The Three Toms

The Little Man, the Lincoln Knight and the Man at the Window

There are stories that survive because they are true.

There are stories that survive because they are useful.

And there are other stories — stranger stories — which seem to survive because something inside them refuses to die.

A name.

A place.

An image.

A particular kind of man.

Sometimes the old craftsmen did not carry an idea forward by explaining it.

They changed its clothes.

Ars est celare artem.

The art is to conceal the art.

And somewhere between Arthur’s Britain, Lincoln, Coventry and the cheap printed books of early modern England, one small English name begins behaving very strangely.

Tom.

I. TOM A LINCOLN

Before there was Peeping Tom, there was another Tom.

And he did not begin at a window.

He began with Arthur.

Richard Johnson's Tom a Lincoln appeared at the end of the sixteenth century, with editions belonging to 1599 and 1607.

Its hero was no ordinary Lincolnshire fellow.

Tom belonged to the enormous afterlife of the Arthurian world.

Arthur had already been dead for a thousand years.

Yet Arthur could still produce another son of Britain.

Another wandering knight.

Another English story.

And this time the knight carried an almost ridiculously ordinary name.

Not Galahad.

Not Percival.

Not Lancelot.

Tom.

Tom of Lincoln.

Tom a Lincoln.

Tom a Lin.

That matters.

Because the great medieval names were being brought down from the illuminated manuscript and into another world — the world of printers, apprentices, craftsmen, actors, ballads and people who could buy a story for a few pennies.

Arthur was changing clothes.

The king had entered the street.

And the name given to one of his surviving children was Tom.

II. THE OTHER TOM

In 1621, The History of Tom Thumbe refers explicitly to:

“Tom Lincolne, or Tom a Lin.”

But it does not tell us that Tom Lincoln and Tom Thumb are the same person.

Quite the opposite.

The text distinguishes them.

This distinction has to remain.

Tom a Lincoln is not Tom Thumb.

Yet they occupy the same printed field.

They are being remembered together.

Two Toms.

One large enough for Arthurian romance.

One so small that the world itself becomes gigantic around him.

And Tom Thumb also travels toward Arthur.

His strange adventures carry him through a world of birds, giants, sea, fish and impossible transformations until he too enters the gravitational field of Arthur's court.

Again the small name reaches the great king.

That is the first thing worth seeing.

The second is stranger.

Tom Thumb survives by passing through openings.

Through bodies.

Through mouths.

Through impossible spaces.

The world continually threatens to swallow him.

Yet he re-emerges.

The little man cannot easily be extinguished.

By the 1630 continuation of the tradition, the stories are full of the language and imagery of seeing, apertures, concealment and looking.

We should not claim that Tom Thumb is therefore Peeping Tom.

The evidence does not permit it.

But the image has entered the room.

A Tom.

An opening.

A concealed act.

An eye.

III. LINCOLN RINGS THE NAME

And meanwhile Lincoln itself begins to speak.

There is another Tom there.

Not a man.

A bell.

Great Tom of Lincoln.

The earlier Great Tom belongs to 1611.

A later Great Tom would replace it in 1834.

Between those dates the name Tom was therefore not merely printed in stories connected with Lincoln.

It could be heard over the city.

Tom in print.

Tom in bronze.

Tom carried through air.

This should not be mistaken for evidence that somebody designed a secret programme connecting these things.

We do not need such a claim.

The historical phenomenon is more interesting without it.

English culture kept choosing the same ordinary name as a vessel.

And Lincoln repeatedly became one of the places in which that vessel sounded.

There is another Thomas in the cathedral current too:

Thomas Lany.

Different man.

Different history.

But again the name enters the ecclesiastical body of Lincoln.

The cathedral acquires a Thomas voice.

The city has become crowded with Toms.

IV. THEN THE WOMAN RIDES

To understand the third Tom, however, we have to leave Lincoln.

We have to go to Coventry.

And before we look at the man at the window, we have to look at the woman in the street.

Godiva.

Or Godgifu.

The historical woman belongs to the eleventh century.

The naked ride belongs to the developing legend surrounding her.

And the watcher comes later still.

