by James Blish
The fellows around Julian closed ranks and jostled forward, but the beggar went by without paying them any heed. His filthy hand, missing its middle finger, thrust the bowl toward Roger.
‘An alms, clerkly sir, to thy better health. Only a penny.’
For a moment the two haggard men looked each into the eyes of the other. Why Roger was so moved he did not know, but leaning for the moment more heavily upon Raymond, he stretched his hand out to the bag and by the feel of the metal fumbled out a penny. No more, no less; this was what had been asked; he reached it out to touch that most famous of all begging bowls, which had been freighted once with tears from the blinded eyes of the last general to defend Rome from the infidels. Surely he who carried that bowl in the streets of modem Paris must be a holy man.
‘God bless thee, Daun Buranus, holy friar,’ the beggar said. ‘I’ll will thee my relict, an thou livest.’ He tasted the penny, and put it away in his rags. ‘God bless thee, students. Alms, alms for John! Only a penny for John the Pilgrim! … Only a sterling to touch the bowl of Belisarius.… An alms for John.… Alms, an alms for John.…’
Sweetly the cry died … hyrca … hyrca … nazaza … trillirivos … and with a heart waiting to be filled, Roger Bacon turned his burning face toward Rome.
VIII: KIRKBY-MUXLOE
The announcement of the King being even more wearisomely held back than was usual at a commanded secret audience, Adam March cleaved, perforce, to his room; where, even after many prayers, he found ample time remaining in which to think of what he might say to Henry, and Henry to him; and each of these imagined interviews was more disquieting than the last.
The very walls and village were disturbing, not only because Adam had never been there before, but also that the King himself was strange to them, as belike all of his line had been. The castle at Kirkby-Muxloe, a property of Simon de Montfort’s, was beyond being merely ancient. Regarding it, one could hardly bring one’s self to guess at who had built it, maugre what might have happened in its narrow precincts since. In so rude and disproportioned a keep might the Grendel-worm have been slain, that the most brutish of the serfs used under their breaths to frighten their children. The outer works might have been more recent, but looked much older by fault of neglect; for a work of Norman design cannot simply be maintained, it must be constantly under construction, otherwise it falls down almost at once.
Without a past, it frowned emptily upon the town from its tonsured hill. Someone had been there, once, for torches had smudged the ceilings inside; but who? No one could say. This room and a few others had been hastily furnished, but only because Henry had demanded of Simon a place of meeting secret and unlikely enough to permit him to pursue one single matter of state without interruption until the King should in his own time have done with it. Hence they were in Kirkby-Muxloe now, but neither wind nor wall would grant that they occupied it. Here they were less even than ghosts, for that nothing that had ever happened to their ancestors was more than a rumour of a rumour. It was not only for warmth and for the modesty of his Order that Adam kept his hands inside his sleeves, and not only from diligence that his thoughts pursued imaginary audiences with Henry which gave him no satisfaction nor comfort.
About the Inquisition itself, he believed, he might with confidence offer certain reassurances. The King necessarily still had vividly in his mind that series of Lateran edicts against heresy by which the Emperor had bought the favour of Honorius III for his coronation, and later, the favour of the Church as a whole despite his break with that Pope. In these Henry, a pious king, could hardly have seen any real access of devotion on the part of the Emperor; it was very plain that Frederick was no friend of the Church, nor in fact of any religion, true or heretical. No, the real motives had to lie elsewhere, and where but in the greater aggrandizement of the imperial power, over even such lands as England? And if so, what could be more alarming to a devout king with a heart of wax, than the joy with which the Church itself had adopted these edicts as its own?
This, Adam was almost convinced, was needless alarm. It had to be granted that Gregory IX seemed also to have embraced the edicts; but Adam was wholly familiar with Ilk humans generis and Licet ad capiendos, the two papal bulls involved, and it was quite clear from their texts that Gregory’s intentions had been to limit the Emperor’s statutes, not to extend them. The bulls did no more than invest all preachers of the Dominican Order with legantine authority to condemn heretics without appeal; and even this power he had at once further limited by placing the selection of the Preachers Inquisitors in the hands of the provincial prior involved. That so heavily qualified and cumbersome a procedure might represent any threat to Henry’s throne or realm – that Frederick might reach through it and grasp the King – this was only a fancy.
