‘Why, yes, father. But a clerk does not need orders, at least while he is still at his books. The tonsure is enough to bind me to the Church, yet it does not commit me to anything. That’s not the popular opinion, but it’s sound Canon Law. Suppose that later on some great lord who has employed me should offer me a fief. Then, if I am only a tonsured clerk, I might let my hair grow and do knight service for my land. I might even marry. All without breaking the Canons.’
‘Well, I never knew that. I thought every clerk was a clerk for life. You will be telling me next that priests may marry and hold land in lay fee.’
‘They do, in some parts of England; though of course it’s wrong. The King won’t enforce the laws of the Church, and these English were always shockingly slack. You mustn’t judge this country by the decent customs of Rouen.’
‘Then it’s time we compelled them to follow the decent customs of Normandy, the customs of all civilized men. But you know more about the law than your father. I would believe anything of this country.’
‘We shall set it to rights, when we have time. It’s odd to think that after all these years the English still follow their own barbarous law.’
‘Yes, a long time since the Conquest. I suppose the last man who remembered it was the poor lord who died a month ago.’
‘Our Duke Robert? May he rest in peace. Though such a hero of Outremer hardly needs our prayers.’
‘More than eighty when he died,’ said Gilbert, comforting his own middle age. ‘When he was in his cradle there were no Normans outside the Duchy. Now a man can ride from Scotland to Apulia and sleep every night in the hall of a Norman lord. It’s a great thing to be a Norman. Don’t you ever do anything to disgrace us.’
‘I am as Norman as you, father, for all that I can speak a little English. I shall live like a Norman, and I hope to die like one. I have been trained to arms, not to dressing hides.’
It was rank bad manners to crow over his father so crudely. But the recollection of all the glory won by Norman swords in the last seventy years sometimes made Thomas lose his head.
‘As a clerk you may not bear arms.’
‘Let me explain, father. A clerk is not a priest. I want to study the Law, all the Law there is in the world. There is more of it every day, but one man working hard can still master the whole. At Merton they taught us some Canon Law, and at Pevensey I picked up a little of the customs of Normandy. In Paris and Lombardy learned doctors are lecturing on the old Roman Civil Law. If you will support me for a few more years I could attend those lectures. Last of all, at the folkmoot and the Exchequer, I could pick up the odd Saxon customs of England. Then I would know all the Law in the world, and great lords would be eager to employ me.’
‘So that’s what you want. And your mother thinks you are burning to be ordained! Well, it’s not a very noble ambition, but it seems to have taken your fancy. You may stay at St. Paul’s for two years more, and then perhaps I could afford to send you to Paris. I suppose in the end you will begin to earn money.’
‘Lawyers earn a great deal, as a reward for their long training. Seriously, father, it’s what I want to do. Of course I once had the usual boyish dreams of winning fortune with my sword, but no one can do that nowadays. England is a land of peace.’
As he spoke of his vanished childhood fifteen-year-old Thomas looked very wise and mature; but Gilbert reflected that his training at Pevensey would make him hanker after knighthood all his life. Perhaps that chivalrous education had been a mistake, though his courteous manners would be useful to him, whatever his position in the world.
‘Don’t count on too much peace in England,’ Gilbert went on. ‘For more than thirty years our King has kept good peace, but he won’t live for ever. Who will come after? The magnates have sworn to serve the Empress; but she is married to an Angevin. Can you imagine Normans taking orders from an Angevin? It seems against nature.’
‘The Empress has a son,’ answered Thomas reflectively, ‘though I suppose you might call him an Angevin like his father. He could be reared in Normandy, to rule us as a true Norman.’
‘He could, if the King lives another twenty years. That baby is just about a year old. If the King dies while his grandson is a child there will be war. When I was alderman of Cheap I swore fealty to the Empress, so I am bound to her service. I hope she gets her rights without fighting, but I shan’t be surprised if trouble comes.’
‘When I know all the Law that can be known I shall serve her and her son with my pen. England is full of gallant knights, but there are very few good lawyers.’
