15 The Sempster's Tale
Page 31
Eating without much interest the dry bread and cheese waiting for her in the parlor, Frevisse found herself fervently hoping Master Naylor would soon say the streets were safe enough for her to return to St. Helen’s. Cowardly though it might be, she wanted to be away from here before Raulyn’s body was found.
She had done eating when Anne came slow-footed into the room. Like Mistress Hercy, she looked older. Frevisse had meant to say nothing to her, but with her discretion weighed down under her tiredness she said, “You didn’t go with him.”
Going slowly to the window seat where she had sat so much of these few days, Anne sat again and only then, as if she had just heard Frevisse’s words, said softly, “No, I didn’t go with him.”
Not able to ask if she understood how small was the likelihood he would ever come back to her, Frevisse found herself saying, meaning it, “I am most sorry things are as they are.”
Anne raised her head and looked out the window. Tears shimmered in her eyes, and her gaze was inward-turned to some place deep inside herself; but calmly and with a pride that came from that far inward place she said, “Whatever else, I am his eishet chayil. That will have to do.” And took up the embroidery lying there unfinished and began to sew.
Author’s Note
To begin at the very beginning, let me say the title was the most ongoing of troubles with the book. It was to be called The Seamstress’ Tale— until I learned that seamstress was a word first made in the 1600s, when older, non-gender-specific words began to be given new endings to differentiate women doing something from men doing the same thing. The older, common words for anyone who sewed were semster and sempster, and fearing that neither of those would be clear to a potential reader, I wavered back and forth and among other possibilities, but such things as broiderer and brawdster didn’t look likely to ease the problem. But neither could I quite bring myself to the unperiod seamstress, and I wish to express my thanks to members of the CrimeThruTime list who took time to tell me what they thought, and my admiration and appreciation of my editor Gail Fortune’s patience with me while I made up my mind. Not to mention her patience and sustaining help in general!
My particular thanks go to Susan Weintrob, not only for the first suggestion that I do a story with Jews (“How?” I remember protesting. “There hadn’t been any Jews in England since 1290!”) but for keeping me from errors. Such as may be have come from my failure to ask her something that I should have.
Thanks must also go to Chris Laining who has not only made a wonderful rosary for Frevisse but helped Anne Blakhall at her work by guiding me toward such works as The Conservation of Tapestries and Embroideries with its inspiring close-ups of medieval embroidery rich with gold thread and pearls, and the invaluable Medieval Craftsmen: Embroiderers by Kay Staniland, besides advising me at length on what was period in sewing and what was not. If there are errors, it’s because I didn’t listen to her well enough.
My research to understand Daved Weir and his double life ranged from children’s books about Jewish religious life as a starting point through to such studies as (but not only) Dean Philip Bell’s Sacred Communities, Jeremy Cohen’s The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism, Mark R. Cohen’s Under Crescent and Cross, John Edwards’ The Jews in Christian Europe 1400-1700, Menahem Mansor’s Jewish History and Thought, James Parkes’ The Jew in the Medieval Community, K. R. Stow’s Alienated Minority, and Erwin I.J. Rosenthal’s “Anti-Christian Polemic in Medieval Bible Commentaries” in The Journal of Jewish Studies.
Much told here is true. Among other things, there was a German bishop in 1450 who ordered all Jews out of his territory, and forced baptism was a frequent threat—and practice—against Jews. Oddly, the House of Converts— Domus Conversorum—founded by King Edward I not long before expelling all Jews from England, meant for the support of Jews impoverished by turning Christian, survived in almost steady use more than 300 years longer. A list of its inmates through those centuries and speculation on where they came from can be found in Jews in Medieval England by Michael Adler. There, you will find Joan of Dartmouth and her daughter Alis named among the inmates from 1409 to 1449 and 1454 respectively.
As for the persistent insistence through the late Middle Ages that Jews ritually murdered Christian children, pope after pope ruled and decreed that no such murders were taking place or had ever taken place. Pope after pope forbade anyone to act on such false rumors, and pope after pope was ignored. In the same way, mob violence against Jews broke out again and again despite of the Church’s orders to the contrary, including the Council of Bourges ruling in 1236 that “Faith must be kept with the Jews and no one may use violence towards them…”
This same ignoring of orders held true of papal opposition to the inquisitorial activities of the Dominican and Franciscan friars. Originally given a brief to work against Christian heretics, many of them made grounds to extend their power to include Jews, exactly as detailed in the debate between Daved and Brother Michael. In despite of repeated papal orders to desist and a papal bull in the 1420s attempting to restrict their claimed authority over Jews, they built up a centuries’ long reign of terror against Jews and anyone suspected of being Jewish, mainly in Spain and Portugal but sometimes raising its ugly head in other parts of Europe. For some friars it was probably seen as a holy crusade: for others—well, a convicted heretic’s property went to the Church.
I came across no outright evidence of such secret Jewish efforts as Daved’s in the 1400s, but there is no doubt of such activities hardly one hundred years later in London, as discussed in Cecil Roth’s “Jews in Elizabethan England” in Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, and I’ve no reason not to suppose like activities had happened earlier.
For coming to understand bills of exchange and something of international banking well enough to use them in the story, I am grateful to Raymond de Roover’s works, especially Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Of course there is the small bother that the word “smuggling” is from the 1600s, and therefore Daved could not smuggle the gold into England. Hence the need for “illegal conveyance.” Nor could Cade’s rebels “loot” in London, that being a Hindu word unavailable in England in the 1400s. They couldn’t even be a “mob,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The English uprising in the summer of 1450 did follow the course of events detailed here—or something like the course of events given here. The several contemporary and near-contemporary chronicles agree on what happened but not always on which day or in which order things occurred. My reconstruction of the course of events derives from what seems to me most likely—that the London government could put up with Lord Saye’s and Crowmer’s deaths, brutal though they were, but turned on Cade when he began wholesale seizures of property and money. That this ordering differs from I. M. W. Harvey’s conclusions Jack Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 does not lessen in the slightest my great indebtedness to that very fine coverage of the revolt and its aftermath.
Concerning London itself, some readers will find my description of it at variance with the cliche of filth-ridden streets stinking of garbage and ankle-deep in mud too prevalent in some presentations of medieval London. Whatever may have happened during the breakdown in society that came with the Renaissance and Reformation, the plethora of medieval civic laws concerning streets—paving, repair, and cleaning as well as lighting—would seem to indicate an active effort in all those areas. Certainly John Stow in his later Survey of London, when talking about officials in the city’s wards, includes scavagers (non sic) whose job was to keep a ward clean. Regular, frequent removal of waste was expected and failure fined. London probably smelled in ways we would now find unfamiliar, but have you choked on the exhaust of a passing bus lately?
The biblical quotations are translated from John Wycliff’s Middle English version of the Bible.
pster's Tale