Not quite a thousand years ago, there lived in the city of Coventry a tailor known as Tom O’Thneedle, which was neighborhood talk for “Tom of the Needle”. The O’Thneedles had been tailors for time out of mind. Tom’s grandfather liked to talk about the days when things were tough for tailors, before the needle was invented, but his grandfather drank a lot of glog, a taste Englishmen acquired from the constant Viking forays through the countryside.
Though known as Tom of the Needle, Tom hated his work. “Bent over the cloth all day, nose practically in the seams: that’s no job for a man of vision”, he would tell any of his customers who stayed long enough to listen. In fact, Tom was really, really good at tailoring, so good that he could sew with his fingers and use his brain for dreaming of the great things he MIGHT be doing. This was why the people kept bringing jobs to Tom, despite his constant grumbling. An occasional job even came his way from the castle, when Lord Leofric or his wife, Lady Godiva, had a special request requiring deft fingerwork.
“They say he could make an entire shirt in the dark,” the good lady of the castle would say, sending the servants down with her requests. SHE didn’t have to go to the shop and hear him complain.
It wasn’t that Tom was yearning to ride off and fight dragons: he was a good ten years too old even to believe in dragons, none of which had been seen around Coventry in positive decades. No, what Tom dreamed of as he sat stitching seams into baldrics and festival tunics, was woodworking. He felt that, given a chance, he could make his living with a hammer and a pocketful of nails.
Like any good daydream, this had no basis in reality. When he was about seven years old, he had watched a travelling carpenter go from house to house, installing the newly invented shutters on the windows of anyone interested in technological advances. “Keeps out the wind and weather,” said the smiling man with cheeks of tan. “It’s a must-have in all up-to-date cottages.”
The O’Thneedles, being a long-established and conservative firm, had not invested in this unproven device, still relying, even now that Tom was a young man, in the old-fashioned and traditional window-closing method of hanging a heavy cloth or tanned hide over the opening. The O’Thneedles, in fact, had been the last family in the region to add windows.
To some degree, Tom, stuck in the house all day, envied the carpenter’s access to sunlight, but even more he was jealous of being able to stand up straight and bang on something with a hammer and make money. Tom liked the smell of sawdust, and would much have preferred to spend his days, say, cutting wooden roof tiles for people modern enough to make the switch from thatch, and climbing on a roof in the midday sun to nail these into place.
In fact, when he could spare the time, he would go out into the neighborhood with an old hammer the cobblers next door (the A’Footes) has thrown away, and do little repairs for free, just to let people know his true calling. And it turned out Tom was far less talented with his hammer than with his needle. The chair he repaired for Good Granny Th’Apple, who sold apples at her shop al day, fell apart the second Granny sat in it, throwing her into a bushel of cider apples. When he installed a doorknocker for Mistress O’Potty, the apothecary, it fell off every other day. She finally gave up and went back to hanging out a doorhorn people could blow if they needed medicine after hours.
But Tom was so much more cheerful when he was banging away at things with that hammer, that people called on him just to listen to his happy humming. And, anyway, he could not leave anything alone. The family next door found one morning that the sign that had hung in front of the shop for years, showing a red, sore bare foot next to a happy foot in a shoe, was gone. They were telling the constable about this theft when Tom showed up with it. The sign had been squeaking a lot in the wind, he said.
“I knew I could fix it for you,” he told Toto, the pretty daughter of the family, handing it over. “So I just took it to my workshop.”
It took three weeks before the sign would even stay on its hooks out front after Tom fixed it, which did not improve relations between the neigbors. (The A’Footes thought the O’Tneedles were primitive and low-class, while the tailors thought the cobbler family effete.)
Aside from this habit of taking things which didn’t belong to him, sheerly because he knew he could improve them, Tom was thoroughly law-abiding. When the whole of Coventry was stunned one day by the constable explaining that the Earl’s wife was going to protest taxes by riding naked through town, and ordered that everyone stay indoors with their windows closed, no one was quicker to close up shop than Tom.
“I’m sure I would never disobey a proclamation from the castle,” he said. He had sat down at his worktable, with his back to the window, and picked up a pair of trews which needed some decorative embroidered bands reattached when a horrible thought struck him.
“Zounds!” he cried, alarmed enough to swear, “Those shutters on the A’Feetes’ place are loose: I noticed it yesterday. They might fall open at any moment and make lawbreakers of my neighbors! I should have taken them home yesterday when I saw that, but who knew the good Lady….” Grabbing up his tool kit, he ran to the cobbler’s shop and hammered (literally) on the door.
“Goodness gracious!” exclaimed Toto, peeping out. “Tom, you should be….”
“This won’t take a moment.” Tom pushed past her into the dark shop. “Those shutters just won’t do in a time of civic emergency! See? There’s light peeping through. I’ll just….”
“I’m sure it will be all right,” said Toto, closing the door. “As long as we….”
“Just a few taps,” Tom told her, “I can just….”
He heard the clipping and clopping of a lone horse on the cobbles of the street, and knew he didn’t have a moment to spare. With his trusty hammer in one hand, he put the other to the faulty shutter, and pulled it toward him.
There was a flash of light, more than could be explained by the sun peeping in through the narrow opening. With a loud cry, Tom fell back. “Are you all right?” Toto asked, running to him.
“I…I….” Tom looked around. “Did I fix the shutter? It seems very dark.”
Tom had, in fact, opened the shutter at precisely the wrong moment, and his world was dark from then on. A power that guards the honor of the virtuous had struck him blind all in a moment. Once the coast was clear, Toto ran for Mistress O’Potty, but the apothecary could not do anything for the tailor.
“It’s a Judgement,” she said. “I’ll not be tampering with a Judgement.”
Well, after a great deal of fuss (Toto had to testify before Justice o’Peace that Tom had not MEANT any harm), Tom was able to go back to work. He could, indeed, sew without needing to see his work, though it was not so easy to take measurements without getting into trouble. In the end, and against the will of her parents, Toto A’Feete married him and handled measurements and cooking for him. He was a grateful and loving husband, and very little trouble, really, now that he could no longer see if a door or a piece of furniture was awry.
To be sure, if he heard a squeak, he might set about seeing whether he couldn’t do a little carpentry. But Toto found she could simply substitute a really hard parsnip for the hammer until the mood passed, and so they lived happily ever after.
And that is the true tale of Peeping Tom, as found in an ancient…blog that dates back at least as far as yesterday.
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