Black Mary's Hole

Not lost but gone before

[My series of ‘London in Slang’ (online c. 2012) tended, I must admit, to favour Clerkenwell where I was lucky enough to live from 2008 to 2022. Miraculously preserved by metropolitan standards, although the warehouses, watch-menders and printshops (you could still hear the machinery clicking) that were there at our arrival had long gone to start-ups, ‘loft-style’ dwellings and in the case of my street, an endless parade of office furniture.¹ But if much survived even more had gone, in substance if not invariably street-name. Our small block, for instance covered a Black Death plague pit, and beneath that, the orchard once tended by the monks of the adjacent Charterhouse. Move on a century or three and there’s Samuel Johnson, greatest of all my professional forbears, working (albeit pre-Dictionary) in St John’s Gate. But these were drops in a relative ocean of such. For instance, let us consider Black Mary’s Hole…]

Passing? My arse!

We have been to Clerkenwell before and here we are again. I shall forswear Pissing Alley, long bowdlerized as Passing Alley but still redolent of the odours that named it; I shall abandon a search for Codpiece Court, even if, as Views of London & Westminster nudge-nudged of the latter in 1725, ‘’tis creditably reported, that there is no want of that sort of Work in this Parish.’² Enough of supposition, let us have some facts. Let us turn then to what Views termed 'the reputable Village called Black Mary's Hole.’ Reputable usually synonymises respectable; an earlier use means ‘of note’. One may assume that it was that sense that Views, which tended to irony, preferred. And if what follows offers no tangible slang, there was plenty in the air. Views again: ‘The inhabitants [of Clerkenwell] speak as plain English as those of […] Billingsgate. The Women for the most part , are observ’d to wear black and blue Eyes, with swell’d Faces, […] owing to their too great Volubility of Speech, and the Courtesy of their well-bred Husbands, who are for the most part Butchers,³ and treat them in the same tender and respectful Manner as they do their other Cattle.’⁴

Black Mary’s Hole lay on the bank of the Fleet River, half a mile or so upstream of one of the area’s most flesh-besotted of red light zones, Turnmill (sometimes Turnbull) Street.⁵ It was also called Black Mary’s Well, which is what the ‘hole’ contained, and Black Mary’s Field was adjacent. One can find a reference to Black Maries in the Poor’s-rate-book of 1680. The well was popular – its iron-impregnated, technically ‘chalybeate’ waters supposedly cured sore eyes – and it was covered and made into a conduit in 1687 and is marked as such, near the Pantheon Turnpike Gate, on Rocque's map of London (1746-8). A hamlet developed around it, ‘a tiny alienated settlement on the banks of the upper Fleet’, as a latter-day commentator put it. Still rural in 1642, the Common Council had mounted a battery of cannon there, fearing a Royalist attack.

‘Reputable village’ or ‘Tiny alienated settlement’

It had a pub, The Fox at Bay, which appears to have been a hangout for local villains who, if contemporary reporting is to be credited, sallied forth to mug and rob. The Hole appears regularly in Old Bailey records, a site for highway robbery. Thus the case of Richard Tobin, indicted in 1739 ‘for assaulting Michael Crosby , in a certain Field and open Place, near the King's Highway, putting him in Fear, &c.’ Fearful, perhaps, victim, definitely not:

As I was coming last Sunday Night from Black Mary's Hole, the Prisoner overtook us in the first Field we pass'd over, and turning upon me he gave me a Jolt. I asked him, What he wanted? And he ask'd me, What I wanted? I told him, I wanted nothing but Civility; upon that he held up this Iron Bar to me, and said, - d—mn you, you Dog, deliver your Money this Moment, or else I will kill you: I put my Hand in my Pocket to give him my Money; but I was the longer in delivering it, because I was thrusting my Watch into my Breeches, when I had done that, I deliver'd him all my Money, which was 9 s. and 4 d. then he snatch'd off my Hat and Wig; but the Wig falling, and he stooping to take it up, I fell upon him, and beat him, and got the better of him. While I had him upon the Ground, I held him down with one Hand, and with the other I unty'd his Garter, and bound him.

Tobin climbed the one-way steps up the deadly nevergreen before the year was out.

It was also among the first noted gay cruising grounds. In 1705 the salacious ‘newspaper’ The Wandering Spy, mentioned ‘that Sink and Sodom of the Town, the famous Black Mary's Hole’. In 1731, one David Hall was tried as a ‘molly’ for stripping, robbing and then kissing John Hart, who had been ‘much in Liquor’ at the time. Nor should we forget a piece of contemporary, punning porn, A Voyage to Lethe. By Captain Samuel Cock, sometime Commander of the Good Ship Charming Polly . Dedicated to the Right Worshipful Adam Cock, Esq., of Black Mary’s Hole, Coney Skin Merchant.⁶

Miss Muff’s Molly House 1728. Forget trousers, who wears the ‘sword’?

So why Black Mary? The Gentleman's Magazine of 1813, in an ‘Account of the Various Mineral Waters around London’ lists ‘the spring or conduit on the eastern side of the road leading from Clerken Well to Bagnigge Wells, and which has given name to a very few houses as ‘Black Mary’s Hole’. The land here was, formerly, called Bagnigg Marsh, from the river Bagnigg, which passes through it. But, in after-time, the citizens resorting to drink the waters of the conduit, which was then leased to one Mary, who kept a black cow, whose milk the gentlemen and ladies drank mixed with the waters of the Conduit, from whence, the wits of the age used to say, “Come let us go to Black Mary’s hole”.’

