The Forest

by Edward Rutherfurd

  The abbot sighed, closed the book, carried it over to a large strong box in which he placed it and carefully locked the box.

  He had made a mistake. The last abbot’s judgement, which he had so foolishly ignored, was right. The man’s character was clear: he was flawed and possibly dangerous.

  ‘So why did I appoint him?’ he murmured. Had he done it as a sort of penance? Perhaps. He had told himself that the man deserved a chance, that he had earned the position, that it was up to him as abbot – with prayer and the grace of God, of course – to make it work. As for his crime? It was in the book. It was long ago. God is merciful.

  He glanced out through the open window. It was a beautiful day. Then his eyes fell on a pair of figures, walking quietly together in conversation. At the sight of these his face relaxed.

  Brother Adam. There was a very different type. One of the best. He smiled. It was time to go outside. He unbolted the door.

  Brother Adam was in a playful mood. As he sometimes did when he was pacing, he had pulled out the little wooden crucifix that hung on a cord round his neck, under his hair shirt, and was thoughtfully fingering it. His mother had given it to him when he first entered the order. She said she had got it from a man who had been to the Holy Land. It was carved from the wood of a cedar of Lebanon. He was enjoying the fact that the afternoon sun was gently warming his bald head. He had gone bald, and grey, by the time he was thirty. But this had not made him look old. Thirty-five, now, his finely cut, even features gave him a look of almost youthful intelligence, while one could sense that, under the monk’s habit, his thick, muscular body exuded a sense of physical power.

  He was also quietly enjoying the business in hand, which was, as they paced up and down between two beds of vegetables, to inculcate, in the kindest way, some much-needed common sense into the young novice who walked respectfully beside him.

  People often came to Brother Adam for advice, because he was calm and clever, yet always approachable. He never offered advice unless asked – he was far too shrewd to do that – but it might have been noticed that whatever the problem, after a troubled person had discussed it with Brother Adam for a while, that person nearly always started to laugh, and usually went away smiling.

  ‘Don’t you ever rebuke people?’ the abbot had once asked him.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he had replied with a twinkle. ‘That’s what abbots are for.’

  The present talk, however, was not entirely comforting. Nor was it meant to be. Brother Adam had given it before. He called it his ‘Truth about Monks’ catechism.

  ‘Why’, he had asked the novice, ‘do men come to live in a monastery?’

  ‘To serve God, Brother Adam.’

  ‘But why in a monastery?’

  ‘To escape from the sinful world.’

  ‘Ah.’ Brother Adam gazed around the abbey precincts. ‘A safe haven. Like the Garden of Eden?’

  In a way it was. The site the monks had chosen was delightful. Parallel to the great inlet from the Solent water that lay to the east of the Forest a small river ran down, forming a small coastal inlet, about three miles long, of its own. At the head of this inlet, where King John had kept a modest hunting lodge, the monks had laid out their great walled inclosure. It was modelled on the order’s parent house in Burgundy. Dominating everything was the abbey church – a large, early Gothic structure with a squat, square tower over the central crossing. Though simple, the building was handsome, and made of stone. There was no stone in the Forest; some of it had been brought across the Solent water from the Isle of Wight; some, like the best stone in the Tower of London, from Normandy; and the pillars were made of the same dark Purbeck marble, from along the south coast, as had been used in the huge new cathedral up at Sarum. The monks were particularly proud of their church’s floor, paved with decorative tiles they had painstakingly made themselves. Beside the church was the cloister; on its southern side the various quarters of the choir monks; along the whole of its western side the huge, barn-like domus conversorum – the house where the lay brothers ate and slept.

  The walled inclosure also contained the abbot’s house, numerous workshops, a pair of fish ponds and an outer gatehouse where the poor were fed. A new and grander inner gatehouse had also just been begun.

