This much is suggested also by the play’s references to Saint Hugh, the patron saint of the shoemakers. Just as ancient Lud was doubled by the statue of contemporary Elizabeth, so is the long-dead Saint Hugh doubled by material artefacts in the play’s present. He appears in The Shoemaker’s Holiday in the monumental form of his ‘bones’, the term that the shoemakers repeatedly use when referring to their tools. In other words, the property of skill materialized by Saint Hugh’s bones insists not only on fraternal relations between artisans in the present, but also on the present’s association with the past. Skill implies collective membership in mystery and history alike. The historical dimension of artisanal fellowship is underscored by Simon Eyre’s repeated comparisons of his shoemakers to legions of Hyperboreans, Trojans, Mesopotamians, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Capadoccians and ancient Britons. Eyre’s comparisons implicitly invoke a theatrical tradition that similarly insists on the monumental doubling of the ancient past by the present: the civic pageant play. Indeed, his first invocation of the Lord of Ludgate – when praising the war-bound shoemaker Ralph to the army musterers – is accompanied by a virtual Who’s Who of English pageant play heroes and villains:

Take him, brave men. Hector of Troy was a hackney to him, Hercules and Termagant scoundrels. Prince Arthur’s Round Table, by the Lord of Ludgate, ne’er fed such a tall, such a dapper swordman. By the life of Pharaoh, a brave, resolute swordman.

(1.164-8)

Eyre’s association of Ralph with Hector, Hercules, Termagant, Arthur and Pharaoh consolidates the civic pageant play’s view of history, in which – like Saint Hugh’s bones and the Elizabethan Ludgate – the past is not divided from the present but serves rather as its affirming template.¹⁷

Monumental time is insistently represented in The Shoemaker’s Holiday through the language of patrilineal reproduction. Eyre’s foreman, Hodge, claims ‘we are the brave bloods of the shoemakers, heirs apparent to Saint Hugh, and perpetual benefactors to all good fellows’ (18.1-3). The play’s several jokes about reproduction fantasize that ‘heirs apparent’ double not only their fathers’ names but also their offices and attributes. Simon Eyre, upon becoming Lord Mayor, claims that he will ‘get two or three young Lord Mayors ere I die’ (21.29-30). As this wisecrack suggests, each son is a monument to and double of his father. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, another city gate is invoked to represent this reproductive vision of monumental time: when the journeyman Firk teases Ralph that his children will be ‘Cripplegates’ (14.66), he resorts to a pun that conflates Ralph’s war wound with London’s northern city gate.

The shoemakers may value their ‘Saint Hugh’s bones’ as property in which the present monumentally doubles the past. But as we have seen, the play’s dénouement depends on a very different kind of property: the transnational capital asset. This species of property presumes also a different conception of time. It no longer secures the continuity of past and present, but rather dissolves the present into a radically uncertain future of profit or loss. Hence in his new guise as global commodities trader, Eyre abandons monumental time and enters the high-risk, high-gain temporality of early mercantile capitalism.¹⁸ And just as Eyre’s use of the term ‘freebooters’ plasters over the conflict between artisanal and capitalist economies, so does his ‘Lord of Ludgate’ plaster over the differences between monumental and capitalist conceptions of time. That it does so is because Ludgate was not just a civic monument. It also served another, more financially related purpose.