'A place of ghosts! Soil soaked in blood! Houses and mansions built on the sweat of labourers! Graveyards full of corpses whose souls cry to God for vengeance! A pit of darkness with ground fertile enough to grow a thousand Judas trees!'

This is how the preacher who'd swept into London in the autumn of 1380 described the city.

'The whore of Babylon!' he had thundered from the steps of Cheapside. 'The place of the Great Dragon! Didn't its citizens see Satan, and all his fallen seraphs, rising like dark clouds, plumes of smoke from the spiritual battlefield, across the skies of London?'

The preacher's mouth was full of such choice phrases. Nevertheless, his words had little effect upon the citizens; they had even less upon the King's good fleet, fresh from patrolling the Narrow Seas and berthed at the different quays along the Thames. The sailors had swarmed ashore, filling the taverns and the streets with their raucous sounds and revelry. The preacher, in disgust, took off his sandals, shaking the dust from them, a sign that his task was finished. He would have nothing more to do with the citizens of this new Babylon.

Now he sat in the Lion Heart tavern across the Thames on the outskirts of Southwark.

The preacher had gone down its narrow mean streets, the alleyways and runnels full of filth from the open sewers. He had seen the brothels and the whorehouses, the ale-shops and the taverns. Before dusk he had even stood in front of the pillory and watched a man, his ears pinned to the wood, have to pull those ears away leaving them torn and bloody: a sure sign that the King's justice had been done while the brand he'd carry all the days of his life.

Ah well, life was full of pain! The preacher had done his task. He'd leave London and go to the Cinque Ports. Some good ladies in Cheapside had given him silver pieces. The preacher had snatched them up only to spit in their faces.