by Andy Brown
Although I didn’t like to hear it, he was right. The prices of foodstuffs were too high for purchase and had been galloping skyward for some time, like run-away horses bolted from their stable.
‘The freeholders pay no rent at all, or next to nothing to your Lord. Those yeomen sell their corn and cattle for three times the price. Three times, Morgan! Who d’you think’s paying for it?’
‘I don’t understand, John,’ I said. ‘What does this have to do with your land?’ I didn’t care for the way he was talking so roughly to me, yet again.
‘We’ve got high rents forced on us, Morgan, because these long-leasers aren’t obliged to pay more. We are paying for their leisure and profit.’
‘But the landlord’s got to pay for his goods too, John, which, as you say, have trebled in price. I know, because I’ve got to pay for them at market.’
‘And you think that your Lord doesn’t have enough to pay for such things, whatever their cost?’
‘For sure, he’s the wealthiest of men, John, but…’
‘And for sure, Morgan,’ he interrupted me, ‘he raises his rents and converts the land to pasture. What’s happened to allegiance? To time-honoured custom? To settled rights? Prices are soaring, Money’s worthless. Oh fine, yes,’ he went on, the bit now firmly between his teeth, ‘some men are doing very well, thank you. But others? Others are in misery. I’ll tell you now for nothing, Morgan, there’ll be fighting over this before the year’s done.’
Some say that March is a thunderous month, with the year’s first sunny days broken by terrible rains, by hail storms and late frosts. It seems as though the very weather itself is torn by the choice of which way to blow. More confused still are the mad March hares, who court in the long grass of the pastures, in the roughly-ploughed fields. They’re full of breeding time’s folly, with their mad leaping and boxing matches. But most confused of all this March were our own good people of Buckland.
And so, Easter morning this year was strange and strained in many ways, from our own individual doings, to the greater collective actions of our people. Creeping to the cross was banned, already, by the King’s new orders. The customary start to Easter Day was altered. After the service of Mass that Holy day, we entertained ourselves with the usual games: rolling eggs down the side of the hill and hiding them in the Barton’s garden. Yet these seemed like trivialities after the changes to our service of Communion.
We’d dyed our eggs in the common way: with beetroot juice for red, gorse flowers for yellow and onionskins for brown. I stained my clothes most awfully with the beetroot, it looked as though I’d been hit by a bolt from a bow.
But you wouldn’t catch me washing my linens that day. It was said that in the nearby village of Upton Pyne, north of us in Buckland, that on Easter Day of the previous year, the very stains of Christ’s Holy Blood had appeared on the sheets of the Lady’s bed when the scullery maid took them to the stream for early washing. Cross myself and Hail Mary, I would’ve died there and then if I’d seen such fearful signs.
And, closer by in Northwood, the village smith himself had received a lightning bolt from out of the Heavens for working with iron on Easter day. I vowed for my own protection that I’d only stoke the fire with a sturdy stick of rowan, afraid as I was to handle the poker. Wasn’t it fashioned from the very same metal as the brutal instruments of Christ’s ordeal; pernicious iron nails?
I didn’t wish for lightning bolts to come and strike me down that day for handling it.
No. Rowan would do just fine.
V
Cuckoo… Cuckoo...
The Venus Doves had returned. It lifted my spirit to hear them announcing the spring, on that warm April morning. The mist was still rising off the fields, like steam from the crust of a deep-filled pie, stuffed with sweet cookers and pippins. What a drear winter we’d had of it in Buckland. But what a time those fairy birds had had – while we were all still wet and cold, they were buried under ground in their earthly lairs throughout the lingering winter. There they had stayed, warm and fed, protected, until the wise old woman of the stars had set them free one spangled night, to spend another year in breeding. Song.
How softly then the cuckoos professed to the world that cold hardship had passed.
Cuckoo… Cuckoo...
