Perhaps the Bishop’s behaviour was better than many. Others stole to enrich themselves. Much of the time the good Bishop seems to have taken money not for himself, but to fund long-term ventures which were to the benefit of the diocese and the country.
Not a bad epitaph, really.
At the same time, there were many other religious men and women who were far less honourable than they should have been.
After the Ralegh scandal, the affair of Nicholas Sandekyn’s robbery of some money from a sum deposited with the friars seems somewhat tame. Still, it was a humiliating matter for the friars. That one of their number should steal from a justice and Sheriff of Devon was sufficiently embarrassing to make three consecutive priors seek to conceal the theft.
At the same period there were many men and women fleeing the harsh regimes in convents, incidentally breaking all their vows. I have mentioned in past Author’s Notes the cases of the Parson of Quantoxhead, the murderous Dean John of Exeter and, of course, the Mad Monk of Haldon Hill.
The fact always to bear in mind is that such a large percentage of the population was employed by the Church in one capacity or another, and it would be incredible to think that of all these people a number would not be thieves, con men, or perhaps dangerous psychopaths. All had been raised with weapons everywhere around and were used to a concept of personal honour, and many of them had been brought up believing in their right by birth to have authority of life and death over their villeins. Some of them even believed that they could remove a person’s right to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
A simple case of murder really wouldn’t have bothered them.
I regularly tour with the Medieval Murderers and with Quintin Jardine, among others, and one question that is often thrown at me is whether or not I’d have liked to live in this period. Read about the sanitation, the starvation, the poverty, and then imagine relying on a clerical psychopath for your soul’s safety, and I think you can guess my view!
Michael Jecks
North Dartmoor
Winter 2004
Prologue
Exeter, August 1317
In the grey light, the winding sheet looked thin, as though it had been stretched by the heavy deluge that fell all about. The shroud was so sodden that it lay tight across the flesh beneath, and Estmund could see every curve and projecting bone of the body it covered. Water pooled where it might: in the eye-sockets, between the breasts, in the soft hollow of her empty belly, her groin … This was his woman – and yet it wasn’t. Emma was dead, her soul was gone. Truly, this was a husk, nothing more.
The shame! He was discarding her carcass with as much ceremony as a man throwing away some worthless trash. If she had died even a year ago, he could have afforded a coffin. It was wrong for her to be out here like this, on view to all passers-by, the thin cloth showing off her body as plainly as though she were naked. He wanted to cover her up, hide her from the people who wandered about the place, their dull, uninterested eyes glancing at him before surveying Emma’s corpse. Two urchins appeared and stood silent, staring fixedly. In the end he grabbed his cloak and threw it over her. It was wrong that she should be the subject of such attention here on the boundary of the cemetery.
He felt a sob start deep down in his belly, and closed his eyes. Yes, he should have provided a proper coffin for her, just as he should have given her a real funeral, but he could do neither. Coffins were all but unknown now. Already, just in the last three months, one twentieth part of the population of the city had died, so they said. There weren’t enough coffins for the bodies. And his job was unprofitable now. In the past it had been worthwhile to be a butcher. It meant sufficient money, good food … Good Christ, they had been happy on what he could earn, and her pregnancy had set the seal on their delight.
All Estmund had ever wanted was children of his own. Growing up with three younger sisters, he had been used to having babes and toddlers about him, and even when he went to be apprenticed he had gone to a master butcher who had a large family. Est had grown up with youngsters all around him, and the idea of fathering his own with his wife was wonderful.
He had wedded his beautiful Emma just four years ago, and it had seemed that soon all his hopes would be fulfilled. Shortly after their wedding, she fell pregnant and Cissy was born in August of 1314.
But even as she was brought struggling into the world by that incompetent bitch of a midwife, their lives were changing.
The winter after Cissy’s birth was cold, but not so much worse than many others – Est had filled their plates with whatever he could buy – but worse was to come. Throughout the summer the rain fell in torrents. At first all were stoical about it, laughing about the normal English summer; some made jokes about a new Noah. But as the summer progressed, their humour left them. Men could see the harvest was going to fail. The crops drowned in the fields. And soon the people began to die.
Theirs was not the only family to lose a child, but to lose Cissy so young, only one month over a year old, seemed to Estmund to be awful. He did not hear her call his name, nor see her stagger for her first steps. All was snatched from him when she died.
At the same time, when the cathedral refused to bury Cissy, Est saw his wife begin to slip away. It took her two years, but at last she had joined their baby.
He returned to the pit. As he dug, Estmund could hear the rattling thump of another cart moving along the way. Pausing, he straightened, a short, thickset figure with a stooped back, his face drawn and pale under a thinning cap of mousy hair. He peered with eyes that were raw with grief at the small party led by a gaunt pony straining at its harness.
‘Come on, Est,’ his friend said, shovelling aside dirt from the pit at his feet. Much of what he brought out was mud now. The hole filled with running rainwater as swiftly as they could clear it, an unwholesome red water like blood.
