Senior Alderman Thomas Keld

Senior Alderman of Cambridge and head of its older civic council, which controls streets, wells, fire rules, public houses and the ordinary watch. A Cambridge street question belongs first to him.

Cambridge is known for its white institutions of artifice, but the town also has an older civic council, and Senior Alderman Thomas Keld stands at its head. With High Constable Adam Fenne, the council controls streets, wells, fire rules, public houses and the ordinary watch — the unglamorous business without which schools, examiners and aerial yards could not function. A Cambridge street question belongs first to Keld, and his is one of the few civic names whose weight carries beyond its own jurisdiction.

His view of the town is municipal rather than scholarly. The stone men, kiln men and glass men of the three yards drink apart, marry within their trades and hold opinions of one another that have not altered in living memory. The Collegium reckons this harmless. Keld and his council reckon it the reason three of Cambridge’s four annual disorders fall in the same two streets, and plan accordingly.

He is very old now, in his eighties, stooped and softened by age but not in authority. Cambridge speaks of him with the respect it reserves for things that have outlasted several generations of clever young men. He keeps street and fire reports going back decades, and is known to read them.

Companies meet Keld’s authority whenever an errand touches licensing, fire, public order or the watch, and meet the man himself when trouble in the yards or the public houses has grown large enough to need an alderman’s signature. He is irritable with vagueness and patient with anyone who has actually walked the street in question.

In person

Keld is visibly a very old man, in his early eighties, sturdy but softened and slightly stooped. His reddish-brown hair has thinned and faded mostly to white, though thick old side-whiskers survive; his face is deeply lined, broad-nosed and age-spotted, with heavy-lidded eyes that have heard most kinds of civic excuse. He wears fur-trimmed municipal robes and a heavy chain of office, and is usually found among street maps and fire reports.