Crowner's Quest

by Bernard Knight

  Ulf of Dartington was waiting for them inside the gate, which had just opened for the day. It was a hanging offence for a porter to allow any gate to be opened between dusk and dawn, except in some rare emergency sanctioned by the sheriff.

  The three mounted men moved through the gate against a milling crowd pressing the opposite way. These were mainly countryfolk, laden with baskets of vegetables, eggs and chickens or pushing handcarts piled high with such produce. They came to sell to the city-dwellers, setting out their wares on the edge of the street or supplying the established stall-holders with fresh stock.

  Once out of the gate, the riders crossed on to Exe Island, the marshy area reclaimed from the river, which supported mean huts clustered around the fulling mills for washing and preparing wool. At the other side of the island, de Wolfe led them into the cold water of the Exe, to splash across the shallows. There was a flimsy wooden bridge for travellers on foot, but the long stone bridge stood unfinished, as the builder, Walter Gervase, had again run out of funds.

  Once up the opposite bank, they took the main highway west towards Plymouth and Cornwall. The going was good as the usual muddy morass had been hardened by the frost into a firm surface. Clipping along at a trot, they reached Chudleigh in less than two hours and turned off the main track southwards, to head towards Totnes on the river Dart.

  Another hour or so brought them near the village of Ipplepen, when they branched off again on to tracks through the scrub and forest that lay between the villages. John knew this area well: he had been born and brought up at Stoke-in-Teignhead, a manor in a small valley south of the Teign estuary. Here his mother, brother and sister still lived and he resolved to call upon them on the way back to Exeter. Eventually they reached the hamlet of Loventor, where Ulf led them behind a tithe barn near the small wooden church. A few curious villagers trailed up to them as they slid from their horses and lashed the reins to a fence. Behind the barn, a leaning structure of wattle walls and a thatched roof, was some wasteground on which several hurdles of woven hazel-withies had been stuck in the ground to form a square against the back wall of the barn.

  ‘We kept them in here for you, Crowner,’ said Ulf proudly, aiming a kick at a scraggy dog sniffing at the enclosure.

  The bailiff pulled aside a hurdle and ushered de Wolfe and his henchman inside. On the ground were two bodies, laid side by side. They were dressed in clothing so rough as to be little better than rags. ‘These were outlaws?’ The coroner’s remark was more a statement than a question.

  ‘They were. We gave them some food and a few pence to teach those woodcutters a lesson. They are always hanging about the villages along the edge of the moor and forest, looking either to rob and steal or to do some occasional work for a pittance.’

  De Wolfe well knew that although outlaws were supposed to be hunted like vermin, they often crept back into society, either to perform casual labouring work or even to settle permanently and take up a trade. Officially they were outcasts, usually escaped prisoners, suspects on the run or sanctuary-seekers who had promised to abjure the realm but who had melted away into the forests instead of seeking ship at a port. Anyone could slay an outlaw on sight; in law, they were considered ‘wolves’ heads’, and a bounty of five shillings could be claimed for their amputated head, if brought as proof to the sheriff or coroner.

  ‘Were all your gang outlaws who attacked the assart-makers?’ snapped de Wolfe.

  ‘All but two, who were our own men, including the reeve. Sir William decreed it should be done, so his steward found the men.’

  De Wolfe bent over the corpses and saw that the right arm of one had been severed at the shoulder – the bloody limb was lying on the grass alongside him. The other had a massive wound in the neck and the coroner unhesitatingly stuck his fingers into the slash to gauge its depth. He looked up at Gwyn. ‘The neck bones are chipped by the blade. It was a good blow, almost took his head off,’ he said conversationally. He considered himself an authority on methods of killing and maiming, after a score of years on a multitude of battlefields. He wiped his fingers on a tuft of frozen grass and stood up. ‘I suppose I must hold an inquest on them, Gwyn.’

  The hairy assistant looked dubiously at the still figures on the ground. ‘Is there any need?’ he asked grudgingly. ‘If they are outlaws, they don’t even exist in the eyes of the law. Why bother?’

  The coroner rasped a hand over his black stubble – he was due to have his shave tomorrow. ‘I’m not sure. Nor do I think that anyone else knows the answer. The instructions are far from clear as to the duties of coroners.’

