The White Horse of Cherhill

If you’re on the A4 heading east from Bath, you’ll pass through a Wiltshire village called Cherhill just before you get to the turn-off for Avebury. Just after Cherhill, take a glance at the hillside on the right, for there, carved into said hillside, is a white horse. If you’re heading west from Avebury, pull over before you get to Cherhill and take a look at the White Horse of Cherhill.

There are quite a few hill-figures in that part of southern-central England where the bedrock consists of chalk. A couple of these are of men (naked men at that, as anyone who’s ever seen the Giant at Cerne Abbas in Dorset will testify!), but the majority are of horses. One is ancient indeed – the White Horse of Uffington in Oxfordshire, which is reckoned to have adorned the hillside there since the late Bronze Age – but most of them are of a more recent vintage. The one at Cherhill is still pretty old, though, although it ‘only’ dates back to 1780.

It is the creation of a doctor from the nearby town of Calne. Christopher Alsop was known locally as the ‘Mad Doctor’, presumably because he decided to cut the image of a horse onto the hillside. Actually, he didn’t do the cutting (the removal of the top-soil to get at the chalk beneath); his servant did that, while the Mad Doctor sat in a chair at the bottom of the hill shouting instructions through a megaphone.

Quite why the Mad Doctor did this is not entirely clear. He was a friend of George Stubbs, the famous painter who specialised in pictures of horses, so the hill-figure may have been done as a tribute to him. It’s also possible that he might have done it to show his support for the Royal family of the time, the Hanoverian dynasty whose symbol was the white horse of Hanover (that is also one of the theories regarding the older white horse at Westbury, also in Wiltshire, although some reckon that that one is much, much older, having been cut to commemorate Alfred the Great’s victory over the Vikings at nearby Ethandun (modern-day Edington) even though there is no mention of that particular hill-figure prior to the mid-eighteenth century). Or it could be that the Mad Doctor was doing some advertising for a local pub, the White Horse – as the A4 was a coaching road (the Great West Road, also known as the Bath Road) in the eighteenth century, that might be plausible – but then again, maybe the White Horse pub is so named because of the white horse on the hill, rather than the other way round!

Close to the White Horse of Cherhill is a stone obelisk. It is the Lansdowne Monument, erected in 1845 by the aristocratic Lansdowne family to commemorate … themselves. Or rather, one of their ancestors, Sir William Petty (1623-87) – an economist, scientist and philosopher who was a founder-member of the Royal Society. He was a friend of Samuel Pepys, who in his diary described Petty as “one of the most rational men that I ever heard speak”.

Historical English crime: 'Stand and deliver!'

Even today, the mention of the word ‘highwayman’ conjures up a certain image – that of a masked, well-dressed man astride a horse, brandishing a pistol and demanding that rich travellers in a stage-coach ‘stand and deliver’ (in other words, hand over whatever cash and assorted valuables they might have on them) somewhere on an open road at some point in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Having made off with the loot, he would of course outwit the authorities if they sent anyone after him. It can be a rather romantic image even though the reality was far from romantic – these were brutal, violent men operating in a brutal, violent era.

In a very real sense, there was nothing new about highway robbery, for thieves who operated on foot – footpads – had been robbing travellers for as long as there had been roads. However, the gun-toting thief on horseback was something new to the seventeenth century. This was a violent age (what with the Thirty Years War in Europe and the Civil War in this country), and the increased availability and effectiveness of firearms combined with the proliferation of men, often former soldiers, who either lacked or didn’t much care for gainful employment and knew how to use a gun while riding a horse (the latter being vital to ensure a quick getaway). They were helped by the ineptitude of the law enforcement system of the period; in the days before organised policing, the job invariably fell to the parish constable who was usually under-equipped to deal with anything other than minor crime, and who was often thought of as being lazy or incompetent (Shakespeare having set the standard for that particular stereotype with Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing).

The mounted thieves started to become known as ‘highwaymen’ in the mid-seventeenth century; they were also known as ‘gentlemen of the road’ on account that many of them dressed smartly enough to pass for gentry even if they were of more humble birth. The famous demand to ‘stand and deliver’ goes back to that time, while the earliest references to the follow-up ‘your money or your life’ are from trial reports dating back to the mid-eighteenth century. The growing print industry produced pamphlets detailing their crimes, which brought them to the attention of the public (this would continue in the eighteenth century with publications like the Newgate Calendar and plays like The Beggar’s Opera, followed by the ‘penny dreadfuls’ of the nineteenth century).

One of the earliest highwaymen to become well-known in England was James Hind, who had fought for the Royalists in the Civil War and took to highway robbery during the time of the Protectorate, preying in particular on those associated with the Parliamentarian cause (he once tried, and failed, to rob Oliver Cromwell himself). Others followed, some becoming famous in their time. Claude Duval was a Frenchman who operated just north of Restoration-era London; one of the first highwaymen to dress in fashionable clothes and put on gentlemanly airs, he’s said to have once agreed to only take some of his victim’s money, as opposed to all of it, if the his pretty wife agreed to dance with him by the side of the road (which she did). William Nevison was a former soldier who rode from Kent to York in less than a day (a previously unheard-of feat) in order to establish an alibi, a tale that greatly amused Charles II. Robert Congden was an Old Etonian gentleman-farmer by day and a highwayman by night who held up the Earl of Dorset for a thousand guineas.

Most famous of them all, though, was the Essex publican’s son Dick Turpin, who had started out as a butcher before turning to crime; in addition to being a highwayman he was also a poacher, a burglar and, like many of his fellow-highwaymen, a cold-blooded killer. Such was Turpin’s fame that acts performed by other highwaymen, such as Nevison’s ride to York, ended up being attributed to him. Despite their often-violent behaviour some highwaymen – Turpin in particular – were to a degree idolised in that way in which criminals are sometimes, and somehow, made out to be popular heroes (a point picked up in an episode of Blackadder, wherein Baldrick describes a highwayman as “halfway to being the new Robin Hood … he steals from the rich, but he hasn’t got round to giving it to the poor yet”).

From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the main roads of England became hunting-grounds for the highwaymen and as such very dangerous places – especially the bits that ran through what was then open country on the outskirts of London (although robberies in London itself were not unknown; it was partly concern about highwaymen in Hyde Park that led William III to ensure that Rotten Row, the road between Westminster and Kensington Palace, became the first road in the country to be artificially lit). Highwaymen often chose isolated areas that the main roads passed through; Bagshot Heath, crossed by the roads to both Portsmouth and the West Country, was popular. To the north, Finchley Common on the Great North Road acquired a certain reputation, while to the south on the Dover Road Shooter’s Hill was the venue of choice for hold-ups (it had already got its name from being a place where archery was practiced in the Middle Ages). Many such places had gibbets where the bodies of executed criminals were displayed in metal cages to deter others from a life of crime, and these were well-known to people who often travelled out of London; Samuel Pepys, for example, once mentioned riding past “the man that hangs on Shooter’s Hill”.

