[[Hamo] was trained as an illuminator in the scriptorium. He prepared the inks and the paints; he smoothed the parchments and drew lines upon them with rule and charcoal pencil. He learned to mix black and red, white and yellow. Then he was trained in the art of drawing outlines with a brush of squirrel hair. He was taught how to plaster the walls of the church in preparation for the murals; he would cover them with lime putty, rendered damp for the better retention of colour.

Hamo turned the corner of Paternoster Row, into the street of the illuminators and parchment-makers whose work was displayed all around him.

Here was a rich volume indeed, illuminated with great coloured capitals though which birds and monkeys ran. Jolland felt the vellum paper with his forefinger. "Every page takes the skin of a sheep. So here we have many flocks before us." He turned the page very carefully, in case one of them might crack or tear.

Cole Bateman, the miller for the convent of Clerkenwell, was kneeling in the north transept of St Sepulchre. He had just delivered twelve sacks of flour to the parish priest of that church; the priest had agreed to act as arbiter in the miller's dispute with the bailiff over that stretch of the [River] Fleet that ran between them. The bailiff had in turn presented him with a mastiff, since the priest had complained of roarers and masked men who seemed strangely drawn to the Newgate prison. The mill beside the Fleet was less thn a mile beyond the city gates, and Coke Bateman often drove his cart within the walls. For him it was a city of springs and streams. He had got so accustomed to the sound of water rushing beneath the mill that it seemed to him to be the sound of the world. He slept with the rush of waters, and awoke with their rhythms in his head. He knew the harsh and hasty sound of the Fleet, therefore, and compared it carefully and deliberately with the other rivers within the city. He recognised the soft sound of the Falcon sighing through reeds, the disturbed and excitable Westbourne with its hidden springs sending out competing currents, the slow and heavy Tyburn winding through marshes, the light Walbrook gliding over stones and pebbles, and the Fleet itself with its strong and sweeping central current running like a sigh through the city. And then of course there was the Thames, majestic, many-voiced, at one moment a mass of dark turbulance and at the next a gleaming sheet of light.

"If a man full penitent come to me and pay for his sin," [said the pardoner], "I will assoil him. Here is the authority granted me." The pardoner held up a sheet of vellum decorated with a great initial "I" in which monkeys clambered among vines. "If anyone gives seven shillings to Anthony's [St Anthony's Hospital, Threadneedle Street], I will bestow upon him an indulgence of seven hundred years. I am entrusted to do this by the pope himself." He rolled up the papal bull and carefully placed it within his bag.