  The only mandate they had was a single sentence issued by the meeting of the King’s justices held in Kent last September. This merely said that, in every county, three knights and one clerk were to be appointed to ‘keep the pleas of the Crown’, which meant all legal events that took place in the county had to be recorded for presentation to the Justices when they made their visits, which were noted for their infrequency and irregularity. As part of this ‘keeping of the pleas’, the coroner had to investigate all sudden deaths, assaults, rapes, finds of treasure, wrecks, catches of royal fish, such as whales and sturgeon, and perhaps even robberies. He had also to attend all hangings, mutilations, ordeals, trials by combat and any other legal happening that might come along. Yet the instructions for how to deal with such matters were vague in the extreme. De Wolfe knew that if he tried to seek clarification as to whether he need investigate the deaths of non-persons such as outlaws, he would wait months for a response from the royal court, if the judges of the King’s council could be bothered to consider the matter.

  ‘Let’s do it, to be on the safe side,’ he muttered to his officer. ‘There may be some political aspect to this. I suspect that a couple of dead men are but a symptom of some feud between Henry de la Pomeroy and William Fitzhamon, over land tenure, apart from this assart business.’

  As if some heavenly ear had overheard him, a diversion occurred. Gwyn’s head went up and he almost sniffed the air. ‘Horsemen, coming this way – at least three of them,’ he said.

  It was a minute or so before de Wolfe’s less keen ear heard the hoofs, but soon horses appeared at the end of the track through the village and four riders cantered up to the tithe barn. ‘It’s Sir William Fitzhamon,’ said Ulf, hurrying out of the hurdles to pull his forelock to his master.

  The leading horseman was a thin, erect man whom John had met somewhere in the past, but with whom he was barely acquainted. Fitzhamon dismounted, walked across to the coroner and greeted him abruptly, giving hardly a glance at the bloody cadavers on the ground. ‘This is my son, Robert,’ he said jerking his head at the lad, who had also slid from his horse, leaving two squires mounted to guard their rear. ‘I assumed rightly that you would come here this morning, in response to the message I sent with my bailiff,’ he said, with a touch of arrogance that irritated John. ‘These dead rogues are of no account in themselves, but I wanted official recognition of the harm and insult that Pomeroy has done to my estate.’

  De Wolfe, half a head taller than Fitzhamon, glowered at the older man. ‘I gather this comes about from some land dispute?’

  ‘There is no dispute, Sir John. The land is mine and has been in our family for generations. It is flagrant robbery on the part of Pomeroy, who is trying to push back my boundary by several hides, hacking and burning my part of the forest where it abuts on to his land, between this village and Afton.’ He smacked his leg in anger with a riding crop. ‘It’s not the first time he’s tried this.’

  He took the coroner by the elbow and pulled him away from the others, while his son followed uncertainly behind him. ‘I have a number of manors scattered over the western counties and I cannot be everywhere at once. But this has gone too far. I have threatened Pomeroy that I will petition the King if he does not stop cutting my trees and withdraw back to his own boundaries.’

  ‘The King is a hard man to petition, these days. He is ever abroad,’ observed de Wolfe, tho
ugh without any hint of criticism of Richard the Lionheart’s disregard for England.

  ‘I know that, and resign myself to not seeing him in person – though I wish I was still young enough to assist him in his war against that milk-sop in France, the unspeakable Philip.’

  De Wolfe’s heart began to warm to Fitzhamon, after their first cool encounter. Anyone who was such a staunch supporter of the King was a man to admire, in his eyes.

  ‘I can – and will – go to see the Justiciar over this,’ continued Fitzhamon. ‘I regret that I missed the chance to meet him last month when he was in Exeter, but I had a week of the bloody flux and could not get from my bed or the privy.’

  ‘Hubert Walter is a fair-minded man and would consider your complaints seriously,’ advised de Wolfe.

  Fitzhamon gave a quick look over his shoulder. ‘I could tell him a few other things as well, beyond my complaints about my land boundaries, if I had a mind. Things he might well pass on to our sovereign.’

