A few yards from this tree stood the pardoner of St. Anthony’s Hospital, Umbald of Arderne; he was also known as a quaestor or public inquirer, but his principal role was to sell papal pardons or indulgences for money. The indulgence was a remittance of punishment in the fires of purgatory, and was therefore much prized. He also carried with him relics for sale, as well as phials of holy water and cures for various ailments; he was a true merchant of the Church.
Although he had not visited a shrine for many years, he always wore the garment of a pilgrim. He stood beneath the tree in a shaggy woollen robe, decorated with small wooden crosses; over his hood he wore a large round felt hat, upon the brim of which were tied phials of holy oil, scallop shells, the lead tokens or badges of various holy sites, and a miniature representation of the keys of Rome. He clutched a staff tipped with iron, with a red cloth wound about it, and he carried a bag and bowl by his side. The bag held his “patent” for trade in the area, as well as a testimonial from St. Anthony’s Hospital that he was licensed to work on its behalf. There were small bells fixed to his hood, which jingled as he cried out on the corner of the street. “You may see by the signs on my hat that I know Rome and Jerusalem, Canterbury and Compostela. O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! I have seen the place where Our Lord was scourged. It is known as the Shadow of God. And there beside it are four pillars of stone that always drop water, and some men say that they weep for Our Lord’s death. In the place called Golgotha was found Adam’s head after Noah’s flood, a token that the sins of Adam should be bought in that same place. I have seen the tomb where Joseph of Arimathea laid the body of Our Lord when he had taken him down from the Cross, and men say that it is the middle of the world. Nearby is a well that comes from the river of Paradise. O Jerusalem! All those who cannot weep can learn from me! Our old world is now at his last ending, as in his last age.”
It was the thirtieth day of September, the morrow of St. Michael the Archangel; Londoners had already heard that Henry Bolingbroke had visited Richard in the Tower and had there compelled him to abdicate his throne. One party asserted that he had been forced with threat of torture or of death to forfeit sovereignty; another party declared that he had done so willingly to spare his country further blood and war. Whatever the circumstances, Umbald of Arderne was determined to take advantage of the unsettled time. “God does not sleep,” he called out. “When the hills smoke, then Babylon shall have an end.”
A priest of St. Alban, at the other end of Wood Street, had crossed the road in order to confront him. “Pardoners may not preach. They do evil through their manifest deceptions!”
Umbald glanced at him briefly. “You are an old fool. Your garb is heavy, but your tongue is light. If you had said nothing, you would have been mistaken for a philosopher. Let me be.”
St. Anthony’s Hospital in Threadneedle Street, to which the pardoner was attached, was an ancient institution. It consisted of an empty church which had been converted into a pillared hall, with rows of beds in the nave and aisles; there was a chapel at one end, with a refectory and dormitory for the priests arranged around a courtyard. It was known in the immediate neighbourhood as “the house of dying.” That was the true name for the hospital, where care for the soul was considered to be more important than treatment of the body. It benefited from many gifts and bequests, of course, but the proceeds of the pardoner were eagerly received.
“If a man full penitent come to me and pay for his sin,” he was saying, “I will assoil him. Here is the authority granted me.” The pardoner held up a sheet of vellum decorated with a great initial “I” in which monkeys clambered among vines. “If anyone gives seven shillings to Anthony’s, I will bestow upon him an indulgence of seven hundred years. I am entrusted to do this by the pope himself.” He rolled up the papal bull and carefully placed it within his bag; then he took out a small piece of bone. “Here is a holy relic of the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne. Wash this bone in any well, and the water from that well will make you whole.” An old woman selling pasties made the sign of the cross, but Umbald ignored her; she would not have seven groats, let alone shillings. “Make any sheep or cow swelling with the worm drink it, and he will be healed. Sores and scabs will be washed clean.” Two or three passers-by had stopped, curious to see the object which possessed all these miraculous properties, but Umbald had replaced the bone in his satchel. It was his way of drawing a crowd.