Quite a few highwaymen ended up on the gallows, having either been captured in the act or found out later (when people noticed that they’d suddenly started spending a lot more cash than they usually did, for example). Hind was done for treason rather than highway robbery because of his overt support for the Royalist cause, resulting in his being not just hanged but drawn and quartered as well. Congden had shot and killed his first victim when he had tried to resist, while Nevison had killed a constable who’d tried to arrest him; both were hanged for murder. Duval, somewhat unusually it would seem, was actually hanged for no more than highway robbery. Turpin, meanwhile, was arrested for horse theft which was also a capital offence at the time – and although some in the government wanted him to stand trial in London or his native Essex, his trial and subsequent hanging took place at York.

The ‘golden age’ of the highwayman is usually considered as having been the period between the Restoration (1660) and the death of Queen Anne (1714), although Turpin’s ‘career’ post-dates this (he is thought to have turned to crime in the early 1730s, and was hanged in 1739 at the age of 33). Yet there were still some fairly audacious highway robberies being carried out well into the eighteenth century; in 1774, no less a person than the Prime Minister, Lord North, wrote of being “robbed last night as I expected … at the end of Gunnersbury Lane”. For much of the eighteenth century, travellers along England’s roads took to preventative measures – Horace Walpole, the writer (and son of Britain’s first PM), wrote of being “forced to travel, even at noon, as if one was going into battle”. When encountered by two highwaymen outside London, the Duke of Montrose shot and killed one of them (the other escaped, with the duke declining to give pursuit on the grounds that enough blood had already been spilled). The subject of whether or not one should shoot a highwayman, regardless of whether or not he’d shot first, is one that Samuel Johnson (who defined ‘highwayman’ in his Dictionary as simply “a robber that plunders on the publick roads”) had few doubts about. Boswell records that, when it came up in conversation, the great man of letters stated: “I would rather shoot him in the instant when he is attempting to rob me, than afterwards swear against him at the Old-Bailey … I am surer I am right in the one case than in the other. I may be mistaken as to the man, when I swear: I cannot be mistaken, if I shoot him in the act. Besides, we feel less reluctance to take away a man’s life, when we are heated by the injury”. Boswell retorted that Johnson “would rather act from the motive of private passion, than that of publick advantage”, to which Johnson replied: “Nay, Sir, when I shoot the highwayman I act from both.”

In such an atmosphere, it became a matter of routine for coachmen, post-boys and the like to travel either armed or accompanied by someone who was, the weapon of choice usually being a brace of pistols – as guns back then were of the muzzle-loading, single-shot variety it paid to have more than one loaded and ready to fire – or a blunderbuss (an early form of shotgun with a flared muzzle, easier to load while on the move but only effective at close range). Rich travellers, particularly those heading along the Great West Road to the fashionable spa town of Bath, took to travelling with as little money or jewellery in their coaches as possible – the wealth could go on ahead, stuffed in the pockets and saddle-bags of a single servant on horseback, preferably carrying a gun of some sort for his own protection.

Sometimes, a lone rider confronted by a highwayman could get the better of him; one story is of a servant carrying his master’s money who, when confronted by a highwayman, said he’d willingly hand over the cash but asked if the highwayman would be so kind as to put a bullet through his hat first, so that he later could show that he’d put up some sort of resistance before standing and delivering. After the highwayman had obligingly fired, the clever servant produced his own pistol who had been concealed in his coat! As the highwayman had only been armed with a single pistol, the servant now had the advantage and took his opponent to the nearest town to hand him over to the authorities (and, presumably, collect any reward that may have been on offer).

Some highwaymen responded by forming gangs, although many of these were short-lived as they invariably fell out over how to divide the spoils. One of the more notable gangs of highwaymen operated in and around Cherhill, a Wiltshire village on the Great West Road, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; being poor men who only owned one set of clothes each (clearly highway robbery was not always lucrative), they became (in)famous for doing their robberies naked so that no-one would be able to identify them by their clothes.

Highway robbery in England died out in the early nineteenth century. Some would assume that it was killed off by the railways, but it would appear there were a number of factors at play. Highway robbery had actually become quite rare by the time that century began, and the last recorded one took place in 1831 (two years after Stephenson built his Rocket). The increase in the turnpike system with its tolled and gated roads had combined in the mid-to-late eighteenth century with the increased enclosure of farmland to limit highwaymen’s activities (there was, quite simply, less open space), and in the early nineteenth century they were limited further by the expansion of cities (especially London) into what had been open countryside. As the cities grew, policing became more effective, and the increased use of banknotes helped too as they were easier to trace than gold coins. The ‘gentleman of the road’ had had his day.

Of London's Christmas traditions, with references to Samuels Pepys and Johnson

Looking into the stories behind London’s various Christmas traditions has been a fun thing to do for my latest Londonist piece. I must say that my favourite bit is the one about the ‘Boy Bishop’ of St Paul’s, probably because I used to be a chorister myself and am therefore favourably inclined to the idea that, in times past, one of them briefly got to be a mock-bishop. This would seem to be an ecclesiastical variant of the ‘Lord of Misrule’ tradition (whereby the social order was briefly inverted) which was prevalent in the Middle Ages but which dates back to Roman times. Anyway, it is one of several aspects of a London Christmas, modern as well as historic, which made it into my seasonal article which also looks at (among other things) the meat auction at Smithfield, the lack of public transport on Christmas Day (something about which many Londoners are oddly accepting) and the question of which was the first London department store to have a Santa’s Grotto. The result can be found via this link:

http://londonist.com/london/christmas-in-london/what-are-london-s-christmas-traditions

My source for the ‘Boy Bishop’ story was a book called London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World’s Most Vibrant City by Steve Roud – a really good compendium of London’s folklore, of which there is a lot (including various ghost stories, local customs, etc). Definitely recommended reading for anyone with an interest in London’s rich and varied history.