  Intrigued, John tried to lead him into more detail, but Fitzhamon seemed to feel that he had said too much already and would not be drawn further. They walked back to the barn and Fitzhamon prepared to remount his horse. ‘I wished to bring these deaths to your notice in the proper manner, Crowner, so that Henry de la Pomeroy is in no doubt that he has done wrong in setting a pack of rogues upon my own men who are defending my land.’

  As he swung himself into the saddle, de Wolfe went up to him. ‘Your bailiff said that a man called Giles Fulford was among those who attacked your men, but that the leader was a red-headed fellow. Have you any idea who that might be?’

  Fitzhamon shook his head. ‘I am not acquainted with the mercenaries of this county, sir. I know that many hot-blooded young men are putting themselves at the disposal of those who need strong arms and long swords to further their ambitions. I myself was invited to join them, but I considered it infamous! But, as to names, I can’t help you. I leave that to my servants.’ With this arrogant snub, he swung his horse round and cantered off, his silent son and two guards close behind him.

  The coroner stared after them, until they vanished around a bend in the track. ‘I wonder what it was he almost told me,’ he mused.

  The inquest that followed was a simple, hurried affair. Gwyn rounded up the two Loventor men who had accompanied the outlaw pack that had attacked the woodcutters. The surviving outlaws had vanished: no forest-dweller was going to risk being in the proximity of the King’s coroner if he wanted to keep his head on his shoulders.

  As Thomas was not there to pen a record on to his rolls, de Wolfe had to remember the few relevant facts so that he could relay them to the clerk when they got back to Exeter. With a handful of village men as a jury, the coroner rapidly recounted the circumstances of the killings. Though there was obviously no way to ‘present Englishry’ on a pair of nameless outlaws, he was reluctant to amerce the village with a murdrum fine, salving his legal conscience with the excuse that as the men were legally non-existent, it did not matter from what race they came.

  Within ten minutes, the circle of uncomprehending men standing around the corpses had been told by the coroner to bring in a verdict of murder by persons unknown. They were allowed then to shuffle away, reluctantly going back to their tedious labours after this unusual diversion from the endless drudgery of village routine.

  ‘I had thought to name Giles Fulford as one of the killers,’ said John to his officer, ‘but there’s no proof other than the word of a villager – and little good it would do anyway. But we must keep a closer eye on Master Fulford when we get back to Exeter.’

  It was gone noon when they left Loventor, and although they could have got back to Exeter before curfew closed the gates, de Wolfe took the opportunity to visit his family. Though they travelled through lonely countryside, along narrow tracks well suited to ambush, the two old fighting companions felt no threat from wayside brigands. John’s steed patently advertised the fact that he was a warrior, for Bran was a giant of a horse, his size and hairy feet proclaiming him for a destrier, a warhorse used to carrying the weight of arms and armour. As for Gwyn, it was the man rather than the brown mare that would have given any footpad cause to hesitate. The wild, hairy giant, with his leather cuirass, shoulders protected with metal plates, had a ferocious look that strongly suggested he would be quite happy to use the huge sword hanging from one saddle-peg or the hand-axe swinging from the other.

  An hour and a half took them the nine miles from Loventor, through Kinkerswell to Stoke-in-Teignhead, a well-ordered village with a neat manor house, nestling in a green valley a mile or so from the sea. The house was solidly built in stone, one of the last acts of his father, Simon de Wolfe, before he went off to the Irish wars where he was killed. Years of peace had allowed the defences of the house to be relaxed, and though there was a wooden stockade around the yard, its drawbridge had not been raised for as long as John could remember. They clattered across it to be greeted with genuine pleasure by the servants, some of whom had known John since he was a child. Gwyn was also a favourite, as he had been there many times. Both serving-wenches and the men enjoyed his boisterous good humour, which gave the lie to his wild looks. He went off to the kitchens to pinch the cook-maids’ bottoms and be fed until he could eat no more, while de Wolfe went in to his family.

  The steward, an old Saxon called Alsi, met him on the stairs from the yard, beaming his pleasure at the visit. ‘Your brother is at Holcombe today, Master John, but your mother and sister are up in the solar.’