But intentions are not the only forces that rule popes; and the first bull in question had been promulgated in 1233 on April 20, which was not a saint’s day; the second on May 20, 1236, which was not a saint’s day either; two days later in the one case, only a day later in the other, the Pope might have been vouchsafed better guidance. The fact, in any event, remained, that the Inquisition was already reaching into England – and not by the agency of the Friars Preachers either, but in the hands of a Franciscan: Robert Grosseteste.
In the face of this, how could Adam rationally assure the King of anything? It was even possible that the Capito had been prompted to this surprising new outburst of zeal by the urgings of some within his and Adam’s own Order, discontent that only the black-robed Dominicans should be deemed worthy of the pursuit and punishment of heresy. Nor could it be said with any assurance that the English nation lacked the inquisitorial temperament – not here in Kirkby-Muxloe, inherited from the man who had extinguished the Albigensian heresy in the field in a torrent of blood.
And hindsight made it equally clear that what Grosseteste was doing was wholly consistent with his nature, his conscience and his history. The regularity and severity of his visitations to the deaneries, chapters and monasteries of Lincoln were already famous; he had long fought for the resumption of this right, which had fallen into disuse even in his own cathedral chapter, and had been confirmed in it by the new Pope, Innocent IV, only last year. He had proceeded to apply it with such vigour that the religious houses were already wondering that they had ever called his predecessor omnium religiosorum malleus, ‘the Monastery-Hammer’.
In this light, it might even be accounted remarkable that Grosseteste had allowed nine years of his episcopate to elapse – ten since Gregory had issued Ille humani generic – before proclaiming throughout his diocese a synodal witnessing. Yet this too was hindsight; for the teste synodale was hardly comparable to the ordinary visitation, even of Grosseteste’s drastic kind. In these the people were only involved peripherally, being assembled to hear the word of God, and bringing their children to be confirmed; inquiries into parish administration and correction of abuses came later, after the bishop had preached, not to the people, but to the clergy.
The net of the teste synodal was drawn much wider. As the bishop reached each parish, the whole body of the people was assembled in a local synod, from which Grosseteste selected seven men of mature age and proven integrity. These were sworn upon relics – of which there was never any scarcity, though no doubt some were spurious – to reveal without fear or favour whatever they might know or hear, then or subsequently, of any offence against Christian morals. The accused – noble or commoner, priest or parishioner – were summoned before his archdeacons and deans, and examined under oath.
Most of the abuses which came to light during a visitation were, alas, wholly ordinary: the holding of markets in sacred places, which had been expressly forbidden by Gregory ten years ago; the scotales or drinking bouts; the open celebration of the pagan Feast of Fools, on the same day as the Feast of the Circumcision, also proscribed for a decade; the gaming in churchyards; the clandestine marriages in inns of youths no older than fifteen, valid to be sure in canon law
by vows per os alone, yet sinful without the Church; the paying of milk-tithes not as cheese, but as a pailful spilled on the floor before the altar; Sunday work; the overlaying of children; the squabbles over precedence in the Pentecostal processions to the cathedral … all familiar, all unlikely to be stamped out, few so horrible as to justify the application of the law, and none, surely, heretical. For the people it were better to be fatherly, and seek to be loved, rather than merely to be obeyed. Nor did the visitations find much to write against the clergy: some slackness, some simony, some embezzlement, some collecting of moneys at Easter from those who came asking the sacrament, some exacting of corpse-presents from the dying, but again no sensible trace of heresy; nothing, indeed, but cupidity, for which preaching and correction might not suffice, but all the same would have to do. And nothing anywhere in all this could have reached the ears of Henry the King by ordinary, nor interested him if it had – forbye at his most watery, he knew well what ought and ought not to engage a king – had it not been for the teste synodale still blowing like a gale through the diocese of Lincoln.
