This contact they described in poems and art was felt as a physical experience. It had nothing to do with opium-based dreams and fancies, which faded on waking. Those who have experienced epiphanies, damascene moments, and the like will testify to this. When these visions add up to belief, mercy is found to be the touchstone of religious or spiritual experience. The religious visionary, the eccentric, and those who lead a "spiritual" life are those whose lives are touched by mercy. But these voices are mildly derided in their own lifetimes, or romanticized after death by virtue of their weirdness and obscurity.

One who may be said to follow in this strange and peculiar tradition is alive and kicking in contemporary southeast London. In short, John Constable, a playwright from Southwark, has composed an epic poem that celebrates a patch of wasteland behind the famous cathedral. In the guise of his alter ego John Crow, he names this land as a sacred place for the city's outcast dead. He knew nothing of its existence until the words came into his head. On further research, he found out that the bodies of 15,000 paupers and prostitutes lie buried a few metres from some of London's biggest tourist attractions. The story Constable tells is remarkable. More than that, the story has a deeply spiritual vein to it and a moral, in the sense that this story shows mercy to and levels us all.

From the 12^th to the 17^th century, the Bishop of Winchester was the Lord of a manor - the Liberty of the Clink - that he ran as his own. The manor was in Southwark, and his London residence, Winchester Palace, stood between the church, now Southwark Cathedral, and the Clink Prison.

Milord permitted and regulated prostitution within the Liberty. By Shakespeare's time, the Bishop's stretch of Bankside was London's demimonde, with theatres, bear-pits, taverns and "stews" (brothels), licensed under Ordinances dating from 1161 and signed by Thomas Becket. Winchester Geese, a euphemism for prostitutes, were famous all over London.

In his 1598 Survey, John Stow referred to a burial ground for "single women", another euphemism for prostitutes. Stow wrote: 

"I have heard of ancient men, of good credit, report that these single women were forbidden the rites of the church, so long as they continued that sinful life, and were excluded from Christian burial, if they were not reconciled before their death. And therefore there was a plot of ground called the Single Woman's churchyard, appointed for them far from the parish church."