Margery Kempe and the Book in the Ping-Pong Cupboard

Read the episode (Narration script)

In 1934, in an English country house belonging to the Butler-Bowdon family, someone went rummaging in a cupboard for ping-pong balls. The cupboard was stuffed with old books and papers, and the colonel of the house threatened to put the whole lot on the bonfire. Among the clutter was a small manuscript in a fifteenth-century hand. An American scholar named Hope Emily Allen was asked to look at it, and she recognized it as the only surviving copy of a book missing for about five hundred years: the life of a merchant's daughter from Norfolk, told in her own words. Today we meet Margery Kempe.

Welcome to Hidden History. Take a break from the modern world and journey into a medieval English port town, where a woman who could not write decided her life should be written down anyway.

Margery was born around 1373 in Bishop's Lynn, the port we now call King's Lynn. Her father, John Brunham, was one of the town's leading men, five times mayor. Around the age of twenty she married John Kempe, a burgess of the town, and was soon pregnant.

The birth went badly, and afterward she fell into a long sickness of the mind. By her own account she saw devils, tore at her own skin, and had to be watched by keepers. Then one day, alone, she saw Christ sitting on her bedside in a mantle of purple silk. She recovered, and her first practical request was for the keys to the buttery, so she could eat and drink again. Her maids warned her husband she might give everything away. He gave her the keys.

Recovery did not make her humble, and the book is frank about it. She wore gold ornaments in her hair and cloaks slashed to show bright colors underneath. When her husband asked her to tone it down, she reminded him that her father had been mayor and that he should never have married her.

She went into business. For three or four years she was, in her words, one of the greatest brewers in Lynn. Then batch after batch failed. The ale would stand with a handsome head of froth, then the froth would collapse and the whole brewing was lost. Her embarrassed servants left. So she tried a horse mill: two good horses and a man to grind other people's grain. On the eve of Corpus Christi, both horses refused to pull. The man led them, beat them, coaxed them, put on spurs and rode them, and they walked backward. Then he quit. Word went round town that neither man nor beast would work for Margery Kempe. Some said she was cursed. She concluded God was trying to get her attention.

Over the years she bore fourteen children, and she came to want something almost unheard of for a married woman: a chaste life, with her husband still living. John Kempe was not keen.

It was a Friday, Midsummer Eve, 1413, a hot day on the road from York. Margery was carrying a bottle of beer, and her husband had a cake tucked inside his clothes. He asked her a question. If a man came with a sword and threatened to cut off John's head unless they slept together again, which would she choose? She said she would rather see him killed. He said, "Ye are no good wife."

They walked on, and he sat down under a roadside cross and offered terms. He would grant chastity if she kept sharing his bed, paid his debts before she left for Jerusalem, and gave up her Friday fasting so they could eat together. She refused to give up the fast. After praying in the field, she came back with a counter-offer: separate beds, his debts paid, and she would eat with him on Fridays. He accepted. "As free may your body be to God," he said, "as it hath been to me."

What followed was a second life. In Norwich she consulted the anchoress Julian, the great English mystic, who told her that tears were a sign of the Holy Spirit and that she should not fear the talk of the world. She would need that. On the hill of Calvary in Jerusalem, Margery fell to the ground and let out a cry so loud it became her signature. For years she wept and roared during sermons, and many neighbors and fellow pilgrims found her unbearable. Some made her sit at the far end of the table.

She also found real danger. In an age when Lollard heretics were being burned, a married woman who traveled, spoke about God in public and dressed in white looked suspicious. Outside Canterbury a crowd shouted that they had a cartful of thorns ready to burn her. In Yorkshire she was brought before the Archbishop of York, and a clerk quoted Saint Paul at her: women should not preach. She answered, "I preach not, sir; I come into no pulpit. I use but communication and good words." Asked to repeat a story she had told about bad priests, she gave the archbishop's household a parable about a bear that ate the blossoms off a pear tree and then relieved himself in front of a priest. The bear, she explained, was a careless priest. The archbishop called it a good tale. Then he paid one of his men five shillings to lead her out of the diocese. The man had asked for more, and the archbishop said he would not spend so much on her.

When John, past sixty, fell down the stairs and lost his wits, Margery brought him home and nursed him, washing his soiled linen herself. Later, around sixty herself, she sailed with her widowed daughter-in-law to Danzig on the Baltic, then made her way home largely overland to Calais.

Late in life she dictated all of it. The first scribe wrote neither good English nor good German, and the priest who inherited the draft could not read it for four years. In 1436 he began again, with Margery beside him. A scribe who signed himself Salthows made a copy, which ended up with Carthusian monks in Yorkshire who wrote approving notes beside her tears. Then it vanished into private hands until someone needed a ping-pong ball.

The Book of Margery Kempe is often called the earliest surviving autobiography in English. It smooths over very little: a failed brewer, a stubborn wife, a woman bishops found exhausting, bargaining with her husband over beer and cake by the side of the road. Nearly six centuries on, she is still a little hard to ignore.