Estmund Webber remained standing staring at the cart. Its iron-shod wheels creaked as it lurched from side to side, crashing into a hole where a slab had been moved, then righting itself and continuing as the pony lumbered onwards. At the side were two carters holding the boards steady, so that the corpse resting on them mightn’t topple off and fall into the mud that lay all about. Behind them, through the greyness of the blanket of rain, came the grieving family. A woman first, only five-and-twenty or so, a pretty thing, with a man at her side. Est knew her and her husband: Jordan le Bolle and his woman, Mazeline. Behind them came their servants and a cousin of Mazeline’s.
It was too small for an entourage, not enough to remember the dead. Who was it? Est had been told, but things like that seemed unimportant now. The grief of others could not penetrate the scars of his misery. Vaguely he recalled hearing that Mazeline’s mother had died. Starved, of course. Just like all the others. So many …
Even before the wagon had gone, he could hear another making its way up from the Ercenesk Gate. There were so many deaths now. So much suffering.
That was the way people should go, he thought. Along that paved way that led up to the great west door of the cathedral, the last door on the road to God. The cart should stop before the door so that the men could carry the wrapped body inside, up to the altar where they could pray for the soul, make sure that she’d be accepted at the gates of Heaven.
‘Est?’
He was sobbing uncontrollably again. Pathetically, hunched over his spade, he tried to wipe the tears from his face, but only succeeded in smearing a thick plaster of reddish mud over his features. The rain was so heavy it didn’t really matter. It would soon be washed away. He closed his eyes and bent his head as the racking grief engulfed him again, remembering … remembering so much joy …
Young, gay, sweet, she had been all those things. His delight, his love, his darling, his sweeting … his beautiful wife. He took a deep, shuddering breath and thrust his shovel into the rough ground, leaning on it, face covered with a muddy hand.
‘Get a move on, Est. We need to finish up here.’
Now
the memories flooded back, and the tide washed away the grief, if only for a moment.
His wedding had been the happiest day of his life. He had gone to the parish church with Emma, and they’d repeated their oaths in front of the priest there, a kindly old soul who had known them both all their lives – he’d baptized Emma when she was born, and would have buried her too, except of course none of the parish churches were allowed to bury anyone. All the city’s secular funerals must be conducted at the cathedral church, and the burials must take place in the massive cemetery that almost encircled it. Not that Emma could have been buried there anyway.
‘Est, come on, hurry up!’
The urgency of the words reached Estmund through the all-enveloping anguish that was now his life. He stared down at his friend, Henry, who reached out to him, his face torn with sympathy, and as his fingers touched the rough material of Estmund’s tunic Estmund began to sob again. His eyes rose once more to the cathedral, to the great edifice that stood to protect people like him, like his wife. It was there to save their souls.
But not his beloved. The Bishop had declared her excommunicate. Her soul was lost, just like Cissy’s.
A cathedral in such times must accommodate many funerals, of course, and far be it from Agnes to complain about that, but it was nevertheless upsetting to have to share it today of all days.
The rain was a constant blanket over the world. It wasn’t just that it lanced down, thick gobbets pounding into the already sodden ground, it was the way the light had changed.
This late in the summer, all should have been clear and bright, warm and serene, with children playing in the cathedral’s yard, wet- and dry-nurses idling with their charges, men haggling over deals, horses cropping the rough cemetery grass, hucksters offering pies or trinkets, others calling out with wine or ale. The colours should have been distinct and glorious, gay flags fluttering, men and women flaunting their finery for others to admire … and instead all was grim. This greyness was more than the absence of light: it was the dullness of obscurity. The falling drops made all details murky, and the rain gathering on her eyelids didn’t help, either.
The sun could not penetrate the thick layer of clouds. She was hidden from all, but here in the cathedral’s close, away from the chilly gusts, Agnes could still feel her warmth. Up there somewhere the sun shone, and her efforts served to make the dampness worse by increasing the humidity.
Agnes looked up at the cathedral as they approached. The old church was being rebuilt, the eastern portion first, and later this, the western entrance. Precarious-looking scaffolding was lashed together against the building, great cranes reached skywards, rubble lay all over the area near the cathedral where old stones had been dashed from the walls to make way for the new ones, and it looked a mess. It hardly seemed a fit setting for the solemn rite that was about to be conducted for Agnes’s father.
At the great door stood a cart from which a body had only recently been carried inside, and she felt a frisson of distaste. Poorer folk could not afford the necessary sustenance, of course, but it was more than a little unsatisfactory to have them leave a pony and cart before the doors where others were intending to enter for their own business. Churls ought to have a separate entrance; it wasn’t right for them to get in the way of people like her family.
Stepping past the cart with its underfed pony, which watched the second funeral with a lacklustre eye, Agnes stood at the doors to watch.
Her mother was weeping uncontrollably. She had her mouth open, and Agnes felt a fleeting discomfort. Mother and Juliana, Agnes’s younger sister, were both showing their grief to the world, but she herself could not. She felt sure that Daniel, Juliana’s husband of four years, felt the same as she. Although peasants might wail and moan, it would be unseemly for people in Agnes’s station to behave in like manner.
