Number one in the order of precedence of the City livery companies, and they have never had to argue about it
The Mercer Roof Terrace holds a 4.4 from five hundred and twenty-four people, and it is named after the first company in the City of London.
First
There is an official order of precedence for the livery companies, and it matters enormously, and it has mattered for six hundred years.
The Mercers are number one.
The Grocers are two. The Drapers three. The Fishmongers four. The Goldsmiths five.
And then the Skinners and the Merchant Taylors, who both claimed sixth, and who brawled in the street about it, and who were finally made to alternate – swapping every year, and dining with each other – by the Billesdon Award of 1484, which is still in force and which we wrote about at the Pelt Trader.
The phrase at sixes and sevens is generally held to come from that dispute.
Nobody has ever disputed the Mercers.
What a mercer was
A dealer in fine textiles – silk, velvet, cloth of gold – and it was the top of the cloth trade, and it was where the money was.
We wrote at the Golden Fleece that England was a wool economy, and at Merchant House that the great national achievement was to stop exporting the raw fleece and start exporting the woven cloth.
The mercer sat at the luxury end of all of that, and he sold to the court, and the court paid.
And Richard Whittington was a mercer.
Whittington again
Whom we met at the Saint on Bow Lane, and who is the most consequential Lord Mayor in the history of the City.
The story is that he was a poor boy who heard the bells of Bow calling him back – turn again, Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London – and turned round, and made his fortune, with a cat.
He was not poor. There was no cat. He was the son of a gentleman, he was a mercer, he lent money to three kings, and he was Lord Mayor four times rather than three.
And he left essentially his entire fortune to the City. Almshouses. Drinking fountains. The rebuilding of Newgate prison, because he had seen the conditions. A ward at St Thomas’s for unmarried mothers, with the records kept confidential so that the women would not be shamed – in the fifteenth century.
The Whittington charity is administered by the Mercers to this day, and it is still distributing money, six hundred years later.
What the companies do now
Schools, mostly, and almshouses, and charitable funds – run quietly, on a serious scale, out of buildings most Londoners have never entered.
They lost their trades a very long time ago. An institution that outlives its purpose usually dies. These found a second one and said almost nothing about it.
Verdict
Good terrace, good view. Go, and raise one to Whittington, who was rich, had no cat, and gave it all away.
Where the cat came from
Nobody knows, and the theories are all unsatisfying.
It appears about two hundred years after his death, and it is grafted onto a story type that exists across Europe and Asia – a poor boy sends his only possession, a cat, on a trading voyage, and it is sold for a fortune to a king whose palace is overrun with rats.
The tale is older than Whittington and it has been attached to a dozen different men in a dozen different countries.
It landed on him because he was the most famous rich man in England, and because a self-made fortune requires an explanation, and because a cat is a better explanation than being born a gentleman and marrying well.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Das hat die Energie von jemandem, der auf Dinge achtet, die niemand bemerken möchte.