“At all costs,” he said to his wife, “I’ll preserve what we still have at Avonsford.”
It was a phrase she knew well. Since his father’s careless loss of the family’s second estate when he was a boy, Gilbert had been obsessed with preserving what was left. The memory of Roger’s spendthrift ways remained with him like a nightmare and made him excessively cautious in everything that he did. Once as a youth, with Roger’s encouragement, he had left Avonsford to seek his fortune: that had been in 1314 when he had gone as a squire on the king’s disastrous campaign in the north. It had been a fiasco: the campaign had ended in the crushing defeat of the English by the Scots of Bannockburn – a defeat that effectively ended hopes of a unified kingdom of England and Scotland for centuries; and he had returned discouraged and much the poorer. As a young man, he had little stomach for public affairs, for the court of Edward II disgusted him. His disgust was justified. First there had been the bisexual king’s favourites Gaveston and Despenser, and their years of misrule. Then, even more shocking, the queen had left and become the open lover of the great Lord Mortimer. It was a disastrous reign and when Parliament had finally deposed the king, Godefroi had felt a sense of relief. Soon afterwards his enemies had murdered Edward horribly in Berkeley Tower; he had been shocked, but not surprised.
Since then, times had been better. The new king, Edward III, soon showed himself to be a wise and competent governor. Indeed, when the king gave his trusted friend Montagu the vacant earldom of Salisbury ten years before, Godefroi had a chance of advancement: for the new earl, who now became Gilbert’s feudal overlord, kept a large retinue and a court of his own. But once again, Gilbert was cautious; instead of coming forward, he remained quietly and safely at Avonsford. “One’s always either in or out of favour at a court,” he told his wife. “Why take the risk?”
He had not gone to the French wars either. And this had probably been a mistake.
The old disputes with the French had smouldered on since Edward’s grandfather’s time and had been complicated because now, through his mother, the English king had acquired a claim to the French throne. At first young Edward had made the same mistake as his ancestor Henry III and tried to build up a great European alliance; as usual it had been unsuccessful, ruinously expensive and almost started a new barons’ revolt. But young Edward, unlike his great-grandfather, was flexible. Soon, he hit on a better way: small armies from England, without expensive and untrustworthy allies and comfortably paid for by English wool, had made straight for France. Their strength lay in the Welsh and English archers with their longbows, and also in the fact that the well-trained knights who accompanied them were not too proud, when it was needed, to dismount and fight side by side with ordinary men. In a series of short, daring campaigns they humiliated the proud but disorganised feudal cavalry of France. At Crécy, only two years before, Edward and his gallant son the Black Prince had routed the French king. The next year, the port of Calais had been taken. And when the Scots had played their usual trick and raided the north of England when they thought the English were busy with France, they were beaten and their King David captured. For the first time in many generations, war was popular in England. It was profitable, there was plunder, and there were French knights to ransom.
Gilbert regretted that he had not fought at Crécy. The profits could have been used at Avonsford. For his mind seldom left the manor now.
He made some modest improvements: he installed a bathroom with a large wooden tub which the maidservant filled with hot water once a week; he rebuilt the kitchen with a stone vaulted ceiling and two huge fires set in the walls. But though some of the richer landowners were building fine stone halls on the ground level of their houses, he stuck conservatively to the old Norman hall on the upper floor with its narrow windows. “It did for my grandfather,” he stated with finality.
The estate, too, was cautiously run. On the demesne land that he cultivated for himself, he had sharply reduced his activities from those of his father’s day; in order to ensure the maximum yield from the minimum investment, he now raised crops only on the best land.
Indeed, when he compared the estate accounts of today with those of two decades before he was surprised at the change himself. They were as follows:
Acres of lord’s demesne
Wheat Bere Barley Peas Vetch Drage Oals Total
1328 66 31 64 10 15 10 50 246
1348 48 53 10 10 33 154
The flocks of sheep were smaller, too, than in his father’s and grandfather’s time and he withdrew them from the poorer pastures on the high ground. But their wool was of a higher grade. Not only the acreage under cultivation had been reduced: he now needed fewer labourers and so more of his villeins paid him money commutations instead of service, increasing his modest profits further. Other men with larger operations might make a killing in good years, but careful Gilbert was never in trouble.
If sometimes his wife admitted to herself that her husband was a little too cautious, if sometimes she secretly wished that by bolder action he had built more of a reputation, she quickly reminded herself that his unadventurous life had all been for her and the boy; and she was contented. So was Godefroi.
By the afternoon of the second day as he sat down in his hall for the main meal, Gilbert was satisfied that he had done all he could for the manor and the village. But the most important decision of all had still not been taken, and so it was now, when the great salt cellar and the nef containing the spices were set upon the table, that he turned to his wife and asked:
“What about our son? What should we do?”
She looked at her cautious husband fondly.