The cart stopped and the pallbearers lifted her father’s body on its bier. With bowed heads, the men carried it inside.
Agnes waited until her mother and sister were at the door, and then she joined her mother. As she glanced at her, Agnes realized how old her mother had grown. She and Agnes’s father had always been so close; Agnes suddenly wondered whether she would have any reason to continue living. The idea was shocking – yet unavoidable.
She took her mother’s arm and walked with her inside, aware all the time of her sister and brother-in-law just behind her. She was always aware of him: Daniel, sergeant of the city. She cast an eye about her as they entered the gloomy interior. Yes, Juliana had done very well for herself. Marrying a sergeant of the city might not seem like much of an achievement – after all, almost any of the members of the Freedom would earn much more than a mere sergeant – but Daniel was slightly different from the run of the mill officers. He was brave to the point of rashness, convinced of his own strength; handsome, with a jutting, pointed jaw and square face. His eyes held the confidence of a man who knew that his friends would soon see him promoted. Perhaps he would be given one of the gates. It was an important job, having the control of a gate; but then he could be given some duties in one of the courts instead. Men there could always make themselves wealthy, and Daniel was bound to be successful.
Agnes dipped her fingers into the stoup of holy water and crossed herself. It was an awesome thought, that Juliana – ‘little sister’ – was already a mother herself, but at least Juliana had achieved her life’s ambition. Agnes knew full well that her little sister had early on been determined to marry before her. Well, that was well and good, because Agnes had not wanted to marry. She was content with the life she enjoyed, she told herself, and the idea of having to pander to a man was unattractive. She had no need of a husband yet. The oft-repeated injunction was soothing, faintly, but not enough. She was growing lonely, and the thought that her life could be ended as swiftly and as quickly forgotten as that of her father was alarming.
In front of her she saw the funeral party which had arrived before her father, and she could not help a small sneer. It was Jordan le Bolle and his wife. That, Agnes knew, would be enough to drive her brother-in-law the sergeant into a cold rage.
Thinking that, Agnes could not stop herself from casting a glance at Daniel. No matter what she told herself, that she wasn’t jealous, that she hadn’t wanted to marry yet, that she had never really felt that much attraction to Daniel, there was always that niggling annoyance at the back of her mind.
After all, Daniel had been her man until Juliana snatched him from her.
He could feel her eyes on him, but Daniel was no fool. He knew damned well that she would be near him every day from now onwards. No matter what his success or failure, little Agnes would always be there to smile with that small, sarcastic twist of her lips, just as she always had been. With her father gone, Daniel had a responsibility towards her.
At first he’d wanted her so much more than Juliana. Agnes was the older, more sensible woman of the two, but of course at her age she could afford to be more sensible. It wasn’t as though she had to worry about anything much, except winning herself a suitable husband. That was a tough demand, though, for a maid such as her.
Agnes was not unattractive, of course. Christ’s pain, when Daniel first met her, he’d thought her perfection itself. A pleasing face with that mass of reddish-golden hair, faint freckles dotted over her nose and upper cheeks giving her a faintly childlike appearance, and the way she had of peering at him with lifted chin, as though challenging him in some way. At first he’d thought that she was simply a slut with fire in her groin, a wench who wanted to grab the first man she found and pull him into her bedchamber, but when he’d tested her he’d found there was more depth to her than that.
She was intelligent, that was certain. That lovely head of hers held a brain that was capable of embarrassing the brightest. Daniel himself had often been bested by her in argument, and when he had played her at nine men’s morris she had thrashed him. Some fellows could have accused her of witchcraft for the skill she showed in calculating
five or even six moves in advance. There was a masculine ruthlessness in the way that she utterly destroyed him during that game which rankled even now. He was so glad he’d chosen her, Juliana, in the end. She had given him his lovely daughter, Cecily, and no man could ask for more.
Juliana was a calmer, more kindly soul. She only ever had a smile and a welcoming word of encouragement. A sweeter woman in every way.
Looking at her now, he told himself he was right to be so entirely besotted. Agnes would be an adornment for any man’s bed, but – Christ Jesus! – how she would scold and taunt when the mood took her. She had the tongue of a viper when she wanted, and she could poison a man’s heart with her words; by contrast Juliana was supportive and thoughtful of his needs. A complete difference. Whoever was to win Agnes would find himself with a right challenging bitch, and little peace in his marriage.
He could not help himself. His gaze was drawn to Agnes, and he caught a glimpse of her curled lip just as she looked away. Hard-hearted bitch! Even today she had to watch and sneer. She had a heart frozen to ice.
Looking away, he found himself meeting the cynical stare of Jordan le Bolle, and he gritted his teeth. If he could, he would run up to the son of a hog and beat him. But today of all days he could do nothing. He must endure, while the priests mumbled their words over Jordan’s mother-in-law’s body in the hurried service that was so commonplace now, with so many dying of starvation. It was a disgrace that the priests should let le Bolle in before Juliana’s and Agnes’s father. He at least had been honourable.
The Butcher of St Peter's: (Knights Templar 19) Page 2