Sticking with Christmas, though, there are of course some things that don’t change much over the years and even the centuries. For evidence of this, we can look at the experiences of Samuel Pepys on Christmas Day, 1661; he had an argument with a close family member and witnessed someone dealing with a drunken guest, both of which are things that many would readily identify as festive occurrences in our own time. After going to church, Pepys had dinner followed by an argument with his wife (“taking occasion, from some fault in the meat, to complain of my maid’s Sluttery”), causing the diarist to go “up to my Chamber in a discontent”. Later on, Mr and Mrs Pepys popped in on a neighbour, Sir William Penn (the admiral and father of the man who founded Pennsylvania). Unfortunately, another guest, a Captain Cock, “came to us half-drunck and began to talk; but Sir W. Pen, knowing his humour and that there was no end of his talking, drinks four great glasses of wine to him one after another, healths to the King &c., and by that means made him drunk, and so he went away; and so we sat down to supper and were merry; and so after supper home to bed.”

I have also recently been drawn to the writings of Samuel Johnson, in particular his essays which were for the most part published under three short-lived periodicals – The Rambler (1750-52), The Adventurer (1753-54) and The Idler (1758-60). There are some true literary gems to be found here, and it surprised me to learn that a few are dated Christmas Day, meaning (presumably) that the great man could sometimes be found writing over the festive period as opposed to going out and indulging in some seasonal perpotation (a word that is in his Dictionary and means, and I quote, “the act of drinking largely”).

One such essay, from The Adventurer (25^th December 1753), concerns the folly of wanting too many things. Taking the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates as his starting-point, Johnson ponders “the great business of life to create wants as fast as they are satisfied”. He observes that “there is no man, who does not … suffer himself to feel pain for the want of that, of which, when it is gained, he can have no enjoyment.” A couple of paragraphs later, he writes: “What we believe ourselves to want, torments us not in proportion to its real value, but according to the estimation by which we have rated it in our own minds.” Some seasonal food for thought there!

Fire!

350 years ago today, the Great Fire of London began. It started in a baker’s on Pudding Lane, and over the next four days it engulfed some four-fifths of the City of London. Some 13,200 homes, 89 churches and old St Paul’s Cathedral were destroyed.

To get an idea of what it must have been like, there can be no better eyewitness than Samuel Pepys. He wrote at length on this in his diary, describing – as he watched the blaze from “a little alehouse on the Bankside” – “a most horrid and malicious bloody flame, not like the flame of an ordinary fire … we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire … an arch of above a mile long” (eyewitnesses of the Blitz have described that blaze in a similar way). Interestingly, he also described how it was he who convinced the King (Charles II) of the seriousness of the blaze, and he who conveyed the King’s orders to the Lord Mayor (who, to be frank, wasn’t really up to the job).

As an historian, I’ve long been intrigued by a few snippets of information about the Great Fire. One such is the role played by the King’s brother, the Duke of York (the future James II) – his role has, I feel, been downplayed in favour of his (much more popular) brother, but his leadership during the Great Fire was exemplary. It was he who was in charge of pulling down houses to create firebreaks and thus prevent the fire from spreading, and it was also he who ensured the rescue of those who, by virtue of their being foreign, Catholic or both, were threatened by the angry lynch-mobs that were after convenient scapegoats (James himself did not convert to his mother’s religion until 1668 or 1669, although he kept it a secret until the 1670s).

One surprising aspect of both of the things the Duke did during the Great Fire has always been a little surprising; no-one appears to have been killed in the (frankly dangerous) job of demolishing the houses – this would have involved using ‘fire-hooks’ to quite literally pull buildings down, as well as controlled demolitions using gunpowder – and very few died at the hands of the mobs.

In fact, according to the records few people appear to have died in the Great Fire, long seen as a destroyer of property rather than people (in contrast to the Great Plague which preceded it). The official records say that just six people died. Can this really be true? I wanted to look into this further, and my findings have been published on Londonist:

http://londonist.com/2016/08/is-it-true-that-only-six-people-died-in-the-great-fire

During my research, I managed to find a few more interesting pieces on information about this most momentous of events:

  

1)      The fire started at a bakery on Pudding Lane – famously, the site is as far from the Monument as the Monument is tall (202 feet). Everyone – and this includes the Worshipful Company of Bakers, who put a plaque on the building that stands on the site of the bakery – seems to think that the baker, Thomas Farriner (or Farynor, Faryner, etc) was the King’s baker which leads one to think he was baking bread for Charles II. Not so – he actually had a contract to supply hardtack (ship’s biscuit) for the Navy.

2)      It didn’t bring about an end to the Great Plague; this had largely subsided by the time the fire broke out (it had been at its height during the previous year) and there were a few (but not many) instances of plague-related deaths after the Great Fire.

3)      Old St Paul’s – that Medieval Gothic structure that was destroyed in the Great Fire – may well have been threatened with demolition in any case. It had been in decline for years – the spire had been destroyed after being struck by lightning in 1561 and there had been some restoration work done by Inigo Jones before the Civil War. After the Restoration, Christopher Wren was put in charge of restoring the cathedral and advised that it should be demolished – advice that was opposed by both the clergy and the people of London. At the time when the Great Fire broke out, the old cathedral was surrounded by wooden scaffolding – which, along with all of the books and pamplets that were stored in the crypt, greatly assisted the blaze. I can think of two models of the old cathedral that exist for those who want an idea of what it looked like – one is in St Paul’s (appropriately enough) while the other is in the Museum of London.

4)      Charles II was particularly concerned about the actions of the mobs that went on the rampage looking for scapegoats afterwards; remembering that London had backed Parliament during the Civil War, he was afraid that this would lead to a popular uprising against him. The need for a scapegoat would lead to one execution at Tyburn (that of a French watchmaker whose confession was dubious to say the least) and a plaque on the Monument that blamed the Great Fire on “the Popish faction” (ie. Catholics). This was removed during the reign of James II, put back after the Glorious Revolution and later removed for good when Catholics were given the vote in 1830.

5)      Some of the plans for rebuilding London were truly radical and would have resulted in a City of piazzas and wide avenues; in the event, much of the old street plan was retained – albeit with wider streets, better access to the River and a rule stating that new buildings had to be made from brick and stone (not wood).

6)      And finally, something about cheese. Pepys famously recorded burying “my parmazan cheese as well as my wine and other things” in a pit in his garden so that he wouldn’t lose them in the flames – not as crazy as it seemed, for Parmigiano-Reggiano was a highly valuable commodity in the seventeenth century, especially given the cost that would have been involved in transporting it from Italy. In the event, Pepys’s house – he lived on Seething Lane, not far from the Tower, at the time – wasn’t burned down, but he never did record in his diary whether he was able to recover his cheese and wine.

There are numerous ways in which the Great Fire is being commemorated (lots of London’s museums have special exhibitions going on), of which my favourite is the  large wooden sculpture of the City on the Thames which is to be set alight on Sunday afternoon. 