I rose to strew the house with fresh rushes and cleanse the Barton’s hall with mallow, geranium, broom. As soon as I’d finished these chores, I was out to the herb garden early, where the cuckoo’s plaintive calls came drifting over the fields into my waiting ears. With luck I hoped I might just stumble across a cuckoo feather on the path and wear it with me in my bonnet all the month, to ward the evil eye away. In those days of change, you could never be too well guarded. Sadly, I didn’t find one. Their song alone would have to do.
When the days begin to lengthen at both ends, with the sun sooner risen and its later setting, there’s much work to be done early in the morning in the herb garden. All manner of herbs are growing to their potency. Pick them in the early hours and you’ll have them at their freshest, while the dew is still crisp in their leaves. I had cures to prepare: rosemary powdered and bound in a cloth, to lighten and cheer my Lady’s soul; verdancy for pickling and infusion; nettles for rheumatism; bistort for stews; borage leaves to cleanse the blood. The picking time is vital, especially if rains are on their way. And signs of showery weather had been plentiful. When I was at my tasks that morning, I noticed that the spiders’ webs, draped between bushes and crystalled with dew, were all broken. The sow was also squealing in her pen, the hens huddled in their coop and the bees were hidden, nowhere to be seen, but waiting in the confines of their hive, without so much as a murmur or a buzz.
There are none so good at predicting the weather as our common sense livestock.
‘We’ll have ourselves a storm before the day’s out,’ I noted to Alford and, mark my words, I was right.
By three o’clock that afternoon, the skies opened and such a deluge came, I was ready to build the ark again. April showers make May flowers may well be the case, but I’d rather have finished my work in April, than be idly gazing at the pretty, rain-fed herbiage in May.
The day’s downpour set back my plans for work by a whole day, for the new young bees were ready to swarm and this would have been the perfect day to build their new hives. That would all have to wait and, with it, all the other duties of the apiary. Some day soon, I thought, when the ground was dry, we’d gather in the new combs and start on making candles, ointments, beeswax polish.
Such was the pattern of those April days; showers and sunshine. These are the markers of fertile spring, portioning out the days for God’s tiny creatures and workers. Rashes of ladybird bugs appeared on garden nettles, sent from Heaven above to save our seedlings from the greenfly. At evening time, brimstone moths flew into our candles. Later in the month, St. Mark’s flies emerged in swarming clouds, hanging over the scrubby lanes with their legs dangling beneath them like gauzy sprites. In the hedgerows and banks, where bright cleavers fought their way through the straggling undergrowth, caterpillars were suddenly present in legion and bumblebees hummed in their industry. Wood ants and spiders were building their nests and webs. Dandelions turned the ground bright yellow. Birds and bees sucked at their sap. Goldfinches ate their seed. We gathered the dandelions in and made them into sweet wine. The lengthening days set off the natural desires and drives of every plant and creature.
During the dry spells, Alford and I collected baskets of ramsons to flavour my Lord and Lady’s food. We dug them out of a rich carpet of anemones and violets on the woodland floor. In the garden, we weeded out unwanted plants and sowed new vegetables.
When the sun shone, it was as midsummer, bright and warm until the evening; warmth on our crowns and light on our faces all day. When it was warm like this, we harvested St. George’s mushrooms from underneath the birch trees in the old grassland. They sprouted up between the fortresses of moles, busy raising their young clutches undergrou
nd. Doe hares were also raising their leverets, protecting them from stoats, buzzards and foxes.
Beech and ash buds burst into crimson flames of leaves. The sweet smell of bluebells was perfume to the nose.
In the darker, dappled glens of the wood, the crosiers of young ferns released their delicate fronds. I brushed my hands along their spikes and showered myself in their fern dust, imagining myself invisible. At once, I became a part of the woodland, flitting in between the shadows and the light. It gives you private sight of all that’s unfolding on the land. Blackbirds and goldcrests, nuthatches, jays and woodpeckers, all became knowable to me, while I myself remained invisible to them. I spied the first badger cubs emerging from their setts at night, as I walked back from the evening Mass. Keeping downwind of them, they didn’t notice me. I watched their tumbling, clumsy antics. These were the simple pleasures of spring.