As he began his new oration, he saw someone whom he knew. The sub-prior of St. Bartholomew had crossed the street and turned the corner; Umbald recognised William Exmewe at once, from the great feasts held upon the love-days of the London hospitals. He considered him to be an enemy, too, since it was Exmewe who had instituted a review of the alms gathered by the pardoners for the sake of their foundations; Exmewe himself had insisted upon a scheme of proper accounting. Umbald was now obliged to keep a tally of all those to whom he distributed indulgences, which afforded him less chance of private gain.
Exmewe was waiting on the corner; he was glancing up and down Cheapside, continually folding and refolding the sleeves of his habit. He had come, as Umbald supposed, at an appointed time. Who should approach him, then, but Emnot Hallyng? Umbald knew the clerk by sight, as he knew all the noted ones of the city; Hallyng was reputed to practise the black arts and to work his cunning against the good of the Church. Why was he now in company with the sub-prior?
Umbald took his hat, saluted the few who had gathered around him and, with a “God give you grace and a good death,” walked slowly towards the corner of the street. The pardoner stopped beneath the Canute Tree, and listened.
“Why did you wish to see me in this open place?” Exmewe had not even waited for the greeting of “God is here!”
“No notice will be taken of us here,” Emnot Hallyng replied. “And I have much to impart to you.”
“Of what?”
“Of one Thomas Gunter.”
“Gunter?” Exmewe was astonished by this further mention of the leech, but he feigned ignorance. “Who is Gunter?”
“He practises physic in Bucklersbury. I have spoken to him as a convivial man. But he knows all.” Then Emnot Hallyng informed William Exmewe of the conversation in Roger of Ware’s cookshop.
“Whom did the physician name?” Exmewe asked him.
“The law-man. Vavasour.”
With this, Exmewe became alarmed, but he managed once more to conceal his feelings. “The leech, Gunter, is a rattler. A scare-bug.”
“In the cookshop he spoke to me of the five circles.”
“You should keep well your tongue and be still, Emnot Hallyng.”
“I said nothing to him. But he knew of the fire at St. Michael le Querne, even though it has yet to be achieved. How did he come by this knowledge? He is not predestined.”
“Soft, soft.” Exmewe was considering the matter carefully. “Take heed. Think of what this Gunter’s intent might be. His will is not rightful.”
“Meaning?”
“He is about our deaths.”
“But we cannot die.”
“Not in a ghostly sense, no. But our work is not yet accomplished on this earth. His murmuring must cease. His bile must be broken.”
“He has always been merry with me.”
“He drives dust in your eyes, Emnot. Believe me. His are the snares that spell death.”
They began walking along Cheapside towards the stocks; the pardoner could not follow them without being seen.
“You know, Emnot, that if anyone hinders us then God’s curse is upon him?”
“There is no need for God to curse him. He is cursed enough already.” There was an uneasy silence between them. “So what are we to do?”
“You are to do nothing as yet. I have another task for you.”
“Concerning?”
“Miles Vavasour. He troubles me. He has discovered our holy faith. He squats by holes. He lies close to the ground like a dying lark or a frightened fowl. He is a law man. If you are born of such a nest
, you will never be dumb from lack of words. He gabbles. He whispers. His open mouth must be stopped. His murmuring must be restrained. You are a clerk. You know your French. Vous estes sa morte. You must not only bridle the horse. You must curb him for ever.”
Emnot was on his guard. “For whom should I quake? For him or for me?”
“To kill is to be free. We are far above the law. We are the realm of love. When love is strong, love knows no law.” It was a settled doctrine of the foreknown men that they could kill with impunity as long as their instinct or humour suggested the occasion to them; they were then filled with the divine breath of all being and had become sacred. God killed His creation at every moment. But the predestined men could not kill for profit or with deliberate malice; the case of Miles Vavasour, then, was an ambiguous one. “I know, Emnot, that you are as true as stone. Do you know of any secret and close poison?”