The Pepys show

To Greenwich, where the National Maritime Museum is housing an exhibition devoted to the life and times of a seventeenth-century naval civil servant and man-about-town who just happened to record everything that he saw and experienced in a diary. ‘Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire and Revolution’ tells the story of a most turbulent time in English history (from the aftermath of the Civil War to the Glorious Revolution) through the eyes of the greatest of diarists.

Here was a man who, although he must have realised that someone in the future would read what he’d written down, left nothing out – even when it reflected badly on him (and, as he wasn’t the most faithful of husbands, there’s plenty of that). As well as the minutiae of his personal life (what he ate, who he met, problems with the servants, trips to the theatre, falling asleep in church), his diary – which he kept between 1660 and 1669, writing it in shorthand by candle-light and only giving up when he feared for his eyesight – has eye-witness accounts of some of the key events of the age – the return and coronation of Charles II (Pepys left the ceremony early, as he needed the loo), the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of 1666. It is both a fantastic and fascinating read, a real window through which we can glimpse the past. The whole thing amounts to over a million words, and remains one of the key texts for understanding Restoration England; for this reason, the exhibition’s publicity calls him, with some justification, “history’s greatest witness”.

Pepys came from a humble background – the son of a London tailor, he was the fifth of eleven children but the oldest one to survive. Earmarked as a bright boy, he attended St Paul’s School and then went to Cambridge, following which he came under the patronage of his well-connected cousin, Edward Montagu (who’s appeared on this blog before; he was a Parliamentarian soldier who became one of Cromwell’s generals-at-sea before being instrumental in inviting Charles II back to England, upon which he was ennobled as the Earl of Sandwich) who ensured his entry into the civil service. He married young (but not as young as his wife Elisabeth, who was just 14) and in 1658 he underwent surgery – a high-risk option at the time – to remove a bladder stone. Seventeenth-century surgical equipment can be seen in the exhibition.

The tumultuous times in which he lived are brought to bear early on in the exhibition with a large painting of Charles I’s execution, which Pepys bunked off school to see (although curiously, the painting shows Thomas Fairfax as the executioner, even though he hadn’t even signed the death warrant). There are plenty of items Cromwell-related (Pepys was a great admirer of the Lord Protector), including his death mask and a large bowl commemorating Charles II’s evading of Cromwell’s troops by hiding in an oak tree after the battle of Worcester – an event that, in addition to giving us the Royal Oak pub name, Charles later retold to one S. Pepys, who recorded it for posterity.

Portraits abound – as well as Pepys himself, there’s Cromwell, Charles II in coronation regalia, two of his patron Montagu (“my Lord”), his wife Elisabeth (reproduced from an engraving, the original having been destroyed long ago) and various contemporaries like Sir Christoper Wren. There are also portraits of some of the Merry Monarch’s mistresses, including an almost-naked Nell Gwyn, the most famous actress of the age (“pretty, witty Nell”, Pepys called her), and Mary Davis, another actress who (we learnt) Pepys rather liked, although Elisabeth took a different view, describing her as “the most impertinent slut in the world”. There’s even space for a miniature of Frances Stuart, who refused to become a royal mistress and who is said to have been the model for Britannia, as depicted on the old (pre-decimal) penny and the (pre-2008) 50p coin.

As well as exhibits – models of ships, musical instruments (Pepys loved to relax with some music), items used in futile attempts to ward off plague, many documents and letters (do check out Charles II’s love-letter to Louise de Kerouaille, and wonder how it could have been written by a man who was far from monogamous) – there are graphics, and it’s here that the exhibition does very well. The section on Restoration theatre (quite literally restored, as Cromwell had banned it) is complete with recordings of extracts from plays – a period comedy, and Macbeth done in the style of the time – interspersed with readings of extracts from Pepys’s diary where he comments on plays he’s seen, complementing visuals of silhouetted actors and actresses giving it their best despite loud cat-calls from a lively audience. Better still is the depiction of the Great Fire of 1666 – a large-scale picture of old London across which the flames gradually spread, to the sound of a roaring fire and Pepy’s commentary (indeed, many consider his eye-witness account of the Great Fire, right down to his burying a Parmesan cheese in his garden, to be the best part of the diary).

Pepys’s professional career is dealt with in a section on naval warfare (the diary aside, he is still regarded by naval historians as one of the most crucial civilians ever to have played a part in the development of the Royal Navy), while beyond that there’s a part devoted to science that explores Pepys’s role in the Royal Society – through which he knew the likes of Newton, Hooke, Halley and Wren. There are scientific instruments on display here, and most interestingly there’s a first edition of Newton’s Principia that refers to Pepys by name on the title page, as he had authorised its publication in his capacity as President of the Royal Society.

The exhibition ends with some detail on the Glorious Revolution – an event which brought about Pepys’s professional downfall. He rose high – as well as an MP, he was Secretary for the Admiralty – but his career was tied with the fortunes of James II (who, as Duke of York, had been the Lord High Admiral and had as such been well aware of Pepys’s work with the Navy). By supporting James’s right to succeed to the throne despite his Catholicism, Pepys was in fact one of the original Tories (the Tory-Whig distinction dates from the Exclusion Crisis) and he was for a time imprisoned in the Tower on fabricated charges (he was accused, among other things, of secretly being a Catholic – a dangerous thing to be accused of at the height of the hysteria known as the Popish Plot). When James fled the country, Pepys retired from public life.

Just about the only thing that’s not on show is the diary itself – that is kept at Pepys’s old college at Cambridge where it’s not allowed to leave the premises as per the terms of Pepys’s will, which is on display. Written in shorthand and bound in six volumes, the original version of the diary was part of Pepys’s very large book collection (itself one of the most impressive seventeenth-century private libraries in existence) and it wasn’t transcribed into plain English until the early nineteenth century – a job that took three years, with the transcriber only realising towards the end of his mammoth task (and you can see some of this work) that the key to Pepys’s shorthand system was written down in another book located a few shelves above the diary volumes!

There were a few things that I learned, and not just the fact about the actual diary not being allowed to leave Cambridge. I was rather surprised to learn that it wasn’t published in its entirety until the 1970s; earlier editions of the diary left the really racy bits out, and it was only after the Lady Chatterley trial that these were deemed fit for publication. The full-length version runs to eleven volumes (including the companion and index); most of us settle for single-volume abridgements like The Shorter Pepys (itself over 1000 pages) although there is a very useful online version of an older edition.

There are just a few weeks left before the exhibition closes. Go now, while you still have the chance.

