The Tinner's Corpse

by Bernard Knight

  She shook her head carelessly. ‘I’ve given him a corner upstairs – a straw pallet at the end of the stalls.’

  The large room under the thatch was divided off into a number of open-fronted cubicles, each with either a mattress or a pile of clean hay for penny and halfpenny guests.

  De Wolfe grunted, failing to hide his displeasure. ‘As far as possible from your chamber, I trust.’

  ‘Are you afraid that he’ll break down my door at night, then?’

  ‘I’m thinking of him being an audience for us, when we’re together in there,’ he grated. ‘That’s if I am still welcome.’

  Again that enigmatic smile. ‘You are welcome this very night, John.’

  He flushed with chagrin. ‘Would that I could, but I must go with Matilda this evening to visit her damned cousin. I had long promised her, to save her endless nagging.’

  ‘Tomorrow, then, John,’ said Nesta, with a long-suffering sigh.

  He groaned. ‘It’s the Shire Court in the morning, and then I must go to Ashburton to take confessions from two robbers who have locked themselves in the church there.’

  ‘What about the evening, when you return?’ she asked tartly, beginning to lose patience with him.

  John almost writhed on his bench. ‘I cannot, Nesta! From Ashburton, I must ride at dawn the next day to the high moor, to attend the Great Court of the tinners.’

  Nesta’s generous lips tightened. ‘It seems difficult to get an audience with you these days, John.’ She rose again and walked away towards the kitchen door, calling imperiously for Alan as she went.

  That evening, while de Wolfe was fidgeting with resentful impatience in the two-roomed dwelling of Maud, his wife’s impoverished cousin, his clerk was sitting on a stool in a hut at the back of a canon’s house in the cathedral Close, talking in low tones to a friend.

  Thomas de Peyne had free lodgings in the house – or, at least, a straw-filled palliasse laid out near the hearth of the cook-shed in the backyard. It was warm and it was free – and had the added virtue of being within the ecclesiastical pale of Exeter, which was a city within a city. In the cathedral Close, the writ of the sheriff and burgesses did not run, except on the main pathways. The bishop was the ultimate authority here, and Thomas felt more at home in a coven of priests than in the bustling city itself.

  When he had prevailed upon his uncle, John of Alençon, Archdeacon of Exeter, to have mercy on his destitution following his ejection from Holy Orders in Winchester, the good man had persuaded a fellow canon, Gilbert de Basset, to allow the penurious Thomas to sleep in his servants’ quarters. At first Thomas had begged scraps from the cook and raised a few pence by writing letters for illiterate merchants, but when his uncle had persuaded John de Wolfe to take him on as coroner’s clerk, the twopence a day stipend had allowed him to buy food, which he cooked on the kitchen fire – though de Basset’s cook often took pity on him and fed him some of the servants’ rations. Now, although his bodily needs were satisfied, he suffered an increasing hunger of the soul.

  This evening he sat in the kitchen, leaning on a rough table, with one of the secondaries opposite, a young man called Arthur. The priest was drinking slowly from a pot of small ale, but Thomas had a cup of cider. He disliked ale – a serious handicap in a world where it was almost the universal drink. Wine was for the affluent, and water was foul-tasting and dangerous, useful only for boiling, cooking and the occasional wash.

  ‘Have you yet tried to be restored to the priesthood?’ Arthur asked, as they eyed each other across the table.

  Thomas shook his head miserably. ‘No. What chance would I have? The Archdeacon in Winchester who defrocked me said I was lucky not to have been hanged or mutilated and that I was a disgrace to the cloth.’

  ‘But that was approaching three years ago and a hundred miles away. I know that the Archdeacon has since died, God rest him. People will have forgotten about your problem by now.’

  ‘But where would I start?’ Thomas said sadly. ‘Soon enough, someone would bring up the past to defeat me.’

  The other topped up the ale in his pot from a jug. ‘Your uncle is the obvious place. John of Alençon is well respected for being an honest, compassionate man. He has already done much for you – and you have proved your worth with the crowner. Both would surely support you if you tried for ordination again.’

