It was a cold and wet day in early April 1677 and in Carter Lane in the City of London a small group of masons took shelter at the Mermaid Inn. Just to the north, through Prerogative Court, stood the wide-open space that would soon house the new St Paul's cathedral. That was their place of work, where the walls of the great structure were rising slowly above the recently laid foundations.

Shaking off the rain, the company settled down around the fire. Having secured himself a warming drink of purl one of the younger masons looked over a table cluttered with pots, pipes and pamphlets. Reaching over, he took up a copy of the Bill of Mortality for the week before and scanned down its columns of ‘The Diseases and Casualties this Week’. He was surprised to see that a terrible accident had taken place just around the corner in the neighbouring parish of St Benet Paul's Wharf: a man had died by being scalded in a brewer's mash-tun. His curiosity sparked and trying to build a picture of the scene in his mind, the reader asked of his workmates ‘Have you seen this? Do you know who ’twas? How'd it happen? When and where?’ And so the conversation turned to the gruesome incident as together they constructed an imagined narrative for the event.

As they did so they were joined by the slow-moving frame of One-Eyed Eddy, a carver who had worked on St Paul's for most of his sixty-five years. Picking up their theme, he regaled the gathering with stories of injuries on the works, including his own, the gory detail of which soon suppressed their chatter. Eventually the propensity for drunken brewers to drown in their products found its way into the conversation. It was an observation that leavened the horrors they had been forming in their mind's-eye. The thought of brewers drinking themselves to death, literally, provided a hearty if dark dose of bar-room humour just when it was needed.

And so the talk of accidents subsided but, still wanting to know more, the curious young mason vowed that he would seek out, if he could, someone who had knowledge of the inquest. Discarding the Bill onto the table he picked up a pamphlet, Strange News from Ireland, about a great fish of horrible shape – now there was something to talk about!