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There can’t be many walking tours that take the ‘getting you drunk’ bit almost as seriously as the history bit. On our two-and-a-half-hour journey through the eerily quiet Saturday streets of Guildhall, Cheapside and the city in between, the winning Dr Matthew Green paints a lively and, let’s be honest, pretty grim picture of Medieval London. Wild pigs roamed the streets, going out after dark was not only inadvisable but punishable and a night at the inn would mean sharing a mattress with several other naked drunks; history’s equivalent of the stag do.
Green’s account of London’s past was enriched by encounters with a corrupt priest, a vintner’s wife, a shivering fornicator and a vengeful saint, among others, with the odd musical interlude along the way. Medieval wine was often diluted with a mouth-puckeringly generous helping of vinegar, though the tipples we were served en route showed no sign of it. Generous goblets were poured in an underground speakeasy, an ex-vineyard, an ancient port and a not-at-all-medieval but pleasingly cosy riverside bar, leaving us as rosy-cheeked as a friar in the mead cellar. Thankfully, the stories we’d heard were plenty vivid enough to stick in our fuzzy heads. Gold-plated skulls were the wine glass of choice back in the Middle Ages: the only bit we’d resurrect, because the most important lesson we learned from this lighthearted jaunt is that modern London ain’t so bad after all. Ashleigh Arnott