  The clerk looked doubtful, but a spark of hope glowed in his eyes. ‘Do you really think I should try?’

  His companion was a young man, still enthusiastic about his calling and optimistic that the world was filled with honest men. A secondary was the lowest grade of applicant for the priesthood, under the age of twenty-four and usually a choir-boy who wanted to make the Church his career. They stood in for the vicars-choral, older men who had attained the priesthood and who were themselves stand-ins for the canons in the interminable daily services of the cathedrals. Each canon had a hierarchy of assistants, depending upon his affluence and activities; a vicar and a secondary were the minimum and they often lodged in the canons’ houses, which were spread around the cathedral Close. Canons’ Row, along the north-east side of the Close, was the largest concentration of such dwellings, but others were dotted around the precinct. There was insufficient room for all the junior grades, many of whom lodged in Priest Street,1 near the Watergate, not far from the Bush Inn.

  Arthur lived in Canon de Basset’s house, in one of the communal cubicles along the passageway that led from the canon’s rooms to the backyard. He had befriended Thomas and felt sorry for the obvious misery that losing his priestly status had caused – especially when he learned that Thomas had been at the centre of ecclesiastical life in Winchester, working in the chancery and teaching in the cathedral school.

  They talked on for a time, until Arthur had finished the jug of ale and Thomas had sipped the last of his cider. Then the secondary crept off for a few hours’ sleep on his pallet, before he had to rise at midnight for Matins, the first service of the day. Thomas went to many of the services, lurking in the background of the quire: the cathedral devotions were meant for the continuous glorification of God by the cathedral staff, not the laity, who worshipped at the seventeen parish churches inside the walls of Exeter. Tonight, after the ride from Chagford earlier that day – and the prospect of riding back to Dartmoor tomorrow – Thomas felt like staying quietly on his bag of straw.

  When Arthur had gone, he remained at the table, gazing absently at the flickering kitchen fire, which like all fires in the cathedral precinct was exempt from the nightly curfew. The bell tolling from the castle at the eighth hour signalled the couvre-feu, when all fires elsewhere in the city must be covered with turf or extinguished, for fear of conflagration.

  Thomas looked for shapes in the glowing logs, as if he might find a sign there as to his future. Should he take Arthur’s advice and seek his uncle’s help to be reinstated in the clergy? Could he stand a rebuff? His state of mind had spiralled downwards lately to a point at which he had ceased to care whether he lived or not without the embrace of the Church that had been his life since his schooldays in Winchester at the age of seven.

  He heaved a final mighty sigh, then got up and went to his thin mattress and threadbare blanket in the corner. As he lay down, he resolved to broach the subject with his master on the morrow.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In which Crowner John goes to the Tinners’ Parliament

  The following evening, the coroner’s trio rode wearily into Dartmeet, almost at the centre of Dartmoor. It was no more than a couple of farms and some scattered shepherds’ huts, where the two upper branches of the Dart met to form the river that meandered down to the sea twenty miles away. The rolling moors spread around them, like a fossilised ocean, some crowned by weird tors – flattened, wind-scoured rocks piled up into fantastic shapes.

  They plodded down into the valley from Yartor Down to the ancient clapper bridge, at the end of a long, winding, eight-mile track from Ashburton, seeking shelter for the n
ight, which was heralded by the closing dusk. De Wolfe reined in alongside the bridge. ‘This side or the other, Gwyn?’ On this bank there was a longhouse of cob under thatch, with two barns behind it. On the other side of the Dart, he could see a larger dwelling with wattle and daub walls within a timbered frame, but only one barn and a couple of ramshackle sheds adjacent.

  The Cornishman settled for the nearer demesne. ‘We’re not likely to get room by the house fire, with all these damned tinners congregating for the morning, so let’s try for a pile of hay in a barn.’

  It was true that that day the moorland tracks had been busier than usual, with groups of men drifting towards Crockern Tor, almost four miles further on. No doubt a few men would be sleeping in every nearby hut and byre overnight.

