Maddermarket
& Dove Street.
St John Maddermarket, as it is properly called, is a medieval alley running from Charing Cross, and thence to the market. It becomes Dove Street at the southern end. The area also encompasses the open square where the street meets Pottergate: this was the 'madder market' of old, madder being a plant that was used to dye cloth red in olden times. So from a simple street sign we can deduce that the area was a cloth and dye market, in the days after the Normans arrived, when the city began spreading out from its heart at Tombland.
Also included in this bundle of passages and buildings is the alley running on the other side of the adjacent church, St John's. Today the alley is encumbered with scaffolding, while repair work is being done on the church. You emerge, blinking, into the light of the cobbled meeting-place, and are greeted by Julia Allum's mural, dedicated to the 'City of Stories'.
THE NINE DAYES MORRICE.
At St John's church is a blue plaque commemorating Will Kempe. Kempe was an actor and co-owner in Shakespeare's theatre troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, renowned for his comic genius. He starred as Falstaff in several plays, and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He and Shakespeare fell out in 1598, possibly because Shakespeare wanted to do darker stuff (there is a jibe in Hamlet, written around the time Kempe left the troupe, aimed at cheesy improv comedy).
In 1600, aged about 40, Kempe undertook a publicity stunt: as a comic performer famous for his jigs, he morris-danced in nine days from London to Norwich. Billed as the 'Nine Days' Wonder', this actually took place over a few weeks, with nine days' travel and 'morricing', and multiple days' rest in between each leg of the journey. Kempe was pursued by adoring crowds for much of the way. He arrived at St Giles' Gate, but was blocked by onlookers. So he rested at an inn for a few days before exiting the city and re-entering (dancing) via St Stephens' Gate.
In Kempe's own account of his jig, he describes passing through the packed marketplace and accidentally stepping on a girl's petticoat and pulling it off her legs: 'now had she her cheekes all coloured with scarlet. I was sorry for her, but on I went towards the Maiors ...' The crowds were such that George Sprat, the man travelling with Kempe to make sure he actually completed his nine days of dancing, lost sight of him in the throng and made him repeat the last few hundred yards of his dance the following Tuesday. Kempe describes jumping over the church wall of St John's to get to the Mayor's house, his final destination; he also tells us that his boots were nailed to the wall of the Guildhall, at the height of his final jump, to mark the occasion, although there is no record of the boots staying up there for very long
THE NINE DAYES MORRICE.
At St John's church is a blue plaque commemorating Will Kempe. Kempe was an actor and co-owner in Shakespeare's theatre troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, renowned for his comic genius. He starred as Falstaff in several plays, and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He and Shakespeare fell out in 1598, possibly because Shakespeare wanted to do darker stuff (there is a jibe in Hamlet, written around the time Kempe left the troupe, aimed at cheesy improv comedy).
In 1600, aged about 40, Kempe undertook a publicity stunt: as a comic performer famous for his jigs, he morris-danced in nine days from London to Norwich. Billed as the 'Nine Days' Wonder', this actually took place over a few weeks, with nine days' travel and 'morricing', and multiple days' rest in between each leg of the journey. Kempe was pursued by adoring crowds for much of the way. He arrived at St Giles' Gate, but was blocked by onlookers. So he rested at an inn for a few days before exiting the city and re-entering (dancing) via St Stephens' Gate.
In Kempe's own account of his jig, he describes passing through the packed marketplace and accidentally stepping on a girl's petticoat and pulling it off her legs: 'now had she her cheekes all coloured with scarlet. I was sorry for her, but on I went towards the Maiors ...' The crowds were such that George Sprat, the man travelling with Kempe to make sure he actually completed his nine days of dancing, lost sight of him in the throng and made him repeat the last few hundred yards of his dance the following Tuesday. Kempe describes jumping over the church wall of St John's to get to the Mayor's house, his final destination; he also tells us that his boots were nailed to the wall of the Guildhall, at the height of his final jump, to mark the occasion, although there is no record of the boots staying up there for very long
THE NINE DAYES MORRICE.
At St John's church is a blue plaque commemorating Will Kempe. Kempe was an actor and co-owner in Shakespeare's theatre troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, renowned for his comic genius. He starred as Falstaff in several plays, and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He and Shakespeare fell out in 1598, possibly because Shakespeare wanted to do darker stuff (there is a jibe in Hamlet, written around the time Kempe left the troupe, aimed at cheesy improv comedy).