  Outside the wall lay the inlet and a small mill. Above the mill-race was a large pond surrounded by banks of silvery rushes. Beyond that, on the western side, some fields sloped up a small rise, from which there opened out a magnificent panorama: to the north mostly wood and heath; and to the south the rich, marshy land, which the monks had already partly drained to produce several fine farms, and which stretched down to the Solent water, with the long hump of the Isle of Wight lying like a friendly guardian just beyond. The entire estate, woodland, open heath and farmland, extended to some eight thousand acres; and since the boundary was marked by an earthwork ditch and fence, the monks referred not to the walled abbey inclosure, but to the eight-thousand-acre estate itself as the ‘Great Close’.

  Bellus Locus, the abbey was called in Latin – the Beautiful Place; in Norman French: Beau Lieu. But the forest people did not speak French, so they pronounced it Boolee, or Bewley. And before long the monks were doing so, too. Rich, tranquil haven that it was, the Great Close of Beaulieu might well have been mistaken for the Garden of Eden.

  ‘One is secure here, of course,’ Brother Adam remarked pleasantly. ‘We are clothed and fed. We have few cares. So tell me’ – he suddenly rounded on the novice – ‘now that you have had the chance to observe us for several months, what do you think is the most important quality for a monk to possess?’

  ‘A desire to serve God. I think,’ the boy said. ‘A great religious passion.’

  ‘Really? Oh, dear. I don’t agree at all.’

  ‘You don’t?’ The boy looked confused.

  ‘Let me tell you something,’ Brother Adam cheerfully explained. ‘The first day you pass from your novitiate and become a monk, you will take your place as the most junior among us, next to the monk who was the last to arrive before you. After a time there will be another new monk, who will be placed below you. For every meal and every service you will always sit in the same position between those two monks – every day, every night, year in, year out; and unless one of you leaves for another monastery, or becomes abbot or prior, you will stay together, like that, for the rest of your lives.

  ‘Think about it. One of your companions has an irritating habit of scratching himself or sings out of tune, always; the other dribbles when he eats; he also has bad breath. And there they are, one each side of you. For ever.’ He paused and beamed at the novice. ‘That’s monastic life,’ he said amiably.

  ‘But monks live for God,’ the novice protested.

  ‘And they are also ordinary human beings – no more, no less. That,’ Brother Adam added gently, ‘is why we need God’s grace.’

  ‘I thought’, the novice said honestly, ‘you were going to be more inspiring.’

  ‘I know.’

  The novice was silent. He was twenty.

  ‘The most important qualities a monk needs,’ Brother Adam went on, ‘are tolerance and a sense of humour.’ He watched the young man. ‘But these are both gifts of God,’ he added, to comfort him.

  The last part of this conversation had been quietly observed. The abbot had actually intended to join them, since he always enjoyed Brother Adam’s company; and he had been secretly irritated when, just as he got outside, the prior had appeared at his elbow. Courtesies must be observed, though. As the prior murmured at his side, the abbot eyed him from time to time, bleakly.

  John of Grockleton had been prior for a year now. Like most of his ilk, he was going nowhere.

  The position of prior in a monastery is not without honour. This is, after all, the monk whom the abbot has chosen to be his deputy. But that is all. If the abbot is away he is in charge – but only on a day-to-day basis. All major decisions, even the assignment of the monks’ tasks, must await the ab
bot’s return. The prior is the workhorse, the abbot is the leader. Abbots have charisma; their deputies do not. Abbots solve problems; priors report them. Priors seldom become abbots.

  John of Grockleton: properly speaking, he was just Brother John, but somehow his original name, Grockleton, had always been appended. Where the devil was Grockleton anyway? The abbot couldn’t remember. In the north, perhaps. He didn’t really care. Prior John of Grockleton was nothing much to look at. He must have been quite tall once, before the curving of his spine caused him to stoop. His thin black hair had once been thick. But despite these infirmities, the prior still had plenty of life left in him. He’ll outlive me I’m sure, the abbot thought.

  If only it weren’t for those hands. It always seemed to the abbot that they were like claws. He tried to correct himself. They were just hands. A bit bony, perhaps, a bit curved. But no worse than any other pair of hands belonging to one of God’s creatures. Except they were like claws.