Although Rose, daughter of the Winchester knight Tancred de Whiteheath, had been chosen for Gilbert by his father, and had brought only a modest dowry, their marriage had been an unqualified success. “The only good bargain my father ever made,” Gilbert would say contentedly. With her long pale face and her tall, willowy figure she was known at Sarum simply as the lady of Avonsford. But her most striking feature was her hair. When they married, it had been dark, but when she was thirty, it suddenly turned, not grey but snowy white, and the effect was, surprisingly, to make her look even more beautiful: “The lady of Avonsford is lovely; she is white like a swan,” the villagers used to say.
The knight of Avonsford and his wife had been in love for twenty years. Of their three children, two had died in infancy, one of them a girl; Rose wished she had been able to give her husband more. “I should like a daughter. She would be like you,” he had often told her, and she had loved him for this simple compliment. But one child had survived, Thomas, and he was their greatest joy.
Indeed this was the problem. Like many Englishmen of his class, Godefroi had sent his son to receive part of his education at the castle of anotner lord. The boy was fifteen now, a page; in due course he would become a squire and then, perhaps a knight. To teach him his knightly duties and the manners of a gentleman, Gilbert had chosen his own brother-in-law, Ranulf de Whiteheath – a sensible choice, not only because he was the boy’s uncle, but also because the Whiteheath establishment was considerably larger and more splendid than Avonsford. He had even heard that Ranulf used silver forks – a most unusual sophistication when most men even of his class were content with knives alone.
“You’ll see how things should be done,” he told Thomas; “and one day at Avonsford, if we find you a rich wife, you’ll be able to live as a noble really should.”
With this new threat of the plague, though, he was not sure what to do. Should he summon the boy home, or leave him at Whiteheath? He hated not to have Thomas at his side at such a time, but which was the safer place?
This was the difficult question he and Rose debated during their meal.
It was the normal custom at Avonsford for a musician to play while the lord of the manor supped, and then for the vicar of the little church, who in the absence of any other priest acted as a private chaplain to Godefroi as well, to read to the
lord afterwards. Today however, Gilbert had dispensed with the musician, a peasant from the village who played the bagpipes atrociously.
At the end of the meal, they were still uncertain what to do. Perhaps, after all, this plague the merchant spoke of would not come.
It was now that Godefroi saw the priest enter and, not wishing to disappoint him, nodded curtly for him to begin. Perhaps his recital would help him to decide.
He was a balding young man in his twenties with gap teeth and a high-pitched voice; but he read clearly. Now he stood respectfully before the table and pulling out a little book that Godefroi had lent him announced:
“The tale of Sir Orfeo.”
There was no poem that Gilbert loved more than this popular ballad. In this recent courtly version, the legendary Orpheus had become an Arthurian Knight, Dame Euridice his lady, and the underworld to which he journeyed to find her had become the faery kingdom. It would have pleased Godefroi to know that, several feet under the ground of the manor house there lay a broken Roman mosaic celebrating its hero; but he would scarcely have recognised the Romano-British Orpheus depicted there.
It was a haunting tale.
Orfeo was a king
In England, a high lording.
Orfeo most of anything
Loved the delight of harping.
As he recited the gentle cadences of the bitter-sweet poem, the vicar’s high voice became almost tuneful; and Gilbert, who knew it so well, nodded encouragement from time to time.
It was the sense of sorrow in the early lines that moved the knight, as the poem told how Euridice sleeps with her ladies under an orchard tree and awakens half mad after a dream in which the faery king has told her that he will steal her away the very next day.
Where’ere thou be thou wilt be fetched
And torn apart your limbs be all
None can help you, no one shall:
Tomorrow lady, we shall call.
And Gilbert smiled and shook his head as the tale related how poor Sir Orfeo took all his useless precautions, standing guard over his queen with a thousand armed knights.
They formed in ranks on every side
And said with her they would abide
And die there for her, every one
Before the queen be from them gone
And yet from the midst of that array
By magic she vanished away.
Gilbert closed his eyes with a smile of contentment as the story related how Sir Orfeo became a ragged minstrel and beggar, wandering the world in search of his wife. For all his cautious management of his own estate, he identified with the pilgrim knight who gave up everything completely. He listened intently, familiar as the tale was, as Sir Orfeo at last saw the faery king, hunting in the forest with his lords and ladies. And then came, for him, the most touching moment of all, when the ragged Sir Orfeo sees that one of the ladies is his own wife, and approaches her.
Then he beheld her, and she him too
And neither to other a word did speak;
She for pity, to see him so,
Who had been a king, now so weak.
And then a tear fell from her eye:
And the other women the tear did spy
And made her swiftly ride away.
What was it about that meeting and parting, as though the hero’s wife were separated from him by a pane of glass, that always made the tears start from Godefroi’s eyes? Was it the sense of loss? He was not sure exactly.
But soon his eyes were glowing with delight again as Sir Orfeo followed the riders back to the faery castle and played his harp before the faery king. And when he was offered a reward for his playing, Gilbert’s face relaxed in pleasure as Sir Orfeo replied:
‘Sir’, he said, ‘I beseech thee
That thou wouldest give to me
That fair lady that I see
That sleeps under the orchard tree.’