Henceforth Thomas had an end in view, the satisfaction of a cherished ambition. He studied with an ardour that amazed his teachers, until they congratulated Gilbert on being the father of a genius. That was a stroke of luck, for it saved Thomas’s career even when the family suffered a heavy financial misfortune.
At harvest he paid a short visit to Pevensey, thus missing the great fire which devastated London. During a September gale a house caught alight, and the wind carried burning thatch far and wide. It happened in broad daylight, when everyone was awake, and there was little loss of life; but St. Paul’s Cathedral was utterly consumed, and with it most of the rented houses which provided Gilbert’s income.
He must go back to his trade of drysalting. He was tempted to put his clever young son to work, but for all his mildness he had his share of Norman honour; he had given his word that the boy might complete his education, and his word must be kept. The visit to Paris was postponed for one year only; by the autumn of 1135 some of the little wooden houses were rebuilt and rented, and there was just enough money for the support of his son.
When at last Thomas sailed from Pevensey he was in his seventeenth year, rather old to begin a new course of study. The top of his head gleamed white, for every student of Paris was a clerk, and he had received from the Bishop of London the minor orders of exorcist and doorkeeper.
He carried a small purse of silver pennies, and a letter to a Parisian saddler who dealt with his father; he could draw more money when he needed it, and ultimately the debt would be settled in English hides. The lord Richer had given him a fine gown and soft leather shoes for formal occasions, and his mother packed his everyday clothes in a basket that would make half the load of a packmule. The normal route from Normandy to Paris was by barge up the Seine; but that was very slow and as usual there was raiding in the Vexin where the Duchy bordered the Ile de France; he proposed to walk with a mule-train.
The journey through Normandy and France seemed a homecoming. It was strange to hear the poorest peasants speaking good French; but this was the land of his ancestors, and it was thrilling to see for the first time great castles and walled towns which had been the background of family conversation since he could understand it. Paris itself was smaller than London, cramped on its fortified island and just beginning to expand on the south bank of the river; there was obviously less trade than in the city of his birth. But this town was more alive. The King of France lived in it nearly all the time, since his magnates would not permit him to do justice within their fiefs, as the King of England did justice in the fiefs of his vassals. The great schools brought a multitude of clerks from every nation in Christendom. The town was always full of prominent visitors.
The foreign clerks were organized in clubs, whose chief purpose was to bargain with the lecturers over tuition fees. Thomas was advised to join the English ‘nation’, and did so with reluctance; it seemed to reflect on his status as a Norman, but there was no ‘nation’ for Normans only, and the north-French ‘nation’ would take only vassals of the French King. Each ‘nation’ haunted a particular tavern, and saw to it that there was always a senior scholar waiting there to give advice to newcomers. Thomas was told of the best lecturers in Canon and Civil Law, and how much he ought to pay to be enrolled among their students.
In his private life he was completely free, for his tonsure placed him beyond the jurisdiction of the King’s Provost. His
teachers made him pay his fees, and enforced order in the lecture hall; but so long as he paid for his course no one compelled him to attend and listen. There was no authority to check the drunkenness and evil living of the young scholars.
Thomas had often wondered where the numerous pupils of the London grammar schools would find a living. Now he understood that he had reached the stage at which most clerks abandoned the career of learning; boys who had commenced their education in the strictness of a monastery, and continued under the salutary discipline of home life, were turned loose in a foreign city where no one would inform their parents of their behaviour. Some died of drink, many drifted into the furtive underworld of hired letter-writers or forgers of fake charters, a few even enlisted in bands of professional mercenaries. Most of them heard enough lectures to pick up the latest intellectual fashions, and then occupied their time in endless and pointless debate; when they were tired of Paris they would wander off to some other centre of learning; if they were lucky they would be unemployed students all their lives, if the money failed they would turn to crime.