  ‘I’m glad to see that our young novice is seeking instruction from Brother Adam,’ he remarked to the prior. ‘Beatus vir, qui non sequitur …’ Psalm One: Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly … Verse One.

  ‘Sed in lege Domine …’ the prior quietly murmured. But his delight is in the law of the Lord. Verse Two.

  It was quite natural, this reference to the psalms in ordinary conversation. Even the lay brothers, who attended fewer services, did it. For in the constant monastic offices in the church that punctuated the daily life of every monk, from matins to vespers and compline, and even the night office for which you were wakened long after midnight, it was the psalms, in Latin of course, that the brothers chanted. They could get through all hundred and fifty in a week.

  And all human life was in the Psalms. There was a phrase apposite to every occasion. Just as simple village folk would often converse in local sayings and proverbs, so it was natural for the monks to speak the psalms. These were the words they heard all the time.

  ‘Yes. The law of the Lord.’ The abbot nodded. ‘He has studied, of course, hasn’t he? At Oxford.’ Their order was not an intellectual one, but a dozen years ago there had been a move to send a few of the brightest monks to Oxford. Brother Adam had gone from Beaulieu.

  ‘Oxford.’ John of Grockleton said it with distaste. The abbot might approve of Oxford, but he didn’t. He knew the psalms by rote: that was enough. People like Brother Adam might think themselves superior. But although the monks at Oxford had been quartered well away from the university city itself, they were still sharing the worldly corruption of the place. They weren’t better than he was, they were worse.

  ‘One of these days, when I have gone,’ the abbot remarked, ‘Brother Adam would make a good abbot – don’t you think?’ And he looked at the prior as though he expected him to agree.

  ‘That will be after my time,’ Grockleton answered sourly.

  ‘Nonsense, my dear Brother John,’ the abbot said happily. ‘You’ll outlive us all.’

  Why did he taunt the prior like this? With an inward sigh, the abbot awarded himself a penance. It’s the man’s stubborn refusal to recognize his own limitations that brings out the worst in me, he thought, and now it’s made me guilty of cruelty.

  These reflections were abruptly cut short, however, by a series of cries from the outer gate. A moment later a figure came running towards them, followed by several anxious monks.

  ‘Father Abbot. Come quickly,’ cried the man, half out of breath.

  ‘Where, my son?’

  ‘To Sowley grange. There has been a murder.’

  No one had followed him. Luke rested by a gorse brake, wondering what to do next. A mile away one of the abbey shepherds was tending his flock of sheep on the open heath, but the shepherd had not seen him.

  Why had he done it? God knows he hadn’t meant to. It would never have happened if Brother Matthew hadn’t come. But that was no excuse. Especially when it was Brother Matthew – he winced to think of it, poor Brother Matthew lying in a pool of blood – who had put him, a humble lay brother, in charge of the grange in his absence.

  The Cistercians were different from other monks. Nearly all monastic orders were based on the ancient Rule of St Benedict. And St Benedict’s model was clear: monks were to lead a communal life of constant prayer balanced by physical labour; and they must take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Obedience and even chastity, more or less, had usually been achieved. But poverty was always a problem. No matter how simply they began, monasteries always finished up rich. Their churches became grand, their life easy. Time and again there had been reformers. The most notable was the huge French order centred upon Cluny; but even the Cluniacs, eventually, had gone the same way and their place had been taken by a new order, spreading out from their parent house of Citeaux in Burgundy: the Cistercians.

  There was no mistaking them. Known as the white monks, because they wore habits of simple, undyed wool, the Cistercians avoided the sinful world by choosing wild and lonely places for their monasteries. Operating through farmsteads, called granges, often miles out from the monastery, they were especially known for raising sheep. The Beaulieu monks raised thousands, grazing them not only over the Great Close but the open Forest too, where they were given grazing rights. And to ensure that they could devote the majority of their time to prayer they had a subsidiary category of lesser monks – the lay brothers – who took monastic vows and attended some of the services, but whose main occupation was to tend the sheep and work in the fields. Usually these were quite rustic, local fellows who, for one reason or another, were drawn to the religious atmosphere of the monastery or its security. Men such as Luke.

