Cuckold's Point

The Horn Fair was a procession which led to Charlton.{{Cite web|url=https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/scott-a-morning-with-a-view-of-cuckolds-point-n05450|title='A Morning, with a View of Cuckold's Point', Samuel Scott, c.1750-60|website=Tate}} It is said that King John, or another English monarch, gave the fair as a concession, along with all the land from the point to Charlton, to a miller whose wife he had seduced after a hunting trip,{{cite web |url=http://www.thames.org.uk/pages/guide2.htm |title=The Swiftstone Trust,. Past, present, future, on the Thames |accessdate=2007-09-14 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070928073700/http://www.thames.org.uk/pages/guide2.htm |archive-date=2007-09-28 }} Swiftstone Trust'Parishes: Charlton', The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent: Volume 1 (1797), pp. 420–41. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=53782. Date accessed: 14 September 2007 though this story is disputed.{{Cite web|url=http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/the_horn_fair.htm|title=The Horn Fair of South London: London's first Carnival ?|website=www.fantompowa.net}}

Cuckold's Haven is first mentioned in writing on 15 May 1562, in The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London; the entry reads "Was set up at the cuckold haven a great May-pole by butchers and fisher-men, full of horns; and they made great cheer". Only two years later, however John Taylor (the Water Poet), lamented the marker's absence — in verse. It may have been a temporary or occasional structure, therefore.{{cite journal|last=Bruster|first=Douglas|year=1990|title=The Horn of Plenty: Cuckoldry and Capital in the Drama of the Age of Shakespeare|journal=Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900|volume=30|issue=2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama|pages=195-215|jstor=450514}}

File:Cuckold's Haven.png

Cuckold's Haven appears on a 1588 government map of London's river defences at the time of the Spanish Armada; in the context, it is a shown as recognised landmark for mariners.{{cite book|last=Wright|first=Laura|year=2005|chapter=On the Place-Name Isle of Dogs|title=From Clerks to Corpora: Essays on the English Language Yesterday and Today|editor1-first=Philip|editor1-last=Shaw|editor2-first=Britt|editor2-last=Erman|editor3-first=Gunnel|editor3-last=Melchers|editor4-first=Peter|editor4=Sundkvistsher|publisher=Stockholm University Press|

isbn=978-91-7635-006-5|doi=10.16993/sup.bab|url=https://www.stockholmuniversitypress.se/site/books/10.16993/sup.bab/read/?loc=Text%2FSUP_002_erman_book_Chapter-06.xhtml|access-date=8 January 2025}}

Cuckold's Point was also the location of a riverside gibbet, where the bodies of executed criminals (usually river pirates) were displayed as a deterrent to others, while it also gave its name to an adjacent shipyard during the 18th century.{{citation needed|date=February 2025}}

For some reason English Renaissance drama was fascinated by the subject of cuckoldry, and Cuckold's Haven featured in many a play, including The London Prodigal (attributed to Shakespeare — probably falsely); Eastward Ho! (by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, for which the authors had a spell in jail); Northward Ho! (a reply to the former); The Isle of Gulls; and The Witch of Edmonton, which contains the line {{quote|confidence is a wind, that has blown many a married Man ashore at Cuckold's Haven.}}

Cuckold's Point is mentioned in the diaries of Samuel Pepys. On Friday 20 February 1662/63, Pepys described a river journey from Woolwich back to The Temple:

File:Hogarth the idle 'prentice.jpg

{{blockquote|Up and by water with Commissioner Pett to Deptford, and there looked over the yard, and had a call, wherein I am very highly pleased with our new manner of call-books, being my invention. Thence thinking to have gone down to Woolwich in the Charles pleasure boat, but she run aground, it being almost low water, and so by oars to the town, and there dined, and then to the yard at Mr. Ackworth’s, discoursing with the officers of the yard about their stores of masts, which was our chief business, and having done something therein, took boat and to the pleasure boat, which was come down to fetch us back, and I could have been sick if I would in going, the wind being very fresh, but very pleasant it was, and the first time I have sailed in any one of them. It carried us to Cuckold’s Point, and so by oars to the Temple, it raining hard, where missed speaking with my cosen Roger, and so walked home and to my office; there spent the night till bed time, and so home to supper and to bed.}}

In William Hogarth's print Industry and Idleness, Plate V, the Idle Apprentice, sent to sea in disgrace, is depicted in a boat off Cuckold's Point; in allusion, he defiantly makes the sign of the horns.{{cite book|last=Trusler|first=John|year=1768|title=Hogarth Moralized|publisher=S. Hooper, Jane Hogarth|location=London|url=https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_hogarth-moralized-being_trusler-john_1768/page/81/mode/1up?q=cuckold%27s|access-date=7 February 2025}}, p.81

Cuckold's Point is near to Pageant Crescent, Rotherhithe and to Nelson's Pier, from which the Docklands Hilton has a ferry connection to Canary Wharf.

{{wide image|Limehouse Cuckold.jpg|1200px|Panorama: The bend in the Thames at Cuckold's Point, showing (left to right) Canary Wharf, Limehouse Reach, Ropemakers' Fields (in foreground), Cuckold's Point (across river), Limehouse Basin lock, and the Lower Pool of London.}}

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{{More citations needed|date=February 2010}}

Category:17th-century theatre

Category:History of the London Borough of Southwark

Category:Geography of the River Thames

Category: History of the River Thames

Category:Rotherhithe