by Norah Lofts
‘So should I, of course. Of course,’ I said, and ran out into the night.
Squatters Row was fully occupied and the Friar had taken one of the least favourable places, mid-way between two buttresses, with no corner to huddle into. He was eating a slice of rye bread and when I proffered my invitation to supper he said,
‘That is kind of you. I have enough here. Perhaps tomorrow. … if you can afford it.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. Truth to tell my… my wife and I,’ I had to say that, for there were ears all about, ‘my wife and I wanted to ask you something… a favour. Would you come indoors with me? It is very near.’
‘Of course,’ he said and heaved himself to his feet.
Inside the hut I closed the door which hung awry from two hinges of leather which I had made, and wedged it close. In the faint light of the dying fire we all looked into one another’s faces for a moment, none of us speaking. The Friar broke silence, looking at the children in their bed by the inner wall.
‘They are sick?’ he asked gently.
‘No, Father, asleep, I hope,’ Kate said. ‘My… this man and I have a confession to make and a favour to ask. We have lived as man and wife for four years now, but we were never married…’
‘And now you wish to be?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but not openly.’ I told him – not everything, but all he needed to know – of our circumstances; how we had intended to marry and been prevented through no fault of our own, and had come to the town as man and wife and then dared not betray our state.
‘You have been living in sin; you know that?’
‘We know. And we have suffered for it.’
‘And during this time you have performed your religious duties, always with this sin unconfessed and unabsolved?’
‘Yes.’ He looked so grave that the consciousness of sin did come upon me. I must confess that in the rough and tumble of daily living the matter had troubled me very little; I had only thought of it, occasionally, as having been a mistake, the cause and reason for some of our misfortunes.
‘But you are free to marry? And during this time you have been faithful to one another?’
Kate said, ‘Always, Father.’ And I said, ‘Unswervingly.’ And that was true. I had never even looked with desire upon any woman save Kate and not for lack of temptation. During my pack-whacking days the chances had been plentiful.
This can be mended then,’ the Friar said. ‘Tomorrow you will both fast all day. At about this time in the evening I will come to you and you may make your confessions and in that state of grace, you shall be wed. We will then break fast together.’
We thanked him heartily and he went quietly away.
Next evening we fed the children and put them to bed early. Kate scrubbed the rough board which was our table top, and set out upon it the meat pie she had bought in Cooks Row, a fresh loaf and a dish of red-cheeked apples. She was in high good spirits, calling this our wedding feast, and regretting that we had no wedding garments.
‘Like the man in the Bible story,’ I said.
‘But he was sent away. That can’t happen to us.’
We had left the door open and made up the fire with dry sticks which gave light but little heat; and in the light I looked at her with new, searching eyes, making compare with the girl who had entered the hall with me at Rede and roused an old man’s lust. Hard work and poverty and misery had aged her by five times the four years that had gone by since then; her face was thin and lined, her hair rough and lustreless as hay. I thought how lightly the years would have touched her had she gone to Abhurst, and I remembered again those silly words,‘My pretty one, you shall be safe with me.’
‘It’s the Guilds that have ruined us,’ I burst out suddenly. ‘They threw me out to rot and when I refused to rot they broke my leg. Kate, I never meant it to be this way, I meant to take care of you and cherish you.’
‘And so you have,’ she said, and came over and put her arm about my neck and kissed me. ‘Few men are so careful about fetching water and carrying the heavy loads. Who else would have walked with me to work every day, to spare me? You say what you meant. I meant never to say a sharp word to you, and Heaven knows I’ve said many. But from tonight I start afresh.’
I pulled her close. I felt tenderly towards her though there was no desire in me.
‘Few women’, I said, ‘would have been so patient and worked so hard. Who else would have kept food on the table and washed and mended and made a home as you have?’
These were not romantic speeches, but they were sincere and more suited to our state than any flowery words could be. And I was angry that immediately afterwards my empty belly gave a loud rumble.
