Читать книгу Coffin’s Ghost - Gwendoline Butler - Страница 7

May, 166–

On Wednesday last, I did go to Easter Hythe across the River Thames. I crossed the river in a waterman’s boat from Rotherhythe with a joking waterman who challenged me to swim across if he dropped me over the side because the weight of me and my friend Mr Williams was like to sink his boat. We let him laugh and staid where we were.

We were met by Mr Williams’s son. It was but a short walk – for walk we must – to the township of Easter Hythe which some say was first used by Viking sailors. Easter Hythe is a poor-looking place with low-built wooden houses and some stone-built hovels said to be of Viking origin.

In Easter Hythe we went to Drossers Market where were many stalls and great crowds. Young Mr Williams said here you might buy anything you wanted and most of it would be stolen and might be stolen back again before you got home with it.

From it leads Chopping Tree Lane and there I was shown the pit into which the bodies were dropped and which we had come to see.

For this was the Viking execution place, so it is told, where victims were sacrificed and criminals hanged.

Many skulls and other bones were found but young Mr Williams said that it was his belief it was nothing of the Vikings but more recent and more criminous. Mr Williams is a surgeon and sees many broken bones and it is his opinion that the bones in the pit are too new broken to be Viking.

The sense of evil in Chopping Tree Lane was mighty strong, creeping into Drossers Market, and Mr Williams said to me that the evil would be there for centuries.

We came back in poor spirits, although I bought a pretty bracelet for my wife and one, but not near so dear, for my maidservant Alice.

Editor’s note: It is thought that Pepys’s real motive for the visit to East Hythe with his friend Williams was that they had been told that it was home to some handsome and willing and pox-free young women whose embraces they could enjoy at a lower price than in the City of London.