antiquarian postcards

On Friday I had the pleasure of attending the premiere of Benjamin Till’s Oranges and Lemons in the church of St Mary le Bow. One of the texts set by Till (and beautifully sung by a tenor soloist) was a piece of doggerel supposedly recited by the bellman of St Sepulchre’s church, near Newgate, to the prisoners awaiting execution:

All you that in the Condemn’d hold do lie,
Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die.
Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near,
That you before th’Almighty must appear.
Examine well yourselves, in time repent,
That you may not t’eternal flames be sent:
And when St ‘Pulchre’s bell to-morrow tolls,
The Lord above have mercy on your souls!

I’d never come across this rhyme before, and I wasn’t the only person to be intrigued by it. wolfinthewood has traced it back as far as The Tyburn Chronicle (1768), which says that it ‘has long been a custom’. But was it ever actually recited to the prisoners on death row, or is this just one of those picturesque pieces of London folklore?



Gillian doubts whether the rhyme was ever really used, and at first glance I was inclined to agree with her. It sounded a bit too good to be true; the sort of thing that a mischievous eighteenth-century antiquarian like George Steevens might easily have invented. But a little research led me to change my mind. For a start, the tradition of bellman’s verses goes back much further than I’d realised. The minor poet Samuel Rowlands (mainly remembered, if at all, for having plagiarised the works of Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe) prints a selection of bellman’s verses as an appendix to his final book, Heavens Glory (1628).



This includes verses for New Year’s Day (‘All you that doe the Bell-men heare, / The first day of this hopefull yeare’) and Good Friday (‘All you that now in bed doe lye, / Know Jesus Christ this night did dye’), as well as one set of verses that might easily have been the model for the Newgate rhyme:

All you which in your beds doe lye,
Unto the Lord ye ought to cry,
That he would pardon all your sinnes;
And thus the Belmans prayer begins;
Lord give us grace our sinful life to mend,
And at the last to send a ioyfull end:
Having put out your fire and your light,
For to conclude, I bid you all good night.

My favourite is the splendidly plonking rhyme for St David’s Day:

I am no Welchman, but yet to show
The love I to the Countrey owe,
I call this morning, and beseeke
Each man prepare him for his Leeke;
For as I heare some men say,
The first of March is Saint Davids day.

‘All you that in the Condemned hold do lie’ is not included in Rowlands’s collection, but it seems to be alluded to in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, where Bosola tells the Duchess: ‘I am the common bellman / That usually is sent to condemn’d persons / The night before they suffer.’ He then breaks into verse, of considerably better quality than Rowlands’s but clearly belonging to the same memento mori tradition:

Of what is’t fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.
Strew your hair with powders sweet,
Don clean linen, bathe your feet,
And (the foul fiend more to check)
A crucifix let bless your neck.
‘Tis now full tide ‘tween night and day;
End your groan, and come away.

So I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to assume that the Newgate rhyme really was recited by the bellman to the prisoners awaiting execution. It first appears in The Most Pleasant and Delectable History of Whittington’s Colledge, otherwise (vulgarly) called Newgate (1703) -- ‘A Bell-Man, at dead of Night rings his Bell under Newgate, and then with a dismal Voice calls the condemn’d Persons to hear the following Speech’ – so it certainly dates back to the beginning of the eighteenth century, if not earlier.



And the performance? I thought it was thrilling. Take two hundred bells, recorded from seventeen different City churches and mixed together in a Phil Spector-ish wall of sound. Add a choir – put them in fancy dress, because, well, why not? – and just for good measure, throw in a Bengali singer and a group of London schoolchildren performing ‘Oranges and Lemons’ on handbells. It might have turned into an awful mess, but in fact it worked brilliantly, swept along by the energy of the music and the enthusiasm of the performers. Afterwards there was a walking tour through various backstreets and alleyways, which artnouveauho and I dutifully followed as far as Old Broad Street before playing truant and slipping off for a meal in Wagamama. Altogether a wonderful evening; huge thanks to artnouveauho, belle of the bells, for inviting me along.

The title of this post, by the way, is taken from Macbeth, ‘the fatal bellman / Which gives the stern’st good night’. The Fatal Bellman would make a great title for a detective novel; I’m surprised that no one seems to have used it yet. P.D. James take note.