My Lady called me into her chamber during that afternoon’s rain. She was sore from bunions on her feet. Long months of wearing winter shoes had finally brought her toes to a fierce and inflamed condition. When I came to her, I brought a purging tonic, made from the boiled roots of Lent Lilies, which were then so plentiful in the lanes. I bathed and rubbed my Lady’s feet in the yellow ointment and she talked to me of this and that, while I relieved her sores. She often told me small things of her affairs and, in such moments of intimacy between a Lady and her maid, would sometimes tell me things of greater import. Today was one of those.
‘You know full well, Morgan,’ she said to me, ‘that my Lord Ponsford is a conscientious gentleman and devout to the faith of his forefathers above any other man?’
I didn’t know if my Lady was asking me a question, or telling me a point of fact. Whichever way it was, the only possible response was in accord.
‘Indeed he is, my Lady. There’s no way one could find him to be anything but.’
Recalling the recent opinions that John Toucher had fervidly aired with me, concerning my Lord’s care of the village beggars and the sudden increase in his rents, I wondered if we hadn’t perhaps been spied upon and overheard. Report could easily have been made to my Lady of John’s disgruntled words, but by whom?
I immediately found myself suspicious of everyone. Sweet Alford included. Why would she do it? I thought. What could she possibly hope to gain from seeing me punished?
But then I became angry with myself for thinking such uncharitable thoughts and felt my cheeks reddening. I tried to hide away my worry by dropping my gaze to the pewter bowl, in which my Lady’s feet were steeping. It seemed, however, that my Lady didn’t notice my discomfort and she went on with her business despite me.
I rubbed the unguent into her aggravated toes.
‘My Lord came by his wealth through his own hard work, Morgan. And by his interests in cloth and commerce, both at home and abroad. It was his father – and not he – who made his wealth in purchasing monastic lands. All this wealth, in truth,’ she said, gesturing around her chamber to its luxurious furnishings and features, ‘belongs to God. But my Lord took no direct part in its journey from church to private hands.’
‘Heaven forbid, no, my Lady!’ I nodded. I couldn’t think why she was pursuing this line of discourse with me, but felt sure now she’d make her accusation: John and I were recusants, weren’t we?
I waited meekly for her denunciation.
‘When the Church overlords disappeared, it was his father who became more powerful, Morgan. I won’t hear it said by anyone that my Lord’s abused his position in the dissolution of the church. He couldn’t be expected to do anything about the provenance of his own inheritance!’
She seemed extremely agitated and I wondered further what gossip it was that had brought her to this unusual outburst. I wished I had my rosemary now, instead of foot rub, to lighten her mood.
‘Indeed not, my Lady,’ I assuaged her.
She seemed to waver a moment, deciding if she’d tell me what was troubling her, or not. Having revealed so much to me, she perhaps felt that she now had no choice but to continue. Should I wait for her to reproach me for what John Toucher had said, or should I come straight out with my apology?
I searched myself for some resolve and opted to confess.
‘My Lady, I’m sorry… but I…’
Immediately, as if she hadn’t heard me, she interrupted.
‘Which is why I’m so gravely wounded, Morgan, by our own son’s allegations.’ She smoothed her hairpiece back with a sigh.
I, too, breathed some inner sigh of relief, saved from confessing to something she clearly knew nothing of.
But her forthright accusation against her son was confusing in its own way. She blushed to have spilled out so personal a matter to me and fiddled with her brocades.
‘No word of this to anyone Morgan, I need not tell you.’
‘Of course, my Lady,’ I obediently replied. ‘It goes without saying.’ I was saved my own indignity, but the burden had been shifted somewhere else. Sir Robert.
Several days earlier, my Lady’s youngest son had arrived back at the Barton on a visit from Exeter. He made his money there as a merchant in the cloth trade. As was customary, he’d left the household some years past when he’d come of age. By then, my Lord had already willed his land and money to the elder son, Walter. Although this was the traditional partition of a father’s wealth, it fuelled the rivalry that existed between the two of them.