When Samuel Pepys went treasure-hunting

On 30^th October 1662, a party of men arrived at the Tower of London. Their leader was a short man who was obliged to surrender his sword to the guards; unwilling to proceed unarmed without a cloak, for a gentleman of the time was not considered to be properly dressed without one or the other, he retreated to a nearby pub while his servant ran home to fetch said garment. Luckily for the servant, the man lived on Seething Lane, just to the west of Tower Hill. Once properly attired, he proceeded into the Tower where he met with Sir Henry Bennet, the Secretary of State. Bennet was there to give the man the King’s warrant to search the Tower.

The man was Samuel Pepys, Clerk of the Acts at the Navy Office, and he already knew what he had been sent to look for. Earlier that morning he had met with his patron, the Earl of Sandwich, who had told him that an acquaintance of theirs called Thomas Wade had reported that a cache of gold, silver and jewels with an estimated value of £7000 was buried somewhere in the Tower’s grounds. Sandwich had arranged for Bennet to obtain the necessary warrant to enable Pepys to carry out a search. The fact that he was delegated with this task can be seen as a sign of Sandwich’s increased confidence in his abilities.

Whatever information Wade might have had about the money’s exact location was, alas, unreliable. “We went into several little cellars,” Pepys would later record in his diary, “and then went out a-doors to view, and to the Coleharbour; but none did answer so well to the marks which was given him to find it by as one arched vault. Where after a great deal of counsel whether to set upon it now or delay for better and more full advice, we set to it; and to digging we went to almost 8 a-clock at night – but could find nothing.”

He was back at the Tower two days later, along with Robert Lee (Bennet’s agent), Wade and some workmen, “to make one triall more”. Digging, he recorded, “was now most confidently directed; and so seriously, and upon pretended good grounds … but we missed of all, and so we went away the second time like fools.” Later that day, Pepys met with Wade and a Captain Evett who claimed to have been told of the location of the treasure by a confidante of the man who had hidden it. Pepys appears to have been convinced by Evett’s account, even though he was dealing with what was at best third-hand information.

Unfortunately, the one man who might have been able to state with confidence where the treasure could be found – the man who had apparently hidden it – was dead. That man was John Barkstead, who had been the Lieutenant of the Tower under Oliver Cromwell. As a younger man, Pepys himself had supported the Parliamentarian cause and his entry into what we would now call the civil service in the 1650s had been due to the patronage of a distant cousin, Edward Montagu, who had fought for Parliament in the Civil War and had risen to become one of Cromwell’s generals-at-sea. In the political uncertainty following Cromwell’s death, Montagu had switched his loyalties and played a crucial role in restoring the monarchy, for which Charles II had rewarded him by making him the Earl of Sandwich.

Barkstead had also fought for Parliament but he had then been a commissioner at Charles I’s trial and had therefore been one of the signatories of the latter’s death warrant. He owed his position at the Tower to Cromwell, who approved of his efficiency and even knighted him in 1656. After Cromwell’s death, though, he had been dismissed amid accusations of his having fleeced the prisoners in his care, and he had fled the country at the time of the Restoration – only to be captured and sent back to England along with two of his fellow-Regicides, Miles Corbet and John Okey. Charles II may have been lenient towards some repentant ex-Parliamentarians, but for surviving Regicides there was little mercy. All three were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 19^th April 1662.

Barkstead, who Pepys also refers to as Baxter, is not known to have mentioned any hidden valuables at his former place of work following his arrest, but rumours about this started after his execution – many doubtless remembered the accusations that he had used his position to line his own pockets – and it is perhaps surprising that it had taken six months for these rumours to reach someone (Sandwich) with the power to order a proper search. Even with the treasure not yet recovered, it had already been decided that the estimated £7000 would be split three ways: £2000 for Wade for reporting it to the proper authorities, £2000 for Sandwich and £3000 for the King. Pepys reckoned that he might get between £10 and £20 from his patron for his efforts.

The Tower at the time was in a parlous state – the structure had been neglected for some time, and Cromwell had considered demolishing it. Some parts of it had been partially dismantled prior to the Restoration, and one of these was the Coldharbour Tower – what Pepys referred to as the “Coleharbour”, which stood next to the White Tower. In many respects, Pepys and his workmen were digging for what is known to history as Barkstead’s treasure among ruins.

One 3^rd November Pepys met with Wade and Evett again, and found that their “prime Intelligence”, the person in whom Barkstead had apparently confided the treasure’s location, was a woman. They resolved that the next time they tried, she would “be there in a disguise, and confirm us in the place”. She was duly there when Pepys returned to the Tower four days later. By this time the treasure’s estimated value had risen to £50,000 (so Pepys records), and after the unnamed informant pointed out the cellar in which it was apparently hidden (“in butter-ferkins”), the digging-party once again set to work. Once again they found nothing, and by now Pepys was starting to have his doubts. “I do believe there must be money hid somewhere by him,” he mused, “or else he did delude this woman in hopes to oblige her to further serving him – which I am apt to believe.” His dashed hopes cannot have been helped by his domestic arrangements that day; he was “very much displeased” because his wife had gone to stay with relatives while his house was being cleaned. The next day, he compensated for this by working late.

Pepys met with Wade and Evett again the following week (“I have great confidence that there is no cheat in these people, but that they go on good grounds, though they have been mistaken”) but he does not record any more attempts at searching for the treasure until 19^th December, when the workmen were set to dig “in the corner against the Mayne-guard [Main Gate], a most unlikely place”. It being a cold day, Pepys spent much of it inside, reading and conversing with Lee by the fire in the Governor’s residence while the labourers toiled outside. Once again, nothing was found, “and having wrought below the bottom of the foundation of the wall, I bid them give over; and so all our hopes ended.”

Thus ends Samuel Pepys’s search for buried treasure at the Tower of London, a tale that might seem to be little more than an historical curiosity, to the extent that it is usually edited out of the abridged versions of his famous diary. The story of Barkstead’s treasure, though, has had a surprisingly long life, with the last attempt to find it taking place in 1958. Whether it ever existed at all is doubtful.

But the fact remains that there was buried treasure beneath Restoration London, not at the Tower but on Cheapside. In 1912, a stash of jewels dating back to the mid-seventeenth century was found there, buried beneath the cellar of a building that was destroyed in the Great Fire. It is not known who put it there, but the most likely theory is that it was buried during the Civil War. The Cheapside Hoard was exhibited at the Museum of London from October 2013 to April 2014.

The unknown person who buried the Cheapside Hoard certainly wasn’t the only person to have buried valuables in seventeenth-century London. As the Great Fire took hold in early September 1666, Pepys himself famously buried his wine and a Parmesan cheese, and witnessed two others doing likewise (his house survived the blaze, but whether he was able to recover these delicacies afterwards remains unknown).

