idleness: he therefore, one may certainly conclude, became a rogue by
profession and in due course met his fate bravely with white ribbons
round his cap, an orange in one hand, a Prayer-book in the other, and a
large nosegay in his shirt front.
Here is another story of the same Eighteenth Century Sanctuary. It will
seem incredible that the Executive should have been so incapable, but
the story is literally true.
[Illustration: MINT STREET, BOROUGH]
Things being in so satisfactory and settled a condition, the Law being
so triumphantly defied, at the Mint in Southwark, some of the residents
or collegians naturally desired to go farther afield, and to establish
more Sanctuaries or Law-defying colonies on the other side of the
river, which was reported to be ripe for these settlements. No reports
of Meetings, Proceedings, and Resolutions held and passed on the subject
have come down to us. However, that matters very little. Every great
movement, we know, is the work of one man. Therefore there arose a
Prophet--the Prophet as Rogue. He perceived, understood, and presently
began to preach that a 'long felt want'--call it rather a
'need'--existed, which it was his duty to supply. The old Sanctuaries of
North London, he pointed out, had fallen into decay. Alsatia was
deplorably respectable: bailiffs had been seen in Milford Lane: the
trade of counterfeit rings was no longer carried on in St. Martin's.
And, though there were certainly taverns in Clerkenwell which bailiffs
regarded with a useful respect, it could not be denied that London
needed a new Sanctuary. This need he called upon his friends and
fellow-residents in the Mint to supply. He set before his hearers with
burning eloquence--I am sure it was burning--a Vision of a New London,
Purged; Purified; without honesty; without morals; without law; with
neither gallows, pillory, whipping post, or stocks: a City entirely in
the hands of Rogues who would compel all the conquered City to work for
them: would seize on all property and would live triumphantly happy with
complete control over all the Prisons. To make a beginning of this
Millennium, he proposed, by means of colonies from the Mint, to plant
all London with Sanctuaries until, in fulness of time, the City should
become one huge Sanctuary, where debts would never be collected, and
robbery and murder would never be punished.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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