Those layers must never be collapsed.

Because for centuries the Godiva story could apparently live perfectly well without anyone called Peeping Tom.

Thomas Deloney's Garland of Good Will preserves a Coventry song about how the city was made free.

The Godiva current was already moving in popular print.

And Deloney is important to our wider craft because he is himself one of the great writers of the working English world — cloth, shoemakers, tradesmen, apprentices, ordinary people.

A Thomas carrying story through craft.

His collection can move from Coventry and Godiva into the great legendary histories of Britain.

Arthur.

Locrine.

Humber.

Old Britain had entered popular song.

The court and the workshop were no longer separate worlds.

But still —

no Peeping Tom.

V. THE MAN WITHOUT A NAME

Then something appears.

In 1659, Joseph Jeyeson records the Coventry figure associated with the Godiva story.

There is a watcher.

There is punishment.

There is the developing idea that somebody looked when everybody else obeyed.

But the surviving evidence does not securely call him Tom.

Around 1690, Humfrey Wanley records the window-looker.

Again the act is there.

The name is not yet securely there.

In 1697, Celia Fiennes encounters the Coventry tradition and the blinded-looking figure.

The eye has become part of the story.

In 1732, Rapin's history can tell of an anonymous viewer who violates the command and suffers for it.

Still the mechanism matters more than the name.

A woman passes exposed through the town.

Everybody must close their doors and windows.

One person looks.

This is not simply seeing.

It is forbidden seeing.

And that distinction lies at the heart of our work.

Because there are two kinds of eye.

The eye that seeks.

And the eye that possesses.

The witness.

And the voyeur.

The person who looks because truth demands it.

And the person who looks because another person's boundary means nothing to him.

Not every eye is holy.

Some eyes witness.

Some eyes violate.

VI. TOM ENTERS THE WINDOW

Then, by 1740, something remarkable has happened.

A pamphlet concerning Roger Johnson can use the phrase:

“peeping Tom of Coventry.”

The phrase apparently requires little explanation.

The watcher has finally acquired the familiar name.

Tom.

But why Tom?

We cannot prove that somebody deliberately lifted the name from Tom a Lincoln.

We cannot prove that Tom Thumb crawled through literature until he reached a Coventry window.

That would go beyond the evidence.

But we can say something much more precise.

The culture in which Peeping Tom emerges already possessed famous printed Toms.

And one of them had been called:

Tom Lincoln.

Another had been carried beside him in print:

Tom Thumb.

Both belonged to an older popular story-world touching Arthur.

And then the unnamed Coventry watcher — already associated with looking, concealment, windows and punishment — eventually receives the same common cultural name.

Tom.

The safest bridge is therefore not identity.

It is transmission.

The name travels more securely than the man.

VII. THE THREE FUNCTIONS

Place the three beside one another and their difference becomes the clue.

TOM A LINCOLN

He goes outward.

The knight.

The traveller.

The Arthurian adventurer.

He seeks the world.

TOM THUMB

He goes inward.

The tiny survivor.

Swallowed, hidden, enclosed and released.

The little thing that passes through the impossible opening.

He survives the world.

PEEPING TOM

He stays outside.

At the aperture.

The watcher.

He wants to see what has been forbidden to him.

He looks through the boundary.

And he fails the test.

Three Toms.

Three relationships with the hidden thing.

One enters.

One passes through.

One merely peers in.

That may be the most important distinction of all.

VIII. THE WRONG WITNESS

For our Craft, Peeping Tom should therefore never be treated merely as a comic character.

He is useful because he represents a failed form of the seeker.

He reaches the threshold.

He finds the aperture.

He understands that something extraordinary is passing before him.

And then he looks wrongly.

Godiva's nakedness is not offered to him.

It is part of the price she pays in the story for the freedom of Coventry.

Her exposure becomes sacrifice.

His looking turns sacrifice into spectacle.

That makes Peeping Tom the shadow-form of Thomas.

The false initiate.

The man who discovers the window but not the discipline required to stand beside it.

Peeping Tom opens the window wrongly.

The true seeker enters the close rightly.

The difference is not whether one sees.