With a start, Adam became aware that he had been staring for some moments at a small painted figure, at first seemingly on some flat surface near at hand, then suddenly far away at the base of what Robert Bacon – no, it had of course been Roger, not the stable, wise Dominican – had called ‘the cone of vision’, and now plainly in motion toward him, its footsteps beginning to tick like dripping water in his ears. He stood up, feeling cold rills of sweat running down his ribs, trying to retake possession of the laws of perspective which the Capito had taught him, yet unable to focus his eyes beyond the walls of the cell in which he had been praying and hoping for all the seven hours of the ecclesiastical day; it was as though the distant marcher had indeed stepped down from the nearest wall, still clad in the indigo and madder and mosaic gold of a fresco, leaving behind a wall of Kirkby-Muxloe as dreadfully bare of any human touch as it had always been.
Yet the ticking went on; and in an instant the cell turned inside out to his eyes, and the reaches before him with it. At once he saw what he should at once have seen; and could not forbear to laugh. There were no doors in Kirkby-Muxloe, only low stone entrances which probably never had been curtained, and surely never had been closed. He had been sitting all this time looking down a passageway, down which the revenant was coming; had he not been pondering so earnestly what he could say to Henry, he might have been spared these tapestried illusions, and apprehended instead only what there was to be seen and naught more: a familiar of Edmund Rich, his name unknown but his face comfortable to Adam, a mere piece of ecclesiastical furniture – not a ghost, but only a lawyer.
‘Friar Marsh: I am bidden to summon you, and bring you to the Archbishop. And he bids me say: The King is with us.’
Adam took a deep breath and covered his forehead with his wimple. ‘Bless you,’ he said, ‘and lead me; for the love of Christ our Lord.’
‘We thank you; enough,’ Henry said, resettling the silver clasp of his robes on his right shoulder with slender fingers. ‘We forgive you these ceremonies; there is work to be done, and quickly. Take your places.’
Adam studied him as they all moved to the table. In this vein the King was sometimes at his most dangerous, because least like himself. His white hands were bare, and so were his robes; in fact he wore no ornament to body forth what he was except the workaday fleur-de-lis coronet. Beneath that circlet his handsome, long-nosed countenance with its delicious red mouth was both framed and softened by the curls of his hair, almost like those of a page, and of his short silky beard. By the many furrows between his brows, and the set of his lips, it might have been thought that the King was only troubled, or perhaps even sorrowful, but no more than that. His voice was even and reasonable.
It was when Adam looked into Henry’s eyes that he knew he had reason to be frightened. He wondered, a little, why he was not.
‘My lord King, an it please you,’ Edmund Rich said, and, bowed his head. The iron fleur-de-lis tilted almost imperceptibly, as if in the gentlest of hot breezes, while the Archbishop made some brief benediction too much under his breath for Adam to catch. Possibly Henry could not hear much of it either, though Edmund stood immediately on his right hand. Then they were all seated around the table and Adam had a moment to tell over the beads of these his confreres in this hermetic conference.
To Henry’s left, Simon de Montfort, in half mail. To Edmund’s right, a thin sallow grey-haired man with a pointed nose, wearing a spotted pallium, with inkpot and quills before him; Adam remembered him without quite being able to name him. To Simon’s left, Adam himself. Between Adam and the man in the pallium, a baron Adam had never seen before, and knew better than to heed,: an abject thing created by Henry to honour the letter of the barons’ demand that one of them be always in attendance in matters of state; if he held any castle, it was probably something like Pontrhydfendigaid or Biddenden the Less. He was magnificently attired, but might equally well have come in cap and bells.
A small company, in a small bare ancient hall; and the air as taut and full of incipient thunder as a drying drum-hide.
‘We are not again to be menaced and forestalled by the Bishop of Lincoln,’ Henry said pleasantly. ‘We have called you here for your advice as to the means, but the end is already fixed in our heart. To wit, this teste synodak is pernicious, and must be ended.’