His rightful inheritance in place, my Lord’s son Walter resided mostly at the Barton, but he’d been away in London for most of the year, on matters of business relating to my Lord’s estate and government of the county. He would return home soon for the summer season.
In the meantime, Robert had returned and was once again resident, arranging to meet with some north Devon merchants to strike a deal in wool and bring profit to his partnerships in Exeter.
My Lord’s estate was of no great measure itself by Royal standards, but means enough by any other. It could easily provide for the sustenance and livelihoods of all the commoners in our village. I surmised that my Lady’s agitation stemmed from her youngest son’s recent return; from some ongoing jealousy and old rivalries between the brothers, or between father and son. I ventured my nerve.
‘Master Robert has returned in bold spirits, my Lady?’ I asked, immediately regretting my choice of words. She gave me a withering look that warned me not to step beyond the pale of my rightful place and pulled her foot away from me.
Water dripped from her irritated toes onto my lap, as I knelt before her.
‘He’s returned home in more than bold spirits, Morgan,’ she chided me. ‘It seems he thinks he’s become richer and more powerful than his father, coming back with boasts of his own hard-won earnings, yet accusing his father of profiting from the sale of Church lands. Of erring from his devout religious ways. It’s unthinkable!’
‘Blessed Mother,’ I said beneath my breath and crossed myself, almost spilling the bowl at her feet.
Many a man had grown into wealth and power on the back of the sale of Church lands, as John Toucher made it plainly known to me. Such changes were the root of common troubles and now seemed to divide the very ground on which we walked and farmed, even in my Lord and Lady’s household it now seemed. Her confidence in me that day was sign of how greatly these matters had come to trouble us all.
When I’d finished drying her feet, I washed my Lady’s soles with a perfume of cowslips. The fairies live among these flowers – most abundant at the time, carpeting the hedges in soft yellow pomades – and, where their tiny feet fall, they imbue the cowslip petals with a most effective medicine for removing spots and wrinkles. With this final rinse upon her feet, she bade me leave her to her sewing. I went to the kitchen and cooked her a syrup of pansies, a fail-safe guard against her sadness and hopefully for healing rifts in her domestic affairs too.
Around this time, work, relentless, necessary work, picks up around the Barton, in preparation for the summer’s harvests. Everyone was pl
oughing in dung with teams of oxen, lest the rains wash it all away from the surface. To ease his labour, John Toucher contracted the help of the ploughman, Lucombes, to speed his work along.
Lucombes could turn a field twice as fast as any other man and was fair in the price of his trade. His religious conscience too was like a straight furrow. All he asked for was the observance and upkeep of the old, traditional ways. Defence of his Catholic devotion. He and John Toucher worked well as a team and turned the manure into the season’s later growth. But each time he came to see me after work, I pushed my John away from me, towards the water butt. He stank to high Heaven of muck from his day in the fields.
‘Morgan,’ he pleaded, ‘you’re mighty stern. Come and give me a cuddle, you smell as sweet as breadfruit!’
‘I wouldn’t come near you John, even if I had a pig snout for a nose! Now, get yourself to the barrel and scrub that stink away, before you even so much as think of approaching me.’
‘A hog with as pretty a nose as yours would woo me any day,’ he said, lunging for my arm. I slapped him back.
‘And a hog without a ring through his nose is a nuisance to all, as you are, John Toucher, digging up dirt where he shouldn’t. Which is all well and good for the hog, but not so good for his keeper. Now get yourself to the pail!’
Now when I think of it, this was the last time we played our foolish games. How befitting it should be when he was thoroughly be-shitten. But he scrubbed himself down and came up shining.
Mind you, he could simply have stood in the rain and let the weather wash the smell from him, for it rained drearily throughout most of the month. Thankfully, it was also time to be indoors in the dairy, churning butter in the butterbox and setting milk for cheese. We’d sit industriously by the buttery door, watching the rain splash down onto the cobbles of the yard, shining them up so they looked like glass apples. We got soaked sometimes, however, going to the fields in the evenings to milk the cows, or to strew them some good hay to make their milk come thick and plenty.