It is whether one has learned how to see.

IX. THOMAS THE TESTER

And here the ordinary English Tom reaches something older.

Thomas.

The doubter.

The tester.

The apostle who refuses the second-hand story.

He asks to see.

To touch.

To verify.

Thomas is therefore not the enemy of belief.

He is the patron of the difficult threshold between belief and knowledge.

That makes the later transformation extraordinary.

In one cultural branch, Thomas becomes the man whose demand to see leads toward revelation.

In another, Tom becomes the man whose demand to see leads toward blindness.

The contrast is almost perfect.

Right seeing.

Wrong seeing.

Thomas touches the wound because he must know whether what stands before him is real.

Peeping Tom looks through the window because he has been told not to.

The actions appear similar only from a distance.

The intention changes everything.

X. THE CRAFTSMEN CARRY IT

And the name continues moving through the people who manufacture English story.

Thomas Deloney.

Writer of craftsmen.

Writer of the shoemaker world.

Carrier of Godiva, Coventry and older British history into cheap popular literature.

Then Thomas Dekker.

Stage-maker.

City writer.

Another Thomas working where elite material is transformed for the crowd.

This is part of the reason our wider Gentle Craft current matters.

Stories do not survive only because kings commission manuscripts.

They survive because printers set type.

Because apprentices read.

Because actors speak.

Because songs are remembered.

Because craftsmen carry things that scholars sometimes fail to notice.

The hidden current does not need a secret society.

Sometimes the craft itself is the mechanism.

XI. ARTHUR NEVER LEFT

And behind the three Toms stands the king.

Arthur.

Tom a Lincoln enters directly through Arthurian romance.

Tom Thumb finds his way into Arthur's orbit.

The Coventry-Godiva print world sits beside older British legendary material — Arthur, Locrine and Humber — in the same popular culture.

Then, centuries later, Arthur returns powerfully through another man connected with Lincolnshire:

Alfred Tennyson.

Arthur enters Victorian Britain again through Idylls of the King.

Prince Albert admires the work.

Queen Victoria reads it.

The old king passes once more from story into the consciousness of the realm.

And Lincoln still has Great Tom.

This does not create one unbroken secret commission.

It gives us something better.

A recurring public mechanism.

Tom in print.

Tom in bronze.

Arthur in popular story.

Arthur in royal reading.

The forms change.

The names remain strangely difficult to kill.

XII. THE LITTLE NAME

And perhaps that is why Tom matters.

Thomas is not an exotic name.

That is the point.

The grand stories of Britain repeatedly descend into an ordinary name.

The apostle becomes Tom.

The knight becomes Tom.

The tiny hero becomes Tom.

The watcher becomes Tom.

The bell becomes Tom.

The craftsman writing the story is Thomas.

The playwright carrying it onto the stage is Thomas.

The cathedral speaks through Thomas.

The extraordinary hides inside the ordinary.

That is precisely the old method.

The great thing concealed inside the little thing.

The king hidden in the commoner.

The mystery hidden inside the joke.

The ancient story hidden inside the children's tale.

The warning hidden inside the dirty old legend.

Ars est celare artem.

XIII. THREE MEN AT THE DOOR

Imagine them standing together.

Tom a Lincoln has his hand upon the road.

Tom Thumb stands beneath the door.

Peeping Tom has his eye against the crack.

All three have reached the boundary.

But only the boundary is shared.

Their choices are different.

The knight crosses.

The little man passes through.

The watcher remains outside and steals a glimpse.

And perhaps that is why the three stories belong together without ever becoming the same story.

They preserve three possible responses to mystery.

Seek it.

Pass through it.

Or

stand outside and stare.

The Gentle Third Craft belongs to the first two.

Never the third.

Because the purpose of the hidden thing is not merely to be exposed.

It is to be understood.

And there is a great difference between opening a secret —

and violating one.

THE THREE TOMS

Tom a Lincoln — The seeker.

Tom Thumb — The hidden survivor.

Peeping Tom — The failed witness.

And behind them:

Thomas.

The man who asks:

How shall I know?

That question may be older than every one of the stories.

And it may be the reason the name kept returning.