  They pulled their horses round and, with Thomas dragging disconsolately behind, made their way to the farmhouse, which hunkered low and forlorn under the loom of the moor, like a beast hibernating for the winter. Gwyn was about to dismount and bang at the weathered door when it opened and a man came out, dressed in a sacking tunic tucked up between his legs like a loincloth, secured by a wide belt. ‘In the smaller barn, men. The other’s full already.’ He waved vaguely in the direction of his outbuildings and vanished back into the house, from where the lowing of cattle and the grunt of pigs competed with the wailing of a child.

  As the door slammed shut, de Wolfe chuckled sardonically. ‘The poor devil must get this influx every time the tinners have their Great Court. Probably needs to keep on the right side of them – they’re a powerful force on the moor.’

  Six horses were tethered outside the smaller barn, which had wattled walls under a steep thatched roof. A small fire within a ring of stones was being tended outside by three men, who were boiling a pair of hares in a blackened pot. Tall doors, high enough to admit a loaded wagon, gave on to a large, almost empty space. As it was April, little of the winter stores of hay, straw and root crops remained.

  Eight men were sitting or lying inside, and before long, John and Gwyn were deep in conversation with them. They were a companionable lot and reminded de Wolfe of his warrior days when, after marching or fighting, tale-telling and gossip rounded off the day over food and drink. Thomas sat apart, morose and silent, still trying to summon up the courage to broach with his master the subject of his reinstatement. But tonight was not the best time, he decided. The coroner and his henchman were lolling in the remaining hay eating their bread, cheese and meat and drinking raw cider and stale ale from the leather bottles and stone crocks that were passed from hand to hand.

  For the first time that day John de Wolfe felt relaxed. Although when the opportunity presented he was an enthusiastic womaniser, he also enjoyed the company of men such as these. They were rugged, strong fellows who said what they thought and had none of the devious conceits of so many noblemen and merchants. These tinners were more like the soldiers with whom he had spent so many years.

  Gwyn, an equally seasoned warrior, also revelled in their company, and as darkness deepened in the barn, they swapped tales of adventure and daring, from floods in the stream-works to attacks from outlaws on the high moor, the slaughter outside Acre or the pursuit of Irish tribesmen beyond Wexford. Eventually the only illumination came from the fire, which still flamed outside the doors. No lights could be brought into the barn for fear they might set the hay and thatch ablaze. As they sat in the gloom, the talk turned to the Great Court on Crockern Tor in the morning.

  ‘How often are these held?’ asked Gwyn, mopping the sour cider from his moustache.

  ‘Whenever there’s business to settle, but certainly more than twice each year,’ answered a hulk of a man from Tavistock. ‘Tomorrow there are a few grave matters to chew over and we have had several such meetings this past winter.’

  ‘What’s the main concern, then?’ asked the coroner.

  ‘The business of the Lord Warden,’ cut in another tinner. ‘We want someone of our own choice, and not to have the sheriff foisted on us. Especially when it’s this bastard we’ve got now.’

  This was music to John’s ears and he wanted to know more. ‘What difference would it make, then?’

  ‘Our own man would understand tinning and tinners, and not be dunning us for extra taxes all the time. We’re sure that de Revelle is creaming off some of the coinage that should go to the King but we can’t prove it.’

  The man from Tavistock spat towards the glowing fire. ‘Walter Knapman has been pressing for an elected Warden these past three years, but he’s got nowhere. At the meeting tomorrow we will draw up a plan to force a change. We’ll petition the Chancellor or Chief Justiciar or the King himself, if need be.’

  ‘Paying these crippling taxes is bad enough, but we wouldn’t mind so much if we knew the money went to the King. Having part of it stolen by the officials is what irks us,’ said a third tinner.

  This was all new to John – he had always known that the tinners were a breed apart, but he had not realised that they were taxed so heavily and apparently unjustly. ‘How are the taxes calculated? he asked.

  ‘We have to take our raw ingots to one of the three Stannary towns to be assayed and stamped – “coinage” we call it. A tax is paid on that first coinage. Then the crude metal must go to Exeter to be resmelted and another tax is taken.’