‘How, my lord King?’ Edmund Rich said. ‘It is dangerous, yes; pernicious, perhaps; but eke an established and ordered procedure of the Church. How prevent an ordained bishop from it?’
‘This we have summoned you to ask,’ Henry said. ‘We are not ignorant in these matters. The great Grosseteste may use this procedure, or not use, according to his best judgment for the cure of souls. We do not hold his judgment in the highest regard today. We still bear in mind the congratulations he sent to us in Wales.’
This reference baffled Adam entirely, as by their expressions it did also Simon and the counterfeit baron. Edmund only shrugged.
‘You cannot choose not to understand us.’ Henry said, his eyes narrowing. ‘Matthew, enlighten them.’
The narrow man in the pallium, whose pen had been squeaking and sticking away over a new parchment at almost miraculous speed, dropped his quill on to the table, where it made a shiny irregular black clot. He bent out of sight, and materialized from between his feet a thick roll of manuscript. This, when he began to read from it, turned out to be part of a mensual of Henry’s reign – an account so detailed and full of gossip that Adam was amazed to find the King even tolerating it, let alone sponsoring it.
Now he knew the man in the pallium: this was the clerk Matthew Paris, appointed by Henry to continue the history of the Plantagenet kingships begun by Roger of Wendover, and whom Adam had first seen at Beaumont, avidly recording Henry’s strafing of Hubert de Burgh. Incredible! Henry was a notable patron of the secular arts, that was well known; but how could he stomach a historian so contemptuous, and not only between the lines, even of his good gifts? Like much else about the King, it passed understanding, or even the hope of understanding this side Jordan.
‘Also in this month of 1236 was issued by the King to the Abbott of Ramsey a mandate requiring that he act as an itinerant judge in the counties of Buckingham and Bedford,’ Paris read in a sort of scornful gabble. ‘To this Grosseteste Bishop of Lincoln raised strong protests and asked recall of the mandate, declaring to all who would heed that canon law forbade all clerks below the rank of sub-deacon to become justiciars under princes; to which purpose he cited 2 Tim. ii. 4, nemo militans Deo implicat se negotiis saecularibus, and many other authorities both sacred and secular; among these being his contention that such a king treads on the verge of the sin of Uzzah, who usurped unto himself the office of priest—’
‘My lord King, have we not laid this ghost these ten years bygonnen?’ Edmund Rich broke in. ‘I see that this ill-favoured scribe hath been a-reading at my letters, and indeed intercepting them
unless I doubt mine ears. Thereby he knows, and my lord should know, that neither I nor any other prelate of substance supported the Bishop of Lincoln’s position on this question to such an extreme; finding which, he fell silent.’
‘We assure you that he was still sending us archdeacons to the very field of battle, a good four years later, to accuse us of violation of the liberties of the Church,’ Henry said. ‘This is the Welsh affair of which we spoke; had the preferment at issue not been resigned by him whom we had named, the Bishop’d be gnawing at our laces still.’
‘Sure not, my lord,’ Edmund Rich said, forcibly calm. ‘I deem we’ll hear no more of it henceforth.’
‘Will we not?’ the King said. ‘Matthew, read on.’
Matthew Paris peeled off a great limp sheaf of pages, tucked the roll of them under the rungs of his stool, and resumed reading at once, as though he had targeted this next passage like a lancer aiming his point at his challenger’s visor.
‘And in this month of 1245—’
Adam stiffened; suddenly this was no longer a history. Whatever Paris was about to read had happened only last year.
‘… King Henry was much vexed to be told by the Bishop of Lincoln that he would not yield the church of St. Peter in Northampton to one Ralph Passelew, a forest judge deserving in the sight of the King. And to the King’s vexation the Bishop replied, first, that he sought not to give offence but only to make composition of the difference, out of concern for the souls of the said parish, and out of zeal for the King’s honour; second, that he begged the King’s clemency for opposing him; third, that he hoped for an audience; and fourth, that he hoped that the King shared with the Bishop the desire that all things be directed to the glory of God, the salvation of souls, and the liberty of the Church. And fifth, that the Bishop was right, and the King wrong.’