The Clerkenwell Tales, Peter Ackroyd [sight word readers txt] 📗

What is a bishop without wealth? Episcopus Nullatensis. Bishop of Nowhere. What do they do now, but tremble before the mad nun of Clerkenwell?” They laughed at this. They had all heard how Sister Clarice had been taken before the consistory court, on the grounds that she had uttered false prophecies, but had been immediately released at the insistence of the citizens who had surrounded the court with imprecation and clamour. “These prelates are dumb fools in the realm of hell, dumb hounds that do not bark in time of need.”

A woman cried out, “They pray to Our Lady of Falsingham. They do reverence to Thomas of Cankerbury!”

“Their images may do neither good nor evil to men’s souls,” Exmewe said, “but they might warm a man’s cold body if they were set upon a fire. The wax wasted upon their candles would be fit to light poor men and creatures at their work.”

These were the true men, otherwise known as the faithful, the foreknown or the predestined ones. There were few of them but they were known by many names – in Paris as the apostoli or the innocentes, in Cologne as the men of intelligence, and in Rheims as the humiliati. They believed that their sect had existed since the time of Christ, and that their first leader had been Christ’s brother; they were assured that they were the true followers of the Saviour and that they comprised the invisible church or communion of the saved known as congregacio solum salvandorum. They rejected all the ceremonies and beliefs of the established church, and condemned them as the trappings of the god of this world who is called Lucifer. The pope was a limb of the fiend, as rotten in his sin as a beast in his dung; the prelates and bishops were also perpetual matter for burning in hell. Churches were the castles of Cain.

They were called the innocentes or the foreknown ones because, as Christ’s true followers, they were absolved from all sin. Each one of them partook of the glory of the Saviour, and their actions were prompted wholly by the spirit of God. They could lie, commit adultery or kill, without remorse. If any one of them robbed a beggar, or caused a death by hanging, he or she had nothing to fear; the soul whose bodily life had been taken would return to its source. The predestined ones could commit sodomy, or lie with any man or woman; they must freely satisfy the promptings of their nature or else they would lose their freedom of spirit. They could deservedly kill any child conceived by their actions, and throw it into the water like any worm, without confession; the child, too, was going back to its source.

They met in secret, in small conventicles, because of all heretics they were considered to be the most dangerous. Only six months earlier, an order had gone out from the bishop’s court forbidding “congregations, conventicles, assemblies, alliances, confederacies and conspiracies” against Holy Church.

Their names were known only to one another, and they would often pass in the street without any greeting. The predestined men were so convinced of their sanctity that they eagerly sought for the day of doom. Exmewe had explained to them that the great Antichrist would be an apostate Franciscan friar; he was now twenty and would appear at Jerusalem in the year following. The anointed one, the second Christ at the day of judgement, would be a foreknown one like themselves; he was the Son of Man foretold in the Apocalypse. He had already drunk Christ’s blood and, at his coming, he would free God of his suffering for the creation of the world; he would be known as Christ imperator et deus.

In the undercroft of the bookseller’s shop, a few months before, Exmewe had discoursed to them of the several signs. “There are many diverse tokens which shall come before that day,” he had told them, “by which we shall fully know that the day is near and not far. Among which signs or tokens Christ proclaims in the Gospel when he says that ‘There shall be signs in the sun, moon, and stars.’ You should understand that Christ speaks not only of wonders that can be seen in these visible planets which are set in our sight, but also of ghostly tokens which are more subtle to understand for the coming of that doom.”

So in succeeding weeks he spoke of the circles interlinked and the five wounds of London. Just as the blood of a murdered child will cry out unless it is covered, so the blood of Christ is only visible when the painted cloth of the world is removed from it. “We must fix Him upon the tree once more, so that His image shall stretch across creation. Christ suffered five wounds in His mortal death; we must inflict five mortal strokes on five sundry places in the carnal church which is the church of this world. Wherefore five? It is the image of all that exists. The five joys. The five wits. We have the threefold universe, the trine compass of earth, air and sea, but we must add to them time and space which are the angels of God. Therefore, five. It has been revealed to me in words that are a chosen song before God, a lamp to our life, honey to a bitter soul. When the circles of fire are painted upon London, it will be a sure sign that death is within the gate. That the judgement is not long.”

He had persuaded them, therefore, that five London churches or sacred places must be visited by fire and death. Only in this manner could the day of doom be delivered.

The clerk, Emnot Hallyng, had left the conventicle and was striding down Bladder Street towards his tenement in Bevis Marks. It was close to curfew; the last street-traders were packing up their chests and boxes, while in the dying