Martyrs and Mystics. Ed Glinert

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СКАЧАТЬ Bishopsgate

      A seventeenth-century sect of radical puritans now practically extinct, the Muggletonians were established by Lodowick Muggleton, a Bishopsgate-born tailor, in 1651. That year he claimed that God had appointed him and his cousin, John Reeve, the Two Last Witnesses, as foretold in the verse in the Book of Revelation: ‘I will give power unto my two witnesses and they shall prophesy one thousand two hundred and threescore days clothed in sackcloth.’

      The main tenets of the Muggletonians’ creed were:

      1. God and the man Jesus Christ are synonymous expressions.

      2. The devil and human reason are synonymous.

      3. The soul dies and rises again with the body.

      4. Heaven is a place above the stars.

      5. At present hell is nowhere, but this earth, darkened after the last judgement, will be hell.

      6. Angels are the only beings of pure reason.

      Reeve was obsessed with the notion of mankind’s impending doom, and claimed he knew whom God had chosen to be saved. He and Muggleton were sent to Bridewell Prison for cursing a vicar, Mr Goffin, who subsequently died. The teachings of the two founders were handed down from generation to generation, but as the Muggletonians did not believe in proselytising, the sect slowly died out. For instance, in 1697 some 250 supporters attended Muggleton’s funeral, but by 1803 they were down to just over a hundred members, and a hundred years later only seventeen attended the monthly meeting. According to an article in the Times Literary Supplement, in 1974 a handful of believers were left in Kent. By the end of the decade there were only two remaining Muggletonians who by now may have verified tenet Number 4.

      → The Quakers, p. 226

       OLD JEWRY

      Now a nondescript City street of company offices, this was the centre of medieval Jewish life in London, when the street was known as Jewry. A Jewish community began to take shape here after William the Conqueror invited Jews from Normandy to London in the 1070s to help him improve Britain’s primitive trading practices. The king needed an advanced monetary system – payments made in coin not through barter – and such knowledge was the preserve of Jews, barred from most professions and public office throughout the continent but experts in money, commerce and finance because the Church forbade Christians from practising usury.

      According to most modern histories there were no Jews in London, or even England, before the Norman Conquest. However, Jews had been coming to Britain since King Solomon sent tin traders from the Holy Land to negotiate with the miners of Cornwall some time around the year 960 BC. There were almost certainly Jews in London in Roman times: a brick recovered from the excavation of some Roman ruins on Mark Lane near the Tower in 1650 contained a relief of the story of Samson driving foxes into a field of corn – something which could not have been known to pagan, pre-Christian Romans.

      Hostility to the Jews increased over the years, especially on anniversaries and celebrations that were particularly English in character. For instance, Jews were barred from attending the coronation of Richard I in 1189, but they sent a delegation to Westminster Hall nonetheless bearing gifts for the king, and a few sneaked into the hall to have a look at the proceedings. The palace guards threw them out, whereupon some onlookers started throwing stones. A rumour began circulating that the king had ordered the destruction of the Jews. In Jewry a mob set fire to Jewish houses and thirty people were killed. One Jew, Benedict of York, saved his life by converting to Christianity on the spot; he was rushed to St Margaret’s church and baptised (although he recanted his new views the next day). When the king learned what had happened he ordered the hanging of three of the ringleaders and announced that the Jews must not be so treated.

      From that time the Jews were sent to the Tower for their own safety on such days. But soon excuses were being made to send the Jews to the Tower as a punishment for what were mostly fabricated accusations, usually involving coin clipping (chipping away at coins to use the metal), and allegations of murdering children to use their blood in religious sacrificial rituals.

      King John treated the Jewish moneylenders well. He even granted them a charter and allowed them to choose a chief rabbi. But this détente didn’t last long. In 1210 the king levied a penalty of 66,000 marks on the Jews, and imprisoned, blinded and tortured those who would not pay.

      Henry III compelled the Jews to wear two white tablets of linen or parchment on their breasts. Wherever Jews lived, burgesses were chosen to protect them from pilgrims’ insults about infidels. But in 1220 the Crown seized the Old Jewry synagogue and handed it to the brothers of St Anthony of Vienna for use as a church. In 1232 more pressure was put on the Jews to reject their religion when Henry built a House for Converted Jews on what is now Chancery Lane.

      Jews were then expelled from Newcastle and Southampton. In London the status of the community began to deteriorate sharply after a dead Christian child was found in 1244, its arms and legs embroidered with Hebrew letters – a botched crucifixion, evidently. After a number of further tribulations the Jews asked King Henry if they could leave England officially. The king was outraged. Soon after, eighty-six of London’s richest Jews were hanged for supposedly crucifying a Christian child in Lincoln and there was a riot against London’s Jews. Five hundred were killed and the synagogue was burnt down. Only those who took refuge in the Tower survived.

      Edward I, who came to the throne in 1272, forced the Jews to wear yellow badges so that everyone knew who they were (a symbol Hitler adopted nearly 700 years later). He also levied a tax of threepence on them every Easter. In 1288 all England’s Jews were imprisoned and held until they paid a £20,000 ransom, a handy sum to help finance the castles he was building in Wales. It came as no surprise when in 1290 Edward announced on 18 July – the anniversary of the sacking of the Temple in AD 70 – that he was expelling the Jews from England. All Jews (some 15,000) ‘with their wives, children and chattels’ had to leave the country, and they were given until 1 November, the feast of All Saints, to comply. Any Jew who remained behind after that date would face execution. Ships carrying Jews left St Katharine’s Dock near the Tower. When one vessel ran into a sandbank off Queensborough, Kent, the captain invited passengers to stretch their legs. But once they had disembarked he made off, leaving the party to drown as the tide rose.

      The Crown seized all the Jews’ property and none of their buildings survive locally . . . above ground. Recent excavations of nearby sites during the building of the huge corporate blocks that dominate the area have unearthed well-preserved ritual baths and artefacts.

      → The Jews massacred in York, p. 207

       ST DUNSTAN-IN-THE-WEST, Fleet Street at Hen and Chickens Court

      Founded c. 1185 as St Dunstan’s Over Against the Temple, the church was known as St Dunstan-in-the-West from 1278 to differentiate it from St Dunstan-in-the-East in Stepney. It was here that William Tyndale, whose translations of the New Testament from the Greek provided the basis for the later King James Bible, preached in the 1520s. In the seventeenth century St Dunstan’s was a centre of Puritanism where Praise-God Barebones, the divinely named Roundhead leader, preached.

      The church’s unusual-looking clock, the first in London to be marked with minutes, was erected in 1671 as a thanksgiving from parishioners relieved that a sudden burst of wind sent the Fire of London away from the building. The clock features two burly figures, Gog and Magog, biblical characters who appear cryptically in the Book of Revelation: ‘And ye shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number СКАЧАТЬ