  They had come the night before. Eight of them. With bows and hounds. There had been Roger Martell, a wild young aristocrat, and four of his friends; but the other three had been local men, ordinary fellows like himself. One of these had been his kinsman, Will atte Wood. He sighed. The trouble was, everyone was your cousin in the Forest.

  If only he hadn’t been put in charge. Brother Matthew had been doing him a favour, of course. Sowley grange was an important place. As well as the usual livestock and arable farming, the monks there had charge of a huge pond stocked with fish. There was a deer park belonging to the abbey, too, at nearby Througham.

  Brother Matthew had known the prior didn’t like Luke. By putting him in charge of the grange he had been giving Luke a chance to prove to the prior that he was reliable. But when young Martell and his friends arrived, demanding shelter for the night, it hadn’t been so easy for a simple man like Luke to refuse.

  He knew they’d been poaching, of course. They even had a deer with them. It was a serious offence. The king no longer demanded your life or limb for killing his precious deer, but the fines could be heavy. By giving them shelter he was guilty of a crime too. So why had he done it? Had they threatened him? Martell had certainly cursed him and given him a look that frightened him. But the real reason, he knew in his heart, was when Will had nudged him and whispered: ‘Come on, Luke. I told them you were my cousin. Are you going to embarrass me?’

  They’d eaten all the bread and a whole cheese. They didn’t think much of the beer. The best beer and the wine for guests was all at the abbey, not out there at a humble grange. In the morning they had gone.

  There were only half a dozen lay brothers at the grange besides himself and as many hired labourers. But there was no need to say anything. They had all understood. The illegal visit would never be mentioned to anyone.

  ‘What shall we do about the missing cheese and beer?’ one of the lay brothers had ventured.

  ‘We’ll open the tap a fraction, spill some beer on the floor under it and say nothing. When someone notices they’ll think it leaked away. As for the cheese, I’ll say it must have been stolen.’

  Perhaps it might have worked if Brother Matthew had not been so sharp-eyed and if he hadn’t decided to call at the grange only two days after his last visit. Bustling in short
ly after midday, he quickly inspected the premises, noticed the leaking barrel of beer at once and summoned Luke.

  ‘It must have leaked since yesterday,’ Luke had begun, but got no further.

  ‘Nonsense. It was full. The tap was only just dripping. Anyway, it was sealed tight when I left. Someone’s been drinking it.’ He looked about. ‘There’s a whole cheese missing.’

  ‘It must have been stolen.’ It was no good. Luke needed to prepare himself for a lie and Brother Matthew had caught him off balance. The monk looked at him severely. And who knew what stupid story he might have started next if there had not begun, just then, a furious knocking at the door.

  It was Martell. He nodded to the lay brethren. ‘We’re back, Luke. Need your help again.’ Then, glancing at Brother Matthew whom he had not yet deigned to notice, he casually asked: ‘And who the devil are you?’

  Luke buried his face in his hands as he remembered the rest: the fury of Brother Matthew; his own humiliation; the terse order to the poachers to leave and their arrogant refusal. And then …

  If only Brother Matthew had not lost his temper. First he had cursed him for being in league with the criminals. God knows, it was only natural that he should have thought so. He had threatened to tell the prior and have him thrown out of the monastery. In front of the other lay brothers. Witnesses. The two of them had been outside by then, confronting the poachers. Then Brother Matthew had told the others to bar the entrance. Martell had insolently put his foot in the door and the monk had lost his temper. Seeing a staff leaning against the wall, he had rushed to it, seized it and turned.

  He had not meant to hurt Brother Matthew. Quite the reverse. There had been only one thought in his mind. If the monk struck Martell the young blood might kill him. There had been no time to think of more than that. Beside the staff there was a spade – a heavy wooden implement with a metal rim. Grabbing the spade he had swung it to break the blow just as Brother Matthew’s staff came down.