‘I’m hungry too,’ Kate said. ‘All day I’ve been too much excited to notice, but now I am hungry and he is late.’
Presently we were asking one another whether the Friar could have forgotten us and reminding ourselves that he had spoken of breaking fast together; if he intended to fast with us, surely his own emptiness would make him think of us.
Kate began to fidget, going to the door to peer out and complaining that it was too dark to see.
‘Go and see if you can find him,’ she said. I walked the length of the wall. I could not see the Friar anywhere.
I went home again, and we waited.
It was after Curfew, so we dared not replenish the fire and sitting in the dark the time stretched out endlessly, but at last it was eleven o’clock; we heard the bell tolling the hour.
‘He isn’t coming,’ Kate said.
‘Something must have happened to him.’ I remembered how some of the rough people had jeered and pelted him. I remembered, too, that many of the things he had said about monasteries and the conduct of the monks was offensive enough to make the Abbot take action against him.
‘Have you seen him at all today?’ Kate asked.
‘No, I’ve been off the streets all day today. I offered to guide some pilgrims to the Angel Inn and while I was there I got a job sawing wood. I’m going there again tomorrow.’
‘He promised to come,’ Kate said, and the old complaining note was there in her voice again. ‘I really thought that at last we…’
I realized that marriage meant much more to her than it did to me; a woman who lives out of wedlock with a man is called a whore; there is no such damaging term for the man. I made a great effort to comfort her. First I said, fumbling about in the gloom for the knife and the meat pie,
‘Let’s have our supper. Everything looks worse when your belly is empty.’ And then, between the mouthfuls I said what were, perhaps, the first fanciful words I had ever said.
‘Kate,’ I began, ‘when Brother Sebastian took the broomstick off my leg and found that the bone had healed up short he said he would pray for a miracle. We went together to St. Egbert’s shrine and prayed there. Nothing happened to the bone in my leg, I didn’t expect anything, so I wasn’t disappointed; he was. But a few hours afterwards he thought about thickening the sole on my shoe and when he told me about it he called that the miracle. You see… the thing you ask for comes, but not in the shape that you think. We thought that tonight the Friar would come and marry us, but he didn’t. Kate, really, if we could only understand it we were married, that night by the river under the hawthorn tree… and tonight we were, in a fashion, married again when you said I’d been good about fetching water and I said you’d been good about mending and making a home. Try not to fret about the words that haven’t been said over us. We are, in very truth, married.’
‘The Friar himself said that we lived in sin.’
‘Dummy and his wife were properly married, I’ve heard her boast of it to Loose Liz. Look how they live! Worse than animals. They make the beast with two backs and as soon as a child comes of it he beats her black and blue. Their crooked child takes dole at the Alms Gate, and Dummy meets her on the way home and eats his fill without a thought for his wife’s hunger. Kate, in all the time I was a pack-whacker I never ate a mouthful of what I
was given until I was back here and sharing with you. When the Friar asked us had we been faithful to one another, we could both say yes, and truly. How could any ceremony make us more married than we are?’
She did not answer immediately; but after a moment she said,
‘All that is true; but there is another side to it. The Friar said we were living in sin and that every time we went to Mass with that sin unconfessed and unabsolved we were sinning anew. And our being faithful to one another can’t help them being bastards.’ Even in the dark I could see her arm fling out towards the bed where the children lay. ‘Nothing but ill luck ever since we’ve been here, and now nothing but ill luck to look forward to.’
I pitied the misery that sounded in her voice, but it made me impatient, too. It may be true that misery loves company, but it finds its comfort in a different misery, not in a reflection of its own.
‘I did my best and there’s nothing more to do. Let’s sleep and forget it,’ I said.
