Wolf Hall

Tudor London seen from the desk of a blacksmith's son who rises to run a kingdom. The map holds the City around Cromwell's own house at Austin Friars, then reaches west to Cardinal Wolsey's York Place as it becomes the King's Whitehall, downriver to the Tower, and upriver past Putney to the palace at Hampton Court.

Thomas Cromwell

Putney, the smith's yard

Part One

The story begins on the ground, with a beaten boy fleeing his violent father in a riverside village. Putney is where the future councillor starts as a blacksmith's son, and the distance from here to the King's chamber is the whole arc of the book.

Part One, opening

inferred Cromwell was born in Putney, then a Thames-side village upstream of London, around 1485; the family's exact plot is not recorded, so this marks the riverside village near Brewhouse Lane where his father Walter kept a brewery and forge.

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