The Gate Where Chaucer Lived
London Calling.
London Walks connecting. This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And today, a new mini-series begins. Sparked by yesterday’s podcast about John Wesley and the conception moment for Methodism.
The conception moment – the burning bush moment – took place in London, in Aldersgate Street.
Aldersgate Steet took its name from Aldersgate, one of the gates in the old London Wall.
And, well, no prizes for guessing this one, I thought, hey, here’s an idea, let’s do a mini series on those gates.
All seven of them. Go through them one by one. Alphabetically. Properly. Like opening little secret drawers in an ancient cabinet.
Little secret drawers because those gates are long gone.
Vanished.
Demolished.
Carted away centuries ago.
And yet they’re still there.
In names.
In memory.
In the grain of the city.
You walk through them every day without realising you’re walking through ghosts.
So today: Aldgate.
And here’s your first nugget. Your instant pub-winning fact.
Geoffrey Chaucer lived over Aldgate.
Not near it.
Not by it.
Over it.
The father of English poetry. The man who gave us The Canterbury Tales.
Living in rooms above one of the great gateways into medieval London.
Living there while carts rattled beneath him and traders, pilgrims, thieves, fishmongers and wool merchants surged through the archway below.
That’s London for you.
The sublime and the noisy all jammed together.
Now the name itself.
Aldgate.
Almost certainly from the Old English eald geat.
Old gate.
That’s wonderfully London, isn’t it?
Not “Golden Gate.”
Not “King’s Gate.”
Not “Gate of Triumph.”
Just… the old gate.
A practical city naming things practically.
The Romans built the first version nearly 2,000 years ago. London was still Londinium then.
A walled frontier town at the edge of empire.
The road running through Aldgate headed east toward Colchester, which before London became top dog had once been the capital of Roman Britain.
So if you stood there in Roman times you’d have seen traffic heading out into Essex and beyond.
Soldiers. Traders. Messengers. Packhorses.
Ox carts.
Maybe a legionary muttering about the rain.
Some things never change.
The gate we mostly know about was rebuilt in the Middle Ages,
sometime between 1108 and 1147.
Big, fortified, serious-looking.
Twin towers.
Heavy doors.
Portcullis.
Proper “don’t mess with us” architecture.
This wasn’t decorative.
London’s gates mattered.
The city could shut itself up at night.
Lock itself down.
Defend itself.
And Aldgate saw drama.
Lots of it.
In 1215,
the Magna Carta year, rebellious barons came through Aldgate on their way to lay siege to the Tower of London.
In 1381, during the Peasants’ Revolt, the area erupted into violence.
And one chronicle gives us a line that sounds as if it comes from a medieval horror film: “the cries of the slayers and slain went on
long after sunset,
making night hideous.”
Medieval London could be astonishingly brutal.
Not picturesque.
Not cosy.
Not all ye olde tea shoppe.
One historian called violence in medieval London “endemic.”
Another described Londoners as having a reputation for “reckless violence.”
And Aldgate saw plenty of it.
One poor soul called William de Aldgate found that out the hard way.
William de Aldgate – William of Aldgate – was a tax collector.
Which, in medieval London, was not exactly a popularity-enhancing career choice.
William de Aldgate was stabbed to death.
Funny, curious the way these old London tales stick like burrs once they swim into your ken. Every time I’m in that neck of the woods I think of William de Aldgate being set upon – he must have been close to home – maybe they waited for him, lurked there in the shadows, set upon him and did for him. Stabbed him over and over again. That story, his story, it’s now part of my mental furniture whenever I’m there, in that neighbourhood. Which, I suppose, if you think about it, means he still lives. How’s the saying go? We die three times. We die when we die. We die when we’re buried. We die the last time our name is mentioned. Six, seven centuries ago William de Aldgate was stabbed to death. Died his first death. But he lives on. He’s here with us. We’re telling his story. Saying his name.
And William de Aldgate was just one chalk mark on the score board of Aldgate violence.
Another official, John Fuatar, had a finger bitten off by an angry woman.
Medieval Londoners had strong opinions about taxation.
And apparently expressed them physically.
Which tells you something important about Aldgate. This was not a sleepy edge-of-town outpost.
It was loud.
Combustible.
Crowded.
Commercially vital.
And occasionally murderous.
Because Aldgate was one of the busiest gateways in the whole city.
The neighbourhood around it teemed with crafts and trades. Fishmongers. Chandlers. Armourers. Brewers.
Leather workers. Shopkeepers.
Dock workers from nearby quays.
The smell alone must have been extraordinary.
Ale.
Fish.
Horse dung.
Wood smoke.
Wet wool.
Humanity.
And then, above all that racket, up in rooms over the gate itself, sat Geoffrey Chaucer.
Reading.
Writing.
Thinking.
In 1374 Chaucer was appointed comptroller of customs for
the Port of London.
Important job.
Wool, skins and leather. Serious money.
Serious paperwork.
And with the post came a remarkable perk:
rooms above Aldgate.
The word “Apartment” hadn’t arrived in English yet. Chaucer would have had no idea what an apartment was. But that’s effectively what he got: a rent-free apartment over one of the busiest gateways in medieval London.
Imagine it.
You finish work at the customs quay near the Thames. You climb the stairs into your rooms over the gate. Below you, London roars and creaks and curses its way through the arch.
And up there, candlelit, Chaucer writes.
Probably Troilus and Criseyde.
Certainly The House of Fame.
Possibly The Parliament of Fowls.
One of the lovely things about Chaucer is that he jokes about himself.
In The House of Fame an eagle teases him for being a complete bookworm. Basically says:
after work you go straight home and bury yourself in another book until your eyes go blurry.
Which feels wonderfully modern.
Somebody in 1380 saying: “Mate, honestly, get out more.”
And there’s another delicious angle to Aldgate.
The gate itself eventually vanished.
Like all the London Wall gates except for fragments here and there, it lost the battle against traffic.
That’s important.
The gates that once controlled movement eventually became obstacles to movement.
London outgrew them.
Aldgate was demolished in 1761.
Gone.
Finished.
Though apparently bits of it were briefly re-erected at Bethnal Green, which feels very London indeed.
“Can’t bear to throw this medieval gate away. Stick it somewhere else for a bit.”
But the name survived.
That’s the thing about London.
Names outlive stone.
Outlive walls.
Outlive empires.
The gate disappears but the word stays pinned to the map like a memory that refuses to die.
And Aldgate today?
Glass towers.
Traffic.
The swirl around Aldgate East station.
People hurrying with takeaway coffees and AirPods
and Deliveroo bikes zipping past.
Most of them with no idea that they’re crossing the line of the old Roman wall.
Or that Geoffrey Chaucer once looked out from rooms above this very spot.
Or that barons marched through here toward civil war.
Or that Roman soldiers once clattered eastward through this gateway nearly two millennia ago.
That’s why this series matters.
Because London doesn’t give up its stories easily.
You have to prise them loose.
You have to know where to look.
And once you do, the city changes.
Aldgate stops being just a station announcement.
It becomes a portal.
And next time…
We move on to another gate in the London wall.
And another vanished piece of London that isn’t vanished at all.
See you tomorrow.