London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Saturday, October 25th.
And here we go – here’s your daily London fix.
Red-letter day today, October 25th. St Crispin’s Day.
Red-letter day in the English calendar –
and, as it happens,
a red-letter day in English literature.
Can you hear it? The bell is tolling.
And you’d better send to ask for whom the bell is tolling.
Yes, I’m afraid so.
On this day – October 25th, 1400 –
Geoffrey Chaucer –
the first great English poet,
the man who made our language sing –
breathes his last. Chaucer. He did. No, I’m not grammatically. That’s another English Literature echo. Joseph Conrad, five centuries later. And inasmuch as Geoffrey Chaucer is the father of English literature.…well, you’ll get my drift.
Chaucer. He dead. On this day, October 25th, 1400. St Crispin’s Day.
And now a quick fast forward – fifteen years later,
on another St Crispin’s Day,
English arms and English words
triumph together at Agincourt.
Henry V.
And that speech.
That “we few, we happy few” speech.
Two writers.
Two ages.
One date.
And I’m going to stick my neck out here and say it: two Londoners.
Chaucer – a Londoner through and through.
And Shakespeare – a Londoner after a fashion. Yes, Stratford bred him,
but London gave him a stage, literally and figuratively,
for his fortune.
Let’s start with Chaucer.
Born about 1343,
probably in Vintry Ward – right in the heart of medieval London –
within earshot of the bells of St Paul’s
and the shouting of the Thames watermen.
His father was a vintner, a prosperous wine-merchant.
So Geoffrey grew up amid the smells of the river,
the hum of trade,
the clatter of carts over cobbles.
Yes, London through and through.
He was page, soldier, diplomat, civil servant, MP –
but through it all he watched.
Listened.
Absorbed.
The London street gave him his ear.
The taverns and courts gave him his eye.
And The Canterbury Tales –
that glorious procession of stories and voices –
took the talk and bustle of the city
and turned it into literature.
Before Chaucer, English poetry was a patchwork of dialects –
proud but provincial.
After him, it had a centre:
London English.
The language of merchants and clerks,
of Westminster and Cheapside.
Our language.
When he died – October 25th 1400 –
they buried him in Westminster Abbey.
Not yet Poets’ Corner –
he started it.
English literature quite literally took root at Chaucer’s feet.
And now –
jump fifteen years forward.
October 25th again.
It’s 1415.
A cold, muddy field in northern France.
Henry V’s little English army –
hungry, exhausted, outnumbered five to one –
faces the might of France at Agincourt.
Out of that grim dawn comes one of the great victories in our history.
Nearly two centuries on,
Shakespeare will give that dawn the words that still make the heart lift.
In c. 1599, writing Henry V,
he sets the scene in Act IV, Scene III:
the king steps forward and says –
(pause – lower tone, steady, reverent)
“This day is called the feast of St Crispian.
He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say, ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day.
Then shall our names – familiar in his mouth as household words –
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester –
Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered –
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”
(pause – let it breathe; then, softer)
Still the greatest pep-talk in history.
But beneath the trumpet-blast,
something subtler:
the old order shifting.
Birth and rank fade.
Mere men become brothers.
The seed of equality – sown in verse.
And that – that’s where Shakespeare and Chaucer meet.
Chaucer gave English its voice.
Shakespeare gave it its music.
Both drew from London –
its streets, its speech, its soul.
Chaucer’s pilgrims set out from the Tabard Inn in Southwark – that’s right, on the other side of the river Thames, barely a stone’s throw from
where Shakespeare’s Globe would later rise.
The road to Canterbury and the road to Agincourt —
they both start on the same bank of the Thames.
And what of the day itself – St Crispin’s Day?
Crispin and Crispinian: Roman brothers, shoemakers, saints.
Beheaded for their faith.
Patron saints of cobblers.
(grin – change tone, mischievous, confiding)
And as the old rhyme has it –
and you can almost hear Chaucer chuckling into his ale –
“The twenty-fifth of October,
Cursed be the cobbler
That goes to bed sober.”
(pause – let the laughter roll)
That’s the street talking again, isn’t it?
The London tongue.
Earthy, irreverent, alive.
Exactly the voice that links Chaucer’s pilgrims
to Shakespeare’s groundlings.
So October 25th
was once the shoemakers’ holiday –
a feast of craftsmen.
Shakespeare, ever the wit, surely relished that.
The cobblers’ day becomes the soldiers’ day.
And the poet who first made English literature
walk in proud leather boots – Geoffrey Chaucer –
bows out on that very date.
Think of it.
Chaucer, the vintner’s son of London, dies.
Shakespeare, the Stratford glover’s son turned London playwright,
makes kings and commoners brothers.
Two men, two centuries, one city, one language.
And where do they rest?
In a very real sense, under the same roof – Westminster Abbey. Chaucer is literally there. At the head of Poet’s Corner. Shakespeare is there in spirit. Shakespeare’s of course buried in Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon. But he’s certainly memorialised – there in spirit – Westminster Abbey. The greatest poet of them all hard by the father of English poetry.
London’s twin laureates –
united by one tongue,
and by one day.
October 25th. St Crispin’s Day.
For English letters – a day of days.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com.
Home of London Walks, London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £25 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do to attract and keep the best guides in London – you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating: the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative – is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Jack the Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians, university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)… well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.