The Tainted Relic

by The Medieval Murderers

  To escape this miserable existence, it was essential for him to have money, to tide him over until he could build a new life. Until two years ago, he had been a parish priest in a hamlet near Yeovil, where he was born. He had never been a good priest, having been pushed into becoming a choirboy at Exeter Cathedral, after his shoemaker father died and his mother could no longer support five children. At eighteen, he progressed to becoming a ‘secondary’, an apprentice priest in the household of one of the cathedral canons. In due course, at the requisite age of twenty-four, he was ordained as a priest, and served the canon as one of his vicars, attending most of the endless services each day while his master stayed at home taking his ease. Dissatisfied and disgruntled, he eventually obtained a living at a parish near his home town and, though it was a poor one, at least there he was his own master. A fondness for wine and occasional trips to a brothel in Exeter, however, made him discontented with his miserable stipend, and he was driven by debt to sell a chalice and plate from his own church, claiming that they had been stolen. He was soon exposed and the bishop’s Consistory Court expelled him both from his parish and from the priesthood. It was only by claiming ‘benefit of clergy’ that he avoided the Shire Court, which would surely have hanged him, as all thefts of objects worth more than a shilling were felonies and inevitably carried the death sentence.

  Thrown out of his living, Gervase turned to petty crime to survive and, following thefts from various villages, he was soon was on the run from the ‘hue and cry’. The only place left was the forest, and for the past year or so he had been living rough with this handful of crude companions. He was careful not to let them know that he had been a priest; his tonsure had grown over before he became outlaw and he never revealed that he could read and write, a legacy from his days in the cathedral school that he had attended as a choirboy. Gervase was not quite sure why he had hidden his background, except to avoid possible ridicule from their jealous tongues, but now he was glad, as they would not realize that he recognized that at least one of the relics in Blundus’s pack was of some value.

  The band of outlaws usually split up each day, going about their own nefarious business, but meeting either that evening or the next at some pre-arranged rendezvous in the woods. This time, the former priest hoped that, with luck, he would never see them again, if the plan that was fermenting in his mind was successful.

  Early that afternoon, Gervase was resting up in a thicket just inside the edge of the forest, a few hundred paces from the Exeter road. The next part of his plan required the cover of darkness, so he was dozing under a ragged blanket that he usually wore wrapped around his shoulders, trying not to shiver in the late autumn chill.

  He was unaware of someone passing on the muddy track who had much in common with him–another unfrocked priest. Thomas de Peyne was jogging by on his pony, sitting side-saddle like a woman. He was following the rest of the coroner’s team and the reeve from Clyst St Mary as they rode to inspect the body of Gervase’s victim. A mile farther on, they saw a small group of men standing at the edge of the track, under a canopy of red-and brown-leafed trees.

  ‘They are my men, guarding the corpse,’ announced the reeve, and when they dismounted and approached the sentinels, they saw a still figure sprawled face down in the grass and weeds. Gwyn and the coroner squatted alongside it and de Wolfe tested the stiffness in the arms and legs. ‘Been dead at least a few hours,’ he grunted, then ran his fingers over the back of the cadaver’s head, where he felt dried blood in the hair and a pulpy swelling covering half the top of the head

  ‘Not much doubt how he died,’ said Gwyn, with grim satisfaction, as he laid his own fingers on the scalp. ‘He’s had a good hammering on his head–come and have a feel, Thomas!’ The big Cornishman could never resist teasing the clerk, as he knew how squeamish Thomas was about such matters.

  John de Wolfe looked down at the body, taking in the sober but good-quality serge breeches and leather jerkin, with a stout pair of clogs on the feet.

  ‘Not a yeoman nor a journeyman,’ he mused. ‘Neither does he look like a pilgrim or well-to-do merchant.’

  ‘He’d do for a chapman, I reckon,’ said the reeve. ‘Though he’s got no pack.’

  Gwyn heaved the body over on to its back. ‘He still has a scrip on his belt,’ he grunted, opening the flap of the purse attached to the dead man’s belt. ‘Empty! Whatever was in it has gone the same way as his pack.’