  The rest of the day was spent in eating, drinking and gossiping around a roaring fire in the hall. His mother, Enyd de Wolfe, was a sprightly, still attractive woman of sixty-three, with auburn hair, which now, however, contained some silver threads. Small and dainty, her vivacity made everyone love her, from the lowest servant to her three children. The eldest was William, today at their other manor a few miles north along the coast at Holcombe, near Dawlish. He was two years older than John, but looked much like him – tall, dark and lean, like their father. But William’s nature was different: he had no interest in travel, fighting or foreign wars. His passions were farming, sheep-rearing and running the two manors. When their father had died, he had inherited the estate, but equal shares of the income came to Enyd and the two other children, the third being Evelyn. She was the baby, now thirty-four, an amiable, gossipy woman. Evelyn had wished to become a nun, but after her father’s death, Enyd had asked her to stay at home and help run the household.

  This cold evening, they delighted in fussing over John, extracting all the news and Exeter gossip that they could get from him – even that concerning Matilda, whom they disliked as much as she disliked them. Privately, Enyd always regretted her son’s marriage into the de Revelle family, which had been engineered by his father as a socially advantageous move that would enable John to become a county notable. However, Simon had not foreseen his own early death – nor that John would spend two decades away from Devon at the wars, mainly to keep away from his unpleasant wife. That his mother was Celtic, with a Welsh mother and a Cornish father, was anathema to Matilda, to whom anyone less than full-blooded Norman was on a par with the animal kingdom.

  Eventually, almost dizzy from too much food, wine and chatter, de Wolfe stumbled off to a mattress stuffed with goose feathers set out for him at the side of the hearth and slept as well as Gwyn, who had a blanket thrown over a pile of hay in the warmth of the kitchen hut.

  In the morning, the twenty-eighth day of December, after a huge breakfast, they left Stoke and rode gently up to the mouth of the Teign. At low tide they waded their horses across the narrow river where it passed the sand-bar to reach the sea. On the other side, John led the way up the coast track, then turned slightly inland to reach the village of Holcombe. Here he found his brother supervising the building of a barn, part of which was to store the wool from an increased flock of sheep that helped to sustain de Wolfe’s income.

  William came down a crude ladder to gree
t his brother, and the two men embraced warmly. ‘I couldn’t pass by without giving you my wishes for a prosperous New Year, brother!’ exclaimed John. ‘Especially as my own prosperity depends so much on your efforts.’

  They talked for a while about the manors and the wool trade, which was the economic strength of England. Gwyn watched from a polite distance, marvelling again at the similarity in the appearance of the brothers, and in the difference between their personalities. After family talk had been exhausted, William asked about the coroner’s work, which seemed to fascinate him. De Wolfe related his current problems, then asked if his brother knew anything of Giles Fulford and Jocelin de Braose, but William had never heard of them.

  Gwyn waited patiently for half an hour until the two men had had their say. Then, after mutual slaps on the back, de Wolfe climbed aboard his great horse and they set off again northwards. It was not yet mid-morning as they cantered along the coastal track towards Dawlish, a few miles further on. They could have reached Exeter by early afternoon, but from past experience Gwyn suspected that they would just make the city gates as they were closing at dusk.

  Fishermen’s huts along the beach indicated that they were in Dawlish, though the centre of the village was a little inland, up a small creek where boats were beached on the banks. John slowed Bran to a walk as he turned up the path alongside the little river and seemed to be staring intently at them as if seeking a particular vessel. Then he prodded the stallion into a trot and moved up the track to where a number of houses, both wooden and stone, formed the nucleus of the hamlet. He reined up outside a new dwelling, built of grey stone with two round arches facing the road, enclosing a sheltered arcade in the Breton style. He turned in his saddle to speak to his officer. ‘Gwyn, I have a call to make, so find yourself the alehouse and have some food and drink. I’ll see you later.’

  The Cornishman grinned under his bushy moustache: his earlier prophecy had been confirmed. As he plodded away for some welcome meat and ale, de Wolfe dismounted and tied his horse to a rail at the side of the new house. There was a closed door at the front, under the arches, but he walked down the side towards the yard at the back, seeking the rear entrance.