But, continues the Magazine, ‘This etymon is contested in a pamphlet called An experimental enquiry concerning the Contents, Qualities, Medicinal Virtues of the two Mineral Waters of Bagnigge Wells &c. (1767): “A tradition goes that the place of old was called Blessed Mary's Well, but that the name of the Holy Virgin having, in some measure, fallen into disrepute during the Reformation, the title was altered to Black Mary's Well, then to Black Mary's Hole; though there is a very different account of these latter appellations; for there are those who insist they were taken from one Mary Woolaston, whose occupation was attending at a well, now covered in, by the footway from Bagnigge to Islington to supply the soldiery, encamped in the adjacent fields, with water”.’

And was Black Mary black? Notes and Queries (1886) ponders the religious aspect – possibly an order of ‘Black Virgins’, i.e. nuns – has no time for the cow: ‘a pleasant fiction’, but offers a 1761 reference to a ‘Blackmoor woman’, one Mary, living on site in a circular stone hut around 1730. Was that Ms Woolaston? Far from impossible. An ex-servant, perhaps. There were plenty of black servants, imported from the Caribbean, in 18^th century London.

Others, since ‘meat’ was not confined to Smithfield’s slaughterhouses, opted for the overspill of working girls from neighbouring Turnmill and Whitecross Streets and similar local stews. William Pinks’ History of Clerkenwell (posthumously published in 1881 and something of a cut and paste job) quotes one ‘John Copywell’ (real name William Woty), whose verses ‘Shrubs of Parnassus’ (1760) showcased the medicinal appeal of the local iron-rich springs and recalled ‘Where each by turns / His venal doxy woo’d, and stil’d the place / Black Mary’s Hole’. The ‘hole’ was indeed low-lying and ‘woo’ would usually imply words rather than deeds (of darkness), but it is hard to dismisss the possible smut.

Nothing lasts, even mysterious wells and ladies who Cheshire Cat-like leave but their name. By the late 18^th century the area was being built over and it had been covered by the new street, Spring’s Place. The well became a cesspool. Forgotten until 1826 it only reasserted itself when the pavement collapsed and the now stinking chasm revealed. Repairs were made and the Hole vanished once more. It now lies beneath a council estate.

Codpieces? Your search is over.

However, if the mood beckons, you can dance it, ‘Black Mary's Hole’ or ‘Black Mary’s Hornpipe’ was published in 1735 in Walsh's Third Collection of Lancashire Jiggs, Hornpipes, Joaks etc., a book that the compiler reveamped that year as The Compleat Country Dancing Master.

I offer the pertinent figures. A Mullinet, no signs in the OED, sounds like a French moulinet, a little mill, and presumably involves whirling.

Hands across all round and back, including Mullinet

Figure of 8 (Whole figure) (x2)

Turn, 2 dancers, by one or two hands (x5)

Lead down the middle and back

Turn, 2 dancers, by one or two hands

Lead down the middle and back

Turn, 2 dancers, by one or two hands

Stamping, clapping hands and snapping the fingers is considered mandatory.

1. I have always, if tongue-in-cheek, believed that the multiplicty of such showrooms was what has really driven up the ruination of the city by its infinity of ugly skyscrapers (‘rising up like felixes’ as Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginner was already seeing them in 1959). What otherwise to do with that infinity of chairs, tables, sofas, pouffes…

2. It may be that Codpiece Court was a mistaken identity, at least in EC1. Various gazeteers appended to surveys of 18th century London attribute the Court to an offshoot of Petty France, in Westminster; Clerkenwell does have its Codpiece, and earlier, but this one is a Row and identified as being ‘by Hockley in the Hole’ itself another lost portion of the area, but once a popular venu for various sanguinary sports whether involving animals (bears, bulls, dogs, rats) or humans (bare-knuckle prizefighters). In Ogilby and Morgan’s City of London Map of 1676 it is an alternative name to the anodyne Town’s End and by my time Codpiece had been long gelded and renamed Coppice.

3. Smithfield, London’s great meat market, doubtless employed them all. The market, if no longer providing a backdrop for public burnings of religiously heterodox humanity, had no scruples over slaughtering the cattle who were driven down from the North and took their last steps along Cowcross Street, just turn left at the end of that haunt of tarts and topers, Turnmill Street.

4. I have considered Billingsgate and its piscine speech here

5. Either worked. The street ran along the Fleet River and there had been water-mills; cattle, bulls among them, would have trod the street on their way to their Smithfield quietus.

6. A coney-skin, literally a rabbit’s pelt, was yet another of slang’s near-1500 vaginas and played, in the way of slang’s c-words, on cunt. The earliest recorded use comes in Beaumont & Fletcher’s Beggar’s Bush (1622), in which a character requests: ‘Bring out your cony-skins, fair maids, to me, / And hold’em fair that I may see.’ (The following lines add ware, properly an object for sale, here once more the vagina, another commodity.) It was still going strong in 1798 when the poem ‘The bankrupt Bawd’ explained how ‘In coney skins her commerce lay, / A charming stock she’d laid in.’