In 1600, aged about 40, Kempe undertook a publicity stunt: as a comic performer famous for his jigs, he morris-danced in nine days from London to Norwich. Billed as the 'Nine Days' Wonder', this actually took place over a few weeks, with nine days' travel and 'morricing', and multiple days' rest in between each leg of the journey. Kempe was pursued by adoring crowds for much of the way. He arrived at St Giles' Gate, but was blocked by onlookers. So he rested at an inn for a few days before exiting the city and re-entering (dancing) via St Stephens' Gate.
In Kempe's own account of his jig, he describes passing through the packed marketplace and accidentally stepping on a girl's petticoat and pulling it off her legs: 'now had she her cheekes all coloured with scarlet. I was sorry for her, but on I went towards the Maiors ...' The crowds were such that George Sprat, the man travelling with Kempe to make sure he actually completed his nine days of dancing, lost sight of him in the throng and made him repeat the last few hundred yards of his dance the following Tuesday. Kempe describes jumping over the church wall of St John's to get to the Mayor's house, his final destination; he also tells us that his boots were nailed to the wall of the Guildhall, at the height of his final jump, to mark the occasion, although there is no record of the boots staying up there for very long.
The churchyard wall, roughly at the spot where Kempe jumped over. Obviously this wall is a newer version, but the one Kempe scaled was probably the same height.
Anyway, Kempe completed his jig at Maddermarket, where the then-mayor's house was at the time, and although he made lots of money from the stunt ('The Maior gaue me fiue pound in Elizabeth angels') he would die penniless and in obscurity just three years later. He ends his account with a snarky letter addressed to his critics, which is too good not to reproduce here:
My notable Shakerags ... I know you to be a sort of witles beetle-heads that can understand nothing but what is knockt into your scalpes ... farewel, and crosse me no more, I prethee, with thy rabble of bald rimes, least at my returne I set a crosse on thy forehead that all men may know thee for a foole. WILLIAM KEMP.
A contemporary woodcut of Kempe
throwing shapes on the Newmarket Road.
THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT,
THE SMELL OF THE CROWD
Maddermarket has another strong connection to the world of drama. The Maddermarket Theatre, in St John's Alley, was founded by Walter Nugent Monck in 1921. Monck was a protegée of the great Victorian stage manager, William Poel; together, the two men re-invented the staging of Shakespearean plays by reviving the idea of theatre in-the-round, without elaborate scenery, as Shakespeare's audiences would have experienced it. Monck's layout and staging at the Maddermarket influenced the modern Globe Theatre and the RSC Theatre in Shakespeare's hometown of Stratford.
Although Monck had a long and illustrious career directing plays professionally in London, he preferred working with amateurs, and in 1911 founded the Norwich Players. A decade later, needing a permanent space to put on his popular shows, he founded the Maddermarket, in the building of a former chapel. His actors, all unpaid and working for the joy of it, helped with the conversion of the building between rehearsals. A concrete extension was added in the 60s (ah! the 60s!), and appropriately was soon smothered in madder plants (some of which were donated to Stranger's Hall across the way).
In 1933 the Maddermarket became the first theatre in the world to put on all 37 of Shakespeare's plays under the same producer. George Bernard Shaw wrote to Monck in 1940: ‘There is nothing in British theatrical history more extraordinary than your creation of the Maddermarket Theatre out of nothing, with no money and no municipal support …’ Monck died in 1958, a few months after receiving a CBE for his work, and his ashes are interred in St John's church opposite the theatre he loved so much. The Maddermarket is still going strong as an amateur theatre today, with everyone involved volunteering (remember, 'amateur' literally means 'doing it for love'.
A NOTE ON WATER
In the old days, the parish pump was where locals got their water, and as the name suggests, the pump was usually placed at the corner of the nearest parish church. The trouble was, there was always a churchyard nearby, and a churchyard means corpses. St John's churchyard, like many ancient churchyards in the centre of Norwich, was so crammed with bodies that it rises above street level, with high walls and plant-roots keeping the remains in, and small iron plaques telling us the churchyard extends 'X feet west of this point' under the modern tarmac. Ralph Hale Mottram, observing the disused parish pump at St John's in 1953, tells us:
Many of [the graveyards] stand several feet above the roadway, which has certainly not sunk. Most roadways accumulate height, naturally. The churchyards outstripped them by the sheer density of human material shovelled into them.
(If Stones Could Speak, p.110)
This profusion of rotting flesh, inches away from pedestrians and their water pipes, inevitably affected the quality of the water. The first publicly commissioned report into the city's water supply rather poetically described Norwich water as 'pure essence of churchyard'. The problem was solved when the Victorians, faced with a growing population, and finally drawing a correlation between contaminated water and massive rates of cholera and dysentery, built a clean water reservoir at Chapel Field (now the Gardens) and a new cemetery on Earlham Road.
