Disability History Month: Accessibility and Archives: “he had not wit enough to looke to himselfe.”

In this final post for the 2024 Disability History Month, Philip Milnes-Smith uses somewhat unreliable sources to recover fragments of the life, and employment, of an Early Modern Londoner with an intellectual impairment and/or neuro-divergence. It contains language and stereotypes of the period which may now cause offence.

We owe what we do know about John to the actor and writer Robert Armin (c.1568-1615), a close contemporary of Shakespeare, who specialised in Fool parts.  He used John as the culminating example in his pamphlet about fools (printed in 1605), and also not only made him a title (if minor) character in a play (printed in 1609), but played him on-stage (see preview image). Both works traded on the familiarity to a London audience of Blue John/John of the Hospital who had, recently (by implication), died.  Armin terms him ‘My old acquaintance, Jack, whose life I knew, and whose remembrance I presume by appearance likely’.  He notes that John had a portrait (which does not seem to have survived) but not an epitaph, which he supplies.

In explaining how John came to be ‘of the Hospitall’, which despite the apparent medical implications of the name, was a school (where the boys wore a dark blue uniform, hence ‘Blue’ John), Armin says he had been admitted as a “fostered fatherless chylde”, which was very much in line with its founding purposes.  Armin approves their decision noting that John ‘was one of God’s creatures, though some difference in persons’, an idea also echoed in the epitaph, which emphasises that he was just as much a man as the wise who can read it.  The civic benevolence followed the death of “blind Alice” of Bow Lane, seemingly once his nurse, but to whom more recently he had been acting as a child carer (“a guide to lead her” through the streets).  ‘Very foole’ though he may have been, he seems to have gained some profit from his schooling and its methods (he knows there are ‘eight parts of speech’, for example), even if he remained unable to become independent (having no understanding of the value of money, for example, see title quote). Even as a grown man, he appears to have been provided not only ‘his owne dwelling at Christs Church’ but a nurse (also liveried in the school’s colours), who had responsibility for meeting his day-to-day needs, ensuring, for example, he wiped his runny nose (‘like Lothbery conduit, that alwaies runs waste’).  Such a role certainly could have been exploitative, given that it was to her he handed over everything he was given.  But we should note, that it is ‘Nurse’ he was imagined to have called out on waking.  It seems, he had continued to live there (and wear the uniform) even as the white-bearded man captured in the lost portrait.  John may well have ‘earned his keep’ by undertaking odd jobs. 

One story shows John transporting some mended boots from a cobbler with premises ‘next to Christs Church gate in Newgate market’.  This turned out to be an expensive mistake on the shoe-mender’s behalf, because John had met someone Armin describes as ‘a Countrey fellow that knew him not’ – and who had therefore interacted with him in a manner which a citizen would not have done (in offering to buy them).  The cobbler ‘would never let John carry home his ware more’ which does not rule out the possibility that there had been successful errand-running on previous occasions.

Christ Church’s sexton Gaffer Homes, we are told, ‘would often set John a worke, to towle the bell to prayers or burials, wherin he delighted much’.  Both works refer to him ringing the bell for his nurse’s dead chicken (we are meant to understand that others would have done this only for humans).  We learn that he would keep going until someone took the rope from him, so continued to toll the bell for hours on this occasion, as the Sexton was by chance absent.  We might note that, in this case, it was not to be the end of him performing this function – the Sexton just made sure the rope was now out of John’s reach. Perhaps he was also the Sexton’s assistant in digging graves – we are not told.  We might note that it is ‘first Clown’ in Hamlet, another probable Armin role offering a distinct perspective on life, who says, ‘I have been sexton here, man and boy thirty years’. 

A key relationship of John’s mentioned in both texts was with Alexander Nowell (c.1517-1602), Dean of St Paul’s.  In the play, John deems him ‘a good man truly’) because of his generosity with groats, which he would distribute to John after each sermon (and which he would not spend but take home to his nurse).  One of the places he had led Alice, back in Bow Lane days,  was St Paul’s and we are told that he would ‘sit, eyther on the staires, or in a corner, & sing Psalmes, or preach to himself’.  There could have been an element of delayed echolalia here, rooted in the comforting familiarity of the liturgy, and the verbal idiosyncrasies of certain preachers.  The pamphlet notes that John had been in the Cathedral on one occasion when, seemingly more disappointed of the chance to hear from the Dean than the expected groat, he had begun to preach himself ‘holding up his muckender for his booke, and reades his text.’

We read that John may have been something of a school mascot (‘chief Captayn’ at the age of 32, in the school’s Easter Monday procession), and was worth the looking for when he went missing.  Potentially, therefore, generations of boys interacted with him (as they are shown doing both in the pamphlet and the play).  Despite the perhaps proverbial cruelty of boys to those who are different, the interactions Armin chose to represent seem quite affectionate and playful (they ‘knew his qualities’ and might invite him home to extend their merriment to others). It is the play’s knightly ‘villain’, Sir William Vergir, who places no value on John and threatens him with a beating for being late. 

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Image: By Papier K - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26015655