Thomas himself was one of the select band of hard workers and sober livers. He enjoyed the study of the law, and in private life he had developed a strong liking for neatness and order; debauchery was wicked, but he was even more repelled by its sordid dirt. The courtesy of his manners marked him out as a youth bred in a castle; his few intimates were also young men of courtesy, cadets of great houses qualifying for careers in the law courts or the Church.
As at Merton and St. Paul’s, though he was on the whole popular he made no close friends. His companions thought he carried into private life too much of the piety which to them was a professional qualification. These gently born scholars heard Mass when they should, frowned on affairs with prostitutes, and went to Confession once a month; but their chief interest was the study of the new code of chivalry, with its fascinating conception that a man might love a woman as a person, not merely as a desirable bed-mate. (In fact the more inaccessible the lady the more a true knight should love her.) They spent their evenings discussing which of the famous beauties whom they had never met they would choose as an ideal to be worshipped. But when Thomas was challenged to name the lady of his choice he replied that he served Our Lady only; which took all the fun out of the discussion, by reminding them that they were dedicated to a celibate career. Peter of Norwich observed crossly that if you believed what Thomas said he was too good for this world and already ripe for Heaven; but that in very fact he was so busy serving Thomas of London that he had no time to serve any lady.
There was enough truth in this to sting. Yet Thomas, examining his conscience that evening in accordance with the training of Merton, could not honestly see he was at fault. By accident he had the manners of a gentleman; in truth he was the son of a poor burgess, with his way to make in the world; a spotless reputation was a valuable asset. His companions never guessed how sternly he had to rule himself. Chastity was not too difficult; he had always known it would demand an effort, and that effort he was prepared to make. He was still a virgin, and a virgin he would die – provided he was careful with drink. There he had to watch himself, for he appreciated good wine; luckily the cheap drink of the students’ taverns was too nasty to be pleasant and he could seldom afford anything better. Anyone who drank cold water in Paris quickly died of disease, and he formed the habit of drinking water in which lime-blossoms had been boiled, which made it safer. He found that with a little resolution he could keep himself chaste and sober.
Anger was the temptation against which he must constantly fight. No matter how often he repelled it the red mist would come back to fill his eyes on the most trivial occasions. In the first month in Paris he struck back at a drunken Alsatian who was looking for the tail all Englishmen were said to carry curled up in their chausses. When the other tavern-loungers intervened he was sitting on the fellow, banging his head against a stone in the mud floor; luckily they pulled him off before he killed him. Now he knew that when he felt his heart racing and his fists beginning to clench he must stand quite still and pray to Our Lady; presently composure would return.
He noted, as an additional favour vouchsafed to him by Our Lady, that on these occasions his adversary often apologized. He did not know that this was because Thomas of London exercising self-control was a most intimidating spectacle. He was now six feet and six inches tall, thin as a lance and as straight, with heavy black eyebrows over snapping black eyes and the hooked nose of an eagle. When he drew himself up, frowning, his right hand by the hilt of his dagger and his left arm across his body in the accustomed gesture of one trained to guard himself with a shield, the thoughts of the average scholar turned naturally to peace.
Old King Henry of England was dead at last, struck down at the dinner-table during an enormous Friday meal of lampreys. For thirty-five years he had kept firm peace, but ‘the King’s peace dies with the King’, and England seemed once again a prize for the strongest sword. That was to be expected, since it was not the custom for the English crown to pass by inheritance. Duke William had won it in battle, Rufus had taken it by force from his brother Robert, and Henry had repeated the usurpation. The old King had planned for the succession of his daughter, binding his magnates by solemn oath. But before his body could be carried from Normandy for burial in his Abbey of Reading the magnates had agreed to crown Count Stephen of Blois, son of Duke William’s daughter.