The Tower had its buried secrets too, of a much more macabre nature than some supposed ill-gotten gains. In 1674, Charles II finally got around to ordering that some of the more decayed parts be cleared, including a turret by the south wall of the White Tower– not far from the ruined Coldharbour Tower where Pepys had been searching. In the foundations of this, workmen uncovered the skeletons of two children; no-one at the time doubted that these were the remains of the boy-king Edward V and his brother – the Princes in the Tower who had disappeared in 1483. Pepys had by this time ceased to keep a diary, so we do not know if he, on hearing of this, thought about his unsuccessful treasure hunt. Four years later, Charles II ordered that the remains be buried at Westminster Abbey, where – following an examination in the 1930s that verified beyond reasonable doubt their identity – they lie to this day.

Sources

Arthur Bryant, Samuel Pepys: The Man in the Making (Granada, 1984)

Christopher Durston, ‘Barkstead, John’, p. 908, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (vol. 3) (OUP, 2004)

Nigel Jones, Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (Windmill, 2012)

Robert Latham & William Matthews (eds.), The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Volume III 1662 (Harper Collins, 2000)

Steve Roud, London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World’s Most Vibrant City (Random House, 2008)

The Tower

There are many places in London that most Londoners are happy to leave for the tourists, and I’m not just referring to a certain chain of steak restaurants in which no-one who actually lives here has ever admitted to dining.

I refer instead to the museums, the galleries, the churches, the monuments - those things that make the place what it is (they're called ‘attractions’ for a reason). How many people who actually live in London have been round Westminster Abbey or the Houses of Parliament, or climbed up the Monument or the dome of St Paul’s? These are some of the best things that London has to offer, but most of the people who visit them are, well, just visiting.

The Tower - or, to use its full title, Her Majesty’s Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London - is such a place. Recently, some friends from Canada came to stay with us, so I had the perfect excuse to buck the trend and see some of London from a tourist’s point of view.

I had a really good time, and I even learned a few things – yes, I who reckoned I knew most things historical already!

I marvelled at the Crown Jewels (for which the queue doesn’t take as long as everyone thinks), and took note of the packing-cases which are also on display by the exit, probably to emphasise that this is very much a working collection (although most of the implements on display haven’t been used for the past 62 years).

Afterwards, we checked the time and headed over to the moat (grassed over, these days) for one of the half-hourly guided tours. These are conducted by one of the Yeomen Warders, and they are full of information about the Tower’s long and often bloody history.

It so happened that the Yeoman who did our tour was the Raven Master; like all of the other Yeomen, he had to serve in the Forces and receive the Long Service & Good Conduct Medal in order to be considered for a position at the Tower, but his particular responsibility is looking after the ravens. There are six of these, and legend has it that the kingdom will fall if they ever leave; in order to protect against this, the Raven Master advised us that they have a seventh, reserve raven who can take the place of any that go AWOL.

The tour ended in St Peter ad Vincula, the Tudor chapel that serves as the parish church for the Tower community (the Yeomen and their families live within the precincts of the Tower). This outwardly pretty-looking building has a sinister past, for it was here that the headless corpses of those who had been executed on Tower Hill were buried (the heads were stuck on spikes and displayed on London Bridge). The Raven Master described this place, rather accurately I thought, as the opposite of the likes of Westminster Abbey; this was where those who had fallen from grace ended up. Among those buried there are three queens (Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Grey) and notables like Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, several members of the Dudley family and the Duke of Monmouth.

We then took in the centre of the complex, the White Tower. First off was the Line of Kings, a frankly massive display of armour which ranged in size from the mens’ extra-extra-large (the suit made for Henry VIII, complete with an overly prominent codpiece) to the boys’ small (the one made for Prince Henry, James I’s eldest son). Elsewhere were exhibits about coins and weaponry – in its time, the Tower has served as the base for the Royal Mint as well as London’s principal armoury – throughout the ages, and amid all of the displays of swords and guns there’s a calm little room which the tourists fall silent as they traipse through it. This room is the Chapel of St John, which dates back to when the Tower was first built in the 1170s and 1180s, which makes it (in structural terms) London's oldest church, and a fine example of Norman ecclesiastical architecture.

Back in the 1960s, the architecture critic Ian Nairn saw through the touristy bits and got straight to the root of the White Tower’s significance: “Perhaps no other building in the whole of England conveys such an overwhelming effect of early Norman steamrollering mass, the force that produced the Domesday Book and fixed the shires.” He’d touched on a key point about the building itself. It was a key - for London, the key - symbol of Norman power. It is with this symbolism in mind that Boris Johnson (who has a good view of it, from City Hall) has more recently described the Tower as “a Lubyanka, an expression of power, a horrible bully of a building ... It told the English that they had been beaten ... conquered by a race of people who built great donjons and keeps on a scale that had never been attempted on the island.”

But the Tower’s long and bloody history has always extended beyond the Normans who built it. The headless bodies buried in the chapel tell part of the Tower’s gruesome history; for centuries it was the most notorious prison and torture-venue in the country, the place where the boy-king Edward V and his brother (known to history as the Princes in the Tower) were imprisoned and then murdered, the place where many prisoners were subjected to the rack (a form of torture which, it was said, could induce a confession merely by having a prisoner take a look at it). These and many other dark deeds form a long shadow over the Tower. Anyone with even a passing interest in this country’s history should visit. Even if they are from London.

One last thing, which has got me thinking. Near Traitor’s Gate at the moment is a series of billboards that tell, among other stories, of Samuel Pepys's unsuccessful hunt for £7000-worth of gold coins that had been buried in the grounds of the Tower. These billboards were obviously covering up some construction work but I was intrigued as I didn’t know that story. I knew the great diarist, who lived nearby, had once fallen asleep during a sermon at the Tower (presumably in St Peter ad Vincula) and that years after giving up on the diary he’d been imprisoned there on trumped-up charges of spying for the French because of his support for James II, but digging for gold? Another story, I think, for another time.

The Capital Ring: Woolwich to Falconwood

Resuming the Capital Ring from where I'd left off meant returning to Woolwich, a place described by the late archtecture critic Ian Nairn as "a provincial centre that has got embedded in London by mistake" (his classic work Nairn's London has recently been republished and I am very much enjoying it; another gem is his description of Hampstead as "a bit of a joke, though many of its inhabitants are deadly serious about it").