  ‘Thirty silver pence a thousand-weight, that’s the first tax,’ muttered the Tavistock man.

  ‘How much is a thousand-weight?’ asked John.

  ‘Twelve hundred pounds burden,’ replied the man. ‘After the second smelting in Exeter, there’s the extra tax of a mark per thousand-weight!’

  ‘More than five times as much?’ queried Gwyn, outraged.

  ‘Yes, though I admit the metal’s purer then and commands a higher price per bar.’

  A cadaverous fellow seen dimly in the background shouted across, ‘It’s the Warden who fixes the rate – and I suspect he fixes some of the registry clerks to falsify the weighing. Who’s to say what the rate should be, except the Warden? And he is the sheriff, with a whip hand to control everything that happens in the county.’

  The discussion became more acrimonious as the cider flowed. De Wolfe gathered that most of the tinners felt they were being exploited by a Lord Warden who cared little for their industry but was only concerned with filling his own purse by extorting as much coinage from them as he could. This matched John’s experience of his brother-in-law, but he had not appreciated until now that the sheriff had available to him this extra avenue of corruption. ‘So, in this, Walter Knapman is your champion, is he?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s the main figure in the play, Crowner,’ answered the Tavistock man. ‘He’s the one we want for Warden, if we could only get shot of de Revelle.’

  Privately, de Wolfe thought this unlikely: where money was concerned, the sheriff would hang on like a dog at a bull-baiting. He also felt that if Walter Knapman persisted in trying to unseat de Revelle, he had better watch his step.

  ‘What else is to be talked of tomorrow?’ enquired Gwyn.

  ‘The killing of poor Henry of Tunnaford. We have had several incidents these past months, none fatal until now. But someone is trying to upset our streaming. Sluices have been broken and one blowing-house was deliberately burned down. We have to find out who’s behind it, if we can.’

  As this was why de Wolfe was attending the Great Court, he kept the talk going on this theme. ‘This Saxon, old Aethelfrith they speak of. Could he be behind it?’

  A sudden flare from the fire showed the tinners looking at each other, each seeking their fellows’ opinion.

  ‘It could be. He’s a mad old devil,’ said one man. ‘Hates all Normans – in fact, I think he hates everyone on earth, God forgive him. But I didn’t think he would kill for it.’

  ‘What’s the cause of his anger, then?’ asked Gwyn.

  ‘The early conquerors killed both his parents, so I hear – must have been some time in Stephen’s reign when Aethelfrith was a child. Then, later,
his own son was hanged. He claims England still belongs to the Saxons, especially the minerals on the moor where he was brought up. But he’s been more of a nuisance than a danger, so far.’

  The conversation drifted on to other matters and the fire, after a final spurt, dimmed to a dull glow, so that the men could no longer see each other. One by one, they curled themselves in their cloaks and huddled deep into the piles of hay. Snores and coughs replaced the chatter until all was quiet.

  Only Thomas sat awake, alone with his morbid thoughts.

  In the sullen light of early morning, well over a hundred men gathered on a hill-top of wind-beaten turf, broken by menacing outcrops of grey rock. Crockern Tor was just north of the track leading across the middle of the vast moor, chosen for the tinners’ parliament because it was roughly at the centre of the Stannary districts. Though only two dozen men from each district were officially jurates, many of the tinners they represented had also given up a day’s work and pay to attend the Great Court. The issue of the Lord Warden was becoming increasingly contentious, and feelings were running high.

  These tinners now stood in a large half-circle, facing a natural rock wall whose jagged strata projected through the sparse grass and clumps of dead bracken. It ran like the spine of some petrified monster, forming the crest of the ridge, ending in a ten-foot tor of rocks piled on each other like a giant’s plaything. Most of the men were wrapped in woollen or leather cloaks against the keen wind, the less fortunate huddled under empty sacks thrown about their shoulders. They stood stolidly or squatted on the scattered rocks that littered the ground, watching and listening to the proceedings. In the background, further down the slope, were hobbled the horses and donkeys that had brought most of the men to the moor – though the poorer ones had walked, some for more than a day and a half.