XI
That summer had been unusually wet and wet it continued over harvest, so that some of the poor thin crop was lost in the gathering, the sheaves standing mouldering in the fields. It was clear that bread would be scarce throughout the coming winter. Part of the blame for what happened next can be laid on the fear and ill temper which this prospect roused in the hearts of all but the very rich. But something must also be blamed upon the Friar who had appeared in our midst, sown his seed of discord and vanished; and a great deal of blame must be laid upon the Abbey, in particular the Cellarer who dealt with many things affecting the good or ill will between the monks and the townsfolk.
There were two rights which the Abbey held and which I had never, during my years in Baildon, seen exercised. One was the right to all the dung dropped within the town boundaries; that is not merely in the streets and market, but in stables and smithies and cowsheds and pigsties. This did not mean that all the dung went on to the Abbey lands, but it did mean that anyone who wanted to use his own manure on his own land or garden must buy it back, in situ, from the Abbey Cellarer. That this right had fallen into abeyance I knew from my years in the smithy. Master Armstrong had derived a small but steady income from the sale of dung dropped by horses waiting to be shod.
The other right was to demand that all corn within the area of ten miles, should be ground at the Abbey Mill which stood a little way out of town on the south side, at Flaxham St. Giles. That this right had not been exercised for many years was proved by the existence of another mill, on the north of the town, which was now being worked by the son of the man who had started it. Two easy-going Cellarers had followed one another in office.
Now, in this year of poor harvest, a new one was appointed, a young man, energetic and avaricious. One of his first acts was to have cried through the town the announcement that in future the Abbey Mill must be used for all corn grinding, and that the rights to the town’s dung would be strictly enforced. Next day the Abbey servants, with a flat cart went about the town, assessing every dung heap and what was not paid for there and then, was loaded on to the cart and taken away. The Cellarer himself, riding a grey mule, went out to the north mill and curtly informed the young miller that he was welcome to grind any corn brought to him from any place more than ten miles distant from Baildon market place, but no other. That meant ruin to the miller, and two days later he drowned himself in his own mill stream. The Church refused him burial and he went to a suicide’s grave at the cross-roads.
This story rang through the town, adding to the ill-feeling which the enforcement of the old rules had brought about.
Worse followed; for as soon as the monopoly of milling was assured, the charge for milling was raised. It had been one-fourteenth, that is a pound of flour for every stone of corn ground, henceforth it would be two pounds – one-seventh. This was bad for everybody, since it put up the price of bread.
Everywhere now people were speaking against the Abbey and the monks and it was curious to hear mixed with the straight-forward grumbling voiced in their own simple words, the echo of the Friar’s accusations. Even those who had listened to him least had picked up from those who had given him their attention, some phrases which sounded foreign on their tongues, ‘appearance of sanctity’, ‘abuse of privilege’, ‘temporal power’, ‘private lechery’. Many of them hardly knew what the words meant, but they did know that they were speaking against the Abbey and the monks, and whipping up the ill feeling.
Nothing might have come of it, but in early November the Abbey officers arrested a man known as John Noggs who kept a little ale-house just inside the west gate of the town. He had set up and been working a small hand mill and his customers had been seen to arrive with sacks of corn and to depart carrying sacks of flour. The power to turn the stone was supplied by two simple-minded boys and if it ground one hundredweight of corn in a full day’s work that was its limit. Still the new Cellarer was a man rather to take account of the breaking of a rule than of the damage done by the breaking. He was also a man to judge the customers of the illicit mill equally guilty with the miller. Within the next few days several more arrests were made. One of those accused of cheating the Abbey of its rightful dues was a respectable solid townsman who owned a cook shop, and one was a poor old woman who had gleaned diligently all through the harvest and taken her gleanings to be ground where the charge was lighter; the others I knew nothing of.
Immediately all the ill feeling came, like a festering boil, to a head. The whole town was now united against the Abbey. Over most matters it was difficult to get the comfortably off to join with the poor, or the merely poor to join with the destitute, and there was a severance, always, between those within and those without the Guilds. Now the arrest of the pastry-cook, who was a Guildsman, was an affront to them all, the fate of the inn-keeper-turned-miller was of concern to the middle sort, and the very poor were all agog in sympathizing with the old woman. The sullen grumbling changed to a more active, though still vague feeling that ‘something should be done’.