“I have the means whereby I might –”
“I pray you put them in full expedition. God be with you.” Exmewe scratched his arm savagely. “I rely upon God. But I rely upon you more.”
“Is this your wish?”
“Turn up his halter and let him go.”
“I must bring death to him then?”
“God is here.” Exmewe looked up at the sky. “Come. The day passes fast.”
They walked off in the direction of the cathedral, wrapping their cloaks around them as the wind rose in the wide street.
The pardoner wandered down Wood Street, starting up his familiar lament. “O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Where is pity? Where is meekness?” But, to Emnot Hallyng and William Exmewe, it was no more than wailing in the wind.
As soon as Exmewe returned to his chamber in St. Bartholomew he took out pen and parchment; in the fitful light of a tallow candle, he scratched out a letter which was addressed to Thomas Gunter at the sign of the Pestle at Bucklersbury by the church of St. Stephen in Walbrook. “Right trusty and well beloved friend, I greet you well.” He asked Gunter to meet the writer of this letter in the woods near Kentystone, at the break of day, “for diverse great matters reaching you, item: the churches of London in some peril of burning. There you shall hear from one who is a friend who will break his mind to you on an affair concerning your interest and your safety. I will write no more but I purpose to write again after our meeting with true evidences of what I will impart to you. Jesus keep you. Nota bene: I choose the woods of Kentystone since we can be assured that no one will be near us or with us. When you see me you will know me.”
He called for a carrier and gave him a penny for this letter’s delivery, on strict instruction that he should say it had been sent by a stranger.
Chapter Twenty
The Shipman’s Tale
The shipman, Gilbert Rosseler, lodged in a hostel for travellers; although he now lived in London, he enjoyed the constant change of companions with their own stories and adventures. He had once sailed as far north as Iceland; he had journeyed to Germany and to Portugal; he had sailed to Genoa, and from there to the island of Corfu; he had taken ship at various times to Cyprus, to the island of Rhodes, and to Jaffa. But, in his talk with his bedfellows, he ranged wider into unknown regions of the earth.
His hostel stood in St. Lawrence Lane, with the customary sign of a bush hanging over its door; it had a common dormitory, containing seven truckle beds on wheels in which travellers slept two by two. It was, for Gilbert Rosseler, as close to being in a ship’s cabin as was possible on land; he called his bed his “berth,” and his companions were his “mates.” They slept naked, according to custom. Nakedness was no cause of shame or embarrassment, and indeed it was said that a serpent fled from the sight of a naked man. Yet nakedness was also associated with punishment and poverty. It was as if all the travellers were willingly engaged in the experience of shared and bare humanity. A bed could be hired by the night, for a penny, or by the week for sixpence. The hosteler, Dame Magga, also had three private rooms – with their own bolt and key – which could be occupied for a shilling a week.
Magga was terrified of fire, like many householders of London. Since its most common cause was a candle igniting straw, she kept all candles in her possession; she would light them each night, and then extinguish them one hour after darkness had fallen. Some months before she had asked the shipman to perform that office in the dormitory, modesty forbidding her to walk among the naked men. In return she charged him only two shillings per week for his board at the high table in the hall of the hostel. Gilbert paid for his lodging and his food by taking Newcastle sea-coal up the Fleet by barge; he navigated his boat from Sea-Coal Lane, near the mouth of the Fleet, as far north as the woods of Kentystone or Kentish Town where a colony of metal-workers had set up a communal foundry.