And at last, having won his queen, the king, still disguised as a minstrel, returns to his astonished court and faithful servants:
To Winchester at last came he
That was his own city.
And then Gilbert reached out and took Rose’s hand and whispered:
“I’d have wandered a hundred years to find you.” And his wife, turning her head and smiling, squeezed his hand in return and said:
“I want us all to be together. Send for Thomas tomorrow.”
Before the young vicar left, Gilbert asked him if he had heard any news of the plague. He replied confidently that he had not.
“But I pray every hour for my little flock at Avonsford,” he replied stoutly, “and I’m sure we shall be spared.”
Gilbert himself was less certain; and the next morning, after he had sent his groom on horseback to Winchester to collect his son, prepared himself to ride into the city to see if there was any news.
It was just as he was leaving that he was stopped at the courtyard gates by a small but extraordinary delegation.
The Mason family now consisted of six people: Edward’s two grandsons, John and Nicholas; their widowed stepmother and her three young children. Since the death of their father Richard, three years before, John and Nicholas, both in their late twenties, had worked hard to support the second family Peter had left behind, and the house the whole family occupied in Avonsford, though crowded, had an air of cleanness and prosperity about it that pleased the knight. Though both men had followed the family calling as masons, John was also a bowman, and had recently returned from Crécy with a modest fortune in booty that was now the family’s reserve against times of trouble.
But it was their stepmother Agnes who ruled them all. Godefroi gazed at her with a mixture of dislike and admiration. She was a small, square-jawed woman whose precise age he could never guess, with sandy red hair and little grey eyes that were honest, but seemed to dart about constantly. With her busy, jerky movements, she often reminded him of a red squirrel; she defended her little family with a fiery determination that did not make her popular in the village, and the aggressiveness in her nature that he sensed behind the respect she had to show him always made the knight feel uncomfortable in her presence. All the same, he had to admire her spirit.
It was this little red-haired woman who now stood in front of him, while John and Nicholas, their large heads respectfully bared, kept silent, and holding her arms akimbo bluntly announced:
“Sir, we want to rent the old sheep house. What’s the price?”
He looked down at her in surprise. The old sheep house was still standing – a long, stone building that lay in a dip some distance away on the high ground. But since he had reduced his flocks, the ridges around it had not been grazed, and the place was now deserted and tumbling down. What could she want it for? Not wishing to waste time he shrugged.
“Sixpence a year.” It was a nominal figure.
Agnes nodded.
“Can we take it right away?”
“Take it when you like,” he answered. And without paying her any more attention he rode away.
As soon as he was gone she turned to the two men.
“Hurry,” she told them. “We must be gone at once.”
As soon as he entered the city, Godefroi went straight to the house of William Shockley. It was a natural choice, for few men were better informed. His house stood in the High Street, and though his primary business was in the export of wool and cloth, he had turned the whole floor on the street level into a store. Here one could find oysters from Poole, wine and fruit, woad, soap and oil imported through the lesser ports like Christchurch and Lymington or the great and growing port of Southampton on the south coast; there were herrings and salt fish brought over from Ireland through the trading city of Bristol in the west, and from more distant markets, pepper, dates, ginger, and fine silk clothes shipped through Southampton or the huge emporium of London. Not only was it a delight to inspect these wonders, but the carriers who brought them also brought news, and this was what made the merchant doubly valuable. He wa
s the soul of the place, a big, bluff figure with a ruddy face, inclined to stoutness, and who loved to wear the brightest and most splendid clothes that he could find. His loose flowing surcoat, buttoned at the front, that fell like a dress to his knees, was of the most gorgeous brocade, worked with gold, that he had brought from London. His capuchon was wound into a huge turban on his head and he usually strutted amiably about the store, dispensing information.
But today, as soon as he saw the knight, he drew him to one side and whispered to him gravely.
“You have heard of this plague? It has come to Southampton.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. Word reached me this morning. Two dead already.”
“Is the city prepared?” Godefroi asked.
Shockley grimaced.
“I warned the mayor and the aldermen. It’s all I can do; but no one believes me and anyway, in the city, what precautions are possible? Personally,” he admitted, “I’m taking the family to the farm today.”
Godefroi nodded grimly. The merchant had six children and he could hardly blame him for wanting them out of the teeming streets of Salisbury.
When he left a few minutes later, he found that the merchant’s assistants had strapped two small panniers onto his horse. “Malmsey wine, just in from Christchurch,” William explained. “It’s a good protection against disease.”
The arrival of the Black Death at Sarum was discovered that afternoon.
The two carts containing William Shockley, his plump wife, their six children, and two servants, had trundled slowly out of the city on the Wilton road in the early afternoon; an hour later they had reached the small collection of timbered buildings beside Grovely Wood that was the Shockley farm. William and his wife were both relieved to be there; the children anxious to run into the spacious freedom of the surrounding woods.
He had sent word ahead and was glad to see that the Wilsons had opened the house to air it and already lit the fire in the main room where the food would be cooked. The house however, though prepared, was silent and deserted.
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