At this moment there popped up a very ancient fellow, half blind and more than half rambling in his wits who could remember back to when he was a little boy, when on a somewhat similar occasion the townsfolk had all joined together and shown ‘them’ that even ‘they’ couldn’t have everything their own way. The squabble then had concerned the taking of eels from the river – another Abbey right – and when the townspeople had done considerable damage to the Bell Tower and the Main Gate, the rules had been modified. The old grandfather, after years of obscurity, suddenly, found himself the centre of attention. The little house of his grand-daughter with whom he lived was always thronged with people anxious to hear his tale of what had happened seventy years ago. He conveniently forgot, or left out of his tale anything which the townsfolk would not find agreeable and the effect was to make them feel that they were a pack of powerful wolves who, for many years, had allowed themselves to be bullied by a few bleating old sheep and who had only to show their teeth to turn the tables. Very soon, before the arrested people could be brought before the Abbey Court, an attack on the Abbey was being planned.
I heard all about it. I was always moving about the town, here and there, in search of work. I was hungry and poor, one of the oppressed whose bread would be dear, whose feelings would veer towards the old gleaning woman. By the simple process of listening and saying nothing I learned a great deal. Sometime in November, at the dark of the moon, the Abbey was to be attacked. The monks would then be in bed and sound asleep; they retired soon after Compline which was at seven in the winter and slept until midnight when they were roused for Matins. It was not badly planned. The postern gate in the great Main Gateway was to be forced by means of a battering ram, and then a body of apprentices, armed with the bows and arrows with which they practised on Saturday afternoons, was to march in and demand the release of the prisoners. The aldermen of the Guilds, dressed in their livery, and unarmed, but under guard of another group of apprentices and journey-men, w
ere then to go and negotiate with the Abbot, or the Prior, and get the charge for milling reduced again to one-fourteenth and the claim on the dung waived. All this under threat of real violence, letting the riff-raff run wild through the Abbey, and firing timbers and thatch. This, according to the old grandfather, was how the townspeople had conducted their business seventy years ago, and they had won what they asked for. Why shouldn’t it happen again?
Now it is true that an ordinary poor man like me can go through a lifetime without once testing his loyalty to anything save his own belly and his own family. In the main he cannot even be said to be loyal to his own kind, since at any moment he is prepared to snatch a job, or a crust from another man exactly like himself; I had done it many a time by the town gateway. But it is equally true that some extraordinary circumstance may arise and the most simple man must ask himself the question – where do I stand in this matter? and the answer is there, clear and certain as soon as the question is asked.
Such a testing point I had now reached and there was no doubt at all in my mind that I was with the monks. I had lived in the town for over four years and the only kindness that I had received from anybody had come from within those Abbey walls. Brother Justinius was mean: the increase in the milling charge made my bread dear, but those facts looked small when placed beside the alms Kate had received in both her pregnancies, the fair, just way in which the Trimble Charity had been administered, the careful attention I had been given in the Infirmary, and the way Brother Sebastian had devised and Brother Anthony had carried out the scheme to make me less crippled.
I owed the Abbey a good deal. And I hated the Guilds, their Aldermen, their journeymen and their rules.
At the same time I will not pretend I was ruled either by gratitude or hatred. Expediency played its part. The old grandfather remembered only that the townspeople had gained their point about the eels; the fact remained that after seventy years the Abbey still governed the town; and even if the townsfolk had won back their right to go eel-fishing, the Abbey had retained every right that mattered. It seemed to me that I should do myself no harm by trying to get into favour with those who would surely get the better of the dispute in the long run. I might even contrive to put in a word for my little threatened house. If I warned the monks in time they would be grateful and then I could say, ‘Please don’t demolish my neat thatched hut with the rest of Squatters Row.’