On one afternoon, at the beginning of October, Gilbert had invited Magga on to his boat. She had expressed interest in “going up the river,” and had never been as far north as Kentystone. As a girl she had been taken to the church of St. Pancras for the festive day of Mary the Child, when she and the other children had danced around a tree decorated with images of the Virgin, but she hardly recalled that part of the countryside. This first day of the month was the eve of the Holy Guardian Angels. On the morning before, the members of the parliament house in Westminster Hall had accepted the resignation of Richard II as sovereign. The Archbishop of Canterbury had asked them if they approved “the points given as reasons for the king’s deposition,” and they had replied with cries of “Yes, yes, yes!” When Henry Bolingbroke then asked whether they welcomed his reign “with their hearts as well as their mouths,” they again shouted out “Yes, yes, yes!” Gilbert and Magga had received the news of this great change in English history with a resignation bordering on indifference; they were not intrigued by the adventures of princes.
Magga was settled on a little stool near the prow of the barge; standing beside her, Gilbert used a long pole to move them against the current. At the stern a young boy, the shipman’s assistant, worked with his oar. From the wharf at Sea-Coal Lane they passed the great bulk of the Fleet prison; it was moated by a ditch, and Magga put the sleeve of her gown up to her nose as the barge passed it. Two prisoners were soliciting alms by the riverside, putting out a box and saucer to the boatmen as they passed; the barge came so close to the bank that Magga noticed the image of a spiked door impressed upon their pewter dish. From the vantage of the water she could see the valley in front of her through which the river flowed, with the steeper slopes upon the eastern side where there were houses and barns; by the bank here the tanners had set up a row of sheds, and the Fleet had become dyed deep with red. It might have been a river of blood. The air, too, was stained with odours compounded by the entrails and refuse which were carted down from the Shambles and thrown into the water.
Gilbert leaned over his pole and spoke softly to Magga. “I was afraid to tell you where we were, in case you lost heart.”
“Never in this world.”
They passed under a double-arched stone bridge; there was a windmill, just beyond a row of tenements and hostels which Magga recognised to be Turnmill Street. The Wife of Bath was walking there with Rose; Dame Alice pointed towards the boat gliding gently across the water.
Gilbert resumed his labour. “What is the broadest water and the least danger to walk over?” Magga shook her head. “The dew. And tell me this. What is it that never freezes?”
“I cannot tell. How can I tell?”
“Hot water.” This was the game known as “Puzzled Balthasar,” in which the shipman delighted.
“What is the cleanest leaf among all other leaves?”
Magga did not reply, but she guessed the answer.
“It is the holly leaf, for nobody will wipe his arse with it.”
“I shall stop my ears, Gilbert. Whatever next?”
“How many calves’ tails can reach from the earth to the sky?”
“Gilbert!”
“No more than one, if it is long enough.”
&n
bsp; The water became cleaner, and the air fresher, as they passed through Smithfield and came up to the fields belonging to the House of Mary at Clerkenwell. The reeve, Oswald Koo, was wheeling a cart filled with sacks. Magga pointed to the range of buildings behind him. “That is where the nun comes from.” She crossed herself. “The Holy Spirit protect her.”
“She has prophesied Richard’s death.”
“She has been drawn into kings’ games. They are not made to meddle with.”
“Unless she would be queen.”
“No. Not her. She is a good maid. She is one of God’s.”
The river curved westward here, following the line of the valley, and had become slower in its course. In the fields beside it boards and shields had been set up for archery practice, and there were fixed stone marks for sessions of javelin throwing. “I have seen in Sweden,” the shipman was saying, “a river that is called I know not what, but it exists still. On the Saturday it runs fast, and all the week after it stands still or runs but little. There is another river in the same country that at the night freezes, but upon the day no frost is seen.” Magga delighted in his tales of the distant world. He had told her of the men who have only one foot but that foot is so large that, when they lie and rest, it shadows all the body against the sun. He had described to her the children of Ethiopia whose hair is white, and the inhabitants of Ormuz where it is so hot that their bollocks hang down to their knees. Gilbert had seen the mountain, seven miles high, where Noah’s ark had come to rest. There was a well by the coast of India which changed its odour, and its taste, from hour to hour. In Sumatra there was a market for fresh children to be bought and sold, as food, which they say is the best flesh and the sweetest of all the world.
The Clerkenwell Tales Page 18