Of our ancestors, marching for centuries
West towards the setting sun,
Their footfalls perfectly preserved
In the shadowed wet-soak slate and gleaming rock,

High above the motte and castle ruins at Nevern,
A numinous reminder of the power,
Of Faith and Time and Tide.