It was getting on for 2pm on a hot June Saturday by the time I disembarked at Woolwich Arsenal station, and I was in need of some lunch before commencing on the next section of the Capital Ring, a seven-mile walk to Falconwood (not a place of which I had previously heard; if nothing else, doing the Capital Ring is certainly increasing my knowledge of London!) which would, so my print-out from the TfL website informed me, take in a castle. 

When I'd finished the previous section at Woolwich (also on a Saturday), I'd noticed a Nepalese food-stall in the market-place next to the old Royal Arsenal gates and that, I thought, would be ideal for lunch. Sadly it was not there this time, and the only stalls at Woolwich Market on the occasion of my second visit were selling goods that couldn't be eaten - cheap clothing, cheap jewellery and mobile phone covers were the most popular items. A nearby sandwich bar looked promising but it was closed, and in the end I had no option but to make do with a kebab-shop; I got a battered sausage and a can of ginger beer to go, and with that I was on my way!

I needed to rejoin the path by the entrance to the foot tunnel, and my easiest route was along Powis Street, described by Nairn as "a commercial gold mine from end to end"; maybe that was the case in the Sixties, but what I saw was the usual contemporary high-street mixture of bookies, discount shoe-shops and charity-shops, with a couple of boarded-up establishments thrown in for good measure.

By the River, the Capital Ring was once again sharing path-space with the Thames Path (which, it seems, runs on both banks). I had views across to the Tate & Lyle processing plant on the north side, while my view upriver took in the Thames Barrier, the Dome and the tall buildings of Canary Wharf in the heart of the redeveloped Docklands.

My route took me through the old Royal Dockyard, now mostly long gone to make way for housing but there are a few remnants, most notably a pair of canons pointing out onto the River and a couple of small dry docks now being used as ponds. These were fenced off but that hadn't stopped several local boys from getting in for a spot of fishing (still the biggest sport in the country in terms of participation); I wasn't sure what they were hoping to catch, though, as the water looked fairly stagnant and had several items of rubbish floating in it. 

Elsewhere was a mosaic that had been created at ground level, presumably when the area was being redeveloped; I guessed that this had at the time been an admirable community project intended to install some sense of local people working together to improve the place where they lived, and maybe even foster some civic pride in a new housing development, but it was sadly in decay. 

Further along, a man was trying to teach his young daughter how to ride a bike; she did not appear to be enjoying the experience. Most of the flats had their windows open - it was a hot day - and the sound of a party emanated from one of them.

The path turned inland shortly before the Barrier, taking me through a quiet housing estate, past a disused factory and along the A206. A pub called Clancys claimed to offer Sky Sports and karaoke on Fridays but it was boarded-up (although some open first-floor windows told me that the building was still inhabited), while further along the White Horse (rebuilt 1897) had bingo, bed & breakfast and the advantage of being open; this pub also had a white ensign in the window with "RIP Lee Rigby" written on it; appropriate, really, as it was Armed Forces Day (and, of course, his brutal murder had happened in Woolwich, just outside the barracks).

Not long after this the path veered left, away from the road and into the first of a series of parks connected by a route called the Green Chain Walk on which the Capital Ring piggy-backs as it had previously done with the Parkland Walk, the Lea Valley Walk, the Greenway and the Thames Path; no doubt there will be others and why not? Part of the point of the Capital Ring was to connect green spaces. 

I passed some tennis courts and a circular patch of grassland on which a running-track had been marked out (briefly making me think of school sports days, long ago) before climbing a steep path through the surrounding woodland. The path reached a ridge on which a quiet road ran before descending into another park. 

This one, which was heavily wooded, had what I assumed (from the sound of a cockerel) to be an urban farm but which was in fact a small petting-zoo with a herd of fallow deer.

The route continued up a hill to another road and then another park, the Capital Ring living up to its billing as a connector between London's green spaces. This park, though, was of a completely different sort from its predecessor; no woods, hills or deer here but flat, open grassland, turning brown in the sun, cut short and with athletics markings painted on. A cafe stood next to a play area frequented by kids whose parents ranged from the burqa-clad to the scatily-clad, neither looking entirely comfortable in the heat. Two lads in football shirts and shorts kicked a ball around in desultory fashion (both West Ham fans, I couldn't help but notice), while elsewhere a young woman read a book under a tree and a cricket match was in full flow.

The route wound through a couple of suburban back-streets of post-war but pre-Sixties local authority housing before another park which looked almost deserted. It had what looked like a BMX track and a sign placed there by Greenwich Council advised me that that is what it was, "A 2012 legacy", so the sign proclaimed. But why, on such a lovely Saturday, was no-one using it? I had a BMX bike when I was a kid and if there had been a BMX track nearby I'd've been all over it. Crossing the next road, I saw a child on a bike heading towards the park and I hoped he was going to have a go on the track.

Next up was not so much suburban as almost rural as the route took me onto Woolwich Common. Any sense of peace and tranquility was short-lived, though, as on the other side was the junction of the South Circular and the A2 in the form of Shooter's Hill Road, the former the southern half of the inner London ring-road, the latter following the route of a road first built by the Romans.

I had encountered Shooter's Hill not so long ago when I had played in a cricket match in Greenwich Park. In the car on the way there, my team-mates and I had idly speculated where it had got its name from, and had reckoned that it must have had something to do with highwaymen. I'd looked it up out of curiosity after getting home, and had found that this was indeed the case, partly at least; this particular part of Watling Street had been known as a venue for archery in the Middle Ages but had become a notorious haunt for highwaymen by the 17th century and it was also the location of a gibbet, positioned there to deter others from a life of crime; the Restoration-era civil servant, man-about-town and (most importantly from an historical perspective) diarist Samuel Pepys describes riding "under the man that hangs on Shooters Hill, and a filthy sight it was to see how his flesh is shrunk to his bones" (a man of his time, Pepys was no stranger to public displays of violent death and the gore that went with it, having witnessed both the beheading of Charles I and the hanging, drawing and quartering of Major-General Harrison). Much later, Shooter's Hill once again lived up to its name as the location of an anti-aircraft battery during the Second World War.

I headed up Shooter's Hill but soon diverted across Eltham Common, into dense woodland through which an uphill path ran. The wood was Oxleas Wood, and my immediate target was the castle on the top of the hill, literally the high point of the day.

To call it a castle is a bit of an exaggeration. Severndroog Castle is in fact an 18th century Gothic folly, built by the widow of Sir William James, a naval officer who in 1755 had attacked and destroyed Suvarnadurg, an island fortress located between Bombay and Goa on the Indian coast (the name of the castle is an anglicisation of that of the fortress). Nowadays, having been saved from redevelopment, the main function of this three-storey triangular building is to serve as a tea-room in the woods. One thing I was particularly looking forward to was the view from the top; seven counties are supposed to be visible, and it is said that on a clear day you can see as far as Windsor Castle.