Thomas was not very interested. As a Norman, he thought first of the interests of the Normans of England. The male line of Duke William had ended with the death of young William Clito, son of Duke Robert. Count Stephen was not a Norman, but he had been reared in Normandy and England, and he was a gallant knight. The late King’s daughter, the Empress, was herself Norman; but she had been reared in Germany, and after the death of the Emperor had married the Count of Anjou, the neighbour and therefore the hereditary foe of Normandy. Since a woman could not lead armies Count Geoffrey must rule in her name, a thing proud Normans found hard to stomach. There was much to be said against either claimant; though Thomas recalled that his father had sworn fealty to Matilda the Empress, and as far as he had any feeling he favoured her cause.
Gilbert’s letters, which had previously come quickly through Rouen, were directed through Flanders and arrived more slowly. The Empress, and Count Geoffrey her husband, had invaded Normandy and detached it from Count Stephen. As a Norman, Thomas now saw Count Geoffrey as his true lord, and wondered whether Rouen might not be a better place to work in than London; especially as Gilbert wrote that in England peace was not kept and business was bad.
In 1138 came news that Count Robert of Gloucester had renounced his allegiance and declared for the Empress, his half-sister; for he was a bastard of the old King. What had earlier been only the threat of disturbance was now a regular civil war. Gilbert wrote that Count Geoffrey of Essex, sheriff of Middlesex and castellan of the Tower, ruled London with a heavy hand.
In June 1139 Thomas was surprised to receive a special messenger, a lad from his father’s warehouse. The letter he carried said only that King Stephen had arrested the Bishops of Salisbury and Ely, and that the affairs of England were in a terrible state. His verbal message, too complicated to be put on paper by one used only to composing short business communications, was that Thomas’s fortune was made. The Metropolitan See of Canterbury had just been filled, and the new Archbishop was Theobald of Bec, a native of Thierceville in Normandy, a contemporary and playmate of Gilbert who still remembered his old comrade. Thomas should concentrate on those branches of Canon Law which would be most useful to a clerk in the household of a Metropolitan Archbishop.
Next spring Thomas had word that his mother was sick, and unlikely to recover. Quickly and efficiently he wound up his affairs, being careful to obtain explicit letters of recommendation from all his teachers. In midsummer calm he crossed the Channel, and reached home in time to stand by the deathbed of Rose Becket.
She made a good end, and
died happy. Kneeling beside her were the prosperous matron and the dignified lady of Barking, her daughters; her decent, sorrowing, elderly husband twisted his hood in embarrassed shyness behind them. But her eyes were fixed on her tall son, Master Thomas the lawyer. He stood under the highest ridge of the roof, six foot eight inches tall in his black legal gown; his fierce nose jutted from his hood, and his hard black eyes blazed with a sorrow very like anger. As his lips moved in prayer the lines of his mouth deepened; in those lines a mother could read iron self-control and a savage temper continually curbed. But there was also honesty, courage that nothing could daunt, unswerving love of justice, and a courtesy that long training had made second nature. She died knowing that her twenty-one-year-old son was a good man, though virtue would never be easy for him.
Thomas arranged the funeral in St. Paul’s Cathedral. His status as a clerk from the fashionable schools of Paris won him automatic respect from all English priests, and he knew better than his father how these things should be done. He looked cold and business-like, and very much on his dignity; but inside the calm exterior his grief was genuine and deep. He saw the fussiness and futility of his father; home to him had been his mother. She had been utterly good; not remarkably devout in a generation of regular church-goers, but honest and kindly and loyal. She served no saint except Our Lady the Mother of God; from her he had learned the same devotion, which had kept firm his virtue through all the temptations of Paris; when he thought of Our Lady he saw Her with his mother’s face. He would never disgrace her, and he would never forget that from her place in Heaven she could see his every action.
Meanwhile there were earthly things to be seen to. His father pointed out nervously that a great scholar was a source of pride to the family, but that it was necessary now for his only son to earn money. The hope of patronage from the new Archbishop of Canterbury had been disappointed; while King Stephen was at odds with the Church Archbishop Theobald preferred to keep his distance. He had not pronounced in favour of the Empress and her supporters, who now held all the west of England; but from London it was difficult to reach him. If Thomas could not as yet serve the Archbishop, what could he do to bring in an income?
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