  Though not mistrusting his officer, John felt obliged to look for himself, and he frowned as his finger picked up some glinting specks as he poked into the corners of the pouch.

  ‘Strange! Looks like shards of gold leaf.’

  ‘Maybe he was a goldsmith?’ hazarded Gwyn. ‘Though they rarely travel alone, given the value of their wares.’

  One of the villagers, who stood forming a silent audience, spoke up.

  ‘Plenty of bloody outlaws in these woods. Damned menace they are, stealing from us all the time. I lost three chickens last week–and it weren’t no fox, neither.’

  ‘They don’t usually kill, though,’ admitted the reeve.

  ‘He was just unlucky, this fellow,’ said the coroner. ‘They must have hit him harder than they intended.’

  Even with the body face up, no one recognized the man. His face was discoloured from the death staining that had run downward into his skin, except where the nose and chin remained pale from being pressed into the ground.

  ‘Stranger, he is!’ remarked another bystander. ‘Not from round here.’

  Between them, Gwyn and the reeve pulled off the jerkin, undershirt and breeches and examined the rest of the body.

  ‘Some nasty scratches on his chest and loins–and big fresh bruises as well,’ observed the coroner’s officer, pointing to some pink-red discolorations on the victim’s trunk. He felt a couple of broken ribs crackling under the pressure of his big fingers.

  ‘Been kicked, no doubt,’ grunted de Wolfe, an expert on all manner of injuries after two decades of fighting in Ireland, France and the Holy Land. He looked up at the reeve.

  ‘You said he was still alive when he was found?’

  One of the villagers, an older man with grey bristly hair, answered.

  ‘Only just, Crowner! I found him and he lasted no more than half an hour after that before he passed away, God rest his soul.’

  ‘He said nothing about who attacked him?’

  The man shook his head. ‘Anyway, he wouldn’t recognize some bloody forest thieves, especially as he’s a stranger. All he got out with his last gasps was “Glastonbury”–and then something about some curse.’

  De Wolfe glared at the villager. ‘What sort of curse? Was he just cursing those who attacked him?’

  ‘No, there was some name he called it…what was it, now?’ The elderly villein scratched the grey stubble on his face as an aid to memory. ‘Yes, strange name it was, stuck in my memory…Barzak, that was it!’

  It was dusk by the time John de Wolfe got back to his house in Martin’s Lane, a narrow alley that joined Exeter’s High Street to the cathedral Close. It was a tall, narrow building of timber, one of only three in the lane, facing a livery stable where he kept Odin, his old warhorse. He was in good time for the evening meal and so avoided a sour face from his wife Matilda, who was forever complaining about the irregular hours that resulted from him being the county coroner–though it was she who had pushed him into the post several months before, seeing it as a way to claw her way farther up the social ladder of the county hierarchy. Her brother, Sir Richard de Revelle, was the sheriff of Devon, and to have a husband who was the second-most senior law officer was another feather in her snobbish cap.

  Matilda was a short, heavily built woman, four years older than her husband. They had been pushed into marriage by their parents sixteen years earlier, and both had regretted it ever since. Until he gave up warfare two years previously, John had managed to stay away from his wife for all but a few months of those sixteen years, at endless campa
igns in Ireland, France and in the Holy Land at the Third Crusade.

  Their meals were usually silent affairs, as each sat at the far ends of the long table in the hall, the only room apart from Matilda’s solar built onto the back of the house, reached by wooden stairs from the yard behind. Tonight, John made an effort at conversation, telling Matilda of the unknown victim of outlaws at Clyst St Mary. She showed little interest, as usual, and he thought sullenly that if the dead man had been a canon or a bishop she would have been all ears, having a morbid fascination with anything to do with the Church. She spent much of her time at her devotions, either in the huge cathedral a few yards away or at her favourite little parish church, St Olave’s in Fore Street, where he suspected that she had a crush on the fat priest.