Alas, a sign advised that the public could only access the roof on Thursdays and Sundays (I was there on a Saturday) and no amount of persuasion could get the waiters to turn a blind eye and let me climb the stairs; deprived of a view of seven counties, I settled for a black coffee and a biscuit.

View-less, I continued, heading through a well laid-out rose garden occupied by a pair of picnickers and then through the woods (a gap in the trees giving me a glimpse of the Crystal Palace radio mast) until I emerged at the top of what was not so much a hill but a gentle, south-facing slope overlooking a field called Oxleas Meadow and, beyond that, south-east London and the North Downs.

A lovely vista (as somebody once said, there is nowhere lovelier than England in June) but I was still feeling cheated by my not having been able to look out from the top of Severndroog. People were scattered across the field, some walking dogs, some walking children, others relaxing. A solid-looking building at the top had the word 'cafe' painted on the roof and it looked so inviting I went in and asked for an ice-cream; I was offered a choice of six flavours and addressed as 'love' by the girl behind the counter.  

Outside, as well as the view, was the inevitable green sign which told me that the Capital Ring was still sharing a path with the Green Chain Walk. I had, according to the sign, come 4 3/4 miles from Woolwich, and I had 1 1/2 to go to Falconwood at the end of the stage. I made that a 6 1/4-mile walk for the day; wasn't it meant to have been seven? Where had the other three-quarters of a mile gone? 

Not for the first time, I wondered at the total distance of the Capital Ring which is officially given - on the TfL website and in the walking guide published by the Ordnance Survey - as 78 miles, although for the Woolwich-Falconwood section the two sources vary between seven and 6.2 respectively. That said, every section distance doesn't include the extra bits where you have to leave the official route to get to a station at the end, so maybe I'm over-thinking things.

Another wooded section, which brought me to the bottom of Oxleas Meadow, followed before I crossed a road to get to the final wood of the day (Shepherdleas Wood, this one). In this one I encountered a tree leaning at a 45-degree angle with half of its roots sticking out of the ground, and then I came to some open parkland where, finally, I got my view of Central London. Looking north-west over the roofs of some semi-detached houses, I took in a vista that included the Eye, Wembley Stadium, the Shard and the Post Office Tower.

After checking out the birds on the small lake (mallards going through their summer moult, and tufted ducks going for a dive), I trudged on towards a bridge that went over a railway line and the A2. The Capital Ring runs south across this bridge but I didn't take it. Instead, I carried on walking east to Falconwood station.

Spirit of Broadside

One thing I love about going to the Suffolk coast – along with the abundant birdlife, the opportunities for swimming in the sea and the chance to temporarily escape from London in the old-world charm of Southwold – is the chance to sample Adnams beer.

Although occasionally available as a guest beer at certain pubs in London, Adnams comes into its own in its home town of Southwold where the range available in any given pub is fantastic. From the dark, full-flavoured Gunhill to the golden, citrus-tasting Spindrift to the strong Broadside ale (not recommended as a session beer!), every Adnams beer is a winner as far as I am concerned.

Adnams, which somehow managed to escape being taken over by the various brewing conglomerates of the 1960s and 70s, was still using a horse-and-dray to delivery beer to pubs in Southwold less than a decade ago but has in recent years modernised in a big way. Nowadays, they have a state-of-the-art distribution centre a couple of miles inland, and in Southwold itself they have an excellent shop which sells fancy cooking equipment and fine wines in addition to many bottles of their beer. Now that is my kind of shop, and it’s a must-visit every time we go to Southwold.

For the past couple of years, it has been branching out and distilling spirits as well – which is not something most breweries would contemplate doing (they completed work on the Copper House Distillery, located next to the brewery in the heart of Southwold, in 2010). As a result, you can now get Adnams gin and vodka, as well as liqueurs like limoncello. Adnams has already started to pick up awards for its spirits, which shows that they’re taking it seriously and are being taken seriously. There’s a whisky too, although as the rules for whisky production state that it has to be matured in wood for at least three years, it’s not available to buy yet. Give it time, though. Good things do come to those who wait, right?

This merger of brewing and distilling has perhaps reached its apogee, though, with a new drink called Spirit of Broadside. What they’ve done is taken Broadside, distilled it and matured the result in oak casks for a year. People seem to be doing a lot more with beer these days – just look at the increasing number of microbreweries and the rise of the beer cocktail – but I haven’t come across anyone distilling it before (unless of course we want to define the fermented grain mash that gets distilled to make whisky as beer, and as far as I’m aware that is not the done thing). There isn’t even a proper name the resulting product – the three-year rule aside, it can’t be called whisky as there were hops involved in the making of the beer, although Adnams helpfully describes it as eau de vie de biere. Naturally, I couldn’t resist this.

The result is a warm, spicy-but-smooth drink, not really like any whisky, or indeed any liqueur, that I’ve tasted. The best way I can describe it is the result of someone combining a very good beer with a fine whisky, albeit in a much classier way than the whisky chaser.

Spirit of Broadside was introduced into the growing Adnams range last year, and if you are a beer-lover and can get hold of a bottle, it’s worth a try.

Broadside, which gets its name from the simultaneous (or near-simultaneous) firing of all of the canons on one side of an old ship-of-the-line, was first brewed in 1972 to commemorate the 300^th anniversary of the Battle of Sole Bay, and Spirit of Broadside in turn commemorates the 40^th anniversary of what has become one of their most popular beers.

The Battle of Sole Bay (sometimes written as Solebay) was fought just off the coast of Southwold in 1672. It was part of the Anglo-Dutch Wars – that now-largely-forgotten series of conflicts in the mid-to-late seventeenth century over control of the seas and trade routes. The battle itself was an indecisive affair. The Dutch fleet surprised a joint Anglo-French fleet at anchor in Sole Bay but was unable to press home its advantage when the wind changed. Today the battle is perhaps best known for the fact that one of the English admirals, the Earl of Sandwich, was killed. He was not the inventor of the sandwich – that was a later earl who was also an admiral – but he was the patron and benefactor of one Samuel Pepys; when Pepys refers to ‘my Lord’ in his diary, he’s referring to him.

The battle is commemorated in Southwold in lots of ways – it’s depicted on the town sign, there’s a plaque commemorating the house where the navy’s commander-in-chief (the Duke of York, later James II) stayed, and there are cannons facing out to sea on the town’s various greens. Plus, of course, the name of the battle is the name of the brewery.

It all, apparently, comes back to the beer.