  He pressed on doggedly with his tale, telling how he had held an inquest in the tithe barn of the village, getting Gwyn to gather as many of the male inhabitants over twelve years of age as a jury. They had to inspect the body and the First Finder, the old man, had to relate how the corpse was discovered. As he was a stranger, it was impossible for the village to ‘make presentment of Englishry’, to prove that he was a Saxon and not a Norman, though as well over a century had passed since the Conquest, this was becoming more and more meaningless as the races intermarried. It was another ploy for the King’s Council to screw more money from the populace, however, as without such proof the ‘murdrum’ fine would be imposed on the village, as a redundant penalty for Saxons assassinating their invaders.

  There was little else the inquest could achieve, he concluded to the inattentive Matilda. The only possible verdict was ‘murder by persons unknown’, and there seemed little chance of ever finding the outlaws in those dense woods that threaded through cultivated land all over the county.

  When they had finished their meal, boiled salmon with onions and cabbage served on trenchers of thick stale bread, their maid Mary came in to clear up and bring a jug of Loire wine, which they drank seated on either side of the blazing log fire in the hearth. John had made one concession to comfort in the high, bare hall by having a stone fireplace built against the back wall, with a new-fangled chimney going up through the roof, instead of the usual fire-pit in the centre of the floor, which filled the room with eye-watering smoke.

  They sat in silence again while they finished their wine, then his wife predictably announced that she was retiring to her solar to have her French maid Lucille prepare her for bed. John sat for a while with another cup of wine, fondling the ears of his old hound Brutus, who had crept in from the back yard to lie before the fire. Some time later, the dog rose to his haunches and looked expectantly at his master, part of a familiar routine.

  ‘Come on, then, time for our walk.’ With Brutus as an excuse that fooled no one, least of all Matilda, John took his wolfskin cloak from a hook in the vestibule and stepped out into the gloom, heading across the close for the lower town. Here, in Idle Lane, was the Bush Inn–and its landlady, his Welsh mistress, the delectable Nesta.

  At about the same time that the coroner was loping through the ill-lit streets of Exeter, the outlaw Gervase was committing yet another felony in the village of Wonford, just outside the city. By the light of a half-moon, seen fitfully through gaps in the cloud, he crept up to the village church. It was deserted in the evening, as the parish priest had no service until the early morning mass the following day. When Gervase trod quietly up to the church door, he knew from his own experience that the parson would be either sleeping or drinking after his supper in the small cottage at the far end of the churchyard. Gently opening the door, he made his way in almost pitch darkness to the back of the building, below the stubby tower that had been added when the old wooden church from Saxon times had been reconstructed in stone twenty years earlier.

  Here he groped about and was rewarded by the feel of a coarse curtain which hung over an alcove, a space for a birch broom and a couple of leather buckets as well as ecclesiastical oddments, such as lamp oil, candles and spare vestments. Gervase pulled the curtain aside and felt around the walls inside until his fingers found some garments hanging from a wooden peg. Taking them down, he went back to the door and waited for the moon to appear again, so that he could see what they were. With a grunt of satisfaction, he found that he had a broad-brimmed pilgrim’s hat and an old cassock, a long black tunic that reached to the ankles, as well as a thin white super-pelisse, usually called a ‘surplice’. This last was of no use to him and he took it back to its peg, then made off into the night with his spoils.

  After sleeping under a bush just within the forest’s edge, he rose late and ate the remnants of the food he had saved from the gang’s last meal. In the daylight, he saw that the cassock was patched and threadbare, but still serviceable. His next task was to take his small knife and, after honing it well on a piece of stone, use it not only to rasp three weeks’ growth of stubble from his face, but also from the crown of his head, roughly restoring the tonsure that he used to have before he was ejected from holy orders. It was a difficult task to perform on himself, but with patience and determination he made a fair job of transforming himself back into a priest, especially after he had stuffed his own meagre clothing into his pack, put on the stolen cassock and jammed the battered hat on his head.

  Around what he judged to be noon, he went back to the road and with his ash staff in his hand, set off boldly towards Exeter. He decided that it was highly unlikely that he would be recognized by someone from his past life in distant Yeovil, especially as the drooping brim of the pilgrim’s hat helped to obscure his face. There were a few others on the track, going both to and from the city, but the main traffic of people going into Exeter with produce to sell had long since dwindled, most entering the city as soon as the gates opened at dawn. To those whom he passed he gave a greeting and sometimes raised his hand in a blessing. After a while he began to feel as if he really was a priest again, and he became more confident as he approached the South Gate. He slowed his pace so that he entered together with a group of country folk driving a couple of pigs and carrying live ducks and chickens hanging by their feet from poles over their shoulders. The porter on the gate was too interested in munching on a meat pie to give him even a cursory glance, and soon Gervase was striding up Southgate Street, past the Serge Market and the bloodstained cobbles of the Shambles, to reach Carfoix, the central crossing of the four main roads. He had been to Exeter a few times, some years ago, but now had to ask directions from a runny-nosed urchin.

  ‘Where’s St Nicholas Priory, lad?’

  The boy decided that this cleric was too tough looking to risk some cheeky reply and pointed out the way. ‘Not far down there, Father. A rough part of town, that is.’

  Gervase entered some narrow lanes and found himself in a mean part of the city known as Bretayne, filled with densely packed houses, huts and shacks, the filthy alleys running with sewage, in which urchins, goats, dogs and rats seemed to survive in squalid harmony. After a few turns and twists, he saw a small stone building, enclosed by a wall that marked off a vegetable plot and a few fruit trees.

  There was no porter on the gate and he went along a stony path that led around to the entrance. Near by, a barefoot monk was hoeing weeds between rows of onions, a dark Benedictine habit hoisted up between his bare thighs and tucked into his belt. He straightened up and stared curiously at the visitor, who held up his hand in a blessing and dredged some appropriate Latin greeting from his memory.

  ‘I wish to speak with the prior,’ he said, reverting to common English.

  ‘Ring the bell at the door, Brother,’ replied the gardener, pointing at an archway.

  He did so. A young novitiate appeared and, after enquiring about his business, led him along a short, gloomy passage and knocked at the door of the prior’s parlour.

  Inside, Gervase found the head of the establishment seated behind a small table, some parchments before him and another pale young brother seated at his side, wielding a quill pen. Prior Vincent was a sm
all man with an almost spherical head. He had no tonsure, for he was completely bald, and his face was moon shaped to match. Given his small eyes and prim, pursed mouth, Gervase felt that he was not the ideal customer for a sacred relic, but he had little choice in the matter.

  With the novitiate lurking behind him, the other two monks stared enquiringly at this rather shabby priest who stood before them.

  ‘What can we do for you, Brother? Are you seeking bed and board on your travels?’ asked the prior, in a high, quavering voice.

  The renegade priest falsely explained that he was from a parish in North Somerset, on his way home from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and recently landed from a ship at Plymouth. Gervase followed his habit of sticking as close to the truth as possible, as he had once been a pilgrim to Santiago many years before and could fabricate a convincing story about it if challenged. He chose Somerset for his parish as this was in a different diocese from Exeter and it would be less likely that anyone here would be familiar with any of the incumbents from that area.

  ‘I would be grateful for a little food and drink, but I have no wish to impose upon you for a night’s lodging,’ he said piously.

  The prior nodded, relieved that they were spared the trouble and expense of putting up an unexpected guest. ‘Young Francis here will see that you get something in the kitchen, before you go on your way.’

  He said this with an air of finality and picked up a parchment roll again, but Gervase had not finished. ‘There is one thing more which may interest you, Prior. I will admit that after six months’ journeying, I am destitute, my last coins being spent on the passage from St-Malo to Plymouth.’

  The prior suppressed a groan, thinking that here was another impoverished priest looking for a handout, but his suspicions were dispelled by Gervase’s next words.